• Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    I think what I’m saying there is that faith is more of an on-off switch. You see an astronaut who’s returned from space and he’s holding a pencil and he lets go of it in the air, goes and does something, and returns to the place where he let it go expecting the pencil to still be there.

    It’s not there, but he BELIEVED it would be, because he had no doubt. It surprised him that it wasn’t there.

    Hypothesis is quite a different thing. If I hypothesize there are crackers in the pantry, all I have to do is go and open the pantry and look and see if there’s crackers. That’s testing the hypothesis.

    One does not talk about the existence of things like love, or truth, or God, in the same way one talks about crackers in the pantry. They are metaphysical, and they are different.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Close. You’re comparing a repeatable phenomenon to an unrepeatable one. Unrepeatable phenomena are where science is equal to religion, in that there may only be a hypothesis supporting the theory.

      For example, according to the current scientific theory of creation, two masses collided in the Big Bang. The laws of physics state that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed. There are scientific theories on how the masses came to exist, and what set them in motion, but there is no way to test an unrepeatable phenomenon. Interference-based creation is just as possible.