Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

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The above poster did not imply human-god communication existed, merely that humans had the capacity for non-ill transcendent experiences.

Furthermore, a lack of evidence for gods does not mean that scientifically there are no gods. The only way for things to be disproven definitely is through mathematical proof. Because this cannot be shown in a mathematical proof (there is no mathematical way to represent godhood) the concept of a god cannot be definitely disproven in scientific approaches. Otherwise the most scientific claim is merely "we cannot find any evidence for <concept>" with the logical step being that therefore <concept> doesn't exist or has a low statistical chance of happening- but this is a cognitively easy conclusion and not what science is actually doing.

Science and the scientific method is actually extremely limited when dealing with the concept of dieties. It can only say that, given claim X, experiment(s) were run that did not verify X. After enough experiments are run, they are evidence X is not true. But none of these are absolutes, and claiming a mountain of evidence is a definitive scientific proof is itself unscientific.

Furthermore, a lack of evidence for gods does not mean that scientifically there are no gods.

True, but it implies the need for skepticism, especially given how many people have desperately attempted to find said evidence. Depending on your outlook it might also imply that a degree of disinterest in warranted, because the world of “things for which no evidence can be found or is required,” tends to be enormous and frankly, not that interesting. Unless we’re very specifically talking about a god who will damn you for a lack of faith, then ignoring the whole issue seems like a safe bet, and when you die you either learn the truth, or you’re just dead. It’s not like a human can do much either way, again, unless your assertion is about a specific and judgmental god.

Tl;dr I think the whole god thing is even less compelling and worthy of attention than the Bermuda Triangle. It’s just another thing that’s possible among an infinity of possible things lacking evidence for their existence. That’s pretty boring.

Very true, but I think a neoplatonic view of reality is extremely worthy of attention. The notion that there must be some unifying, self-enforcing, by-definition dissonant/entropic (we're here, aren't we?) oneness that runs through reality, and that the mere knowledge of it lends towards a rationally and emotionally mature wu wei ("effortless doing") sort of existence. Like an infinitely self-referencing stack of the "first principle" unfolding into time, matter, and ultimately reconciled through the cognition of it.

Self-help is one of the best selling genres, yet the most simple of which has been known to man for thousands of years.

> there is no mathematical way to represent godhood

    SHA3(x) == 0

If we agree that the hash function is secure, and find a value x that hashes to zero, then it might be reasonable to conclude that x was generated by a god.

Bonus points if x is human-readable text.

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