Before we get any farther I am going to say this - it is impossible to disprove God.



Pause a second to take that in. Wait. Wait.



Good. Now we have that out of the way.



However, it is because of this statement that I cannot believe in God. I am scientist at heart. I thrive on the experimentally confirmable, repeatable, cold, hard, objective truths of direct observation. To me there is beauty in the facts. I love discussing the intangible, the unverifiable, but when I seek to truly understand the universe around me, I always turn back to science. And God is bad science.



A good scientific theory involves many components, but one essential ingredient is that it be falsifiable. One must be able to do experiments such that if a certain thing occurs the theory can be discarded. If the experimental data matches the theory, then we have further evidence to back it up.



Let me give a simple example - gravity. Say you have a theory that any object, no matter its mass, will fall with constant acceleration without air resistance (which is true). One way you could test this is to go into space where there is no air resistance and do the experiment (this was done on the moon in real life). If you were to do this, you would find that your theory is correct. However, if the objects didn't fall with the same acceleration you would know for sure that your theory is wrong.

God doesn't work like that. It is impossible to come up with an experiment that could possibly disprove His existence. That doesn't necessarily mean He's not out there. It just means God doesn't qualify as a scientifically tenable theory for the universe.

Why you might ask, must God be scientifically tenable? God is God after all. Can't He be whatever He wants?



Sure. But then I personally won't believe in Him. I only accept scientific theories of the universe, and hopefully I can make you see why.



All humans crave for certainty, but true certainty is impossible, for even the way we perceive the world may not be the way it truly is. We cannot prove that what we observe is reality. However, our observations are the only thing we have. Thus, by necessity, we must assume they are real. This is one of the unprovable assumptions of science. The second, and only other, assumption of science is that what we observe follows a determinable set of physical laws. That's it. Beyond that bare minimum of starting assumptions everything in science must be proven following a precise melding of logic and repeatable observation.



I personally cannot think of a more minimalist approach to unprovable assumptions. Sure, religion may offer more certainty on a superficial level, but if you look at the assumptions, the leaps of faith, that must be made, religion way underperforms science. In my eyes, true certainty lies in the reduction of such assumptions, not in making more of them in order to eliminate any questions about the way the world works.



Now perhaps the basic assumptions of science are wrong. Perhaps there is more to the world than we can observe. Perhaps the universe does not follow mathematically determinable laws. Perhaps there is a God. However, believing in a God involves making a lot of unprovable suppositions, and that makes me uncomfortable. If you can truly believe the irreducible hypotheses of religion, then that system of thought at least appears to offer more security and certainty. This makes religion very appealing, as by our very nature we crave this feeling of assurance. However, in my opinion, it is a false sense of security.



Since I cannot truly know the way the universe works, I choose to play the odds. It seems more likely that the multitude of religious assumptions are wrong than that the two minimal ones of science are. As long as there is a scientific theory for something, whether it be morality, the origin of life, or the dawn of the universe, I will choose that above religion and God.