Yeah, but this also means that atheists believe in something that nobody has ever encountered: a self-contained entity without any external reality. That's a nice paradox: atheists are the most irrational creatures one can imagine - they believe in things that even mathematically don't exist.
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There is no paradox - the "containment" has to end at some point, you may imagine an external reality, but what is that reality contained in?
You'll just end up with an unfalsifiable, Russian doll type universe. It's not "scientific" to hypothesise anything you wish without any good reason for it.
And no, we don't believe anything that is mathematically not possible
There are two options: it's either infinite (Russian doll type universe) or there is a finite numer of realities and they mutually create each other.
Personally I like the latter option: I like the concept that we humans have something which the external reality (we can call it "divine" or whatever) cannot ever have. Thus we complement the divine, or in other words the divine needs us to be complete (just as we need the divine to be complete). Our mode of existence is beyond comprehension of the divine, and it can only realize this form of existence through us, humans.
I agree, it's not scientific and for a good reason: it's beyond science. Things like religion and morality are external to science: they contain science but science does not contain them. Thus science can be discussed in religious terms but the opposite is not true.
In mathematics you can define a self-contained entities (e.g. the set of all sets) but you end up with a paradox or reliance on external axioms. For me this is precisely what defines the term "non-existent" or "impossible".
Yep, a Matroshka fashioned universe goes against "naturalness" assumptions and Occam's razor..
Agree that you have to study these things separately, then in the last point, you said
but the purpose of science is to make theoretical models of the universe using mathematics that accurately describe phenomena , i.e, explains the empirical data collected and also make fairly accurate predictions. I'm not sure how applying religion to this process is practical/useful
And the purpose of religion , morality or ethics are to teach man how to live a meaningful and happy life, again, science is going to be useless (not absolutely, but you get the idea) here.
This problem leads to godel's incompleteness, (as you may have seen in my other post) which sets a limitation on human knowledge : no matter how advanced we get, as a civilization, there will always be some truth that will escape us, and we will, not even in principle, be able to prove some results that "appear" to be always true.
This is precisely a consequence of what you said, but bear in mind that there is no paradox or contradiction within the laws nature themselves, truth exists independently of any human or any sentient being.
Only paradox lies in the humans ability of acquiring knowledge, which will always be a smaller subset of the total knowledge that exists
Actually Godel was the initial trigger that made me question my agnostic mindset a long time ago. There are unbreakable limits to our rational comprehension, yet we need to know more in order to know how to live.
While "how to live?" is the primary question, our technological civilization has chosen not to deal with it.
Let's assume that morality and religion are the same thing.
Morality and science are separate domains - that's quite obvious. However, my argument goes one step further: morality encompasses science and science is subordinate it. Morality tells science what areas to explore while the opposite is not true: we cannot derive any morality from science or validate any religious claims with it.
Absolutely. The ultimate truth is external to our reality and is unreachable within it.