I don't care about the "classical" definition that was popular in the time of Archimedes, Buddha, Confucius and Zarathushtra. This is a place of science and we'll be using the modern scientific definitions of words.
That's highly ironic, since the definition you're using for 'the universe' was used by medieval philosopher and theologian (double irony?) John Scotus Erigena, who defined the universe as 'everything that is created and everything that is not created' in
De divisione naturae.
The
modern definition I thought a naturalist such as yourself would assume is described in The American Heritage Science Dictionary (2005) as "The totality of matter, energy, and space, including the Solar System, the galaxies, and the contents of the space between the galaxies."
Apparently you grew up reading Carlos Castaneda's books so you think there is more than one reality.
I don't know him, but it doesn't matter since I do believe in a single reality, which corresponds to your chosen definition of 'universe'. It includes the scientifically observable universe as well as its Creator.
Where did you pick up such woo-woo language? Did you get your degree from Ambassador College? Or do you just read a lot of sci-fi?
Mostly sci-fi and RPGs, since English is my second language. I don't think we have anything like Ambassador College here. Maybe 'moot' only exists at
savethewords.org or as a founder of 4chan, but all the more reason to use it. It was good enough for Tolkien.
You're making me sick. Who let you in? The fundamental premise that underlies the Scientific Method and governs any scientific discussion is that the natural universe is a closed system (laymen's definition of that term) whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its present and past behavior. This premise has been tested exhaustively for half a millennium and has never come close to falsification. There is no invisible, illogical supernatural universe, full of creatures and forces that capriciously meddle in the functioning of our universe.
To assert otherwise--to contradict the very essence of science--is, to put it mildly, to make an extraordinary assertion, to which the Rule of Laplace (another cornerstone of the Scientific Method) applies: Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect. People have been searching for evidence of the supernatural for centuries, and not only have they never presented the required extraordinary evidence, they haven't even got any ordinary evidence.
You make too much of my little reductionism. There are two sides to this issue. One is the naturalistic fallacy that everything is subject to empirical verification (talking about using 'classical' words - the words are as ancient Greek as they are modern science). The method itself cannot support such a claim. Furthermore,
logic suggests a first cause, even if we cannot prove or disprove it. Science as a field of study was itself born from the theological belief that there is a God who ordered the universe and that this created order lends itself to discovery. And in that same sense, like science started out as theology, naturalism started out as supernaturalism. Ongoing spontaneous generation was very scientific for 1800 years. It didn't require extraordinary evidence to prove, it was simply the accepted hypothesis.
For the past 200 years, naturalism has become a widely accepted (or at least assumed) hypothesis. But the alternative doesn't need to be an "invisible, illogical supernatural universe full of creatures and forces that capriciously meddle in the functioning of our universe." (The Romans believed such things, and Jews and Christians were counted among the "atheists" who thought it was ridiculous.) It can be something
more reasonable than naturalistic fundamentalism, and judging from history, what seems like extraordinary evidence today is common sense tomorrow. I'm not proposing we go back to superstitious naturalism, I just think it's foolish to suppose naturalism is airtight because its tools predict so. It just looks too much like confirmation bias.
In short, that the natural (I'm glad you supplied the adjective) universe is a thermodynamically closed (exchanging energy but not matter with its surroundings) or isolated system (exchanging neither matter nor energy with its surroundings) does not mean it has no ground for existence, or that that such a ground
has to be expressible in scientific rather than religious or metaphysical language. God might seem extraordinary from a scientific perspective, but it's not the only perspective that exists. As I said,
metaphysical naturalism has only recently become a pervasive (or persuasive) worldview.
Go back and re-read Jung. Oh wait, they don't teach Jung at Ambassador College because that would be heresy. Belief in the supernatural is an instinct. Most instincts evolved in eras when they were survival traits, although some were surely accidents of genetic drift and bottlenecks. But just because something comes in handy doesn't make it true.
Perhaps. But the opposite is also true: just because something doesn't have a handy solution doesn't make it false. (And we've progressed a bit since Jung. Belief in the supernatural was also informed by life experience. It was how people made sense of the world, and
it's a self-modifying process that we're still part of.)
And what fortune cookie did you get that from? You talk as if you've got this all figured out. Come back in a century or two when that first ten-to-the-minus-hundredth of a second has been figured out and is in every high school physics book. To think that we know how this is going to play out is as foolish as someone in the 13th century thinking that he knew the origin of infectious disease.
How is placing "I've got it all figured out" in a high school physics book somewhere in the future different from what I'm doing in the present, except that you won't take responsibility for believing you know how it will play out in those physics books?
I don't believe the situation will be much different than today. People might know more about science and have a fuller understanding of nature, but they'll know more or less the same about
God, with old and new arguments for and against.
You're putting words into my mouth. What I believe is that we don't have the science, the knowledge, the models or the vocabulary to even discuss this sensibly beyond the most elementary level. Why do you assume that an ideology must be based on belief in the supernatural? My ideology is that civilization is a wondrous thing and we should all support it.
The elementary level is all we've got, and if history is any indication, our knowledge will always be relatively elementary. Theology and philosophy has been very good at posing abstract models of thought as placeholders for real data. We are always feeding new data into old models, even while we're revising them. Being sensible means taking one's ignorance into account, because as you and I both know, barging ahead with cherished ideas often does more damage to civilisations than good.
I just happen think that the difference between a naturalistic context for humanity and a theological one shouldn't be underestimated. Metaphysical naturalism seems to me like an impoverished model, despite its obvious value and predictive success in the field of natural science. Supernaturalism has the same problem (as I witness from the animistic African religions around me). Neither sufficiently address the real spiritual needs human beings have. And until those needs are met, natural and spiritual poverty will remain.
