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Religion cannot be proven by worldly sciences


Super19

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I should point out he didn't reject the idea of a personal god based on his science; he rejected it based on his world-view and philosophy - it was because of evil, suffering, the abuse of religion on man, and religious authority manipulating the people. To illustrate:

"Thus I came...to a deep religiosity, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true....Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience...an attitude which has never left me."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own - a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in Nature."

Now in light of the previous comments I posted here is another one that supports his stance of "science does not have to lead to atheism":

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views."

And even then we all agree that the historical Jesus existed (not necessarily the Son of God Jesus) here is a quote on him from an interview just because:

"You accept the historical existence of Jesus?" - Int

"Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life." - AE

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Well the existence of a personal god doesn't hinge on the Bible being infallible and all the stories 100% true.

Other than that I don't really disagree with anything you said...so ya :P

Edit

Here are some more quotes on this subject:

"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment."

(Philosophical not scientific objection)

Another interesting take of his on Atheism:

Einstein was more inclined to denigrate disbelievers than the faithful. Einstein said in correspondence, "[T]he fanatical atheists...are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the people'—cannot bear the music of the spheres." Although he did not believe in a personal God, he indicated that he would never seek to combat such belief because "such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook."

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."

In anycase I like his views, they seem very honest and sincere. I do wonder if they would be different now-a-days if he was still alive.

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Actually it does, because the Bible has long been said to be infallible and divinely authored/inspired....when we all know that's malarkey, just as Einstein did at the age of 12.

The personal aspect of the Judeo-Christian god is forever connected to the what's proffered in the Bible....and one cannot, with a straight face, separate the personal god story from the rest of the fables from the bible. They're a package deal. You get it all, lock, stock and biblical fairy-tale barrel.

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Reality: A universe of information

  • 03 October 2012 by Michael Brooks

What we call reality might actually be the output of a program running on a cosmos-sized quantum computer

Read more: "Special issue: What is reality?"

WHATEVER kind of reality you think you're living in, you're probably wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can be explained in terms of information processing.

The connection between reality and computing may not be immediately obvious, but strip away the layers and that is exactly what some researchers think we find. We think of the world as made up of particles held together by forces, for instance, but quantum theory tells us that these are just a mess of fields we can only properly describe by invoking the mathematics of quantum physics.

That's where the computer comes in, at least if you think of it in conceptual terms as something that processes information rather than as a boxy machine on your desk. "Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing," says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. "It's suggestive that you will find information processing at the root of everything."

Information certainly has a special place in quantum theory. The famous uncertainty principle - which states that you can't simultaneously know the momentum and position of a particle - comes down to information. As does entanglement, where quantum objects share properties and exchange information irrespective of the physical distance between them.

In fact, every process in the universe can be reduced to interactions between particles that produce binary answers: yes or no, here or there, up or down. That means nature, at its most fundamental level, is simply the flipping of binary digits or bits, just like a computer. The result of the myriad bit flips is manifest in what we perceive as the ongoing arrangement, rearrangement and interaction of atoms - in other words, reality.

According to Ed Fredkin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, if we could dig into this process we would find that the universe follows just one law, a single information-processing rule that is all you need to build a cosmos. In Fredkin's view, this would be some form of "if - then" procedure; the kind of rule used in traditional computing to manipulate the bits held by transistors on a chip and operate the logic gates, but this time applied to the bits of the universe.

Vedral and others think it's a little more complex than that. Because we can reduce everything in the universe to entities that follow the laws of quantum physics, the universe must be a quantum computer rather than the classical type we are familiar with.

One of the attractions of this idea is that it can supply an answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?". The randomness inherent in quantum mechanics means that quantum information - and by extension, a universe - can spontaneously come into being, Vedral says.

For all these theoretical ideas, proving that the universe is a quantum computer is a difficult task. Even so, there is one observation that supports the idea that the universe is fundamentally composed of information. In 2008, the GEO 600 gravitational wave detector in Hannover, Germany, picked up an anomalous signal suggesting that space-time is pixellated. This is exactly what would be expected in a "holographic" universe, where 3D reality is actually a projection of information encoded on the two-dimensional surface of the boundary of the universe (New Scientist, 17 January 2009, p 24).

This bizarre idea arose from an argument over black holes. One of the fundamental tenets of physics is that information cannot be destroyed, but a black hole appears to violate this by swallowing things that contain information then gradually evaporating away. What happens to that information was the subject of a long debate between Stephen Hawking and several of his peers. In the end, Hawking lost the debate, conceding that the information is imprinted on the event horizon that defines the black hole's boundary and escapes as the black hole evaporates. This led theoretical physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard't Hooft to propose that the entire universe could also hold information at its boundary - with the consequence that our reality could be the projection of that information into the space within the boundary. If this conjecture is true, reality is like the image of Princess Leia projected by R2D2 in Star Wars: a hologram.

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I was watching NovaScience Now, this evening, about what makes humans 'human' and different from other species on this planet. There were some interesting points covered about our evolution.

But one thing in particular stood out for me, profoundly, actually.

And as it relates to this thread and the topic of this thread, it sort of dawned on me that if science is able to turn the creation story(Adam & Eve) on its ear, even more than it has already, mind you, then perhaps science is capable, as a 'worldy' thing, to disprove the foundation of the Islamo-Judeo-Christian religions....since they're all essentially versions of each other.

And what I believe turns the creation story even moreso on its ear, was the proof, the genetic proof in the majority of the world's human population, as a whole, which can be and has been proven to contain 1-4% Neanderthal DNA.

This means, that the majority of humans today, in fact aren't 100% human.....we're almost all a product of inter-species sexual relations by our fore-fathers, or perhaps fore-mothers.

The only truly 'human' humans are Africans. Yep, their DNA is purer than yours or mine, because they didn't migrate out of Africa, into Asia and Europe, and onwards, they stayed there and continued to develop as modern day humans. Those that went North, towards Europe, evolved into the separate species 'Homo Neanderthalensis'.

Yup, Europeans and Asians are evolution's 'muggles'. Europeans moreso though. Higher muggle-blood factor.

Now, this kind of throws a bit of a monkey wrench in that whole, created in 'His' image, no? Unless 'He' was part Neanderthal too. I mean much of 'His' actions were certainly Neanderthal-like.

So,

No to the 'created in His image'....obviously.

No to the female gender being made from the male's rib....obviously.

No to the whole, it takes only two of one species to populate an entire planet, that has another species DNA mixed in....obviously.

And pretty much no, to the majority of Genesis and the Book of Genesis, something acknowledged and used by all 3 religions.

And, it can all be disproven scientifically.

Alright, I await the moving of goalposts and the making of excuses and evidence-less interpretations of so-called interpretations.

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I was watching NovaScience Now, this evening, about what makes humans 'human' and different from other species on this planet. There were some interesting points covered about our evolution.

But one thing in particular stood out for me, profoundly, actually.

And as it relates to this thread and the topic of this thread, it sort of dawned on me that if science is able to turn the creation story(Adam & Eve) on its ear, even more than it has already, mind you, then perhaps science is capable, as a 'worldy' thing, to disprove the foundation of the Islamo-Judeo-Christian religions....since they're all essentially versions of each other.

And what I believe turns the creation story even moreso on its ear, was the proof, the genetic proof in the majority of the world's human population, as a whole, which can be and has been proven to contain 1-4% Neanderthal DNA.

This means, that the majority of humans today, in fact aren't 100% human.....we're almost all a product of inter-species sexual relations by our fore-fathers, or perhaps fore-mothers.

The only truly 'human' humans are Africans. Yep, their DNA is purer than yours or mine, because they didn't migrate out of Africa, into Asia and Europe, and onwards, they stayed there and continued to develop as modern day humans. Those that went North, towards Europe, evolved into the separate species 'Homo Neanderthalensis'.

Yup, Europeans and Asians are evolution's 'muggles'. Europeans moreso though. Higher muggle-blood factor.

Now, this kind of throws a bit of a monkey wrench in that whole, created in 'His' image, no? Unless 'He' was part Neanderthal too. I mean much of 'His' actions were certainly Neanderthal-like.

So,

No to the 'created in His image'....obviously.

No to the female gender being made from the male's rib....obviously.

No to the whole, it takes only two of one species to populate an entire planet, that has another species DNA mixed in....obviously.

And pretty much no, to the majority of Genesis and the Book of Genesis, something acknowledged and used by all 3 religions.

And, it can all be disproven scientifically.

Alright, I await the moving of goalposts and the making of excuses and evidence-less interpretations of so-called interpretations.

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To be fair though it all depends on what the word "image" means. I mean nothing you've said here is incorrect but that word image is a bit ambiguous. (cue Ace and Gary pics) It probably won't be a moving of the goalposts as much as it will be about the interpretation of such an unspecific term.

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Lol at beating the creation story over the head when the vast majority of religious people don't even take it seriously. But that's been the argument of 'The God Delusion' all this time. It bases all it's anti-Yahweh hate on the assumption that the entire bible is supposed to be taken literally. Yeah... Of course it's not. Now what? "Well, duh, then it can't be proved by science!" lol

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Lol at beating the creation story over the head when the vast majority of religious people don't even take it seriously. But that's been the argument of 'The God Delusion' all this time. It bases all it's anti-Yahweh hate on the assumption that the entire bible is supposed to be taken literally. Yeah... Of course it's not. Now what? "Well, duh, then it can't be proved by science!" lol

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Karen Armstrong in The Case for God (she's not a theist fyi) say's that the Hebrew people didn't take the creation story as a literal sequence of events. Almost 4,000 years later fundamentalist christians started to take it literally - setting themselves up as easy targets for guys like Dawkins.

Yes the main theist religions build on divine creation...but disproving a literal reading on Genesis 1 and 2 won't be enough to disprove God, nor should it.

That's just my two cents. I'd be interested to hear some christian responses or thoughts to this.

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