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From: janney@unm-cvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Certainty (Somewhat incendiary)
Message-ID: <1008@unm-cvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Jul-84 00:22:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: unm-cvax.1008
Posted: Fri Jul 13 00:22:52 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Jul-84 02:26:17 EDT
References: <7871@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Lines: 37

Note: the first time I tried to post this, the phone line dropped while I
was still in vi.  I think I cancelled it successfully: apologies if you
got a partial message.

> If I believe that God is the ground of all being,
> the "ether", as it were, of the universe, then I certainly would not 
> consider him to be subject to physical law.  (By the way, all that special
> relativity would say of such an ether is that it cannot be detected; you
> cannot prove scientifically that something does not exist; only that using
> the methods of science would not disclose its existence.)

This is somewhat beside the point of the original article, but I would
like to point out that it is not generally true that one cannot disprove
the existence of something.  If the nature of an object is inherently
self-contradictory, that object cannot exist: for instance, it is easy to
demonstrate that there is no integer so large that every integer bigger
than it is composite.  Or, if you are dealing with a finite domain, an
exhaustive search will do quite nicely, at least in principle.  In
either case, the object in question must have established, well-defined
properties.

	If something is capable of influencing the physical world, we
can, at least in principle, detect it by observing its effects on the
physical world and thus we can ascribe to it a physical existence,
subject to some physical laws.  These need not be the laws of physics
as we currently understand them: those could easily be a special case
of something more complex.

	The term "physical laws" is extremely misleading.  Physical
"laws" are not a set of rules enforced by cosmic policemen;  they
are useful working models for observable phenomena.

Jim Janney
{{convex,ucbvax,gatech}!unmvax, {purdue,lbl-csam,cmcl2}!lanl-a}!unm-cvax!janney

	"And sometimes at the very end of a sentence I'll suddenly
	come out with the wrong fuse-box."