Hacker News Reader

See it's weird but that stuff has never worried me, from a rational perspective anyway.

It's all about knowledge voids and what we use to fill it (pretty much as you say in the last paragraph). But I've always been amused to see Atheists getting all het up about the non-existence of God (it's the main reason I don't identify as one). It is as if disproof is fundamental to their understanding of the universe.

My take is pretty simple; I have absolutely no idea of any of the big answers (and even some of the little ones) but I'm pretty excited to see the progress being made and, maybe, I might get some more awesome answers in my life time.

Beyond that, what does it matter :) The perspective is that we are a tiny dot on a tiny dot on a pinhead in the centre of an ocean. No matter what you believe about the origins and future of the universe our time here is barely a flicker - it doesn't seem worth worrying about not having the answers, instead lets go grab all we can before it's over :)

If disproofing God is fundamental to you, you have a problem. Atheism doesn't aim disproof God, it simply states that there is no proof of God's existence and rejects the beliefs.

Agreed; it's surprising how many Atheists confuse this though.

"at the end of the day you can't prove nor disprove there is a God"

Correct. In the same way you can't disprove that a race of super intelligent massive squid like monsters live at the center of the earth.

There are an infinite number of things which:

1.) We have no evidence that they exist

2.) They don't exist

There are only a finite number of things which:

1.) We have no evidence that they exist

2.) They exist

What puts God into the second category rather than the first? The first contains unimaginably more things...

What Hawking said is not that god does not exist, but that god is not required for the universe to exist. Subtle but important.

Evolution is not required for Homo sapiens to exist.

The above statement does not in any way infer that evolution did not result in humans. Subtle but important.

Evolution is not required for Homo sapiens to exist.

How do you know? If you were framing your statement scientifically it would be "Evolution may not be required for Homo sapiens to exist", which, of course, scientists already understand. Theories are subject to change, and even be discarded altogether in light of better information, unlike faith which cannot change.

Your definition of faith is very narrow.

What certain institutions define as faith may not have changed in thousands of years.

Peoples personal beliefs and understanding of the spiritual change over time. I know mine have.

Faith that a Creator exists without verifiable proof is inherently unchangeable -- that's why it's called faith. How one chooses to arrive at, or express that faith certainly may be subject to change.

That is correct. He also doesn't prove his point at all. Subtle but important.

Your last paragraph nails it. God is an alias and hence doesn't need proving or disproving. There is this huge closet containing the questions we do not have answers for. Some people name this closet God; scientists call it "TODO". You can call it whatever you like, as long as:

1. You accept that questions can be removed from and (more frequently) new questions can be added to the closet.

2. You do not add a question we already have an answer for into the closet.

3. You do not remove a question from the closet unless you have an answer.

The problem with using the God alias is that most people do one more fundamental thing with this closet. They put answers into it on questions we have no way of knowing answers to.

  > I've spent many, many hours on this God thing, and at 
  > the end of the day you can't prove nor disprove there
  > is a God.

Just a slight detail : you can't prove or disprove there aren't unicorns, or an invisible dragon in my garage, or a teapot in orbit between the Earth and Mars (just to take well-known overused examples).

Non-existence is the default state of anything you can think about. You need to prove that things do exist, not the other way around. Therefore unless you proved something exists, it doesn't exist.

Nobody would ever seriously discuss that conclusion on any other subject than God, that's getting tiring, admit it.

Going to reply (against my preferences) here because I'm seeing this repeated. Looks like you are making the mistake several other commenters are: you are ascribing some specific attribute to the word "God" and then throwing rocks at it.

Are you asking me if a giant squid exists somewhere? Probably not. Unicorns that can sing and dance? Highly unlikely. FSG? I kinda don't think so.

But you're the person making up the details. Yes, any detailed explanation of anything that is unknown is more likely false than true. But to say "therefore unless you proved something exists, it doesn't exist" is the height of fallacy. Lots of things exist that I (or nobody else) can prove.

That's my point: in your eagerness for some kind of "answer" you jump too far the other way -- nothing exists unless I can prove it. This is as bad, really, as those who have some large detailed story of a Flying Spaghetti monster that they "know" to be true. If you don't know, you don't know. That's it. End of story.

Looking back through history, I can say with some degree of confidence that whatever our world-of-knowledge was at any one time, there has always been a bigger world that we were unaware of. Many times a world for which we have no language to describe. Hard to talk about Quantum Dynamics with Francis Bacon. For every pond we swim around in, there is always a bigger pond.

This leads me to believe that the unknown is a huge part of our experience. A Great Unknown exists with things in it that will highly interest us and affect our lives. This is just from induction. Not a particular myth that you might find fault with -- the unknown itself. The idea that nothing exists effectively unless we can prove it is a horrible idea. It's really, well, fundamentalism, when you get right down to it.

So you can go on arguing octopuses, pink elephants, Thor, whatever. It really has no relevance on what I'm talking about. If you'd like to call the unknown Thor, have at it. Works for me. I like Thor better than "Bob". But let's not fight over particulars, because that misses the point entirely.

As Hawking put it in another article, there might be a philosopher's God, but he's not somebody that could come down and talk to you. Hawking here still goes off the deep end -- I have no idea if something unknown to me could communicate to me or not. Or -- to put my response to Hawking differently -- can the laws of physics still be valid and things happen for which I have no explanation? Why of course they can. That's just common sense. The opposite belief -- that somehow mankind has a model of reality such that nothing unusual can happen? That's as bad as other folks who think their holy book is a science book. Both groups of people are assuming a certainty that just isn't there.

Just like with your earlier post, I agree with almost everything you say. My one sticking point here is this:

A Great Unknown exists with things in it that will highly interest us and affect our lives.

"Things" in it? Hard to say. Depends on the definition of "things". Although I do agree that whatever the case we would likely have great interest in it.

"and affect our lives"

Not necessarily. And here, again, is a reason I'm led to believe you're theist. If you believe the height of conventional scientific wisdom then the universe will expand indefinitely, and we will simply be left more alone. To suggest that we are to be affected by something unknown is to take a position to the affirmative, as a theist would.

I'm just continuing the inductive series, beginning with pre-fire hominids and ending up with modern man. At each stage we were basically blind to the next stage, and once the unknown was revealed it highly interested us and affected our lives.

I see nothing unique about our present state of knowledge to feel like the series will change significantly.

No unwarranted optimism was intended. In fact, future stages may be terrible, but we will be highly interested in them and they will deeply affect our lives.

"Lots of things exist that I (or nobody else) can prove."

Can you gave some examples, and also tell how you know these things exist?

There are most certainly many, many extrasolar planets that we cannot presently observe, or otherwise prove to be there directly. However, we know that statistically they are certain to exist. Below is a link to the best methods we currently have to detect them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar...

Well I've been a bit short and simplistic, but the fact is that whatever properties you give to God among the generally admitted ones, or even if you limit God to a simple demiurge, you need hints, evidences, or in the absence of material evidence some logical argument.

However there is no hint of the existence of any form of God; nor is there any logical necessity for his existence. When something has no evidence to exist and no logical reason to exist, of course you may always fancy that it does, but this is empty of meaning or use. Therefore I pretend that "agnosticism" is a lack of decision. Either you want to believe, and do so, or you don't and then you're atheist and there's no need to beat around the bush.

Then of course I'll admit that I'd rather be confrontational than gently neutral, because there is so much to despise, hate about organised religion, that it even poisons good rationalists minds :)

But to say "therefore unless you proved something exists, it doesn't exist" is the height of fallacy.

It's not that things currently unknown can't exist; we know from the experience that the opposite is true. But any theory predicted on the existence of an unknown factor is meaningless, unless it yields an accurate falsifiable prediction - and such predictions are only possible for cases there the unknown factor is narrowly defined.

A general unknown factor whose presence is sufficient to provide an answer to any problem in which it appears as a term is not a useful concept. Non-existence here is not a matter of impossibility, but of imponderability.

So does your "Great Unknown" have sentience? That's the question. If I understand you correctly it appears you are theist.