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From: nfp5e@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Nathan Piazza)
Subject: Re: Goedel, and the Proof of "god"
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Date: Thu, 11 May 1995 15:54:06 GMT
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> And this proposition would be as shaky as the one that "God made the
> DNA", and before that "God made the first man" and "God resides
> somewhere on the tops of the clouds", etc. It is not just convenient
> to put God into the unknown but actually the only place where one can
> put him, since from what we know there is no God. But the historical
> experience tells us that each time as the unknown becomes known God
> has to be moved somewhere else, namely farther into the yet
> unknown. So, if one claims that God collapses the wave-function one
> has a great probability to be wrong tomorrow. Thus any reasonable
> person would not do it.
> 
> Andrew

Shaky and unreasonable is the way of the believer, Andrew.
Believe it or not, there are millions of reasonable people out
there who do believe.  How could they be so stupid?  Why would
they posit such a ridiculous idea?  I think that before you can
pooh-pooh such mystical malarky, you need to come up with a
reason so many people believe.

Also, does our scientific knowledge in any way disprove God's
creation or existence?  Of course not.  Whenever we discover
something unknown, the Christian would say that we are just
coming to understand God's methods on Earth.  Whether we
understand them or not has no bearing on whether God is responsible.
However, what is unique about the quantum wave-function and the
heisenberg principle is that as phenomena themselves, they
dictate to us the limits of our ability to know.  The world of
quanta is the world of the absolute unknowable, and as such,
could be labelled as uniquely God's domain.  My point is not
that this is necessarily true.  I made my response originally to
someone who was claiming that Heisenberg's principle disproves God,
which it does not.  More than anything, it makes God more
psychologically necessary because it slaps us in the face with
absolute limits.  I would never claim that God was provable,
but the beauty of God as a psychological construct is that he
is also not disprovable. 

				--Nathan
