RE: [asa] On God

Here's my 2 cents on the article...

I have no idea what scientists do. My entire store of information about
scientific activity comes from what I've seen in the movies. There,
scientists used to be represented as men in white coats busy with
incomprehensible jumbles of glass tubing connected to foaming beakers and
bubbling test tubes. Now, scientists are represented as men (and women) in
white coats busy with incomprehensible jumbles of numbers on computer
screens. All I can really tell you about science is that its set designers
aren't as good as they used to be.

This is humor, right? [He is a satirist.] I will counter with humor.
Scientists have gone from white to multi-colored coats and can be more fun,
too:
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/08/27/large-hadron-collider-rap-is-a-hit/#
more-17421

"But science can be proved," a scientist would say. "The whole point of
science is experimental proof."

I suspect he flunked math, also. :-) Science isn't about proofs; proofs
reside in the math realm.

Yet we non-scientists have to take that experimental proof on faith because
we don't know what the scientists are talking about. This makes science a
matter of faith in men while religion, of course, is a matter of faith in
God, and if you've got to choose...

This is a reasonable point as science can now go quite deep, and the average
person may simply put trust in those that can go so deep. I think this is
why things like the Parallel Universe Theory by Max Tegmark is given more
slack than I would care to see (since it does not seem to meet the
qualification of a theory).

Personally, I don't think you do. Science and religion both assert the same
thing: that the universe operates according to rules and that those rules
can be discerned. Albeit this does make it easier to believe in God than,
for instance, organic chemistry. Just the fact of rules implies a rule maker
while just the fact of mixing nitro with glycerin and causing an explosion
does not imply a Ph.D.

I think he just blew-up a good idea (inference to God), though I'm not sure
what this says.

"Fear of God" is most often manifested today in the public's alarm that
religious zealots will try to destroy the world. Providentially, God has
made the zealots as incapable of using reason, logic, and the other tools of
science as I am.

He doesn't seem to be using reason or logic, but then he warned us.

Religious zealots can't blow up the world the way scientists can. The
zealots must secure the faith of the scientists. But the scientists don't
know what the zealots are talking about. Is faith compatible with science?
Not completely--and that's a blessing.

Yesh!

"Coope"

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Received on Thu Aug 28 11:40:41 2008