Right, said Fred.

It’s just one of those things in terms of logic of the system giving rise outside of itself. Like I said, dogma and religion are two very different things. I just find a lot of beauty in the fact that science can predict literal apotheosis by our own definition; it’s inherent in the system. If someone chooses to see that and assign intent, I can’t argue.

There’s just something amazing about a system which defines the conditions which are outside it’s grasp. It’s like how banach-tarski shows 1+0=2. Practical? Not really, but none the less… under certain conditions…

Well right, which is why they’re separate things entirely. And I am definitely taking some poetic license, but I outlined a pretty concrete example of how the way the scientific process is structured it’s a tool for what’s demonstrable, not inherently what’s correct. In what I outlined, it’s possible you could never gather that data. In every sense that matters most of the universe would no longer exist.

You can do the same thing in reverse (we’ll never actually know what happened at the big bang, we weren’t there, still we can figure out a lot). It just drives the point home more when you realize there are things you can look at, observe, make hypothesis and test against here today, that will essentially leave the realm of science in the future.

So again, this is definitely some navel gazing, and I’m just about as atheistic as they come, but the original spawn of this part of the thread was “how can any scientist be religious”. It’s because the scientific process isn’t actually concerned with being “correct”, now or in the future, just plausible and useful. I’ve worked in the lab with folks who viewed their work as understanding the universe someone created for them. That’s entirely compatible with the scientific method. You can take a minute to appreciate the insanity and beauty of everything we know about this universe and the fact that were even capable of comprehending some of it without it corrupting your scientific method. Some people choose to appreciate that insanity and beauty and assign divine intent. So long as the graph has a decent R^2, that’s just fine.

Science and religion (in the broad sense, not specific statements of a religion) are just two entirely separate things. Faith by it’s definition exists outside anything testable, so it’s just not part of science. Here’s the one hitch: science does in-fact point to faith. Bare with me here.

We know with whatever certainty anyone would require that the universe is expanding, and that the rate of that expansion is accelerating. We know with certainty that >90% of all that we know is there, just by looking up, is already permanently and irrevocably beyond our grasp. It will all blink out of the night sky, and no interaction will ever be possible.

Future scientists (human, alien, whatever) will look at certain phenomena, the cause of which we today would know to be a specific galaxy, etc, but we would have no way to gather a single shred of evidence. There would be no way, literally none, to ever interreact with those stellar structures.

To these future scientists you would be citing ancient texts and proposing a 100% untestable hypothesis. You would be proposing literal gods outside of the machine. And you’d be right. But it would all have to be taken on faith.