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Originally Posted by Timberwoof
As for God, it seems to me that the only possible scientific position is agnosticism. God is not subject to scientific investigation, therefore science has nothing to say about it. One can safely make scientific hypotheses that do not invoke God (actually, that's the usual practice, because once you invoke God in a hypothesis, it ceases to be scientific). It's petty safe to say that God does not exist, but not to insist on the statement as fact.
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No, the only scientific stance on god is atheism for the simple fact that science does not even begin to derive a hypothesis without observable evidence in the first place and there is no observable evidence upon which to hypothesize the existence of any god. People assume that existence itself is observable evidence of god but that is a falsehood because this god is nothing more than a god of the gaps. To say that just because humanity does not have all the answers, therefore god must be the answer is naive at best and arrogant to say the least. It assumes that we will never find the answer or that humanity is so superior that if we don't understand something then there must be some supernatural cause for that particular phenomenon. Humanity once failed to understand things like thunder, lightning, disease, etc and created gods to explain those things. We now understand those things because rather than simply accepting Thor and Zeus as the answer we actually used science to understand why these things really happened. Science provides us with much more reasonable answers to the questions of where we came from and how the universe came to be than religion ever will.
The only reason that God is not subject to scientific examination is because there is no evidence to support the creation of that hypothesis in the first place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Timberwoof
Which brings up the "Intelligent Design" "hypothesis". I put "hypothesis" in scare-quotes on purpose: It's not a good scientific hypothesis because it makes no scientific predictions. Any feature that "looks designed" (whatever that means; no one has properly defined it) could be designed but it's okay for it not to have been. So there's no way to even in principle falsify the idea ... just like there's no way, even in principle, to conduct an experiment that would prove or disprove the existence of God.
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Intelligent design is not a scientific hypothesis because there is no observable evidence to support it. The main problem with ID is that it start with a hypothesis and then goes out looking for any "evidence" it can to support it. It then goes on to throw out any observable evidence or phenomena that refutes it which automatically invalidates ID as being scientific or worthy of discussion. Basically, the fact that ID throws out observable and reproducible evidence because it goes against religion falsifies it as a valid scientific hypothesis before it even gets started.
No one has to create an experiment to disprove the existence of god because there is no reason to start the experiment in the first place. Without observable evidence or phenomena, one cannot even begin to go through the process of the scientific method in order to prove the whether or not the hypothesis of god is correct or not. There is no basis upon which to create the god hypothesis which automatically invalidates it in the first place. (An no, a religious text is not evidence for the existence of god or the creation of a hypothesis. If that were true then every other god or character and event in every work of fiction would automatically have to be considered potentially real based upon the fact that someone put it down on paper which is absolutely ridiculous.)