Pope Advised Hawking Not to Study Origin of Universe 864
BlueCup submits a link to an Associated Press article running in the Northwest Florida Daily News which begins "Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God. The British author, who wrote the best-seller 'A Brief History of Time,' said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican."
According to the article, "The scientist then joked during a lecture in Hong Kong, 'I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo.'"
Hardly news (Score:5, Informative)
He wrote that anecdote himself in "A Brief History of Time". So, this *really* is old news.
Re:Hardly news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hardly news (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, that is why lots of drops of coffee from my computer screen just magically jumped in my mouth! ;-)
swen yldraH:eR (Score:5, Funny)
Ah incest time (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ah incest time (Score:5, Funny)
What about Santa Claus? What a bastard! He's just a big fat git who sneaks down chimneys and steals all the kids' favorite toys!
Re:Ah incest time (Score:4, Funny)
If this image bothers you then I strongly suggest that you never play a porn movie backwards. It is very disturbing to see semen fly out of a woman's mouth into a guy's penis.
Re:swen yldraH:eR (Score:4, Funny)
swen yldraH:eR (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hardly news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hardly news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hardly news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hardly news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hardly news (Score:5, Funny)
Cue a bunch of guys in togas bursting into the room.
"Hey, I expected the Spanish Inquisition!"
Re:Hardly news (Score:3, Interesting)
They never intended to burn him at the stake- that was NEVER the punishment for insulting the Pope (which was Galileo's real "crime", BTW, circular orbits having been removed from the realm of heresy some 20 years before with Copernicus) but they did lock him up under house arrest in a 47 room appartment with on-site laboratory, thus limiting his freedom of motion and publication.
ALS is a pretty awful disease, but it isn't quite like that.
I'd sa
Flawed Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Funny)
-Eric
Deep Believer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Insightful)
I know a couple of scientists who are religious (Christian) and none of them understand what the deal is with the fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible. As far as they're concerned, they're using their God given brain to study how God does His thing. A very classic way of thinking about science. IIRC, Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, etc... all thought of their scientific work as a way to worship Him.
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:5, Funny)
A biology professor I once met was fond of saying that if you study biology in long enough, you will find not only that God exists, but He has a sense of humor.
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean seriously, what the fuck? Hair, bill, warm-blooded, lays eggs, nurses its young, males have venomous spurs..
(They also have the best electroperception of any mammal and swim with their eyes closed. You can't make this shit up, check out the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]. They're even wierder than I thought.)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Insightful)
These people are instructed via the leaders of their religion to not think, to not question, to not consider. They are instructed on what the word of god is, how it exactly should be interpreted.
These people have very little memory of the history of their own religion, that fundamentalism extended to the basic beliefs achieved by questioning the world they live in and realizing they needed order. However, to never question that belief again (not that using science to examine things) is rediculous in the extreme and simply means you learn a lot less about what God's intended for everyone to learn.
Ultimately we're talking about hatred of something they do not want or feel they can't, or more importantly won't understand -- and it might be something that can potentially derail their view of the world. It's scary to them. It makes their religious leaders insecure and in turn makes them worried that science might some day effect them in some unforseen way. Ultimately these people probably don't trust God too much, or at the very least themselves.
All opinions at any rate.
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is a pitty because I'd like to know how much more advanced the human race would be right now if it weren't towing along this massive collective social fraud that it's hobbled itself with for the last x-thousand years.
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Informative)
Your estimates on the world's religions are way off. Judaism is way down the list. Here is one site:
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.ht ml [adherents.com]
Christianity: 2.1 billion
Islam: 1.3 billion
Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
Hinduism: 900 million
Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
Buddhi
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
In Scientology doctrine, Xenu (also Xemu) is an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in DC-8 -like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living, and continue to wreak chaos and havoc today...
Of course that's not really any sillier than most of the stories in the Bible (talking snakes, log bo
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhm, yeah, that is basically the problem with the Bible, but I don't think that you will understand...
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
The Bible is a historic document in the same way that the Iliad is a historic document. Both are collections of myths and fables that are roughly based on actually occurences in history. Both have supernatural events that were not likely but make for a better story. Science lets us determine which parts are likely to be true (i.e. history) and which parts are likely to be nothing more than myth.
Yes, the likelihood of a group of Jewish fisherman making up a story about a Messiah figure who claimed to be God (blasphemy) and then turning the entire Roman empire upside down in the matter of a few decades is highly unlikely. It is even more unlikely that they would all suffer torture and death to protect a story that is not true. And yet, that is exactly what happened. If anything, this is a strong indication that their story was real. Would you die for something you know to be false?
By your logic, a prophet in the middle east who turned the entire regious upside down, resulting in the rapid conversion of the entire area to the same belief must be correct. ESPECIALLY since he has thousands of men and women lining up to die for his beliefs on a daily basis and receive martyrdom for their cause.
Yes... there you have it. Following your logic, both Christianity and Islam are true. And since Muhammed came afterward Jesus and plenty more people are willing to die for Muhammed, Islam must be "more true" than Christianity.
Do you see the flaws in your logic now or are you converting to Islam?
When people require absolute faith regardless of the overwhelming contrary evidence, they have already sacrificed enough of their own identity and ability to reason that sacrificing their lives is merely the next step of losing themselves to their beliefs. Welcome to the Church of Jim Jones, you'll enjoy the Kool-Aid.
ETDAV (Score:4, Insightful)
And then read The Jury Is In [infidels.org], which carefully analyzes the infamous Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Interesting)
The issue is not whether faith but whether reasonable or blind, unsubstantiated faith.
Rich
Belief Is Not Faith (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps, but religious "facts", unlike scientific facts, require a large degree of doublethink to accept.
For example, you have never been into space. You may have never looked out the window of an aircraft, yet you are told that the earth is round. You can accept this fact, in contridiction to your own expieriences of a flat earth, as locally the round earth looks like a flat one. What you have accepted as fact, and what you expieri
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Informative)
Err... you do know that the "thou shalt not kill" is actually a mistranslation? The Hebrew verb stem [wikipedia.org] used (in both versions [wikipedia.org] of the commandments), is the infrequent R.TZ.KH, not the (common) verb for killing, H.R.G. Actually, while murder is a better translation, the concept of manslaughter may be closer to the meaning, as evidenced in the stem's usage in Numbers 35:12, where it is used for an unjustifiable, but not premeditated or even intentional, homicide.
Of course, the reason for the currency of "Tho
Re:the obvious question: (Score:3, Interesting)
To expand on this:
The Universe exists, so something must have created it.
Thus, the universe exists, and something that created it exists.
You have just created the exact same problem again. You've just transfered the problem.
And don't say, "but maybe God's eternal and didn't need to be created!" because you could just say that about the Universe if you wanted to. As long as you're assigning unverifi(ed|able) attributes to something t
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally despise religios zealots because you cannot reason with them. Some of them kill people because they believe they are acting on behalf of their religion or their god(s), while the masses of moderates passively aid them. Muslims do it, Christians do it, Jews d
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:4, Funny)
Not Merely Flawed Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Merely Flawed Logic (Score:3, Informative)
Genesis 15:5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars..."
Clarification: In that verse, God was not telling Abraham to study the heavens or anything of the sort. He was using the numerous (read: uncountable) stars in the sky to give Abraham a familiar frame of reference so he could understand God's promise of an unending family legacy (numerous, uncountable descendants).
Your point, however, remains otherwise valid. As a reasonable human being, I honestly don't understa
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:5, Informative)
This is the prediction that an infinite number of 'parellel' universes must exist. Note that the scientists, unlike SF authors, are careful to say these are likely to be forever unobservable. I'd argue that the prediction that the fundamental constants nust be random is itself unscientific, but why bother, when there is such a common tenedency in the scientists that start from that premise to jump to the consequent and proclaim infinite parellels.
Now I don't personally believe in the whole heirarchial structure of angelic beings postulated by some parts of the Roman Catholc church, with Powers, Seraphim, and Thrones, etc. - but even a claim involving a detailed listing of what every single one of fiftyfive billion angels did every moment of creation would be simpler than a theory that predicts an infinite number of unobservable phenomina, by Occam's Razor. A theory that blames the universe on a conspiracy between Olive (Santa's other reindeer), and Sagan's Invisible Garage Dwelling Dragon is still more scientific than one that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions. It at least has the virtue of testability.
For more on this,
Re:Flawed Logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Your logic is flawed. It contains an implied assumption that a theory that makes an infinite number of untestable predictions is untestable. That is a false/invalid assumption.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with "an infinite number of untest
Re:grammar nazi moment...(sorry) (Score:3, Funny)
Next up... (Score:5, Funny)
The Inquisition (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Inquisition (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Inquisition (Score:2)
Re:The Inquisition (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Inquisition (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no. He's British. Born, raised and lives there. See here [wikipedia.org]
Re:The Inquisition (Score:4, Funny)
It's true. His speech synthesis machine just has an American accent [per TFA] because he had the "British Charm Unit" module removed from the system. He's now just sounds like a Boorish American Clod. He could've kicked your ass from here to Alberqu..ere..q.....e
(I hope you get this)
From TFA: (Score:5, Funny)
The Vatican was unavailable for comment.
Re:From TFA: (Score:3, Funny)
Annnd, it's back to the women again...
Re: From TFA: (Score:3, Funny)
> The Vatican was unavailable for comment.
They were willing to talk; they just didn't know anything about the subject matter.
Nevertheless, it inflates (Score:4, Insightful)
But, I'm surprised to hear the Pope said this. I'd thought the Catholic church was relatively progressive in terms of creationism. A few hundred years ago, it might have made a difference what they thought.
These days, this kind of comment makes the church look archaic rather than actually discouraging scientists. At least in Europe.
Re:Nevertheless, it inflates (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your're pretty confused, this isn't about evolution vs creationism, this isn't even about the origin of life (Abiogenesis), this is cosmology and about the origin of the universe itself.
Re:Nevertheless, it inflates (Score:3, Informative)
The Catholic Church has accepted Evolution and the Big Bang, but they still need some kind of mystery involved in creation so that their God has a role to play. The don't want scientists producing results which might imply the Universe did not need some outside force to get it started.
Re:Nevertheless, it inflates (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nevertheless, it inflates (Score:5, Interesting)
The Vatican also has some fine astronomers (and one of the oldest astronomical research institutions).
http://vaticanobservatory.org/ [vaticanobservatory.org]
The Vatican isn't as backwards as those fundamental christian creationists that take everything the bible says literally.
Would be surprising, if it were true (Score:3, Informative)
I would be surprised, if it were true, but it doesn't seem to be. First of all, it defies logic -- that the Church would a conference on cosmology at which the Pope would simply tell people not to study cosmology -- and second, as far as I can tell from a search of several archives of Papal speeches, the only Vatican conference on cosmology that John Paul II addressed was on July 6, 1985, and his remarks to that conference [vatican.va] do not include even the remotest sugg
If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Catholic Church is all PR. (Score:2)
Like the loopholes they are introducing for contraception use.
I'm always amazed at how otherwise rational and intelligent people can be pulled in to this system of self-deception.
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, kinda like the Xel'Naga did for the Protoss. Except in the end, the Protoss screwed up. And a bunch of bugs assimilated the Xel'Naga. Hmm, yeah, bad example, I suppose.....
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? What? Threatens their beliefs? The Big Bang? Are you reading the same theory I am? The Big Bang is litterally a religious persons DREAM scientific theory. They couldn't have written it any better themselves. Not only is it the perfect theory explaining the moment of creation, but it also predicts that not only does everything happen, all of creation, in a single moment, at a single point, but it even predicts that our laws and rules and science cannot touch anything that happened before it. It, literally, points to a single moment/point and says the entire universe came from this point, at this time, and we can never hope to know what happened before that.
If that's not "biblical" in it's details, then nothing is.
The Big Bang WAS written by the religious! (Score:4, Informative)
That's because the Big Bang theory WAS developed by a religious person, namely Georges Lemaître.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtr
A Roman Catholic priest!
From that link
I do agree though, that this is the best explanation of God. Something we can never possibly understand.
God is timeless. ~ The Universe had NO time before the Bang.
Where is God? God is everywhere. ~ The Universe is everywhere.
etc...
= The Universe IS God
Mind you, the theory DOES threaten the beliefs of the Fundamentalists. Of course, suggesting that the world has a history beyond 6500 years ago does as well.
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If studying the work of God isn't allowed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, seriously, _if_ the universe has a creator, then its creation is _the_ ultimately elegant hack. The guy didn't edit each map by hand, so to speak, he just gave it a set of simple rules and enough energy and let the whole thing build _itself_.
And look at how neatly it all fits together. E.g., nuclei having resonances at just the right places so anything can be built by fusion from hydrogen. It may seem trivi
During the meeting (Score:5, Funny)
Pope, speaking in bad Italian accent: Yeah, you see, it's like this Mr. Hawking... the beginning of everything... that's God's work... he wouldn't be too pleased if you found out too much about what he did... he's very private that way... he tends to get upset easily... and we wouldn't want anything to say, happen to you... you wouldn't want to end up in a wheelchair or nothin'... oh wait...
Re:During the meeting (Score:3, Insightful)
ask any person of "faith" (Score:5, Funny)
That wan't Galileo's problem (Score:2)
Many of the "scientific" disagreements which have happened recently are of a similar political or business-oriented nature, a
Ah-ha, now you see the REAL problem (Score:5, Informative)
Read again the part after the "..." and there you have the real problem.
AFAIK, Galileo had had a pretty civilized talk with the Pope, and while the Pope wasn't convinced by Galileo's argumentation, he let Galileo go.
Before you blame the Pope of being too fanatical to accept science, remember that it wasn't just faith, but they did have their own explanations (derived from Aristotles) about how the world works. It may have been wrong in retrospect, but as far as any wise man at the time was concerned, they already had a science of sorts. Something that comes and turns the whole cosmic model on its head, damn better be convincing, and at any rate the Pope wasn't convinced. And remember that the Pope had been willing to hear Galileo's arguments, which doesn't strike me as too closed-minded.
Unfortunately, Galileo seems to have had the same kind of personality one can see often on
Now also bear in mind that the Pope at the time was debatably the biggest political figure. A king above kings, if you will. They weren't big on democracy and freedom of speech back then...
And Galileo goes and flames him in public and calls him stupid...
I don't know, seems to me like science-vs-religion had _nothing_ to do with what happened from there. You get in a public pissing contest with the dictator of the realm, you get roughed up in return. It's that simple.
Re:Ah-ha, now you see the REAL problem (Score:3, Informative)
The Pope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Pope (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to nitpick (since I have nothing else to do right now) but religion states who and why, rather than explains
Re:The Pope (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea of a "who" makes the assumption that there is a responsible, sentient entity and "why" makes the assumption that there is an entity, and there was reasoning and a purpose in mind. Most religions claim to "know" not only that "who" and "why" exist, but that they know the only answer to both.
Re:The Pope (Score:4, Informative)
I seriously doubt he said it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I seriously doubt he said it (Score:5, Informative)
I think I know where you got that semi quote(more than a little mangled):
159 Faith and science : "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth." (Dei Filius 4: DS 3017) "Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are." (GS 36 ' 1)
From the Catechism, the official teaching guide of the RCC. As far as the Church is concerned, the only caveat to scientific study is that it respects moral law, which boils down to the fact that in biological sciences, you can't treat human beings in ways that are offensive to their innate dignity(Tuskegee study, Axis death camp studies, etc). The idea is that that faith and science can never be in opposition because they have one author, not that science has to be altered to fit religious belief.
Chardin was condemned not for his scientific writings, but because of his religion. He was most certainly, judging from his own writings, not Catholic anymore. His desire was to eliminate most if not all of Christian belief, and replace it with his own. It had nothing at all to do with science. He wanted to create a new religion and call it Catholic, and the RCC understandably said no. He was free at any time to leave and publish his beliefs in any way he wished. But the RCC is also free not to teach his religion in its schools.
Evolution was never condemned by the RCC, so I fail to see how that is "backhanded and deceptive."
Science and Religion (Score:3, Interesting)
But I hope we will not forget that... (Score:3, Informative)
Take for example, Lemaitre who is credited with proposing the none too unsignificant Big Bang theory. He was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest. He convinced Hubble and Einstein of the expanding universe model using Hubble's experimental work and Einstein's theories.
Jokingly, I would say the Pope advised Hawking not to study the origin of the universe because the Vatican wanted to beat him to publishing the first paper
what a pathetic religion (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm agnostic about whether there is some higher power. But a world created and ruled by the kind of schizophrenic and conflicted being that the Catholic church postulates makes no sense to me, and my faith tells me that they are wrong; no omnipotent being could sensibly be as petty and hateful towards mankind as the Catholic church claims God is.
Re:what a pathetic religion (Score:3, Interesting)
I share the general feeling, however, unless other Christian religions are now completely ignoring the Old Testament, that's not unique to Catholics. The God of the Old Testament is very petty. "Look, people are cooperating and united. They're building a grand city and tower. Can't let that happen, the bastards. Let me make sure they don't understand each other, and let me scatter them ar
Re:what a pathetic religion (Score:3, Interesting)
The Gnostics had an interesting dualism world-view derived from Plato. The material world was not important and this is the world that the OT God had control over. The immaterial world is more important and this is the world of the God in the NT, or Monad.
I have a feeling that the Pope was talking about the Monad. The rea
Not quite right (Score:3, Interesting)
And as far as I know, the Pope so far is right; cosmologists will talk about t=1e-12 seconds after the Big Bang, and so forth, but few talk about t=0 (or t0) in anything but completely speculative ways. The Big Bang and "Let there be light!" are perfectly compatible if you're not a literalist.
how vs why (Score:5, Insightful)
I was raised Baptist but am not religious these days. Many many scientists have a deep spirituality or faith and feel that science just gets you closer to the creation. I've never had a problem with science versus faith: to put it into religious terms, I presume that science is our attempt at explaining "how," and spirituality is our attempt at explaining "why." There's no disconnect here.
The bible doesn't explain how the universe was created, and explicitly says that God's timeline is nothing like man's timeline, so there's no point in parsing "six days" as meaning anything in particular to us. If I feel like parsing it at all, I'd say the seventh day of rest aligns quite nicely with the future era of calmness mentioned in Revelations, so maybe we're still in the sixth day as far as God is concerned. I've subsequently heard some Israeli theologians have put forth the same conjecture. But I don't parse the bible that much, as I already figured out what I want to figure out with regards to my own spirituality: do less harm than good, and the world will be alright.
Major organized religions (aka, Church Inc.) just don't want any explaining of either, as it impacts the bottom line. Come in, drop off your tithe, pat a homeless man on the head, and go watch your kids' soccer game. Questions come pretty close to questioning authority, and they like being the unquestioned authority. I mean, really, condoms in Africa...
Fear (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does it matter that someone like Hawkings studies it? If god is real, then he will discover that.. If god is not real, then that will be discovered. In the end only the truth matters, regardless of which answer is 'found'. ( not that i ever expect that question to really ever be answered, there will ALWAYS be doubt.
Religion is being backed into a corner (Score:3, Interesting)
And yes, I read 'A Brief History of Time' several times and always enjoyed the bit about the Pope telling him to stay away from the beginning of the universe.
Speaking as a Young Earth Creationist... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Catholic church does not object to evolutionary theory, on the premise that "life evolved" and "God created life" are compatible--by way of "God used evolution to create life". (In much the same way, no Christian I've heard of objects to the study of embryology, even though Psalm 139 talks about God "knitting together" the psalmist in his mother's womb.) The reason people like me remain creationists isn't because God couldn't create with evolution, but because common descent isn't compatible with the Genesis account.
So why should the pope object to the idea of God creating using a Big Bang? Theologically speaking, that would be no different from God creating life using evolution.
The actual quote (Score:4, Informative)
But wouldn't that also apply to the Bible? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't the Bible the work of God?
Isn't everything the work of God in some manner or another? Doesn't that make all quests for knowledge suspect?
reminds me of another story... (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard this same anecdote from Hawking himself when he visited Chile a few years ago.
I'm reminded of a story Carl Sagan used to tell. He once asked the pope (John Paul II, of course) what he would do if some scientific discovery proved once and for all and irrefutably that the precepts of Christianity were false. The pope lectured him for a few minutes about how this wasn't possible.
Sagan once asked the Dalai Lama the exact same thing. The Lama's answer?
"I would tell the world, of course! There are millions of buddhists in the world and if I find out their all wrong, I should tell them as soon as possible, and we should look for a better way to live then.
Very different mindset.
In a sense both are right (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me use WoW as an example. Let's say the observable universe is WoW. Even the wisest scholar living _in_ the WoW universe, even with the best gnomish instruments, can only observe and measure things that are _inside_ this universe.
What it _can't_ observe is the universe's creator: Blizzard.
Can such a scholar prove, with only the data in his universe, that Blizzard doesn't exist? No. He just doesn't have the data on which to base such a proof. The best his science can do is state that the universe can be explained well enough without this mystical "Blizzard" entity at the helm.
Same is it with RL science and God. Science _can't_ prove that God doesn't exist. All science can do is explain the universe well enough without needing some "God" entity. But that's all.
No, seriously, I know that we all love to troll and bait the christians. But put your thinking cap for a second and you'll realize the same: if a "creator" exists _outside_ the universe he created (just like Blizzard exists outside the WoW universe), science can't prove or disprove this creator in any form or shape. It just can't get any data from there. At all. Ever.
Not to mention that it's not even possible to prove a negative like that. As long as science can't know every single atom in the universe, _and_ go back in time and observe what happened at every single moment since Big Bang, you simply can't have enough proof that something _doesn't_ exist even _inside_ your universe. It's like proposing to prove that a green three-legged rabbit doesn't exist and never existed. You only need one specimen to prove that it does exist, but it's simply unfeasible to prove that nowhere in the universe such a creature ever existed.
The best science can do is apply Occam's Razor. Basically to say "well, we can explain the universe perfectly well even without some 'God' hypothesis, so we don't need such a hypothesis." But that's all.
Plus, some of the precepts of Christianity are pretty much notions, ideals or moral judgments. How do you scientifically disprove "love thy neighbour"? How would you scientifically disprove "thou shalt not kill"? No, seriously. They're moral precepts that reflect a certain set of values, not something you can run through a spectrograph or whatever other instrument.
So basically, yes, JPII was right: it's not even possible. So while it makes for some good christian-bashing material to compare the answers there, in practice it's about as relevant as asking "what would you do if gravity just suddenly disappeared?" It seems to me like "it's not even possible" is a perfectly valid answer there. Sure, it's not the most interesting or imaginative kind of an answer, but nevertheless it is a valid one.
Re:In a sense both are right (Score:3, Insightful)
Publication Date (Score:2)
It was originally published in 1988, though there have been other editions.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
of course with knowledge comes the fact that most religions are just social engineering scams designed to control the population and make people feel better about themselves at the expense of others^H^H non-believers.
Oh well I have my beliefs and I don't care if no one else believes what I do. A good life involves giving to others, for in the end only kindness matters.
Re:So? (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks Jewel.
Re:Wow. This is really, really old. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wow. This is really, really old. (Score:3, Funny)
Well, maybe Hawking himself submitted this, and it just took him this long to... type... it... with... his... little... clicker... thing...
Re:Why science and religion don't mix (Score:3, Insightful)
I kept reading through the posts until I found it, and I knew I would -- the god-hater's words on the matter.
Religion isn't perfect and neither is science. If, indeed, a religious figure told a great scientist to not study something then that's unfortunate. It doesn't make religion useless, no more than detonating an scientifically discovered atom bomb over a city makes science useless, but pound-for-pound, one could argue t