Can Science prove or deny God?

Abstract
There has been lots of attempts to either prove or refute the existence of God using Scientific results. Here I argue that such attempts are fundamentally wrong and there is no way to prove or deny God using Scientific results. I don't mean to pose an agnostic view.

Introduction
Understanding the apparent problem of Science and Religion has always been my primary reading habit: Studying the History and Philosophy of Science, History and Philosophy of Religion, Original Religious texts and etc. Although I do have to confess that due to my job, I have always studied more of the first couple than the second. I have always been curious to extend my knowledge in both to be able to at least personally solve this dilemma.

Recently I saw a documentary by Hawking, in which he refuted God based on Science. I could really not believe how this figure (which I admired so much in my childhood as a model physicist and had inspired me so much) has such a low understanding of Science in general and Physics in particular, it's history and it's philosophy. His arguments in doing so were not at all convincing to me, but I saw lots of my scientific friends taking sides with him while he (and so, those friends of mine) had clearly not fundamentally understood the nature of Science in his arguments. You can see a trailer of the series bellow.

My writing is more general than a critique on this documentary. I also attack the arguments by those religious people who try to prove the existence of God with Science, from their arguments it is clear they too have not understood the essence of Science and Religion. Bellow you can see a small sample of such christian arguments. Since Hawking's view was a video, I chose a video for this and the next one too ;-)...

But this kind of reasoning is not limited to Christianity, you can see this documentary bellow trying to prove the existence of the Islamic God using Science.

Bias in western attempts to prove or refute God
Although he may be educated in Theoretical Physics (not at all representative of most Empirical Science!), he has not been educated and does not claim to have studied religious texts. So he only knows of one side of the fight and tries to prove the other wrong!!! A nice example might be this: Suppose I have only always only eaten McDonald's Hamburgers, will any one believe me when if say "McDonald's is better than Burger king"?!?! Of course not, I have never had a burger king to compare! The same goes for Hawking!

This fact is evident in the way he implicitly understands God; he never bothers to explicitly define the God he is trying so hard to refute! But when you use his arguments to understand his definition of God, you see that he is strongly biased towards the Western (Catholic) God and in a lower extent the ancient European Pagans (like the ancient Greeks or ancient Norwegians). All the evidence he uses to define the God he mentions are based on the Western definition of God. It is clear that he has absolutely no idea of the notion of God in other cultures. It also has to be considered that in Europe they have undergone the Middle Ages (something that didn't happen in the other regions of the Earth), resulting in the current depictions of God as a heavenly father and associating religion with all the horrible things that happened in those times and it's fight on non-holy science.

I have to mention that the above bias applies to the second video trying to prove God using Science too in a lower manner since at least he has studied Science AND Religion! So, when western scientists try to prove or deny God, they are referring mainly to the Catholic God and to a lower extent the ancient European Gods, implicit in all their talks is also the middle ages. They have absolutely no idea and are in fact totally ignorant to the other regions of the world. This bias is usually not seen in Islamic attempts to prove God using Science (like the third video), they have only not understood the essence of Science.

Lack of proper understanding of Science and Religion
The primary definition of science in the words of Karl Popper (a philosopher) is its Falsifiability (the logical possibility that it can be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of a physical experiment), it is exactly this fact that lead Galileo to prove the ancient Geocentric Model view to be wrong, it lead Einstein to prove Newton wrong in high speeds and strong gravitational fields through Special and General Relativity and basically all scientific discoveries are aspects of this Falsifiability. Although I am only referring to Hawking's arguments bellow, to a large extent they also apply to other people trying to prove or deny God using Science

Hawking has blissfully ignored this very important fact and states scientific results with such determinism that is just shocking and not at all scientific. I propose that if any one wants to obtain a better picture of science you should watch (or even better, read) The Elegant Universe, I personally think that documentary portrays a much better vision of Science than this documentary!!!

As an example Hawking refers to black holes as if we absolutely know everything about them and we have observed several of them in the universe, while this is not the case!!! He must be aware that even though it has a strong theoretic basis but theory is not the final judge a scientific fact has to go to! It is observation!!! But he ignores this in the most horrible way and just says that since theory predicts it to be there, it has to be there! Well, this is just like Aristotle ~2300 years ago when he said that women have to have two teeth less than men, based on some theory, because theory says so! He never even looked into a woman's mouth or asked a woman to count her teeth!!! I believe Hawking is making exactly this kind of mistake. Although direct observations of black holes might be made in the future and I for one would be very excited by the prospect, I believe we should not rush to conclusions based on theory so hastily as Hawking does in this documentary. He makes exactly the same mistake in his reference to the Big Bang; accepting it with out any doubt!!!

So, you see, in this documentary, Hawking is not taking a scientific standpoint; in any assertion or claim a scientist has to take into account the probability that she/he might be wrong! This applies in all Philosophy of Science and is not limited to Popper's. Hawking speaks as if he is the GOD OF SCIENCE or at least its prophet!!! It seems he is refuting the GOD OF RELIGION only to replace it with his GOD OF SCIENCE!!!! The strangest part is that he does not define this God he is trying so desperately to prove non-existent!!! Another evidence that, these claims he makes in this documentary are not scientific!!!

Science inevitably (by its definition) has a large amount of unknowns that will always accompany it and in fact become even more: we have more un-knowns now than we did 100 years ago, even 10 years ago! So, ignorant attempts like this one by Hawking will only take away people's trust in science in the long run. Unfortunately there are a lot of scientists like Hawking out here, so any reader will have to be really careful in interpreting what they say!!!

In the time of the Bible and the Quran the scientific unknowns were the rotation and central position of the Earth, that is why foolish religious people said these unknowns have been created by God, then observations advanced and the solutions were found. The descendants of those foolish religious people are now trying to fix the mistakes their ancestors made and re-interpret the texts!!! Now people like Hawking from the self-appointed Scientific standpoint are making this mistake (trying to prove or refute God based on science) and we have to correct it!

God always represents the unknowns for a person who wants to believe in it in a personal stand point and for a society as a whole depending on how many of such people there are in it. Defining God like this, then God has become stronger (our unknowns have increased) compared to 100 years ago in the eyes of those who want to believe in him: even if they are Professors of Science!!! You see, it is pointless to try to prove the existence or non-existence of God based on Science!!!!

The mere fact that he compares religion to science shows how much he has never understood either!!!! I personally think that by its definition, religion is not a tool to judge our observations on since contrary to observation (which is always improving) religious claims are by definition unchanging and any time in the course of history that any religion has tried to explain an observation they have been proved wrong by later generations because observations had improved. I am not attempting to prove any one of Science or Religion to be correct or not. I am just saying that by their definitions, they are separate methods and you cannot compare the interpretation of one thing (here it is nature) from both view points; one is deterministic, the other is falsifiable!

Let me give you a more general and simple example; suppose you are wearing a yellow filtered glasses and I am wearing a blue filtered one (so what ever you see is strongly yellow and what ever I see is strongly blue). Is it correct for us to discuss the color of a toy while we have those glasses on? Of course we can't!!!! That is what I am saying. I am saying people like Hawking and many people in the religious and scientific realm who try to compare such fundamentally different things are strongly mistaking and are by definition ignorant to such differences and thus are not qualified at all to make such claims.

I have studied the evolution of and scientific religious thought and really enjoy being to religious places and understanding as much as I can about them, I have been to the Vatican, Mecca (the most sacred place in Islam) and Chinese and Japanese temples and shrines. I understand what religion has to offer and as my job, I am practicing science. I personally respect both and acknowledge the definitive roles they have both had on our life as a species on this planet. So I really find such claims (on both sides) trying to refute the other very despicable.

So my advice to all the religious people here is that, please, don't base your religion on observational results and don't try to compare scientific (observational) results to religious texts!!! Very soon most (if not all) scientific knowledge we know of today will have improved (and with a high probability contradicted) in the near future and you will have to change your interpretation of your religious text!!! So please don't devalue religion (or generally speaking, spirituality) by validating it based on Observational (scientific results) and please have in mind that people like Hawking are not true scientists!!! PEOPLE LIKE HAWKING ARE IGNORANT TO THE FALSIFIABILITY OF SCIENCE AND ARE TRYING TO MAKE THE LAWS OF SCIENCE DETERMINISTIC AND THUS TRYING TO MAKE A RELIGION OUT OF IT!!!

The arguments above are not Agnosticism
Although I say that Science is not the tool to prove or refute the existence of God I don't deny all other rational, emotional, cultural and personal methods in the proof of God.

Just for Fun:
Today (June 18th, 2012) I was looking around in YouTube and I came up with this section of "Friends" (embedding was disabled) with Phoebe and Ross discussing Evolution. It is nice to watch after reading this discussion!

Updated: June 18th, 2012
Uploaded: March 16th, 2012