Does Science prove or at least entail the unexistence of God(s)?

Graham Farmello elegantly points out that they are all about different things:

God did not create the universe, Stephen Hawking revealed yesterday. In the flurry of publicity preceding his new book, The Grand Design, to be published next week, he does some serious dissing of the Almighty, declaring him/her/it irrelevant. The point is, he says, that our universe followed inevitably from the laws of nature.

But, we might ask, where did they come from?

Crawf Minor is ploughing through sundry science A-levels, so I have been reading some books about science to try to keep up.

Such as this utterly wonderful effort, about the physics of astronomy:

Not read it? Buy it NOW.

Anyway, the wit has it that at Cambridge … Biology becomes Chemistry, Chemistry becomes Physics, Physics becomes Maths, and Maths becomes Philosophy – and Philosophy ends up in Belief?

We’ve previously had a look at Logicomix:

That masterpiece is (I think) all about how far numbers (and logic) can exist independently of real life.

Is 1 + 1 = 2 necessarily ‘true’ and meaningful in all possible universes? Does it in fact mean anything anyway? Is the idea of ‘meaning’ meaningful?

Aaargh.

The point is that Science itself is based upon certain key assumptions which are intrinsically unproveable and in effect veer into mere beliefs. This awful fact has driven some notable clever mathematicians quite mad.

Some ‘beliefs’ are surely better than others. It’s odd how those religious people who jeer at science happily depend upon science, knowledge and human insight for their very existence.

Plus it does not help us much to say that ‘God’ created everything, because even if that is true who created God?

My view?

I am happy to go along with Isaac Asimov and The Last Question. It manages to explain these mysteries in an elegant way which does justice to all sides – and shows how entropy can be reversed:

All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.

But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said …

Read it to find out what…

Update  Check out Cosmic Log for an interesting exchange with Leonard Mlodinow who knows more about these subjects than most, insofar as they are knowable anyway and argues that, yes, it’s possible to create theories to explain how Something came from Nothing:

Q: Does that imply then that there will be no way to answer that classic question, "What happened before the big bang"? Because the uncertainty goes to an indeterminately high level?

A: No, it’s not that. As you go backward in time, quantum theory, combined with general relativity, tells you that if you go back early enough in the universe, time ceases to have the meaning that we assign to it today. It ceases to act as we know it.

So it’s not a well-posed question to say, "What happened at the beginning of time?" — because time doesn’t go back to the beginning.

Hmm. Sounds to me quite a lot like Belief wearing sophisticated trousers.