Has there ever been a sci-fi story based in a world with a scientifically provable god?

good idea!

Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer

If it’s provable, there’s no need for belief.

But I say go for it, if that’s what floats your boat.

God is the antonym of the phrase “scientifically provable”.

Only mathematics deals with proofs, daloon. Science creates models that explain phenomena to the best of the available knowledge.

Knowledge and belief are actually very similar. What you are thinking of is “faith”, which is believing something without evidence to support that belief, or believing something contrary to the available evidence.

If one is to scientifically demonstrate that “god exists”, one first has to define what “god” is. Otherwise that statement holds no meaning. The scientific method observes a phenomenon, then attempts to explain it. What observable phenomenon does “god” manifest? If there is no observable phenomenon, then we need to come to an agreement on the definition of the verb “to exist”. If something exists, but does not manifest, how can it be distinguished from something that doesn’t exist?

However, if you just say that “god is everything” or “god is love”, then you are only re-labeling a word.

Does Star Trek V count?

There are many sci fi stories with themes along these lines to one degree or another, though I don’t know of a title that matches exactly what you’re asking for.

Oh, the short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke is pretty close.

How could you possibly prove the existence of God? To scientifically prove anything requires being able to run experiments with repeatable results. By definition God is completely free, which rules out experiments with repeatable results.

To the extent that theists talk about science, they speak of things that science is not able to explain. There will always be a why question that remains unanswered, and given how weird quantum mechanics is, it is doubtful that the current level of explanation will ever be anything close to intuitive.

In a social sense, modern science marks a return to disorder. The Enlightenment, highlighted by Newton’s physics, created a world that could be explained by simple intuitive laws. Atheism was fasionble. Modern science destroyed that view and replaced it with a system that can only be understood mathematically. Even worse, deterministic laws were replaced by probabalistic ones. At the heart of quantum mechanics is the Uncertainty Principle. This change mirrors the replacement of orderly Victorian society by the chaos of the 20th and 21st centuries and has helped give rise to New Age nonsense.

A science fiction world with a “provable” God might have the comforting effect of reinjecting order and purpose.

Sid Meir’s Alpha Centauri game as well as inspired books had the idea of a sentient Planet with psionic powers and co-organisms it controlled. Normally sci-fi explains god-like beings as being somehow transdimensional or energy base. There are examples in many genres.

There is this one Issac Asimov short story where there’s a computer that will answer any question and someone asks it “where did we come from?” or something like that and the computer says it still needs information.

Throughout the years, people continue to ask the question to the computer and it always responds, “I’m still gathering information”.

Once humanity transcends their bodies, a psychic energy being asks the question agin. The computer states that it is still gathering information.

Eventually, this computer (which is the size of a planet) keeps gathering information long after it is the only thing that exists.

(In case you are wondering, I believe that this story is from The Complete Robot)

At the very end of the story, the computer figures out the answer. However, there is no one to tell it to so he just says, “Let there be light… and then there was.”

As I read one critic years ago, something is considered science fiction when it only breaks one law of physics. It’s sci-fi when if breaks a couple laws, and fantasy when it breaks all kinds of laws of physics in order to make the imagined world credible. It seems like a reasonable definition to me.

The issue is not whether anything is scientifically provable (an nonsensical idea) in the real world. The issue is what has been or could be written about in sci-fi. It seems to me that it would be sci-fi for someone to imagine a world with a “provable” deity.

The words used by writers are rarely defined. Rather, they assume a common knowledge and usage or both words and ideas. Knowledge, belief and faith are used somewhat interchangeably in common parlance and by writers. There are no consistent definitions of gods.

To talk about what is possible in the real world, or how to talk about it is to miss the point, both of the question and of fiction, and especially science fiction and sci-fi. The whole point of the genre is to imagine things that can’t happen, and see what would happen to people under such circumstances.

I wasn’t aware that there was a difference between Science Fiction and Sci-Fi (SCIence-FIction).

I wasn’t either until I read that article. It seems that amongst professionals dealing with the minutia of genre issues, it makes sense.

daloon, what about things that are written about in the future that break no laws of physics? I would call that sci-fi (but I use sci-fi and science fiction interchangeably).

Even sci-fi writers of the 60s wrote about modern computers that where the size of a television. It would be presumed that they were breaking a law of physics but we know today that they were not.

I believe that the best science fiction breaks no laws of physics – i.e., takes the things that are possible now and builds on them in a logical, researched, scientific way rather than just making fantastic stuff up. It’s easier to temporarily suspend disbelief when it’s easier to believe in the first place.

I’m not sure that a well-researched story about “big computers in the future” needs to be presumed to break laws of physics. Same laws, better technology.

Well that makes sense. I’m not saying I remember the article perfectly. It would bump each term up a notch, though. Also, I would take these things as approximate, not absolute rules. It was one person’s attempt at stratifying the genre.

His point is that there are different ways of approaching the subgenres of science fiction, and that not everyone is operating from the same assumptions.

I don’t know, Laureth. I’ve read some “best” stories in all the subgenres.

Laureth,

I’m just saying that there were computers in science fiction long before they were on the desks of the populace. When Eniac was made, it was the size of a warehouse. There weren’t advances enough in science to actually make a personal computer until around 1980ish but they were imagined in sci-fi books in the 60s (and perhaps earlier).

It might not be a huge stretch for your mind but there was really nothing to research. If I was Joe Everyman who was alive in the 60s, I would presume a personal computer was impossible because for the next 20 years, it was.

I’d like to see any of us predict a life-changing invention that will come along in 20 years.

@bodyhead: I think the crux of this debate hinges upon whether the science of the time saw computers as theoretically possible based on the current knowledge of physics, or whether they were made up from fantasy. Like…

Science: we know electrons behave this way, and if we strung some wires and silicon together with some kind of way to talk to it, we should be able to make it do things like count.

Fantasy: wouldn’t it be awesome if we had some kind of box that was a machine and it could count and do stuff for us?

It’s true that many things show up in science fiction before they show up in reality. (Star Trek, for example, looked ahead at the idea of hand-held personal conmmunication devices, which now look suspiciously like cell phones.) However, were they based in “I wish” or where they based in “this might work if”?

The physics of right now says teleportation and time travel is theoretically possible. There are some missing variables to some of the equations. Impossible and improbable are two different things. I would still say that anything involving teleportation and time travel is sci-fi

Flying cars are theoretically possible based on the current knowledge of physics.

I doubt very much that those writers of the day were computer scientists. Even a well researched book would have to start guessing at some point. I’m just saying that the point at which they start guessing is almost immediately no matter how much they research.

@Noon,
Try Heaven by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. It views the natural history of a religious “memeplex” that is infecting the galaxy. It does not have a scientifically provable supernatural god as such, but it has a naturalistically situated meta-consciousness that seems to fulfill all the requirements of an omniscient and omnipotent intelligence. As an atheist, I think you will find it very satisfying, since it is entirely grounded in the sciences.

Stewart is a brilliant mathematician and Cohen is a biologist well versed in the new biology of social systems, economies, and the convergence of technology and living systems.

The Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert (of Dune fame) is also very good. I’m not sure if I’d say scientifically provable but it made me think none the less.

God is proven in the book Contact by Carl Sagen. They omitted that in the movie.