• In total there are 26 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 26 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 789 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 5:08 am

Exploring Origins

Engage in discussions encompassing themes like cosmology, human evolution, genetic engineering, earth science, climate change, artificial intelligence, psychology, and beyond in this forum.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
johnson1010
Tenured Professor
Posts: 3564
Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:35 pm
15
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 1280 times
Been thanked: 1128 times

Re: Exploring Origins

Unread post

Any guess you put forward about the world which has testable elements is a hypothesis. It doesn't mean it's a good hypothesis. It just means it is a hypothesis.

So you could say for instance that the speghetti monster is holding all of us to the surface of the earth with one noodly appendage pressed to the top of each of our heads. This is a hypothesis.

It sets out a set of predictions. First that we should find some kind of noodly appendage, or at least an analog. But what are all the un-intended side effects of this claim?

It is put forward as a substitute for gravity for what's holding us to the earth. But it does not make mention of anything besides people. What holds a rock to the earth? What holds the atmosphere to the earth? What holds the earth in orbit around the sun? If the spaghetti monster is not responsible for all these other objects' gravity, is gravity also functioning on us, in addition to the noodly appendage?

We can now do experiments to determine that human bodies fall at the same rate as innanimate bowling balls. We can calculate how fast we should fall if it were only gravity acting onus, and compare that to experimental results. If it turns out that the noodly appendage is pressing us down exactly as if we were subject to the same rules of gravity as everything else, that would be telling. And we can test that objects fall independant of our heads. A watch can be taken off a wrist, which would previously have been held to the earth with the noodly appendage, but when taken off gravity must somehow decide to take over pulling it toward the earth. The same thing with a shoe, or hair after a hair cut. You could also place somebody sideways on a table with those fold-out leafs so their torso is on the main table, their head over a leaf, and their legs over a leaf. Fold the leafs down, what happens?

The noodly appendage hypothesis states we are being held to the ground by a noodle pressed to the top of our heads. So, should we not be drawn over the edge by the entire weight of our body residing in our heads? if we push that person so that their whole body is off the table, except for their heads, shouldn't they remain in "plank" position? Their bodies don't have mass, the noodle is pushing them down!

But in actuality, these and a billion other experiments you could invent would all demonstrate that the pull of our bodies toward the earth is not evidently from the push of any "noodly appendage" either visible, or not.

So, anything a "god" hypothesis actually says about the way the world works can be put to the test. It's true that just saying "God is real" is not a hypothesis really. Because nothing has been specified about what it means for the way our world works. But if you say "God is real, and because of that anyone with faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains by prayer" you have set up a condition which can be tested. And when that inevitably fails to prove true, you have conclsively proven that THAT god, the one that was described, is not real.

There may still be billions of other versions of god without that specific criteria in their description, and you haven't disproved those gods, but the one described in the hypothesis is out the window.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
Post Reply

Return to “Science & Technology”