Originally posted by Alliance
God's god sounds like Man's man
Maybe. But the fundamental philosophical issue underpinning this question is the following: One of two things is eternal--Matter/Energy or Mind/Spirit. To say that matter/energy always existed (even as a Big Bang-style singularity) does not put you in a much better philosophical position than saying God existed eternally. Both are axioms that are unlikely to be "proven" by any empirical test.
The recent universal acceptance of the Big Bang as the most likely model for the physical origin of the universe is a case in point. When Lemaitre, a French Jesuit edcuator/theoretical physicist, first proposed the theory in the 1930's, it was roundly attacked by the scientific community, including Einstein, as being cataclysmic and smacking of "creationism." At the time, a non-cataclysmic, "steady state" model was ascendant.
Much of the hostility to Lemaitre's idea was the notion that the nature of the physical universe was once radically different than it is now. That the universe could have had a finite origin in time and might have proceeded from a single point was an idea in direct opposition to comfortable scientific preferences for the uniformity of phenomena over time and strict linear, material causation.
While the Big Bang certainly doesn't "prove" God's existence, its reluctant acceptance by the scientific community in the late twentieth century points to a fundamental weakness in the armor of radical skepticism and indicates that, like everyone else, scientists are predisposed to see things framed through a particular world view that may or may not conform to the world around them.
The simple truth of the matter is that science cannot speak to the existence of God, one way of the other. But this self-imposed limitation of scientific method shouldn't eliminate the sphere of religious belief from the public arena. There are many things that cannot be proved empirically that we nonetheless experience intensely--love, anguish, human kinship. Strictly speaking, all these human experiences are anomolies in the otherwise indifferent universe. Even our ceaseless striving after truth is an indication that we exist in a position to stand apart from the world and judge it, that we are unnatural.
Material causation and absolute determinism cannot account for these things. Those that would argue that we are merely biological robots acting strictly through chemical stimulation do not live as if they are automatons--unless they're sociopaths. Those that espouse nothing but material causation and the accompanying belief in the illusory character of the soul are left to explain why they cherish human life, or why they care what the truth really is, or why they care what happens to their children. If these behaviors are merely biological tricks our DNA play on us to facilitate the perpetuation of our species, why should we continue to hold these values once we achieve our "higher" consciousness? After all, if no values really exist, and all is happenstance and natural selection, why should the perpetuation of my species concern me any more than anything else? F..k it.
Human existence is a recent anomaly in the universe, but it is a significant anomaly. Any "scientific" theory must account for our presence as thinking, feeling, loving beings.
Thinking, feeling, and loving are relatively commonplace in our lives, so we generally dismiss these things as banalities, or as subjects not worthy of serious philosophical thought; but I suspect that these experiences are the point of it all, the secret wonder of a cold, unfeeling universe, that doesn't know--nor never will--how to laugh, sing, or cry.
If our humanity is real, and I think we must assume it is, then the universe is stranger than our science knows, and the ultimate author of our uniqueness might still hide behind the veil of that first moment before there was either time or space and the universe was a fleck of nothingness to be held by a child.