You are essentially committing a fallacy here because you are making definitions and simply assuming them to be true. So for example, I don't feel your definition of science is adequate and indeed it is likely that all we or anyone else could do is arrive at a consensus not truth.
If science is not the study of the natural world, then what is it? How can the supernatural enter into it? This sort of purported ambiguity in the very notion of science is the sort of thing that allows young earth creationist pseudo-science to thrive.
I tend to agree with you re cause/effect but what I was saying was that one implication of M-Theory as I understand it is self-creation. But in science everything is provisional and subject to falsification. I don't think you can use the argument of common sense as lot's of science seem to defy that idea - quantum mechanics and many ultimately solid scientific ideas would have been cast on the scrap heap if that was an acceptable criteria - if one is not careful you/we make our own tiny minds the measure of all things.
It is simply amazing how so many people can boast rather than blush at the idea of modern science, by their own admission and interpretation, defying common sense. Our minds are the measure of what we conclude only--or should be the primary measure if not the sole one. Logic is the foundation of science, and therefore a necessary thing in it not to be faulty. If scientific "proofs" were to be produced that there are circles which are not round or seven-sided quadrangles, that would only mean that we should conclude it's the alleged proofs which are wrong, not our notion of the very mathematical and linguistic fundamentals of reason it defies.
My point about God is that it is possible to invoke him and when you do that everything becomes possible but not as you say provable. But ultimately in religion we have to rely on revelation but by its nature all revelation is hearsay because we cannot check it with the source - at least I know of no way of doing that.
If checking claims with the original source were the only means of confirming them, courtrooms and historians would have a lot harder time than they do.
This I think is not quite true in that one might reason flawlessly but have unprovable hypothesis - though you may have meant that. But science ultimately tries to prove its premises and generally it tells us how that might be done - if you like it tells us what data to go looking for whereas with the supernatural as yet it does not tell us what data we might go looking for.
Because it couldn't--any more than religion can tell us what data to look for in the secular sciences. And once again, slapping the label "force" on things doesn't prove a [bleep] thing, it just changes the semantics and creates (as perhaps intended to) the safe illusion of something real being communicated.
We have to give things names but you might note that we might also deduce in an a priori fashion also. But at least in science one can in principle predict outcomes and that of itself is how one might validate a falsify/theory
Predicting outcomes is proving things now? Throwing around the term "a priori" like that is just as pointless and inapplicable as throwing around the term "ad hominem". Scientific deductions have nothing whatever to do with the "slapping the lable 'force' on things and leaving it at that" issue: indeed, it seems to exist to
prevent any deductions from being made. It's a lazy gloss-over.
You might be right but when one trusts in a God who is holy it is hard to then see how or why in your words non positive design occurs, it just seem unfair is all I am saying.
Your very words betray the emotional nature of your rationale. And were said rationale correct, it would still be starkly, even evasively, beside the point as far as this discussion goes. Even if God were an utter sadist and His design for the sole purpose of driving us crazy, it would not erase His existence. When we can agree to have established that rudimentary fact,
then we can move on to the ethics of the being in question. It is useless to consider your opinion of a person's character when the issue at hand is whether he is real at all. And in this thread, very off topic.
Well if any area of science is rudimentary it is psychology and neurology and any one with an iota of common sense knows that. The 'fact' seem to be that we just don't know how thoughts and ideas arise; if we did we could all generate brilliant ideas algorithmically. Consider Einstein or Maxwell in the early part of the last century both had theories that predicted phenomena that had not be observed by anyone so however they generated those ideas it was not from anything they actually knew about or where able to observe. So I don't know how these brilliant men thought but it seems more than just having the logic or mathematical skills (because plenty of others had those) and I don't know what one might call it: genius, insight, brainwave - who knows?
We may not know how they arise, but they are still definitely caused events and not self-creating. We've been over the reasons why.
