When I had gone back to my village, I had an argument with my family over existence of god. A line of reasoning that they (more precisely, my mother) took was
- there are gazillions of people who have faith in god,
- Faith is equal to science
- there is a scientific reason for believing in god
Though I seldom tried to breach their faith, this time I took a hard stance and tried to show them the error in their logic. A central concept in the philosophy of science is empiricism, or dependence on evidence. Any scientific experiment can be replicated by anyone who cares to undertake it, and any theory is based upon sound experimentation and/or observation. The same cannot be said about religion and god. Are their experiments to prove the existence of god ? I agree that there are no experiments to disprove his existence too, but that does not automatically proves god's existence. Another line of argument they take is "Appeal to Authority" i.e. how Newton, C.V.Raman and some other scientists believed in god. With all due respect to these great names, I do not think they have been able give experiments to prove the existence of god, and hence taking their words at the face value is not a scientific process. At this point they stopped arguing with me any further
