The God debate question presumes, typically without any questioning at all by anyone on any side, that the only possible answers to the God question are "exists" or "doesn't exist". Such an assumption blatantly ignores the overwhelming vast majority of reality at every scale, space, which does not fit neatly in to either the "exists" or "doesn't exist" categories.

The simplistic "exists or not" paradigm is indeed useful in our everyday lives, but it doesn't scale to the infinite scope of the God idea, a claim about the most fundamental nature of everything everywhere.

What we might learn from the fact that the greatest minds among us on all sides can make such a mistake for at least 500 years is that human reason simply isn't qualified to generate meaningful statements on such enormous questions. It's very unlikely indeed that useful answers will ever arise from such fatally flawed questions.

However, despair not, for the fact that we don't know and probably can't know may be a gift as such ignorance preserves the magic and mystery which makes life worth living.

As I see it, this often asked question reveals an understandable lack of insight in to what religion really is. While science concerns itself with trying to establish facts about reality, at it's heart religion is about the effort to enhance our _relationship_ with reality, a very different business.

The atheist confusion is understandable because religions often make factual claims about reality in the attempt to help us manage our relationship with reality. The atheist confusion is understandable because I'm not sure that even most religious people understand that factual claims made by religions are really just a means to a higher end, enhancing our relationship with where we find ourselves, a very practical agenda.

To those who say this is just the selling of fantasy I would reply that the notion that any of us are in a position to know whether the largest religious claims are fantasy is itself a fantasy. The idea that the God debate will ever resolve anything, another fantasy.

Religions should be judged not by whether they can accurately calculate the orbits of planets, but by the degree to which they understand, address, and enhance the human condition. The fact that billions of people over thousands of years have willingly participated in religion would seem to demonstrate that in at least some cases religions succeed at this agenda, and thus should not be discarded in a sweeping manner.

PN is not particularly important to me except to sometimes contrast it with scientific understandings of nothing. I imagine it’s of some urgency for others though.

A neutral state of zero energy is comprehensible. PN hasn’t been shown to be scientifically demonstrable. But it may in the end be helpful to show what nothing isn’t. In that way, we can again use science to bring clarity out of mushiness.

Mike

I think I've been fairly good in laying out my "ifs" and I think I've poured sufficient skepticism on your contention that "Nothing is better defined as a neutral state totaling zero energy." Now that you've explicitly stated how incomplete our information is, information required to be more confident about how to best define 'nothing', perhaps we should celebrate that "PN is mushy."—or at least, that philosophy did not jump to your scientific definition.

If the laws of nature are something, then there is something even when you have a neutral state totaling zero energy.

Maybe, maybe not. Currently we are not allowed to definitively conclude what the properties of the laws of nature are. It’s an open subject pending evidence. Evidence which may or may not be knowable to us. Nature is under no obligation to make sense to minds which evolved to survive on the Serengeti. That we know what we already do is amazing and may have to suffice for now or perhaps forever. Patience.

Mike