Quote Originally Posted by Syme View Post
There is no way that reading up on various scientific topics could ever provide you with any evidence against the existence of a god. I say this as an atheist and someone spends a lot of free time reading scientific literature.
I'd just like to add to this why the existence of god is unscientific, since a lot of people just don't understand what science is and what science isn't. They get the impression in elementary to high school that science is a corpus of facts about how the world works that's taught by fiat, statements that should be held as true simply because they are being taught by an authority. That's not what science is at all.

The proposal that god exists is unscientific because it is non-falsifiable. Science works more or less by observing a phenomenon, formulating a hypothetical model with predictive power to describe the phenomenon, and then by performing experiments to see if them model can predict their outcome. If it does, the model is accept as a "true" scientific theory. If not, it is discarded or modified.

God is presented to us as a supernatural entity or at least as one that transcends the physical reality that is sensible to us. Science works only with stuff we can perceive with our senses, usually indirectly through the use of instruments, but nonetheless only with stuff for which we can correct direct evidence.

So what does all this have to do with unfalsifiablity? Well, science works through deductive reasoning. That means it tries the same thing over and over and over and over again, and if the same thing happens again and again and again, then it makes a general statement about the world from these specific instances.

Now, it is impossible to definitively determine that a proposition is true in science. At best we can determine truth beyond a reasonable doubt. However, it is possible to show that something is false in science by finding just one instance of something which definitely contradicts a statement.

Since God "transcends" the realm of phenomenality, there is no experiment that could concievably be used to show that the proposal "God exists" is false. On the other hand, it is quite easy to concieve of an experiment that could show any host of scientific theories are false, and what sorts of outcomes they would have to be.

This is why the existance of God is inherently an unscientific idea.