Is God Still Necessary?

Precisely.

 

Again there is no definitive answer.It all comes down to belief. A Christian would say God is eternal, while a Buddhist would say the law of cause and effect is eternal.

 

I look forward to looking into Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson. I didn't mean to say that Hawking being the most brilliant mind on the planet was a scientific fact, I was simply trying to make the distinction between what qualifies as theory and that it is not on equal footing with simple belief.

 

Science is simply the surest way of knowing, or in many cases, coming to know things. That is to say, rigor and method are our greatest assets in finding truth. If a scientist can show the rigor and method to his theories (and his theories are shown to hold water), then that, inherently, is leagues above someone who simply says, "I believe".

As per your example on words, I fail to see its value in our discussion. It almost seems as though you say God's existence is a fact regardless of when we came up with the word. But God's existence isn't a known fact, so how is any of what you said relevant?

 

That's the thing. There is no arguing science and religion/belief in one single argument.

Science explained that the earth is round. The church burned the scientist.

Useless.

 

Apparently my friend you did not understand what I said. I stated that without words science is no more a plausible explanation for things than the concept of God, not that the concept of God is true. I could name you God but that doesn't mean that you are. Even I were to get so called scientific proof and 100 backers who agreed with my proof that you were God that wouldn't make it so would it? Words are a human machination and that is all they will ever be. You say that science is the most sure way to explain something but we made science what it is through OUR words and without them it is no more valid than the God concept.

 

I agree, but science can never prove such a thing as how everything began. No matter how "educated" a guess is perceived to be, it is still just that a guess. As IndyHippy has been saying, whether about science or religon or anything else, men's words are nothing more than men's words ( There appear to be multiple conversations in this one thread.)

 

OK, I understand that words are a human invention. But words, if one knows what they mean, provide a name for those things that we already know exist, or a concept that exists abstractly, or an idea. This is why words are useful.

And of course no, if all these people said I was God, then of course it still wouldn't be true. It would show they had no idea what the concept of God was. But words aren't what makes science go. It is the same with mathematics - we didn't invent the calculus, it was discovered. Words (and numbers) are simply the way we communicate it. If I had no language and I discovered how to observe and run experiments with precise rigor and method, their results would be just as good if I were mute then if I spoke perfect Latin. The words are ancillary to describing a thing. Language is not necessary to understand, it is simply fortunate that we have it.

The philosopher Wittegenstein goes much into language and in a sense he agrees with you - our language can be a hindrance to the way we understand things. However, just as much he is saying that language is not necessary to understand things. However, if in science and mathematics we choose our words preciesly, then still we come back to the fact that a thing that has scientific and mathematical backing is greater than an idea that has none, even if we are forced to use an imperfect language to communicate it.

 

Which scientist?

 

How do you know that something such as the big bang existed? You believe that something created the universe not because you yourself have irrefutable proof but because people tell you that it happened. Not much more than 400 years ago people still believed the earth was flat and why was this? Because people like our modern scientists told them it was. Do we know without a doubt that the earth is round? We believe that we do, because we have seen what we percieve to be a round spherical structure we call our planet. But I digress, what I mean to say over all is that we only know most so called facts because these facts are what we have been taught throughout our lives. As a person you yourself have no proof that God does not exist, or that he does, but you as your own person also have no proof that a black hole created our universe or that it didn't. In the end everything you think you know is still just words. Just like everything that I have just said is just words, and in the end words are virtually meaningless.

In conclusion God will always be a neccesary part of human conciousness because some people will always need something larger and more important than themselves to believe in. Perhaps God should always exist, without that concept the world would be a much worse place than it even is now. Has religion made some major problems in our world? Yes. But on the other side it has brought much hope to many people who had none otherwise.

 

Well stated. I may not convince you, however I'd counter by arguing that you are using a modern example of somethin to counter an example form a categorically different time and categorically different people.

The martyrs I speak of, at least in the first century like Peter, knew Jesus personally. Claimed to be physical witnesses to his Ressurection and Ascention into heaven. When those nails are about to be driven into your hands to be crucified upside down, you would think that if you just made the whole thing up, your story would change quite fast. Again, this assumes historocity of some traditions as well as a base assumtion that some of the New Testament writings are authenticly written by who they say they are.

 

Ferdinand Magellan was the first person to prove the world was round and he was not a scientist he was a Spanish explorer.

 

was he ever ?

 

To add to this, there is a also a difference between dying for ones beliefs and dying AND killing for one's belief.

 

All scientific theory is tentative. The theory of evolution is one Cambrian rabbit away from being discredited, although so far no rabbits in the Cambrian. We've gone through some dramatic paradigm shifts since the early twentieth century, with the advent of relativity and quantum theory. Although some Christians seem to be intellectually living in the Bronze Age, some atheists sometimes seem to be living in the mechanistic Newtonian world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As for Hawking, if I understand him correctly it might be possible to settle all this some day by going back and interviewing Jesus. This might make perfect sense to mathematicians and physicists and be on the cutting edge of scientific brilliance, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Physicist Hugh Everett has proposed the "Many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics in which every alternative to choices taken in our univrese is replicated in another alternative universe, so while I'm typing profound posts on Hip Forums, I may have counterparts in alternate universes who are robbing banks, arguing court cases, playing on reality TV shows, etc. Why is it that eleven or twenty six dimensional string world that no one has been able to detect are considered to be more plausible than God?

 

I understand that times were different, and in light of that I'll point out that there have been cases of thousands of people who have been fooled into believing so called messiahs in the modern era who were willing to go to their deaths for him or her. Althugh I know that not all those who followed that one guy down into the South Americas and later died due to a mass cult suicide didn't commit suicide on purpose there were some proven diehards among them who did. I'm not saying that Jesus convinced his followers to commit suicide for him, but I am saying that there are cases today that are examples of how over zealous belief can cause some people to do strange and sometimes self destructive things for said beliefs. Peter was cruicfied upside down, Jude was shot full of arrows, and Steven was stoned to death, etc etc etc but who's to say that their reasoning wasn't clouded by over zealousy for their beliefs?

I'm not denying that Jesus may or may not have been a "deity" due to the fact that I believe the universal energy manifests itself in ways that people can best learn from it at any given time. I believe that all Gods are a part of this "Tao" if you will but I don't believe that any one of them is completly and totally correct. If you only see one thread of a tapestry how can you ever hope to understand what the entire tapestry is.

 

Saint Hildegard (1098-1179) describes a spherical earth in her works.

the person was likely refering to Galileo and he did not posit a spherical earth, nor was he burnt.

 

Like you, I believe that Jesus probably existed because the existence of people who claimed to know Him, like Peter and James, is fairly well established. I also think it's more plausible that He existed than that they made Him up. However, I'm always amazed that there have been so many people of so many faiths who have been willing to martyr themselves for their beliefs. In our own time, we have the example of the brave student martyrs of the Arab spring, especially the resistance in Syria--risking torture and death to oppose tyranny. There are also the Buddhist martyrs of Burma and Vietnam. In earlier times, there were the martyrs to the Inquistion who suffered torture and death to challenge Catholic doctrine. And of course, going further back, to the fifth century, Hypatia, the female pagan Neoplatonist philosopher in Alexandria, who was stripped and torn to pieces by a Christian mob stirred up by Saint Cyril. Let us pray that the courage of their convictions won't be forgotten.

 

I was wrong , science was used to determine the spherical nature of our planet. It was done by Hellenistic Greece. http://www.ancient-greece.org/history/helleninstic.html

This was brought to my attention by my sister who has a history major and teaches at a local college.

 

We've already addressed the issue that Hawking could simply be wrong. The OP asks are there any reasons left to believe in God, aside from simply wanting to? In order to decide whether or not God is "still necessary", we have to clarify what God is and does. The ability of universes to be "born" addresses one aspect of God: creation. Hawking's interest is in the explanatory function of God in accounting for the origin of the Universe. But the idea of God has other uses as well.

One is in accounting for the remarkable order and fitness of the universe. Most atheists accept the existence of lawlike order in nature that we can at least partially understand. Physicist Paul Davies remarks that the laws of physics not only permits "a universe to originate spontaneously,; they encourage it to self-organize and self-complexify to the point where conscious beings emerge, and can look back on the great cosmic drama and reflect on what it all means." Davies points out that randomly selcted laws would "lead almost inevitably to either to unrelieved chaos or boring and uneventful simplicity." Instead, we have what another physicist, Dyson Freeman, calls the principle of maximum diversity. Then there is the Anthropic Principle, which holds that the observed values of the parameters that govern the four fundamental forces of nature are finely balanced. The slightest increase in the strong nuclear force would result in binding the dineutron and the diproton and converting all the hydrogen in the early universe to helium. There would be no water or the long-lived stable stars essential for the development of life. Similar relationships appear in each of the four force strengths. A change as slight as one part in 1040 or even smaller would be sufficient—then the universe's structure and capacity for life as we now know it would disappear. Carr and rees found that the existence of complex structures is sensitively dependent on the numerical values of such structures as the speed of light , the masses of the subatomic particles and a number of "coupling constants like the elementary unit of charge, which detemine the strenth of the various force fields acting on matter. Astrphysicist Brandon Carter finds that a change in the strength of either gravity or electromagnetism by only one part in 1040would make it impossible for stars like our sun to survive. If the gravitational constant were off by one part in a hundred million, the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in a way necessary for life to occur. In his book Accidental Universe, Davies reviews the apparent that seem necessary for "accidents" and "coincidences" that seem necessary for the existence of the complex structures we observe in the universe, and the sheer improbability that such a string of fortuitous developments could have occurred by accident. The improbability of this led atheist astronomer and mathematican Fred Hoyle to conclude that "the universe is a put up job."

But that's not all. We have the problem of life emerging sooner than would be expected from fortuitous combinations of chemicals sloshing about in a primordial ooze. And we have the problem of the evolution of intelligent, conscious life. Stephen Jay Gould, whose atheist credentials and resistance to any notion of purpose in evolution are impeccable, thinks thought that our existence was extraordinarily improbable. There were many roads not taken in the evolutionary path toward us, each of which could have led to an outcome other than us. Of course, Gould would have readily dismissed everything I've said by pointing out that if it hadn't led to us, it would have led to something else, or maybe nothing else. Intelligent conscious life is no big deal. As for consciousness, defined as subjective experience of awareness, that seems to have no evident survival function that couldn't be achieved by a smart zombie. Hardcore anti-teleologists like Gould could dismiss it as a curious empiphenomenon. The universe could do without it.

Which brings us to the real issue. Our wonder boy, Stephen Hawking, has characterized the human race as "just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies." One may wonder why self-admitted scum is taken so seriously when he regails us about such matters as worm holes and time travel. Through conscious beings like us, the universe is, in a sense, now self-aware. Is that a big deal or not? I say big.

But of course none of this "proves" that God is necessary. There is no such proof. It's a matter of reasonable inference based on available evidence. Since I'm not a scientist, and am making decisions to guide me during a limited life span, I can't hold out for peer-reviewed proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm willing to take my chances on what I think is a sensible bet backed by substantial evidence. There are alternatives such as the multiverse to consider, but nobody so far has been able to demonstrate empirically that there is even one other universe besides ours. Besides, I'm suspicious of arguments that say--yes there's one chance in ten billion all of this could have happened by blind forces, but there could be a trillion other universes so that the probability of ours could be great. That argument could justify belief or disbelief in anything, and is the atheist equivalent to the Christian retort that God or the Devil could have put the fossils there to test us or confuse us. Life is a gamble, and it seems to me the Occam's razor favors purpose to the universe. And is that the same as God? A good question for another time.