Quote:
Originally Posted by Thentus
Yes, very hard to prove things that don't exist, well don't exist.
That(my response) sort of sounds sarcastic =/. It's not.
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I'd say that's a response that shows your beliefs, and that you are not open to other beliefs. You're right, you can't prove the existence of things that don't exist because they don't exist. But to say that about God reminds me of "old science." This one's an interesting story.
There was a theory in biology known as "spontaneous generation" - people thought that life formed spontaneously. It was even believed that there were certain recipes for forming life. I believe the recipe for mice was putting some old corn kernels among old cloth and then placing those objects inside of a dark room and leaving them alone for three days. When you came back, the cloth was disturbed or entirely missing, the kernels were gone, and there were mice! Imagine that! Even after the field of microbiology developed and people began to understand that there were organisms that we couldn't see with the naked eye, the theory of spontaneous generation persisted. Anyone who said otherwise was waved away by high-level scientists. Louis Pasteur finally devised an experiment which proved the theory of spontaneous generation to be untrue. It's worth noting that even before Pasteur's experiment there were others who performed similar experiments, but scientists claimed that those experiments only proved that spontaneous generation couldn't occur without air.
I bring this up because it illustrates an important point. We as a society are constantly making new discoveries. We take our current knowledge for granted and laugh at the ignorance of people in the past, such as those who thought that mice could form from some random objects. Yet very few people are willing to accept that new discoveries can shake up our understanding of even the basic scientific principles.
Spontaneous generation is one example among many. More recently one need only examine basic biology - in the past, the "tree of life" was made up of five kingdoms (perhaps more even before that?). The five kingdoms were later reduced, I believe, and currently we have three domains in the tree of life - the kingdom model was almost entirely abandoned. The field of genetics has increased our understanding of the relations between living organisms, which were previously viewed based on morphology.
We can't prove God, you are right. But we can't disprove God, either. If you want to be a skeptic of religion and base your views on science, you should understand the scientific methods and realize that under science everything is a possibility unless proven otherwise. Does God exist? It's possible until proven otherwise. Even when something is disproven or proven, new evidence may present a new understanding or interpretation of something that was completely accepted. If you believe there is no God your faith is no different than that of a religious person; only the agnostics can claim to follow scientific principles in this case.