I’ve given up engaging on this point because to me mitchell is saying that 99% deism is somehow more real than 100% theism.
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Yes, a kitchen sink and anti-sink is still small enough to be possible as a virtual particle- antiparticle pair. Anything with more kinetic energy than about a Saturn V and anti-Saturn V in flight in the atmosphere is not, because it would have to last less than a Planck Time to not violate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. (I worked that out a while ago and would have to go back to the math to check it)
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Given a running theme about plumbers, what potential is there for this quantum event to have an effect on my kitchen sink?
As for your argument against naturalism… I don’t agree with naturalism but I don’t find your argument convincing.
The premise of modern naturalism as I understand it equates the scientific worldview with reality because science is a method for uncovering truth which actually works. I disagree, of course, and I will explain why if it interests you.
I don’t know what version of naturalism your premises come from (supposing you didn’t just make them up yourself), but I see no reason why such are necessary for naturalism. I think the point is that whether it is some version of theism or not you have to begin somewhere and the naturalist sees no reason why they shouldn’t start with the universe itself or the laws of nature.
These laws of nature are a product of observation and demonstration. Unlike the things of religion they provide a reasonable expectation that others should agree in the written procedures anyone can follow to get the same result. They certainly do not depend on claims that they are inherent, spontaneous, or ordered. Quite the contrary, many are not inherent and some are the opposite of ordered. Your talk of order looks rather trumped up to me and highly subjective.
I certainly think the process of life requires a fixed set of rules and and that is why God created the universe with the laws of nature. But I see no reason to argue that the laws of nature cannot be the starting point rather than God. Your argument looks like a strawman at best and I see no reason why naturalism must overthrow itself. I frankly think this is just a rationalization of your own subjective feeling about things.
I heard Richard Feynman make a startling admission about how an unending scheme of natural laws would be, I think he said, boring.
Sort of like how an event can be caused by another event to which the same question applies. The twist is in how an uncaused event would appear exactly the same as an event that is caused by something that doesn’t happen.
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Of course. That would be like a wild goose chase. …not sure what this has to do with the naturalist starting with laws of nature rather than with God.
Or as I have often put it… What would we see if we came across an event caused by something outside the universe… by something which we cannot measure? It would look like an event which doesn’t have sufficient causes among the things we can measure… in other words it is exactly what we do see in quantum physics.
One such naturalist I met thought M-theory could explain uncaused events. He was unwilling to admit an uncaused event is unexplainable.
Too often the naturalist is unwilling to think about what it is they are really saying.
If it’s an event in another universe, I do suspect the boundary may eventually unfold. It’s not totally impossible. Either way, I am totally open to the philosophical possibility of a blackhole in one universe being the cause of another universe.
The question is whether it’s possible to have an infinite number of future, present or past universes.
Uncaused or backwards-caused would only have a probability afterwards, and that probability would be 1 since it actually happened. That’s for a specific event; for generic events I don’t know if there’s a probability of one happening – for that matter I don’t know if anyone’s tried intentionally catching one happening.
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I miss having the math skills to work out such things . . . just not enough to try to reclaim them.
Now about that duck at the event horizon . . . 
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You mean like your clogged sink spontaneously clearing?
I vaguely recall an experiment where that was investigated, something like where B was predicted on the basis of A occurring, then B was observed yet A wasn’t. If I’m remembering that right, the universe is strange indeed.
If anyone could get away with listing “non-boring” as a quality expected of physics answers it would be him!
Cosmologists are on the lookout for the same thing. One they’re seeking is gravity waves when there’s nothing at their source – it would mean that the idea of parallel universes isn’t just metaphysics and science fiction.
I encountered a debate on that once. One guy was maintaining that the energy that went into a black hole isn’t enough to start a universe, the next guy maintained that since there’s a singularity involved the energy going out the ‘other end’ would be undetermined and potentially infinite, and the third guy argued they were both bonkers because black holes will eventually all evaporate.
In terms of temporal succession, if they’re linked causally in a string then in essence they’re just one long phenomenon. Even if they’re splitting off new ones, they’re still linked causally.
Basically unless you start with an infinite set you can’t get one.
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I don’t agree with that and I am not a naturalist.
We have talked about this before. You equate explanation with determinism. I do not agree with this. I believe God incorporated randomness in the laws of nature, and He did this for a reason. That is an explanation for events which are not determined.
Huh? I was talking of an event we come across so it clearly not in another universe.
Reminds me of Japanese mythology which has an endless number of gods for every little thing. It just shows our imagination is boundless.
According to quantum physics some measurements select among infinite possibilities, so the number of possible futures, at least, is infinite.
Like the probability for the universe happening the way it did… 1 
I have appreciated the response of the naturalist to the ID proponent in this respect
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Eh… another point in that conversation with the naturalist I mentioned… even in the heat death of the universe, quantum events are more than likely to occur, which could lead to recombination, but that doesn’t equal an infinite number of times.
That’s an overstatement; a measurement is thought to “select” among actual possibilities, which may number anywhere from two to innumerable.
A serious part of designing any experiment is trying to reduce the number of possibilities to as few as possible. When something happens that wasn’t regarded as possible is when we really learn things.
I think the matter of whether or not space is continuous is involved here. If it is, then the possible vectors resultant from a given interaction between two particles could well be infinite. but if space is ‘grainy’ that may not be the case.
Innumerable is a good word. They could be innumerable do to the potential for the number to proceed infinity or because the collection is so large that it is practically uncountable. But to say it is an actual collection that is by definition innumerable looks to me to be a genuine contradiction.
Infinite space is what allows the number to proceed to infinity… I have long been agnostic on whether its infinite (or infinitely divisible)
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That one’s not too difficult since it’s just manipulating the formula in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and plugging in a Planck time to get an energy as output–basically just requiring Wikipedia or Wolfram-Alpha, a few unit conversions, and a bit of algebra.
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Like if space is discrete? Those parts will still bear some kind of spatial relation, even if it is a non-classical space
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