Posted by Gremlin [12.253.230.83 - 12-253-230-83.client.attbi.com] on 20 July 2002 at 05.34.27 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: Evidence? posted by Andy on 20 July 2002 at 04.42.56 ZuluTime:

We've been over this. A belief is unsupported by evidence. And no evidence has been discovered to support the assertions and portents of the bible.
     As for facts which have passed the scientific process: there are a number of them. The fact that things evolve--and I realise that you confirm that readily--has been scientifically processed into fact. Cancer is a good example: it's the result of transcription errors, which are a factor of evolution.
     This is how it works. You propose that a condition is true. For whatever reason. Maybe you already have reason to assume that it's true; maybe you just want it to be true. Either way, we have the proposal. Fine.
     The next step is to test this proposal by the scientific method. Is there evidence to support the proposal? If evidence exists, the proposal can be called a hypothesis; if not, it's disregarded as a mere assertion. To date, the proposal that deities exists remains an assertion.
     If the proposal is actually a hypothesis, applied testing on the hypothesis can lead to the amelioration of the hypothesis into theory. Evolution is a good example of that. Sufficient testing and research has led to the hypothesis of evolution evolving into a theory. It's a theory that all life on Earth evolved from a single type of organism.
     Because we've observed the act of evolution in both controlled and uncontrolled environments, it's a fact that evolution occurs, while the origin of life is still theoretical. And, it probably always will be, since Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies there: we can't really expect to observe a new lifeform happen without interfering in some way. But, again: the evidence supporting the theory is adequate. And the observations of evolution have established the individual acts into fact.
     Theories and facts are often roughly the same thing. The theory of gravity and the theory of music, for example, allow for the fact that gravity and music exist.
     Of course, regarding gravity, there's still a highly theoretical element to it. We theorise that gravitons have an atomic weight of negative six and allow for objects to attract each other. Heisenberg still disallows us from proving that. Same for quarks and black holes and so on.
     Where deities are concerned, there's exactly zero evidence supporting the assertion. The brainless method of presuming deities to exist by trying to weed out any other possibilities--before the hypothesis that deities exist has been established--is never going to do any good. You can't ask how else do you explain X, wait for a lack of answer you like, and then decide that, since nothing else explains it, it must have been a deity.
     To date, I've found one way to show deities to exist. But you're not going to like it. At all.
     Twelve years ago, I started writing a very fictional saga, which relied on the fictional idea of a multiverse. At the time, the multiverse was a complete fabrication. There was no evidence for it at all.
     Now, twelve years later, there is, in fact, some evidence for it. Photons. But that's a long involved story.
     The way in which deities can exist relies on probabilities. In an infinite number of universes [for my purposes, I limited the number of universions to 6^6^6, or 46,656 to the sixth; no real official reason] you have an infinite number of possibilities--a principle more recently reflected in Sliders. That, along with Schrodinger's Cat--the paratransitional ability for a cat to be concurrently alive and dead until observed--we have Schrodinger's Deity, which is concurrently real and fictional until observed. Not that observation of the fictional is partcularly possible, of course.
     Factor that into an infinite number of universions, and you end up with real deities all over hell. In one universe, you have Yhvh; in another, you have Odin. And so on.
     Now: do I believe that all these deities exist in these little ShadowRealms? Not really; no. I'm just showing the mathematical probability.
     Incidentally, one of those probabilities is that a given universe has no governing deity at all. A number of my universions fell into that category, in the saga.
     Whether the deity you want to believe in controls a given universe works out, at 6^6^6, to 3.14 octillion to one against; in an infinite number of universions, it's infinitiy to one against. Or infinity to infinity against, if you like. You can prove anything to be true in quantum theory.
     The multiverse aside, there's no evidence that any deities have ever existed, and thousands upon thousands of deities which have been asserted to exist, which leads back to Pascal's Losing Wager.
     So. Until or unless actual evidence of the existence of deities is discovered, scrutinised, and published in a scientific journal [no, the bible doesn't count], the fact of the matter is that we have no reason to assume that deities exist. They were once a fairly sophistic excuse for things no one knew about yet, but they're no longer useful at all.
     One more thing about deities. The bible, as we know, is not evidence of the existence of deities. The bible is not self-proving as the words of deities. That's important to consider.
     Factoring the errors in the bible, we can conclude one of two things. A) the bible is, in fact, the word of a deity, and that deity is an idiot; or B) the bible is just a FanFic version of the excuses made for the unexplainable universe at the time.
     Leaning toward the latter--since any deity which thinks that rabbits eat cud and that dragons and unicorns are real animals isn't worthy of anyone's attention--the bible itself is neither evidence of a deity's existence, nor evidence that the people writing it had any real reason to think that deities existed.
     For that, in the unlikely--if not impossible--event that deities do exist, we can reasonably assume, in probability, that the authors of the bible misguessed after its characteristics. If deities exist, they're not what the bible describes them to be.
     What they are instead is anyone's guess.
     So I'm not sure where you'd find evidence of deities, since there's never been any. A better idea is to track down one of those remaining things which hasn't been theorised into fact yet, and see--without any presuppositions that it must have been a deity--what might allow for its existence.
     That's what we do as scientists. And it's worked pretty well so far. You're reading this on a computer designed by an atheist, who wasn't so worried about what deities thought that he never got round to making it happen. His name is Bill Gates.