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Message: [QUOTE="slycbnew, post: 1352790, member: 43467"] Science advances through proposals of hypotheses to explain the nature of reality, and through disproof of those hypotheses - see Thomas Kuhn on the nature of scientific revolutions, or read Richard Feynman. The attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics and Einstein's model of spacetime is proving to be very difficult - but that doesn't mean we should simply refuse to try to understand it. Models of multiple dimensions used to attempt this reconciliation are only about 75 years old or so, and I think string theory is about 20 or 30 years old if I remember right, knowing how science works it'd be a surprise if all of it got reconciled at once. I'm not suggesting that God does or does not exist. However, simply positing the existence of a God because there "has to be one", which is what the watchmaker analogy boils down to (otherwise, why posit a "first cause"/creator that doesn't have a prior cause/creator? If the "first cause"/creator doesn't need a prior cause, why does existence need a prior cause/creator?), is a terrible argument - that's not to say it's not true, just that the argument is awful. I don't quite agree that faith and gullibility should be conflated - faith is central to human experience, we don't question/prove everything we face, we have faith that certain basic things just are (unless you're a philosopher or a high school student, there's no point in wondering whether we're just brains in vats a la Descartes or whether gravity will work this morning just because it did yesterday a la Hume etc.). But I'm always uncomfortable with arguments to prove the truth of religious experience that do not acknowledge that, at the end of the day, spirituality/faith/belief isn't a rational, reasoned thing - it's faith, it's not based on rigorous evidence that can be scientifically (i.e., rationally) demonstrated. That people have faith can be demonstrated (William James' [I]Varieties of Religious Experience[/I] is a wonderful study), but what people have faith in cannot necessarily be demonstrated - nor does it necessarily need to be. Social models based on the divine right of kings is also a very old idea, and was justified more or less along the same lines as the watchmaker. Other equally unjust (in my mind) social arrangements have been justified on similar ideas (attitudes toward women and minority/disempowered social groups etc.). In my mind, these are very bad ideas and very bad arguments/justifications as well. [/QUOTE]

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