03-04-2009, 07:35 PM
Quote:You mean like Stephan Hawking who said in Quantum Cosmology, "...there would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time . . . The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE . . . What place, then, for a creator?"
Show me tangible evidence for super strings, or 11th dimensional M-theory.
First, the requirement for scientific theories is that they be testable, not that they be currently testable. Brian Greene has proposed ways in which we might observe strings, if we look carefully. Many scientists are very, very skeptical about mathematically-elegant but empirically-poor theories like String Theory or M-Theory. But this is the whole idea. Ideas are tested by evidence, and until they have stood up to multiple rigorous tests, they are considered speculative, which is exactly where String Theory is now.
However, this entire line of thought is a sidetrack. If it turns out not to be strings, then perhaps there is some other reconciliation of quantum mechanics and gravity. Science has been one long string of ideas which get eventually rejected; that's the whole point. Time and science will tell, and religion, as usual, will contribute nothing but some vague mutterings about how god somehow lurks below and beyond what we've seen. Strings are not *perpetually and definitionally* beyond our capacity for knowledge. God is. (Alternately, if it isn't, the lack of evidence for it makes String Theory look like a done deal.)
What the good Dr. Hawking is talking about is the implications of a scientific theory, which would directly refute well-known theological arguments (Aquinas, at the very least) that postulate god as a necessity due to the arrow of time. He is quite definitely *not* making substantive empirical claims about unobservable phenomena. And, even if he was, science is a method, not a collection of people. You can't just pick statements by individual scientists (however iconic) and claim that they stand for science itself.
-Jester