This is the central problem with Christian theology. God knew before creation that he would have to condemn the majority of people on Earth to eternal torment, yet he proceeded anyway. That makes him by far the worst mass murderer in history. Your god, if he existed would be an evil tyrant with the morals of a spoiled child.
Yes, Darron.
And WAKE UP!!!!! Lily
Stephen,
I'm awake. DarronS has made this charge before and when asked to provide the scripture, he failed. There is nothing in the Bible teaching that God condemns any man to "eternal torment."
OK, I was wrong. You don't believe in hell. Still you're going to heaven and I'm not, according to you.
As for unnecessary suffering, who decides what's necessary?
Well, there is a minimum that a perfectly good, all powerful, all knowing being should allow. So why allow natural disasters? The answer you've given is they are the result of man's sin. This rests on man having libertarian free will which is false and impossible in any case. And also rests on our normal causal explanations being wrong. Frankly it's a silly idea right off the bat.
But it get's worse, why allow natural disaster before man?? Why not prevent them?
You can logically start from any point. For example, I could start with the fact of evil and argue that therefore there must be non-natural moral facts, and then deny naturalism.
You could but you'd be shifting between what is demonstrably real and what is merely imagined, as also in the following:
Lily and most orthodox Christians start with God's perfections (all good, all powerful, all knowing, all benevolent) and the fact of unjust suffering, and then work out how these can both be facts.
You could equally well start with the flying spaghetti monster, which is the point of that invention.
You seem like a bright person. Do you not appreciate the distinction? That's what hard for me to understand: how can a seemingly intelligent person like you write those two things as though they were comparable with known facts, as fact claims. They're not.
The ethical stance is to look at the available evidence then decide, not reach a conclusion then look for rationalizations to support it.
No. You can logically start from any point. . . .
Why argue against people who are a minority? That hardly scratches at the vast thing that is Christianity across time and space. It seems insane to me. Is it a clever tactic I don't understand?
Chris
Maybe you think you addressed Darron's point but to me and I suspect to him, you missed the key word - ethical - and thereby missed the point entirely. Sure, you can start from any point you like, including a flying spaghetti monster but you'd be making it up. Darron can speak for himself but I think I understand what he's saying, and I agree with him: in an ethical worldview people shape their opinions about facts based on what we can reliably know. This includes what we can see and measure, and also what we can deduce but it must be grounded in objective reality. You're making it out as though we can appropriately learn about facts by mere assertion. Both reason and experience say that is not true. We should conform our fact claims to what we can reliably know, not insist that the universe must conform to what we wish to believe.
Humans have invented thousands of gods. The literalist Christian believes in one of them and disbelieves in the rest, which means that the literalist Christian admits the point by her actions.
There are many reasons why many of us secularists insist that belief in imagined gods - and all of them are imagined - is unethical:
1. It's mere wish fulfillment, as Freud observed, which is a form of self-indulgence.
2. It leads to irresponsible thinking, which leads in turn to irresponsible acting. There can be no clearer proof of this than the plethora of ways in which people claim to know "the Word of God," then use it to justify anything they want to do, including the enslavement or annihilation of entire peoples. You can say such actions are aberrational but in point of fact, they are not.
3. It severs the connection between values and reality. You couldn't possibly be more anti-God than that, and here I'm using "God" as a word for what is ultimately real and true.
There probably are other reasons but those should more than suffice. I don't think of myself as a radical at all. In fact, many of my fellow secularists think of me as too friendly to religion: I describe myself as a born-again Humanist, and a nephew by marriage - who I call the most Catholic man in Pennsylvania - says I am the most religious person he has ever met. I take religion very seriously, so when I see it bastardized by theism and theology, I get upset because theism and theology do violence to the human search for beauty and truth, and therefore for God.
OK, I was wrong. You don't believe in hell. Still you're going to heaven and I'm not, according to you.
I do believe in hell, but it isn't eternal torment.
Well, there is a minimum that a perfectly good, all powerful, all knowing being should allow. So why allow natural disasters? The answer you've given is they are the result of man's sin. This rests on man having libertarian free will which is false and impossible in any case. And also rests on our normal causal explanations being wrong. Frankly it's a silly idea right off the bat.
But it get's worse, why allow natural disaster before man?? Why not prevent them?
All of what you say depends on what God is accomplishing. Your idea is that God should create man, not give him any choice in the matter of his life, make everything pleasant for him and be sure to feed him on time. And for heaven sake, no natural disasters.
My understanding is that God has allowed man to experience sin and the result of sin in a fallen world that is temporal and passing away. It's like a proving ground which teaches man about disobedience and evil. In this world man's life is temporary. There are plenty of things that kill people, including natural disasters. None of these things are beyond God's control and he has the ability to restore those who suffer injustice. We are being tested in the lifetime God has given us on this earth, and all of his creation is watching. When his judgment comes, it will be seen as just. He is not creating pet dogs, he is creating sons who will obey him and rule over his creation with justice in the world to come.
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."
"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed."
"To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations..."
You can logically start from any point. For example, I could start with the fact of evil and argue that therefore there must be non-natural moral facts, and then deny naturalism.
You could but you'd be shifting between what is demonstrably real and what is merely imagined, as also in the following:
No; not if either (1) we agree upon the premise (that is, we *assume* it, which even opponents might do for many good reasons), or (2) it was argued on some other grounds and so, even if the opponent doesn't agree, the other person has a reason to begin there. Many people - quite reasonably - feel there are arguments for God's existence, and for the relevant 'omni' qualities. Thus we can start with God's existence with all the faculties orthodox Christians and theistic philosophers grant, in order to argue that *assuming* such a being exists, His existence is compatible with evil or unjust suffering in the world. Then, properly, you would attack not the initial assumption but a weakness in the argument even assuming He is as posited.
You could equally well start with the flying spaghetti monster, which is the point of that invention.
No, you could not *equally* well start with the FSM: because the FSM was constructed to be unbelievable. God, however - or even angels, or even aliens on other planets - are things whose existence is believable at least in principle, and which have a long, uh, pedigree of intelligent and reasonable adherents. I do *not* believe there are any aliens, but I think their existence is not like the absurd existence of the FSM. The same disconnect between positing God and the FSM attaches to the invisible orbiting teapot, and the angry unicorn on the Moon. Or Santa Claus; we know it's fiction: we know exactly who it's based on (a 6th century bishop of Smyrna), and exactly who gave us the modern American version. (I don't recall his name though. The guy who wrote 'Twas the Night Before Christmas'.)
You seem like a bright person. Do you not appreciate the distinction? That's what hard for me to understand: how can a seemingly intelligent person like you write those two things as though they were comparable with known facts, as fact claims. They're not.
Well, thanks ma'am.
I hope I've shown I do appreciate what you're saying - by disagreeing with you lumping together believing in God and believing in artificially constructed, deliberately unbelievable beings. Some beings have *arguable* existence, some are deliberately designed so that their existence is *inarguable*. I think *you've* been misled - may I be so bold - by certain modern writers into believing that you can dismiss God's existence *so* easily. This was a problem of the early positivist movement in philosophy at the turn of the 20th century, and many modern 'scientistic' philosophers, and scientists who want to philosophize, are continuing this freshman mistake. God may not exist, and even may be unlikely to exist, but he's not *inarguably* or *obviously* non-existent. And constructing obviously absurd things and then *claiming* God is like them is another mistake perpetrated upon an honest population. Whatever the final answer, simply constructing - or laughing - God out of existence is a non-starter.
Chris
Chris, for starters, my name is Paul. No offense taken, an honest mistake.
Again with all due respect, I think your epistemology is simply dreadful. You write about constructing God out of existence as though you can construct the same into existence in the first place. The intent behind FSM is completely irrelevant: both constructs are imaginary. All you’ve done is ignore theism’s foundational problem, asserting on the same thin air as you assert your conception of God that it isn’t a problem.
All rhetorical and verbal-philosophical musings aside, the practical effects of your epistemology are as I’ve stated them. You don’t address those practical effects, which is the same essential problem as I have with your epistemology. It ignores what we know of reality. I live in the real world, and choose to construct my life around what I have good reason to know. You don’t have to live that way, you can choose another path; what you cannot choose are its consequences. If that sounds like lecturing or peevish, it’s because I think your epistemology genuinely and consummately sucks, as nice a person as you seem to be.
You missed the key word - ethical . . . . You're making it out as though we can appropriately learn about facts by mere assertion.
Well. At the risk of being too subtle, there are facts *about arguments*. Augustine's theodicy - to give an example - is an *argument*, and as such it is partly independent of its contents. (Partly.) We can begin arguments with 'assuming P...' That may *sound* like mere web-spinning, but I'll just assert for now that it's not. We need to know about arguments too. (Consider the odd game man-cubs play: 'Why? Because!' They're playing with rehearsing arguments - or explanations - independent of contents.)
The literalist Christian
I'm unclear if you mean 'literalist' as usually intended. Orthodox Christians tend to believe not that those other gods have no existence, but that in reality they are reflections in human cultures of the One, Whoever He is. By implication, they understand that parts of their own understanding need reforming. ('Eye hath not seen', no-one here on earth has the Beatific Vision, etc.) The Catholic Catechism is a good example where Christians are enjoined to believe this.
I think you're here confusing gods as conceptual constructs and gods as beings or a Being we seek, and adopt or discard or modify our belief about as we might do with a penpal we slowly gain information about. In a certain philosophical sense (see Descartes) the *idea* of Thor or Poseidon is eternal - and multiple, for there are several such clusters all of which can have the name Poseidon or Thor (the Thor of the middle-class farmer versus that of the skalds, for example) We should avoid confusing the two kinds of 'gods'. In one sense Thor is dead as a doornail; in another, every Germanic householder who prayed to Thor was praying to the same reality as every ancient Greek Corinthian sacrificing to Poseidon. And you and I can just as well pray to that Reality today. If god exists and loves our worship, just so; if he does not or is not such, then it's all the same. But our circumstances do not absolve us of working to better understand that reality.
There are many reasons why many of us secularists insist that belief in imagined gods - and all of them are imagined - is unethical:
1. It's mere wish fulfillment, as Freud observed, which is a form of self-indulgence.
2. It leads to irresponsible thinking, which leads in turn to irresponsible acting. There can be no clearer proof of this than the plethora of ways in which people claim to know "the Word of God," then use it to justify anything they want to do, including the enslavement or annihilation of entire peoples. You can say such actions are aberrational but in point of fact, they are not.
3. It severs the connection between values and reality. You couldn't possibly be more anti-God than that, and here I'm using "God" as a word for what is ultimately real and true.
With respect, I think you're confusing *unethical* with *unjustified*.
~1. Freud didn't 'observe' this. His theories are largely discredited today, tho' he's still honored as a pioneer. And in any case, isn't a Christian the best judge of his own motives - just as you are of yours? What if I claimed atheists have a big, fat wish-fulfillment to have no God? No, I don't believe it of you!
~2. It at least as often leads to altruistic and even heroic thinking. Care to tote up the positives and negatives? No? Then this is just an empty saying.
~3. This makes no sense to me as written, but maybe you could reword it. But its form is tendentious: it assumes what is to be proven, that belief in god(s) disconnects one from reality or values. Who's more grounded in reality of a certain sort, Sheldon or his fundamentalist mom? Who day by day treats the people around them better?
This is interesting btw, but maybe we could slowly steer conversation back to dealing with apologists. or maybe not. (A very different forum I frequent more than this one has very strict rules about thread drift, and all this ranging around makes me look over my internet shoulder!)
Chris
I'm not sure that a Scriptural passage affirming God's perfect love, justice and mercy will convince *him*. On the other hand, you've opened me to thinking that's not a bad way to go for some people; lots of people aren't hardened utterly against the Bible, and all they need is an assurance that it's not a mere book of horrors.
I'm not trying to convince DarronS of anything, but when people continually say incorrect things about what the Bible teaches I like to share what I've learned to the contrary. Many of the people here actually think evilbible.com and skepticsannotatedbible.com are good sources for what the Bible teaches. That's just sad.
How can a person suffer after death? Death is the end of suffering. God has taken home those children who die in disasters and they will suffer no more. It is not an injustice, it is the time God has given them on earth. A person can curse God for what they view as an injustice, or they can trust that he will restore all things in the eternal world to come. Job trusted God even though he walked through the valley of death. The testing of who we really are is not done when all is going well and we are living the good life. Who we really are is revealed when difficulties come, imv.
"Then Job replied to the LORD: 'I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, "Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?" Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know...' After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before."
This is interesting btw, but maybe we could slowly steer conversation back to dealing with apologists. or maybe not. (A very different forum I frequent more than this one has very strict rules about thread drift, and all this ranging around makes me look over my internet shoulder!)
Chris
Chris,
I know about the structure of arguments. In fact, I took a symbolic logic class from Larry Sklar in college. You’re still missing the point. Logic and reason are essential but without a grounding in reality, we’re only playing a schoolboy’s academic game.
By literalist Christian, I was referring to Christians who believe literally in the Christian narrative: God as a supreme being, etc.
I didn’t confuse “unethical” with “unjustified.” I said exactly what I meant to say. The consequences of believing things to be true because we wish they were true are too dire, and there’s no excuse in this day and age for people not seeing that. If you can wrap your ideas around a god, I can wrap my ideas around what enhances and denigrates life. If you look at how people behave when the chips are down, you’ll see that everyone acknowledges the value of my approach in most things, even though they may not admit it.
Chris,
I know about the structure of arguments. In fact, I took a symbolic logic class from Larry Sklar in college. You're still missing the point. Logic and reason are essential but without a grounding in reality, we're only playing a schoolboy's academic game.
By literalist Christian, I was referring to Christians who believe literally in the Christian narrative: God as a supreme being, etc.
I didn't confuse "unethical" with "unjustified." I said exactly what I meant to say. The consequences of believing things to be true because we wish they were true are too dire, and there's no excuse in this day and age for people not seeing that. If you can wrap your ideas around a god, I can wrap my ideas around what enhances and denigrates life. If you look at how people behave when the chips are down, you'll see that everyone acknowledges the value of my approach in most things, even though they may not admit it.
I just posted a new thread, The Ethics of Belief, in the Philosophy forum.
Chris, for starters, my name is Paul. No offense taken, an honest mistake.
Again with all due respect, I think your epistemology is simply dreadful. You write about constructing God out of existence as though you can construct the same into existence in the first place. The intent behind FSM is completely irrelevant: both constructs are imaginary.
There are several arguments - several *kinds* of arguments - for God's existence. You may be under the impression that somehow the sciences have disproved God or made Him irrelevant. I can only disagree; point to the hordes of working scientists who are theists of one stripe or another. Naturalism as a philosophical system has always been in trouble of one sort or another. Attempts to sort of define God out of existence largely failed, partly because they made *all* knowledge difficult if not impossible. And so on. My epistemology isn't the issue; the existence of God has not been swept off the table by any discovery known to Man, despite Dawkins and Dennett.
I also accept personal revelation, although not in philosophy or science: I mean if a person came to me and sincerely told me of being visited by the FSM, I would not dismiss him out of hand if he were otherwise sane. Does that surprise you? (That said, I would only be patient for a friend. We all have limits, and it's reasonable to not stray too far from them. If God's existence is just too much for you to think about, we might be too far apart to do each other much good. But I'm a Pollyanna about such things, personally.)
All you've done is ignore theism's foundational problem, asserting on the same thin air as you assert your conception of God that it isn't a problem.
This is not the thread for my question: What *is* theism's fundamental problem, in your opinion? Maybe that's a new thread.
It ignores what we know of reality.
What we know of reality - which is precious little, though precious enough to those who prised it from Nature's filing cabinet - is not exhausted by what we know of Nature. to claim otherwise is just to assume what has not been proven. by. anyone. Again, who is more connected to reality: Sheldon or his mom? And why? forget his mom's *religion*: isn't she more keyed into specifically *human* matters? Aren't these at least *arguably* non-natural, or at least rather distant from matter in motion, or modification by descent? How are morals, altruism - heck, how is justification, argumentation - 'natural' in a well-defined way THAT YOU CAN TELL OF? Not speculat; not muse on; not spin a possible tale. Even if they are natural, they are *so* distant from the obviously natural - so distant that Sheldon cannot get from physics to human interaction despite his genius. I know, it's a fable, but it is true to life. I used to be surrounded by Sheldons.
Chris
Heh, I bet you do. And that’s fascinating about Larry Sklar, I hope he was as great in class as in print. (That’s not always the case.)
You're still missing the point. Logic and reason are essential but without a grounding in reality, we're only playing a schoolboy's academic game.
Well, that's just where we disagree Paul. I and many others - others (not me) just as intelligent as Dr. Sklar - are arguing about how big and capacious is reality. You think that there is only what we can discover empirically - yes? I think Sheldon's mom is grounded in one part of reality - the non-naturalist part, tho' a little less firmly in the religion department! - moreso than Sheldon.
(I'm not sure how to connect this with the thread's title, but maybe I don't need to. just to be clear.)
Come now. You have no proof that I, or more importantly the philosophers, scientists etc. who believe in Gods and who have argued about them, have a wish-fulfillment about God. You don't believe what you cannot prove, right? When you bring the psychology results proving it, I'll think differently.
IMHO, we are all talking about the same thing. The Ultimate Causality.
The difference is that religions claim to know this ultimate causality, namely God, who has supernatural powers to creates and shape the universe “at will”. But except from some old unreliable documents, that is the totality of the claim for a sentient and motivated God.
OTOH, Science recognizes that the ultimate causality is NOT YET known and is seeking to discover this causality by looking at the parts which make up the universe.
But to date there is no evidence that a motivated, sentient God (as claimed in the available documents) was “necessary”, and even highly improbable as described in scripture.
No scientist will completely rule out the possibility of a god, but does rule out a supernatural scriptural god as it would any claim of the ability to function outside of Natural laws, which have been proven to be consistent by copious evidence.
The problem does not lie with the assumption of a god. The problem lies in the unwillingness by the believer to modify any of his/her views of the only available and unreliable documentation. Science does not reject the proposition of a “wholeness” which exhibits certain potentials, it merely rejects the assumption of a god with supernatural potential. This is done on the logical conclusion that many examples in scripture are inconsistent with Natural laws as we know them to be and therefore are not available to scientific investigation, but must be taken on faith. In science this is not allowed, science requires evidence and either confirmation or falsification of any claim of certainty, something which scripture cannot provide.
Thus the tween shall never meet.
when people continually say incorrect things about what the Bible teaches I like to share what I've learned to the contrary. Many of the people here actually think evilbible.com and skepticsannotatedbible.com are good sources for what the Bible teaches. That's just sad.
Yeah, it takes all kinds. Wait, did you just say someone is wrong on the Internet!?
On just one point of your reply to my very brief outline of the argument *against* god's existence from unjust suffering:
How can a person [too young to deserve suffering] suffer after death? Death is the end of suffering. God has taken home those children who die in disasters and they will suffer no more.
(Scratching chin) I guess so. Do you think this is true, or is it just one possible explanation? (In Christian apologetics, we need not prove things, except to prove our doctrines are not against reason. That's the problem Paul/LaClair is having with us.)
Chris
But no scientist will completely rule out the possibility of a god, but does rule out a supernatural scriptural god as it would any claim of the ability to function outside of Natural laws, which have been proven to be consistent by copious evidence.
You may want to read this article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2056018/Laws-physics-change-depending-universe.html
Excerpts: "The 'constancy' of physics is one of the most cherished principles in science - but the scientists say that the 'laws' we know may be the galactic equivalent of 'local by-laws' and things may work quite differently elsewhere.
"The discovery - if true - violates one of the underlying principles of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and has profound implications for our understanding of space and time."
"It also means that in other parts of the universe, the laws of physics might be hostile to life - whereas in our small part of it, they seem fine-tuned to supporting it.
"Research carried out at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge found that one of the four known fundamental forces, electromagnetism - measured by the so-called fine-structure constant and denoted by the symbol ‘alpha' - seems to vary across the Universe."
Chris, you are under many misapprehensions about what I believe, none of which I’ve given you cause for.
Science has not disproved the existence of a god, though there are some conceptions of God that science has clearly disproved: a god with a 6,000-year-old universe, for example. I’m surprised that you don’t know that as a scientific naturalist I recognize that the existence of a god is not falsifiable, and therefore is not capable of proof or disproof.
I don’t think science has rendered God irrelevant. The idea of God influences the behavior of many people around the world and is highly relevant for that reason.
You misunderstand my views on naturalism, or perhaps more accurately, persist in not understanding them. Of course naturalism runs into philosophical trouble if you take it far enough, trying for example to explain the “ultimate nature of reality," whatever that is and if such a thing there be. So does every other world view. However, naturalism is the only means by which we have acquired knowledge about nature, from subatomic particles to cosmology. Theism and theology haven’t contributed anything – not a speck, shred or iota of knowledge in the thousands of years of their history. You’re overlooking the operational nature of scientific philosophy and inquiry. And again it goes back to the same thing you keep ignoring: reality, the way things really work in the world we actually inhabit.
If your epistemology isn’t the issue, then why do you keep advocating for it? And whether it is your issue or not, it is mine, among many other issues, because it is dreadful.
Theism’s foundation problem is that it isn’t based on any evidence. Again, that may not be your focus but I think it is essential to any meaningful philosophy.
“How much we know of reality" is more a statement about how each of us chooses to look at the matter than anything else. It’s not a useful question because we don’t know how much of the whole we know; we couldn’t because we don’t know what the whole is. All of that is just speculation. What matters about reality is that it is the only thing we have to check our hypotheses and theories. And we’re right back at the same place again: every single thing we know with any degree of reliability is a product of our investigations into or stumblings upon reality.
Larry Sklar was a treat to have as a professor: animated, intellectually and personally supportive and of course brilliant.
With all due respect, Chris, you fundamentally misunderstand what I’m saying. I know that because you write: “You think that there is only what we can discover empirically - yes?" No. There may be more but we can’t make any reliable statements about it until we discover something objective that justifies making such a statement.
You seem to assume that we should have answers for everything. I recognize that the correct answer to many questions right now is “We don’t know."
But no scientist will completely rule out the possibility of a god, but does rule out a supernatural scriptural god as it would any claim of the ability to function outside of Natural laws, which have been proven to be consistent by copious evidence.
You may want to read this article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2056018/Laws-physics-change-depending-universe.html
Excerpts: "The 'constancy' of physics is one of the most cherished principles in science - but the scientists say that the 'laws' we know may be the galactic equivalent of 'local by-laws' and things may work quite differently elsewhere.
"The discovery - if true - violates one of the underlying principles of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, and has profound implications for our understanding of space and time."
"It also means that in other parts of the universe, the laws of physics might be hostile to life - whereas in our small part of it, they seem fine-tuned to supporting it.
"Research carried out at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Swinburne University of Technology and the University of Cambridge found that one of the four known fundamental forces, electromagnetism - measured by the so-called fine-structure constant and denoted by the symbol ‘alpha' - seems to vary across the Universe."
I have read the article and it is an interesting phenomena. Multiple universes with different Natural laws have never been ruled out by science. David Bohm speaks of different plenums (stages) in the greater wholeness..
It shows that science "so far" has not been able to observe the entire universe, that there is an event horizon, similar as there is an event horizon inside a black hole, where Natural laws seem to break down. Would you argue that a black hole is evidence for a god?
We know of "different natural laws" that govern under certain circumstances such as particle behaviors. We know of "virtual particles" which are not directly observable but are known by the observable traces they leave. We have propositions of "string theories" predicting multiple universes.
This is why science does not attach a single law of nature, but has identified 4 fundamental forces which we have named and which seem to be constant in our universe. Read Newton's Laws (classical mechanics)
Newton's laws hold only with respect to a certain set of frames of reference called Newtonian or inertial reference frames. Some authors interpret the first law as defining what an inertial reference frame is; from this point of view, the second law only holds when the observation is made from an inertial reference frame, and therefore the first law cannot be proved as a special case of the second. Other authors do treat the first law as a corollary of the second.[8][9] The explicit concept of an inertial frame of reference was not developed until long after Newton's death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_laws_of_motion
Bohm's work explains why GR and QM themselves seem to be inconsistent in outcomes. But he also explains that this is because scientists have failed to look at the universe as a wholeness (he calls it the holomovement of the fundamental causal forces) and in his book Wholeness and the Implicate order describes in detail the different plenums necessary for this (our) universe to become manifest in reality.
We also know that the "inflationary epoch" did not obey the current laws of nature which govern our universe. But that was just until space cooled down enough for the universal constant to become active. We have known of "different states" for a long time now.
We may well discover other abberant (but natural) phenomena under certain circumstances, in due course.
Bottom line, Science does not CLAIM to have all the answers. OTOH, Religion does make that claim but does not provide any EVIDENCE.
The article does not prove the existence of God at all, it just shows science does not know everything. But to cite this article as proof of God is argument from ignorance.
Not if the middle-school principle has anything to say about it, they won't.
Chris Kirk
Are you suggesting that we teach Creationism in science classes, using the bible as the authority? If I recall this was tried already for centuries and has brought no new knowledge to science. On the contrary, it has resulted in some of the most heinous crimes perpetrated by mankind unto itself.