[troutman]

Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

It's mostly absurd because neither can be proven.

It may be unknowable now, but I don't see why this question can't be answered in the future, scientifically.

Dawkins argues that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other"

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/for_th...l_perspective/

The God hypothesis is a scientific question, one that can, in principle at least, be answered empirically with a yes or no result. The existence of God is thus subject to legitimate scientific scrutiny, bringing to bear all we are learning in the research laboratory to a question that used to be considered one of opinion only. “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientifically question, even if it is not in practice—not yet—a decided one,” he writes. Did Jesus have a human father? Was his mother a virgin? Did Jesus come alive again, three days after being dead? “There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is strictly a scientific answer.”

A criticism of this view:

http://afterall.net/books/490838

I agree, provided that we deal with Dawkins' strong, implicit scientism. The Judeo-Christian religions are historical religions whose scriptures make countless claims about history in particular, but also to some extent about biology, cosmology, psychology, anthropology, and even God's supposed interventions in the natural world. As such, this "God Hypothesis" is indeed open to critical inquiry, including scientific inquiry, and many Christian thinkers through the centuries have welcomed it and pursued it. The problem is Dawkins' view that the answer to the God Hypothesis will be a "strictly scientific answer. The methods we should use to settle the matter [...] would be purely and entirely scientific methods." (pp. 82-83, emphasis mine) Here Dawkins is voicing a problematic epistemology that has been called "strong scientism".

allow me to rephrase Dawkin's statement: "God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice..." through the collective efforts of human inquiry, including science, history, philosophy... and maybe even a smidge of theology. Science doesn't get to have all the facts. The sum of 2+2 wasn't discovered in a test tube, and the fundamental principle that something cannot be both A and not A governs scientific inquiry.