Ten Commandments

[Thorne]

Religions hold that there was a Prime Mover and He was the uncaused cause. He was also the creator of all things, so if a thing exists - which plainly, many things do - He created them. Religions believe this to be so, and hope one day their beliefs will be demonstrated to be true

Your scientific hypothesis says that there must be a natural law of physiscs that says something can spontaneously come into existence, but we don't know what it is yet. But there is hope that we will know one day.

Where's the difference?

The difference is shown in your own words: Religions hope that their beliefs will be demonstrated to be true. But through science we hope that we will know one day. Religion deals with revealed truths, while science deals with learned truths.

But there is also the mistaken notion that "there must be a natural law of physiscs that says something can spontaneously come into existence" to be dealt with. I stated that we basically understand what happened in the universe from a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang until now. We don't yet know what happened before that point in time, which may include before the big bang! We do not have to assume that all the matter in the universe was "created" at one moment in time. Only that it was released at that moment.

Who cares what happened at any time after the Big Bang? God was there before it.

How can you know that God was there before it? You make that assumption, but you cannot know. And even then you run into the same problem science has with the universe. If something had to come before the universe, what came before that? Who created your god? And who created the being that created your god?

Every one of your scientific laws can easily co-exist with the Supernatural Being who created them, along with everything else.

That's perfectly true. But they don't require the existence of any supernatural beings.

It is hard to see how they can exist at all without a Supernatural Being.

I don't find it hard at all. I find it harder the see how the existence of supernatural beings can be so widely believed without evidence. But just because we find something hard to believe does not mean it cannot be so.

Why are you assuming God is bound to perfection? Why does He have to be? Why can't He learn like the rest of us, and make mistakes in the process?

I'm not the one making those assumptions! I don't even believe in God. It's the believers who make those claims, and I'm merely pointing out the contradictions those claims engender. But if God can make mistakes and (hopefully) learn from them, just like the rest of us, how does that make him supernatural? That tells me that he would more likely be a being of advanced technology, not a god as humanity has defined the term.

And I would also submit that our understanding of religion and what we believe in has advanced, just as scientific theory has: from fear of thunderclaps to more sophistcated understandings of who we are and why we are here. Out of Zoroastrianism grew Judaism, then Christianity and then Islam; before Zoroastrianism, pagan beliefs, myths and superstition, perhaps, but all leading to the Ultimate Truth.

Again, I have to agree with you, in part. Religion has changed, certainly, but it has done so because science has usurped those areas which were once the sole province of the priests, bringing a better understanding of the forces of nature than religion could provide. So religion has been forced, kicking and screaming all the way I might add, into the realm of the "inner being", the intangible. But here, too, science is making inroads. Advances in medicine and psychology and other sciences are making inroads into our inner selves, learning how the mind functions, and how the brain works. And the more we learn, the less need we have of gods to explain things such as morality and faith. More superstitions fall by the wayside, and religion will be forced to find other explanations for its existence.

I believe they are theories which give (partial) explantions for our current hypotheses. I agree that these theories are constantly being refined in the hope that we will eventually have a Unifed Theory that explains everything ... or at least, as Hawkins put it, enables us to know the mind of God.

And it's my belief that, when we finally are able to look into the mind of God, we will find the mind of man looking back at us.