God cannot be refuted nor confirmed. It's like unicorns, elves, dragons, and many other myths: we have not seen proof of their existence, nor have any claimed proofs of their existence been confirmed to be a valid, but that doesn't rule out that we will never find proof.
Such is my understanding science: there is no absolute certainty nor absolute confidence. I think only logical fallacies might never exist e.g an all-powerful creator immediately runs into the logical problem of "can god create a rock that it itself cannot lift?".
But what if our universe were just a simulation within a machine of a highly advanced species? Their ability to modify the simulation to their will might make them akin to gods for us, but that also incurs the question: what if they were in a simulation themselves? That can be repeated to the root until a "real world" is reached, but that still leaves the question: how did everything come to be?
We can thus cut out all the "if god exists, who created god" and focus on a world without the need to get distracted by the god problem.
adam_y@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yeah, no.
Newton was such a complex human. He seemed capable of holding many, sometimes opposing beliefs, at the same time.
There’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to his religious beliefs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newton
If you are into learning about him there’s also a rather good read, The Janus Faces of Genius, by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, that looks into his occult work.
Furthermore, for the sake of complexity, we can look into how, when he was the warden of the mint, he became responsible for the deaths of 19 people. He turned a largely ceremonial role into a task force, chasing down forgers and sentencing them to death.