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Creationists & fundamentalists often make a number of claims about or attributed to a deity yet fail to provide any evidence in support of it. This article attempts to deal with such claims of deity.
Despite the fact that there is no evidence to support their existence many that make the claim that a god or gods exist ... for the remainder of this article such phenomena will all be referred to as God or god. In the case of Christianity, Judaism (Jehovah) or Islam (Allah) and, indeed, many other religions the god in question is an all powerful, divine force or entity that "created" or "is" or "contains" the universe and/or watches over it and/or permeates every aspect of our lives.
A key tenet of science is that all items currently in the "scientific database" must be observable (testable against the empirical world), tentative and falsifiable. To the authors knowledge there are no reliable or verifiable instances of such a god being seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelt or otherwise observed nor is it possible to design an experiment to test for its existence or non-existence. Science is currently explaining the universe (the sum of all that exists) around us and assumes that the entire universe is explainable or at least potentially so and, to date, there has been no physical or naturalistic evidence to support the existence of any gods. Available evidence indicates (or at least implies) that men wrote whatever religious scriptures currently exist and there is no evidence to indicate that a deity was involved in any way. In other words there is no apparent physical or naturalistic evidence to support the existence of God.
The accepted method of investigation is to propose a clearly stated hypothesis and to support that hypothesis with evidence and reasoned logical deductions based upon the same. That is how science works and is the method by which humans have discovered things about our surroundings since we were able to reason. It is also understood that if a hypothesis does not "fit" in any way with other knowledge already accepted about our universe, if it cannot be supported by evidence and it cannot provide information about our universe previously unknown then it is assumed to have no value and is dismissed.
From the above and from general scientific principles the following can be stated:
If God is (in principle) entirely or potentially explainable then it is not, by definition, supernatural but natural i.e. a part of the universe. If God exists wholly outside of the universe then there can be no observable evidence to support it's existence and no one has any reason to believe in it let alone try to convince others that it exists. If it exists within some gap in our scientific understanding of the universe then it is a "God of the gaps". Such gaps get smaller daily and therefore God is not only due to one day to be explained (such gaps will not remain open forever) but is also shrinking in size as our knowledge increases.
Logically therefore a deity must be one of the following:
God cannot exist within the parts of the universe we have explained ... if so it would have been explained and would therefore already be a part of the natural (and explained) universe. For the same reason it cannot be everywhere, for if it were it would be possible to observe and test some parts of that deity. If it is a part of the universe that we have not explained then it is a "God of the gaps" i.e. it exists somewhere in the gaps of knowledge we have so far failed to explain. If, however, that is true then every time we discover something new this "God of the gaps" gets a little smaller.
The final option is the assumption that God does not exist ... this needs no justification, no proof, no evidence and is, by far, the easiest and most justifiable position (in terms of lack of evidence) to take. The author concedes, however, that lack of evidence can never constitute positive proof for a given claim however in the event of no supporting evidence for the existence of god and that the accommodation of such a deity would break many fundamental laws of physics it is acceptable to assume the non existence of said deity until evidence is supplied.
Since, at one point, the will of God, divine intervention and creation were once generally accepted to be valid explanations for many phenomena and today is not (at least by the scientific community) it follows that at one point that God was huge but nowadays is getting very small indeed ... perhaps the sceptic should be careful lest he/she tread on the "God of the gaps" without realising it.
Richard Dawkins wrote "It is often said that although there is no positive evidence for the existence of God, nor is there evidence against his existence. So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"
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