First of all, I am not religious.
Then let us agree to disagree on that point, perhaps we simply have different ideas of what defines “religion”.
Secondly, if you are only saying that the gods that man believe in are likely to be false, then I agree with you.
If you change that to “there is nothing to substantiate the claim of existence of any god Man believes in or has ever believed in”, you get my point exactly.
I don't believe in any human religion either.
You mean the basis of these religions (i.e. the god or pantheon thereof), or the institutions? People can be Christians without being connected to any Christian church, for ex.
For me, god is the explanation of the existence of the world. Something must've caused the universe to exist, and that cause is my god. Therefore god must exist by my definition.
Hmmm, I see what you mean. I too cannot imagine the Universe coming into existence without anything triggering it, even if that triggering was a random quantum fluctuation in the fabric of some meta-Universe. Or something else. Even the possibility that some “meta-mind” in a “meta-universe” started the universe we live in the some sort of “meta-testube”. I also think that we may never know, or even have the slightest clue about, what that trigger was, or wherein it happened, or what went on before, etc. The “brane” theories of string theory do give some explanations, but then say immediately they are not or ever will be verifiable, which, at least to me, makes them little more than useless.
But giving that cause (I think you do not mean to specify that “something” you mention?) a name is prone to misunderstanding. Calling it “god” is deifying that cause, just as calling lightning the hammer of Thor is (or was). Do you mean by your definition of god as cause of the universe a conscious mind or something like that? Or merely a name for an unknown force or cause of unspecified substance? Giving it a name like “god” seems like making an anthropic personification of a force or cause or similar, which is like pulling something unknowable like the cause of the universe down into the realm of Man. Unless I misunderstand you, your concept of god is not some entity calling the universe into being, but more like a “prime mover” of unknown(able) sort. If so, calling that cause “god” may be confusing. As in knowing there is a force that makes lightning happen, and calling that Thor, but not meaning you think of Thor as some big man-in-the-sky with a unsettling big Hollywood contract.
But anyway, you keep stressing actually performing the experiment, but in reality many experiments cannot be done.
No, you cannot put a star in a test tube and see what happens when you prod it. But what you can do is, when you have a theory that the Universe started in a big bang, calculate what the background temperature of the Universe would be if indeed that bang did happen. Then you can proceed by building an apparatus that can measure that radiation and see what you get. If what you get is close to what you predicted, you may be on the trail of something, and if it’s way of, something may be wrong with your assumptions. Or your telescope is covered in pigeon poo, of course… This is different than your usual lab experiment, but still it is an experiment. After all, “experiment” means “an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle”. You do not need to bolt the universe to a lab table to test some principles!
What happens if you find the cat alive? What happens if you find the cat dead? You don't really learn anything from opening the box and seeing the results. Certainly you cannot believe in the current theory of how the cat is alive and dead at the same time, since the cat is clearly either dead or alive everytime you do the experiment.
I doubt that is the “current” theory! The thought experiment was set up to explain the principle of uncertainty. And what is uncertain is the radioactive particle, of which it is completely unpredictable when it will disintegrate. We cannot know, in this experiment, whether the particle has disintegrated until we open the box. The cat is not uncertain, for it will be alive or dead regardless whether we look or not. Of course, if you haven’t paid attention to the construction of the box, you could be certain the cat is dead once you realise you forgot the air holes.
Anyway, if the box is constructed rightly, there are three possible outcomes of the experiment. The cat will turn out to be 1) dead, or 2) asleep, or 3) bloody furious.
There is a very good (if somewhat spooky) real experiment that demonstrates the uncertainty principle. You doubtlessly know the “double split” experiment, in which a ray of light (usually a laser) is directed a two very narrow slits, which produces a pattern of interference on a screen behind the slits. The explanation is that the light going through either slit interferes with the light going through the other. However, if you run the experiment so that at any time only one photon at a time is sent to the slits,
the same interference pattern will emerge! The only explanation is that a photon somehow goes through both slits at once, and interferes with itself! The same trick can be sane with single electrons, or protons!
how can information not be facts? There are false information... For example, if I tell you "it's been proven that god exists", that's a piece of information, but not a fact.
Hmm, I see what you mean. However, I consider only right information as information. Clearly wrong information isn’t information at all, in my book!
The indication that god exist is the fact that this universe exists.
Only with the definition of ‘god’ as you proposed above. Meaning calling whatever caused the universe god. Yes there must be a cause, but I personally would not dare give it a name…
Now I'm not going to argue against the theory of evolution.
Good. Would be a bit silly to deny evolution when, for ex, bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics are flying by by the dozen nowadays!
But how life originally generated is a lot less clear, and there are many theories now.
Perhaps we may never know; after all, we cannot rerun how it happened!
Let's take the Urey-Miller experiment. They were able to generate a few amino acids under ideal conditions. But how many amino acids are required to make a living thing? Lots, even for unicellular organisms. And you can't just have any amino acids, only left-handed amino acids. And the amino acids have to combine in a certain order. Besides, who's to say th even if all all this happened, the organism will really be alive rather than just a dead cell?
21 amino acids, in fact, are used in living cells. Chemically it is possible to make many more. I do not know if it is necessary to have left-handed ones, maybe right-handed ones might have done too. But it is very hard to give even a definition of “life” (try!). The best scientific one seems to be “a stable chemical molecular based system that can self-replicate and undergo Darwinian evolution”. The most correct one is probably everything we recognise as life”.
If I remember correctly, the chances of a simple unicellular organism forming is less than 10-50 unfortunately I can't find my source to confirm this. Needless to say it's a very very small chance, something similar to having junk in a junkyard being made into a ferrari by a tornado.
I think you refer to Fred Hoyle, and the chances he gave were even much worse than that, if I recall correctly. He used this to “prove” panspermia, but forgot that panspermia merely transfers the question of the origin of life to another place, and adds the odds of any organism travelling untold light years through space and land on a planet unscathed. Hoyle also did not want a Big Bang, because he, as an fervent atheist, resented the idea of a beginning to the Universe, because that might indicate a Beginner. Hoyle was a very fundamentalist religious atheist, in that he expected the Universe to fit his personal opinions…
And even if this really happened, the organism has to survive long enough in that dangerous atmosphere to reproduce and mutate. Not very likely, in my opinion.
Why not? You would hardly believe what some bacteria can survive, or even thrive on! (Trust me, I work in microbiology. What some can do and adapt to is beyond belief!). What is dangerous to us, is balmy to some of these bugs (like an optimum grow temperature of 115°C (that is 238°F!), or a pH of 1, or the capacity to breath iron…)
Of course you can argue that since there are trillions of stars in a galaxy and trillions of galaxies, it'll happen somewhere.
Who knows, we may life on the only planet on which it ever happened, and existed long enough to evolve into lawyers!
But then we come back to the question of where those stars came from.
We can nowadays more or less see them form before our very telescopes…
*pant, pant, pant…*
Amen, ite missa est…
gep
Topic: Judgemend day! Beware!