We can certainly believe in God, but without invoking science

I want to respond to the May 28 article entitled “The Existence of God Is Rational”. Contrary to the arguments developed by the two engineers interviewed, the authors of a book on the subject, the assumption that God exists is neither rational nor scientific.

The complexity of the world is a bad argument, invalidated by chaos theory, which shows that enormous complexity can be produced by a few very simple rules (just write in “The Game of Life” on YouTube).

Placing the name (“God”) on a mystery (the origin and reason for the existence of the world) does not advance knowledge in any way, but only takes one step back. It will then be necessary to explain who this god is, who created him, and how he works. This is an illusion of interpretation, because one does not understand the interpretation more than it needs to be explained.

From a scientific point of view, the only valid theories or hypotheses are those that produce empirical predictions. The “God” hypothesis produces nothing, so it is a metaphysics rather than a science. We remember Laplace’s famous sermon: “Sir, I did not need this hypothesis.”

The principle of stinginess is applied in all sciences (and can be inferred from Bayes’ theorem), as well as the burden of proof published by physicist Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Thus, the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent being requires much more evidence than a few “clues”.

So we can of course believe in God, but not for scientific reasons…

Pascal Wagner Egger,

Psychology researcher

social at university

from Freiburg