This latest “God Equation” isn’t even laughable, it’s just sad. Last night, the “news” promised us a story tonight about a local man who has come up with a mathematical formula that proves the existence of god.
I’ll just let that sink in for a second before I continue because there is so much wrong with that statement…
Ready to move on? Okay, let’s look at that for a second.
My first problem:
If this guy has proved the existence of god, wouldn’t that be an important enough story to tell us tonight instead of running a teaser for tomorrow night’s broadcast? I’d think that, especially here in the “deep” south, it would lead the headlines. I’d be VERY interested if you could show me proof. I think the whole world would want to know about that. But no, we’ll cover sports and weather and wait to tell you about the most important thing ever tomorrow night.
Second problem:
Since he’s not leading the headlines, they’ve already relegated him to “quack” status. This isn’t the first God Equation and sadly it won’t be the last. In every new incarnation of this “formula” many of the variables are arbitrary and when someone produces “results” they are proving correlation, not cause. Every few years some new idiot comes to the conclusion that people are so dumb that we can just mix together equal parts “math” and “science”, add in a dash of “quantum” and they’ll believe it. Hey, if they swallowed a monotheism made up of a trinity of gods, why the hell not?
Third (and biggest) problem:
Isn’t the point of faith to believe in the unprovable? If they DID prove god, wouldn’t that ruin the point of religion? If you prove it, everyone will join the club and that’ll ruin that “holier (and therefore somehow better) than thou” attitude that super-religious people have. Religion is a hobby of mine and in the many conversations I have had with people of varying denominations, I have attempted the standard reconciliation of science and religion in order to keep the peace. And in almost every single case that argument is refuted. Religious people have a desire, maybe a need, to believe in the supernatural.
I tried to allow for both, I was willing to let science and religion sleep peaceably beside each other but it’s the religious folks that insist on causing the friction. I attempt with “Maybe the Big Bang is just the physical result of ‘let there be light’ and maybe creating the world in six days refers to six trips around the galactic core” and without fail I am always told that I am wrong. Six days means six 24hour periods of day/night they insist that the Universe was created whole and intact and never formed slowly from the result of the Big Bang. They insist that the Earth is only 6000 years old. Some of the people I talk with will let this one slide but still cling to most of the rest… That book is to be taken literally. Some (very few) people insist on taking it 100% literal, almost all of them will pick and choose which parts we have to take literal and which parts can be ignored. (Citations available if you really want to get me rolling on this but for now, let it slide)
So we end up with a group of people that cover their ears and close their eyes to science while embracing an ancient holy scripture. Wouldn’t a mathematical equation (even one with pseudo terms and faulty logic) just infuriate these people? For once I’m coming to the defense of religious people here… If they are happy in their delusions and they are so hardened that evidence and proof will not shake the foundations of their faith, isn’t a “God Equation” kind of an insult?
These are the same people responsible for censoring Copernicus and imprisoning Galileo. Scientific method is not their strong suit. When carbon dating says the Turin cloth was created in the 1300′s, science is wrong. When that same carbon dating tells of a 4800-year old piece of wood near Mt. Ararat, science has proven the Noah’s Ark story. They point to archaeological expeditions that have dug up ancient ruins of cities mentioned in the Bible and scream “vindication, proof the Bible is fact!” just because the city is where the Bible said it was. Then these people go read a Tom Clancy novel and never think about the story as fact simply because he mentions the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial.
It would seem that science has no place in religion so why is this guy trying to dupe people with seemingly “difficult” math? He thinks that if he talks over our heads and throws around enough big scary “sciency sounding” words and a few Greek symbols, some bubba in a pick-up truck will declare that proof enough for him. The rest of us (believers and non-believers alike) will just laugh at him and probably explain why his equation is flawed. This is the same crackpot that will point to the banana as proof of God’s intelligent design. One word refutation; Pineapple.
Someone once told me a line that I’ve come to adopt as my own mantra when I explore the Christian Bible. Some words that if we could just come together and agree on, we’d all bump elbows a little bit easier in this world; “That book is full if truths, not facts.”
May 17th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
1: Yes
2: Yes
3: yes and no. Nice construct though- the straw man fallacy here is that God != Religion != Faith
If you prove the existence of god, an afterlife, and several other things that are entirely based in faith, you will destroy that faith because it’s no longer belief based. But that doesn’t change the other two.
I don’t know the point of the existence of God except that it seems petty to think that the Proverbial Omnipotent and Omniscient god wouldn’t be limited to dealing exclusively with the needs on the practitioners of one faith on one planet. However, that said, the construct of god in religion is fairly easy to define: It’s there to provide a powerful ideal that that humans can hand over responsibility to, when they are no longer willing to.
The point of religion is to hand out and teach moral and ethical structures to a society to help create and maintain the veneer of civilized behavior.
And the point of faith is the magicians slight of hand. People want to believe the things they have been told, when the world doesn’t provide facts to back up that belief, “Faith” provides the believer a method of justification. The smoke and mirrors of “Faith” without facts being somehow more noble, and more honorable than accepting the world as it presents itself, justifies the believers continued reliance on what the rulers of the framework into which the find themselves tells them.
Not that I’m down on faith – some people are absolutely incapable of self control, they have to have a higher power into which they can commit themselves, because they cannot or will not every make their own way through the world, and require outside controls to do it for them. Faith, Religion, and God makes it possible for them to function in the world. For others it’s routine, or imposed organization. People are happy in the military or in some other highly structured lifestyle where they can happily leave the important questions to God, to the master Sargent, or to the Pharoah.