fredonly wrote:dianaiad wrote:
I think that your bringing this up is expressing a view of deity that I have been, with spectacular failure, attempting to talk about; it's not that deity is apart from the natural world, but having invented it, then ANYTHING He does becomes part of that natural world, and explainable within the rules of that world--because the rules change according to what is done.
If God is part of the natural world, do you agree that it is theoretically possible that some physical aspect his existence could be detectable?
Detectable? Of course...if anything is detectable at all, then anything God does, or IS, would also be detectable. That's not the question.
The question is....given this, would it be reasonable, possible or remotely likely that He could do something that would NOT be explainable as 'part of nature'?
Given that He, erhm, IS 'nature?'
Rather......and this is frustrating.... I KNOW what I'm trying to say and I'm having the world's worst time expressing it.
We don't have, or don't accept, that level of evidence that would show us where God is in all this. We are stuck in the physical world, which changes to accommodate any and everything God does; after all, whatever He does IS, and is therefore physically possible, and therefore describable. But that's where the problem is;
Perhaps....can any scientist who can back track the creation of the universe back to within nanoseconds after the beginning of the Big Bang, and can describe the processes as they evolved, explain WHY those processes happened---and not some other process?
WHY is the speed of light what it is?
WHY is gravity, one of the weakest forces in the universe (shoot, we defeat it every second) still one of the most influential?
WHY are the laws of physics what they are?
Science doesn't care. Science is about describing WHAT they are, not why they are.
.....and anything God does, or Is, will be describable in terms of physical processes, because we will be able to see them, and tie them to some other process.
So the answer to your question is yes, because everything God has created is detectable...and no, because you aren't asking the right question.
