Originally posted by Docfeelgood
If a scientist admitts to beleiving in GOD are they looked down on by there peers?
If a scientist admitts to beleiving in GOD are they looked down on by there peers?
I have a few comments. I agree with Boris (was it Boris? ) that God has nothing to do with science. This is not a statement about God, but a statement about science. Since the whole idea of science is to make predictions one cannot include an intrinsically non-predictive phenomenum like God. In other words, scientists make the assumption that God isn't going to interfere with their experiments.
On the other hand, I think that atheists who look down apon people who believe in God are being a little bit naive. Everyone believes in something which cannot be proven, and the scale of the faith does not matter - it is still faith. I would challenge the atheists to make a model of the universe which has no assumptions in it.....
On the propability of life on other planets: this is impossible to quantify because we are missing any knowledge on one of the parameters - the probability of going from a planet which is capable of sustaining life but has none to a planet with life. We have no concept of what this probability is.
Imagine there were 10^40 planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life (I have no idea of the actual number). Now, if the probability of life having been created spontaneously on one of these planets were 0.1 then there would be 10^39 planets with life on them. However, the probability could be 10^-40, meaning that we would only expect one planet in our galaxy to have life (ie. us).
On fitting stuff into black holes: remember that all the fundamental particles are point-like. They have no spacial size (or to be more accurate, their position eigenstates have no size). Their manifestation of size is due to the forces they experience, so the electron appears to have size because electromagnetism creates a cloud of particles around it. But in a black hole, gravity is stronger than any of these forces, so the particles can be squeezed together as much as you like (actually this is how a black hole forms - it is a very dense star which keeps attracting in more and more matter until eventually the gravitational pressure becomes strong enough to overcome the strong nuclear force and it collapses).
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