Science, God, and an emeritus professor
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Victor J. Stenger, he’s an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy who has written a number of books on topics including religion, philosophy and science.
Anyway, I stumbled upon a page of his containing a summary of arguments that claim to prove (and by this, I mean hand-wavy arguments with flawed logic) that God does not exist. For those of you who have a background in formal logic (be it from mathematics, computer science, whatever), the incoherence is blatantly obvious. Whilst he claims that ‘these are not meant to be formal, deductive arguments, but rather arguments “beyond a reasonable doubt”‘, they are far from being rigorous enough to be convincing. There also seems to be very little actual science considering that it’s about “How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist”.
Now, those “arguments” presented are for a “God” from his own understanding and interpretation of what a “God” should be. Unfortunately for him, this understanding is different to the God from Christian theology. To me, it seems like what he has done is defined “God” and itemized some attributes and argued that those attributes cannot mutually agree/exist with each other.
On the other hand, to a Christian, God is simply the entity having all of the characteristics that the Bible attributes to him. These characteristics in themselves are locally consistent and as such, any scientific approach to an understanding of God or a debate to whether God exists or not is moot and pointless.
Of course, it makes for rather amusing philosophical arguments and omnipotence paradoxes, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time…