Monday, December 4, 2017

Origins: Science and Faith

http://backreaction.blogspot.cl/2017/11/how-do-you-prove-that-earth-is-older.html

I think this blog post is one of the most relevant to the interplay between science and faith that I have read in some time. While I currently classify myself as someone who doesn’t know how God created the Universe, in the past I was a creationist. I was a creationist in the sense that Sabine presents in this blog post, I thought that God had started the Universe up some 7,000 years ago (because civilised humanity is what He was interested in, it is similar to when I start my simulation at some specific time right before the interesting behaviour starts) but if you ran time backward you would have dinosaurs and so on.

I still think that this is an entirely reasonable position. This is the position that I present as consistent with scientific observations to my creationist family and friends when we discuss origins.

There is a lot of reality out there that is not currently probed by science and there are very solid arguments (The Island of Knowledge) to be sure that a lot of reality can not ever be probed by science, so it is more reasonable than not to have beliefs that science has nothing to say about. And that belief can include a beginning of reality at some t=t_c.