Fundamental idea on proving God's existence with science

I think part of the problem is: Science doesn't prove anything. Science, at its core, is simply a method of generating testable hypothesis that explain events, which are valued because of their use in predicting future results.

Let me give an example. Based on observations, science came up with a theory for an orbital period, correlating orbital speed and distance. But it didn't prove this - it's simply the best mechanism for predicting an orbit that science knew at the time. Science could compile evidence that would lend credence to the theory - the more observations that matched the theory, the more likely the theory was sound.

But science could never say, "We know this for a fact." Sure enough, we observed small perturbations in Mercury's orbit around the sun - deviations that the orbital theory couldn't explain. Then we came up with Relativity, which neatly patched those holes. So now we have a predictive theory for an orbit that's better - but we still can't prove that it's absolutely 100% correct. There could by any number of phenomenon that we haven't run into that would tear holes in the theory.

Science never proves anything - the best it can do is say, "Well, this theory is our best explanation for prior events and is the best predictor for future events."

So, let's say there's a God - and not only that, he's completely 100% interactive. Dude just pops in every saturday at NIST headquarters via shining beam of light - even buys coffee for the front desk clerk each week. Science still can't prove him. Because there could always be some unexplained phenomenon that's contributing or even causing our observations.

EDIT: Okay, since there are apparently a number of vocal people insisting that Science can prove things, I figured I should expand this answer to provide some quotes and citations:

"Perhaps most importantly, because new evidence and perspectives can lead us to revise them, scientific ideas can never be absolutely proved." -- https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/mathematics - talking about the similarities and differences between Math and Science.

"Well, let me tell you a secret about science; scientists don’t prove anything. What we do is collect evidence that supports or does not support our predictions. Sometimes we do things over and over again, in meaningfully different ways, and we get the same results, and then we call these findings facts. And, when we have lots and lots of replications and variations that all say the same thing, then we talk about theories or laws. Like evolution. Or gravity. But at no point have we proved anything." -- https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/im-a-scientist-and-i-dont-believe-in-facts/

"One of the most common misconceptions concerns the so-called “scientific proofs.” Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as a scientific proof. Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science. Mathematics and logic are both closed, self-contained systems of propositions, whereas science is empirical and deals with nature as it exists." -- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200811/common-misconceptions-about-science-i-scientific-proof

"While the phrase "scientific proof" is often used in the popular media,[13] many scientists have argued that there is really no such thing." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_evidence#Concept_of_scientific_proof - which goes on to quote Karl Popper and Albert Einstein on the topic.

"However, the concept of proof has no place in science. Many people who do not actively practice science do not understand that science is structured so that scientists can never prove anything." -- http://agbiosafety.unl.edu/science.shtml - talking about why it's impossible to prove that biotech crops are safe: because science can't prove it (they can only disprove it by finding a way it's unsafe.)

"Another word that is commonly misused (sadly, sometimes even by scientists, who should know better) is "proof". ... Scientists should be wary of using the term "proof". Science does not "prove" things. Science can and does provide evidence in favor of, or against, a particular idea. In science, proofs are possible only in the highly abstract world of mathematics." -- https://oregonstate.edu/instruction/bb317/scientifictheories.html

Hopefully this helps get the point across, and I tried to stick to purely scientific sources (plus wikipedia, since it has citations to Popper and Einstein). Science comes up with a guess as to how something works, devises a test to determine whether the guess is correct, and then performs the test. If the test falsifies the guess, then the guess isn't correct and was disproven. If the test comes back and matches what the theory would predict, then the test does not prove the theory - it simply is evidence that it might be true.

Attempts to show that God exists by looking at nature such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument can only assert "generic theism", as you rightly point out. If the argument holds, then how does anybody know anything about this god/God?

The answer is revelation or prophecy. When theologians talk about revelation, they are talking about ways that God communicates (or attempts to communicate) with humans directly. You will sometimes hear of a distinction between general revelation, the stuff that we can just see with our eyes that tells us about God, and special revelation, words and sentences from God.

Prophecy is stuff somebody tells you, which they claim is what God wants you to know (and is therefore supposedly true by virtue of God's perfection).

If God exists, and if you think that some information that was presented to you might have originated with God, then it's not impossible that the information before you tells you true things about God (or the future, etc).

The most obvious objection to revelation is "how can I know that this information I'm looking at is really from God?" In fact this question was addressed by the Judeo-Christian God through the prophet Moses, who first spoke then wrote "Deuteronomy" to the nation of Israel before they entered Canaan:

“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him. This is according to all that you asked of the Lord your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.’

The Lord said to me, ‘They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him. But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’

You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’ When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him."

Deuteronomy 18:15-22

This is a common-sense test of prophecy that anybody can apply: you don't have to believe in a prophet who can't prove to you that he or she is from God by way of a miraculous prediction. (Performing a miracle can be a miraculous prediction, too, as in the following where a healing is predicted: "In the name of the Lord, let your blindness be healed!")

Trying to prove, scientifically, that God exists is probably a bit pointless but it's not necessarily absurd.

As with most of science. there's no requirement to try to find a theory of everything in one go. One could, for example, focus on attributes commonly attributed to gods and test for those. You've raised Creation, but there are others.

An interesting example would be the efficacy of prayer. It would be conceptually quite easy to test the effects of prayer with a well planned experiment on a large enough sample. Practically, it might be hard to find enough believers who want to participate in such a test but by no means impossible.

Now say you found out that Muslims were statistically much more likely to have their prayers answered than random but Christians or Jews weren't. Although this doesn't prove the existence of Allah, it would definitely be a start.

Similarly, if one found no effect from prayer, this wouldn't definitively prove the lack of a god but would add materially to the other evidence in that regard.

I believe your claim that God is not well-defined depends on your taking God as a general concept. There are many scholars in many religions who have attempted to outline the defining characteristics of God/s. You might instead be encouraged to argue that these terms are not well-defined, although this is another argument.

As for the second part of your question, that is, that proving these in scientific terms is comical, will again be a subject of debate, as it will greatly depend on your answer as to whose account of God is being used here. If you are taking an account of God that expresses his/her/its only defining factor as a the first cause, and there is scientific evidence for a first cause, then you have also proven that this God exists, as its only defining factor is the very thing proven. On the other hand, if you are looking at an account that claims God is omnibenevolent, it is arguable that you can't derive moral claims from exclusively descriptive facts. As science is concerned only with these descriptive facts, some may say that you couldn't do work in science to analyse the moral status of a God because it is out of the capacity of science to do so; that is, we simply cannot expect of science that it offers answers on such topics. This may be the case with many properties that are looked at, although, as far as I am aware, theologians do not believe that proving the existence of God should be within epistemic scope of science.

On one hand, I agree that proving the existence of a specific god is difficult. How to verify that we proved the existence of the right person? Though each god has a personal name - Jahwe, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Athena - we cannot successfully complete our proof by verifying his/her identity card.

On the other hand, in the present context I do not consider it a serious handicap, that science does not prove general statements. There are many examples that physics discovered specific hypothetical entities: Higgs boson, W-bosons and Z-boson, positron, neutrino etc.

My main reason for being sceptical about a scientific or philosophical proof of the existence of a specific god is different. All these gods are characterized as powerful beings. But

it is not convincing, that sophisticated means are needed to detect a powerful god, who – according to some of its followers – has even created the world and acts as its lord.

E.g., one needs no proof for the existence of the sun. Its existence is evident due to its power.

It's certainly the case that different people have different definitions of "God", but that's true of a lot of words, including ones that are used in scientific papers. We just start off by picking a definition and then making sure we operate from that definition throughout the paper and don't accidentally slip back into using the common definition. The paper is about the idea we've defined. The word is just a shorthand so we don't have to repeat the definition constantly.

There's no particular reason why we couldn't pick a specific definition of God and then do research on whether or not it exists. That research would then be of use to anyone whose god fits the definition we used, and irrelevant to anyone using a different definition. But that's not a problem. There are papers in both information theory and thermodynamics that use the term entropy, and they use subtly different definitions. And to a scientist, "noise" refers to random errors in the data that must be accounted for, whereas to a non-scientist, it means that stuff teenagers listen to. This doesn't stop us from doing research involving these concepts; it just means we need to be careful we're not mixing up the different meanings.

God, as a concept in theism, is well-defined, or at least we can make the term well-defined by assigning a particular set of fundamental properties to it. It's that thing with those properties we call God. Those properties precede the term God. If science can clarify the facts that define God then logic can grant a proof of God's existence. It's not logic's job to clarify the premises. However, even if we could prove the existence of God, we would not be able to prove that this God is in fact the one who belongs to Christianity or some other religion because the definition of the Christian God might be different.

Well then, if I define something that is omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent and atemporal as God, then science should verify the existence of something with those properties with the aid of logic. If an equation has all those properties we will call it God. So, that something could be an equation, a fruit or a dog.

"Fundamental idea on proving God's existence with science" is not really a question but I will answer as if you had asked, "How could science prove the existence of God?".

Science cannot be used to prove the existence of God. Scientific theories provide repeatedly testable explanations for natural observations. God's existence is not repeatedly observable and there are no other natural observations best explained by the existence of a god. The observation that men wrote a book describing the existence of a god is best explained by the earthly motivations of the men that wrote it, i.e. communication of community values to the populous in an age before mass education.

Perhaps more people should try to prove that God can exist instead of trying to prove it does not.

Just as branches of science (mainly physics) dig into how the Universe came to existence and up to this point its been able to prove that particles can form out of energy/waves and can dissipate into energy/waves without a 'creator' interfering, in a similar manner, other areas of science dig into the power of conscience, collective conscience and all possibilities that can result from a collective conscience, including the special proprieties of various levels of consciousness. By proving the true capabilities of different levels of consciousness science could prove that a being with the capability of altering the physical world can exist, therefore God can exist as an Universal creator.

First, while I agree with the claim stated in the currently most upvoted answer that science does not prove things in the way that math proves things, and that science cannot give us 100% certainty, as an answer to the OP I think the answer falls a bit short.

As I see it, we can easily take the use 'proof' in the question to mean the word 'proof' as when in court we 'prove' that someone is guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Indeed, I would say that scientists use the phrase 'scientific proof' in exactly that way, i.e. as 'demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt' rather than '100% certain'.

So, interpreted that way, I think the OP question still stands and is a very reasonable question: does it make sense to use science to try and 'prove' the existence of God in that sense of the word?

Well, as others have pointed out, much depends on how one defines God. Certainly for some concepts of God it seems that science just won't be able to find any evidence; I am thinking of the kind of God who created the world but otherwise just sat back and watch from a distance.

However, if the God we pick has causal effects on the observable world on a more day-to-day basis, then it seems we might be able to use science to convince us that there is really 'something aking to a God' there.

For example, if, as the aforementioned answer imagines, God indeed comes in every Saturday riding his light-beam, well, then we can use science to try and see if there is indeed some genuine object there, or if maybe the people observing this are suffering from some kind of mass hallucination.

Now, of course, we have to be very careful here: if we find that the cup of coffee pops out of nowhere, well, that's pretty weird, and demands an explanation ... but I am not sure if that should convince us that this was due to the 'God' we had in mind, as opposed to something else. If, for example, being 'a really, really, really, good being' is part of how we define God, then frankly, producing coffee doesn't really impress me much, but I would be a good bit more convinced if this being snaps their fingers and all cases of bone cancer in children would disappear (apologies to Stephen Fry for using his example).