Interesting piece in this month's Scientific American about theories, which was brought to my mind when I was reading Nick and Mary Anne's (and others) discussion below about agnosticism and atheism.

Achieving almost canonical status as the ne plus ultra put-down is theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli's reported harsh critique of a paper: "This isn't right. It's not even wrong." I call this Pauli's proverb.

In science, if an idea is not falsifiable, it is not that it is wrong, it is that we cannot determine if it is wrong, and thus it is not even wrong.

Not even wrong. What could be worse? Being wronger than wrong, or what I call Asimov's axiom, well stated in his book The Relativity of Wrong (Doubleday, 1988): "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

And the crux of the argument, in this context:

The theory of evolution, even though it is the subject of vigorous debates about the tempo and mode of life's history, is vastly superior to the theory of creation, which is not even wrong (in Pauli's sense). As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins observed on this dispute: "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."

In a way, I think this applies to the discussion about the existence of God - because even though there is no proof of God's existence and also no proof of God's non-existence, doesn't mean that both possibilities are equally likely.

There is no proof of the existence of Yetis, but neither is there proof of their non-existence, however it's not a 50-50 likelihood that either theory is correct - more 0.001 to 99.999.

To me, the universe makes more sense without God.