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Comment by jscheel | Hacker News Reader

Scientists tend to exclude God, and creationists tend to exclude science. It would benefit all of us for each side to recognize that they can live in harmony. Science can provide insight into how God's creation works, but it can never exclude God. If religious interpretation of scripture flies in the face of provable, observable science, then perhaps our interpretation of that scripture is wrong. I'm tired of this ridiculous standoff between the two side.

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False equivalence. Science is simply making hypotheses about how the world works, and testing thises hypotheses with experiments. Everyone does thus, not just scientists. When he plant on my window sill is looking a bit ill, I might hypothesise that it's not getting enough water. I then test the hypothesis by watering the plant lord. If the plant still looks sickly I discard the water hypothesis, and may try for the sunlight hypothesis. The only difference when it's scientists, is that as professionals, they know what has already been tried elsewhere, so they don't repeat the same erroneous experiment needlessly.

Creationists actively reject evidence. I see no good coming from science bending to compromise with active ignorance.

Science has its own religious as well. There are plenty of people who will extrapolate a hypothesis way past the point of credulity. For example, claiming that the Big Bang excludes the existence of God. You can't scientifically disprove his existence. I'm not sure you can scientifically prove his existence either, but that's were faith comes in.

creationists tend to exclude science

No, that's exactly the problem - many creationists try to pass off their theological scriptures as science. Which is why rules like this have to be imposed. Thankfully, they are an exception among religious people as a whole, at least here in Europe.

If they prove something scientifically, then great. It's when they ignore the overwhelming body of science around certain things, such as the age of the Earth. That's just crazy.

One of the problems is the connotations tied up in the word "God". Because there's so much history, baggage, and tradition tied up in that word it makes it difficult to do any sort of real experiments based on it, nevermind using that word in any defined sense in the first place.

But that said, I'm with you. It saddens me to see most scientists completely close their mind to an idea. It flies in the face of the idea of experimentation and discovery. Especially bad when you see people dismissing very valid interpretations of experiments simply because the downstream ramifications make them uncomfortable (the Copenhagen interpretation comes to mind).

> Science can provide insight into how God's creation works, but it can never exclude God.

People really like to downplay this, but a scientific investigation of any phenomenon must begin, in step zero, by assuming that god is not responsible for the phenomenon. There is no evidence that could support a conclusion of "it was god", because the scientific method assigns that hypothesis a Bayesian weight of zero.

Religious scientists seem to understand this when it comes to their own field; you don't see a lot of young-earth geologists, but you can find geologists rejecting evolution.

It's fine for science to say, this is how we think it worked without God. But science cannot disprove God.

You completely missed what I said. Your original wording was that science couldn't exclude god. Science excludes god by its very nature; the basis of science is the assumption that god is not responsible for anything at all. It makes no more sense to talk about science disproving god than to talk about geometry disproving the postulate of Euclid that states "all right angles are congruent to each other". If you allow for the possibility of a god, you're not doing science.

> If you allow for the possibility of a god, you're not doing science.

No, that's nonsense. It is perfectly possible to do rigorous science but to believe in a God. There is nothing in science that rules out a god.

Sadly the vocal majority of people who believe in a god also believe weird stupid obviously wrong things about science. I'm not talking about those people.

Science proceeds on the assumption that effects can be replicated. Its stated goal is to discover the principles that govern any phenomenon.

If principles govern a phenomenon, god can't. The only god allowed by science is a god with no power to affect anything in the world, or at least no more power to affect the world than a human or any other mundane creature has. The question then is why you want to apply the word "god" to that entity.

http://www.cectic.com/051/

I think it's worth repeating a point from earlier. Yes, there are many people doing science and avowing belief in a god. However, none of them are involving any god in the science that they do. Their gods are tightly restricted to areas of the universe that they don't practice in. This isn't a coincidence -- as I said in the quote you object to, allowing the possibility of a god means you're not doing science. But there are lots of scientists (really, this is the group of all scientists) who don't practice in every area at once.

I don't think Newton thought of it that way.

> It would benefit all of us for each side to recognize that they can live in harmony.

"mutually respectful, honest and rational debaters cannot disagree on any factual matter once they know each other’s opinions. They cannot "agree to disagree", they can only agree to agree." [1]

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2006/12/agreeing_to_agr.html

Maybe it does not pass their basic threshold for assumptions. Anything can be claimed with the same level of potential to be true. Also they may have the strength to accept unanswered (or unanswerable) questions without needing to invent something. For me all religions are the same. They are so absurd to me like the scientology stuff probably is to you. Also Strawberry-God, cause why not. Where do you make the distinction?

> Science can provide insight into how God's creation works, but it can never exclude God.

Of course it can exclude "God," seeing as "God" is nothing more than a fictional construct created by humans because they couldn't fully understand the world around them. Anyone who cannot recognize and accept this is either deluding themselves or lying.

Your assertion has absolutely no more bearing to this argument than saying "nuh uh" and plugging your ears. You bring nothing to this discussion, and you should be ashamed for refusing to participate in real discourse.

Scientists tend to exclude unicorns and Santa Claus as well.

It is ironic that the very same creationists tend to exclude Gods from other religions. Why do they firmly exclude the Mayan God, or the Hindu Gods? Why are their scriptures true but not the others? If there are contradictions in the scriptures of the various religions in the world, then perhaps the creationists "interpretation of that scripture is wrong".

The following quote comes to mind:

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one less god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” —Stephen F Roberts

I had to engage with the Roberts quote because it made me think.

I think he's making a false equivalency. A jump from believing in one god to two gods seems much less significant than a jump from zero to one. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_One_Infinity)

Further, I'm not sure that Roberts understands why the religious reject other gods. Like most things people do, there are a variety of reasons:

- Both Judaism and Islam have explicit commandments or statements of faith that reject other gods

- Suspicious of foreigners? Deride their religion as unreasonable and obviously contrafactual

- Wary of talk of the divine being used as justification for a mortal power play? (And you should be) Add a bias for rejection into your calculations

- And of course, extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence

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