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Q&A: Belief in God Is Not a Scientific Claim

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Belief in God Is Not a Scientific Claim

Question

Hello, honorable Rabbi,
You wrote in the introduction to your book The First Being that belief in God is not a scientific claim, because it cannot be subjected to an empirical test, since “Try to think of an experiment such that if it failed, we would be forced to abandon belief in God.”
What about the following experiment: at some future point in time, the computational power available to the scientific world will grow to the point that we will be able to create some environment and determine that a certain thing occurred within it without a cause. That would contradict the principle of causality, and therefore also belief in God, which is a generalization of it. Obviously this is not an experiment that will happen anytime soon, but theoretically it is possible.

Answer

I have a better experiment: if in the future we have a God-o-meter that can successfully measure the number of gods per unit volume. If it shows there is nothing there, then there is no God.

Discussion on Answer

Oren (2020-11-25)

Okay, so is the principle of causality also not a scientific claim?

Michi (2020-11-25)

Apparently not.

Yishai (2020-11-25)

Does the discovery of aliens contradict the physico-theological proof?

Michi (2020-11-25)

Has something been discovered and I didn’t hear about it?
I didn’t understand the question.

Yishai (2020-11-25)

If aliens are discovered, wouldn’t that show that life can arise by chance?

Michi (2020-11-25)

Aliens have already been discovered. Our world is full of them. Proof that life can arise by chance.

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