Comment Re:A Simple Retort (Score 1) 556
This is wrong on a bunch of different levels. First, God is not "outside" the universe unless you mean something completely different from me by the phrase, "the universe." When I (and most scientists) speak of "the universe," we mean, "everything that exists." If God exists, then God is part of the universe (by definition). If God is not part of the universe, then God does not exist.
Second, anything that exists is a legitimate subject for science to study. If it's part of the universe, it's fair game. Just because some people have religious beliefs about it, that doesn't mean we can't study it objectively. What you "choose to believe" has no bearing at all on what is actually true.
Third, science never "proves" anything. That's a word that has no rigorous meaning in the context of science. What science actually does is collect evidence, and compare it to the predictions of theories (where "theory" is roughly a synonym for "description"). If the evidence does a good job of matching the predictions, we conclude the theory is probably a good description of whatever it's meant to describe. If it doesn't match, we conclude it probably isn't a good description. But nothing is ever "proven". No question is so firmly settled it can never be reopened if new evidence or a new theory comes up.
Fourth, "God" is not a theory. "God" is just a poorly defined word that lots of people use to mean lots of different things. Most people use it without having any clear idea of what they mean by it. If you put together a coherent theory that happens to involve something called "God", we can test the predictions of that theory and see how they check out. But until then, it's meaningless to talk about "evidence". It's impossible (by definition) to have evidence for or against something that doesn't make predictions, because there's nothing to compare your data to.
