Think of “innumerable” as “too big to count but not infinite”.
A non-infinite positively curved space would work, too.
It all depends on the shape. I personally like the idea of a universe curved so if a ship headed in one direction it would eventually end up back where it started (ignoring the expansion of space, that is).
I get how it could be practically uncountable. Simar to how an effect may have a natural cause that is currently undetectable.
I can admit this. Flat earthers call it the Pac-Man effect.
Part of me likes it too
Or a lack of imagination. When we see a picture of the universe like this. Who can really say it’s not a tiny part of a larger object… or to end up back where you started, a particle in your finger tip
You are right to reject both deism and pantheism. Still you are terminologically wrong: it is not a pantheism to assume that all created things are incessantly supported by God, and that they would immediately collapse without this support. On the contrary, it is quite an orthodox idea, which you can find in the Church Fathers’ writings and in the manuals of the major Christian denominations.
For example, that’s how Augustine put it:
“For the power of the Creator, his all-powerful and all-sustaining strength is the cause of all the created things’ subsistence. If this strength, which rules the created things, ceased sometime, the created species would cease and the entire nature would collapse at the same time. For God is not like a builder who goes away after finishing a building; yet the building stands on its own. Thus, the universe would exist for no longer than the blink of an eye if God quitted steering it.”
(“Creatoris namque potentia, et omnipotentis atque omnitenentis virtus, causa subsistendi est omni creaturae: quae virtus ab eis quae creata sunt regendis, si aliquando cessaret, simul et illorum cessaret species, omnisque natura concideret. Neque enim, sicut structor aedium cum fabricaverit, abscedit, atque illo cessante atque abscedente stat opus eius; ita mundus vel ictu oculi stare poterit, si ei Deus regimen sui subtraxerit.” - De Genesi ad Litteram Liber IV. Caput XII. PL 34: 304).
No denial of creatures’ reality follows therefrom. After all, that’s the difference between human dreams and divine Logos: only the latter can create the real things at will.
True, the technical word would be panentheism. However, I don’t see such a big difference there.
…just like a dream, and that is not a real creation, but just an extension of the creator. Again the omnipotence of a dreamer is nothing. Any child has that.
All dreams are real dreams. What you say is like the sophistry which defines anything which God does as good only now you are applying the same to reality. Goodness and reality are in the things themselves or it is nothing at all. Things are not good because God does them. God does them because they are good. And things are not real just because God dreams them. Things are reality because they exist on their own and because this requires logical consistency and no just someone making it so.
I am not a fan of Augustine. He said a few good things helpful to science, but his theology was terrible, full of influence from Plato, more so than Neoplatonism. For him salvation was just God choosing people to replace angels He had lost. No thank you.
God is neither watchmaker nor dreamer, but a shepherd and parent. He prepares the nest and attends his flock/children, keeping things suitable to their growth and learning. God is a real creator giving everything and not holding back out of some need to control everything. Thus what He creates stands on its own with the freedom to follow the nature and free will He gave them.
Certainly, I was talking about ontological naturalism. Its habitual definition (for instance, here ) is that “reality is exhausted by nature” or, more specifically, that “all spatiotemporal entities must be identical to or metaphysically constituted by physical entities.”
Ontological naturalism is not necessarily the same as methodological naturalism, which is, in a nutshell, just the scientific approach - scientists should look for observable and reproducible explanations. I agree that scientific approach doesn’t depend on any metaphysical premises at all - it may be just applied; and it holds as long as it delivers results. But I’m speaking of ontological naturalism, which is a set of metaphysical premises.
Well, surely they can. But the laws that were really “the starting point” would not depend on anything else - on the contrary, they would be a reason why “anything else” appears - e.g., like a tunneling wave function in Vilenkin’s quantum cosmology . A “thing” that doesn’t depend on anything is free - that’s just a matter of definition.
If it is free, why does it have a particular shape - e.g., why can it be described by a wave function? The conditioned things “behave” in a specific manner because they are determined or at least influenced by their causes / conditions. But a “thing” that doesn’t depend on any conditions (e.g., a quantum field “preceding” our space and time) must have somehow chosen its behavior. Thus we get the concept of reality that has caused everything else, that is free, and that has freely made some choices. It is not your usual natural object but something very peculiar. The biblical vision of divine Wisdom (in the Old Testament) or Logos (in the New Testament) is, of course, different from the concept of a free and self-shaping quantum field - but it is quite plausible that the latter is a glimpse of understanding, an approximation of the human mind to the former.
I’m not asking you to become a fan of Augustine 
But whether you love his theology or not, he was never considered a pantheist. That’s all I wanted to show here.
In this context, I suppose, “to explain” means “to correctly model the process”, to write an equation that would correctly describe what’s going on. But it’s still begging the question: why did the uncaused events happen in such a way as to be describable by M-theory?
To achieve better contexuality, simply begin by admitting an uncaused event is unexplainable, but I can appreciate how difficult it would for the scientifically minded naturalist to admit this.
Interesting contrast… and yet a person can still cause real events in the world.
You may like this quote
“God’s providential direction as an unseen, behind the scenes, ‘primary cause,’ should not lead us to deny the reality of our choices and actions.”
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology
So was I. The methodological naturalism of science becomes ontological naturalism when you equate the scientific worldview with reality.
Sounds like the first step in an argument from equivocation. Free has too many meanings. I would also tend to think that beginning with God means God lacks particularity. And yet Christians add all kinds of particularity to God such as when they call God “triune.”
Certainly scientists don’t want to stop asking why with regards to any form the laws of nature takes. They prefer to find a reason why the Standard model is what it is. So far this hasn’t been very successful. And the fact is that this preference is not a mandate of the scientific methodology. The naturalist would stop with this methodology as the limit of what is knowable and would see no reason to accept the validity of the logic you are employing.
Definitely, I was not denying the reality of our choices and actions! I was only pointing at the obvious fact that human thoughts can’t introduce any change into the physical world unless mediated by corporal actions.
At some point there will have to be an interaction between the thought or intention to act and the observable change in the physical world
In fact, I was not specifically implying the Standard Model. It’s more or less clear that it should be somehow upgraded or superseded to unite gravity with the other fundamental interactions - at least, that’s what the scientific ethos demands. But the successor theory’s content is almost irrelevant to what I’m pointing at.
Any scientific model of any natural process, including a scientific explanation of the Universe’s emergence, must refer to some natural laws already at work. That’s just the inherent logic of scientific discourse - and this logic is the only real limit of scientific understanding.
In other words, some further research may show that the natural laws that we deem the most fundamental can be derived from some other, even more fundamental laws; thus, the latter will occupy the place of the basic reality whence everything else appears. The place of the fundamental reality that is postulated without being derived from anything else is never empty.
To give an example: I somewhat love Vilenkin’s hypothesis of small close universes spontaneously nucleating out of nothing, “where `nothing’ refers to a state with no classical space and time” (Fanaras and Vilenkin 2023). I don’t mean that I deem this hypothesis necessarily correct. But it is a good illustration of what I’ve written above.
This hypothesis, based on Wheeler-DeWitt equation, seeks to describe the Universe’s earliest stages by a wave function (but this wave function is different from the Hartle-Hawking model). The hypothesis proposes a model of multiple universes’ spontaneous emergence out of nothing - but this “nothing” is not an absolute nothingness. The very fact that this spontaneous emergence is described by wave function implies that a certain quantum field’s existence is prerequisite for this “mechanism” to work.
Why does this quantum field exist? The Vilenkin’s hypothesis, like any other hypothesis describing the universes’ emergence out of nothing quantum-mechanically, by a wave function, doesn’t answer this question.
Perhaps, one of these hypotheses will someday become the proven theory. Perhaps, scientists will then proceed with further research proposing some hypotheses on the primordial quantum field’s origin. But these hypotheses would inevitably refer to some other, even more basic form of reality.
Thus, science has repeatedly confirmed, confirms, and will always confirm that it deals only with the derived realities. But the existence of the derived realities is inevitably premised on some fundamental, non-derived, independent reality - which the scientific research can only approach without grasping.
This is not equivocation but analogy, which is an inescapable language of theology. When we speak of divine love, mind, freedom, will, actions, etc., we should understand that these terms don’t have the same meaning as the human love, mind, freedom, and the like. But these are not homonyms either. All these terms refer to different but related and, therefore, comparable realities.
In the end, you are certainly right - human corporal actions themselves are the changes in the physical world. Still human intentions with regard to the outer world will clearly need human body’s mediation. That is to say, our ability to immediately translate thoughts into physical events is very restricted although not completely nonexistent.
Which is the point I like to bring up for people who think that believing in God is irrational: some sort of “reality” has always been here because otherwise there would be nothing; the question is whether the basic reality is merely ‘material’ or whether it has/is mind.
Should?
The plain fact is that attempts to do so have failed.
I am partial to the ideas of Neil Turok that the Standard model explains everything (i.e. all the experimental data).
Speculation is not science. It is a way to come up with hypotheses, but the scientific method is to test those hypotheses. Until you do that, it isn’t a finding of science.
Sounds to me like an excuse for sweeping things under a rug and even worse an excuse to discard the dictates of such these things (love, goodness, mind, freedom, and the like) to create a inhuman, evil, and devilish theology. Seems to me that the human version of these things are limit of our understanding and we should go to that limit and no farther.
I suppose that attempts to achieve some unification will continue because many scientists feel uncomfortable with the two separate but equally fundamental theories - one for gravity, the other for everything else. But as for me, I don’t have any stake in this game.
My point doesn’t depend on which particular theory will prevail. Anyhow, every scientific theory of the fundamental natural forces or of the Universe’s initial stage will always have to refer, at least implicitly, to a reality that is not derived from anything else but is assumed to exist on its own.
I sympathize with your concern because a certain hyper-Calvinist school of thought has really tried to distort the words’ meaning in this way. But to acknowledge that any human language about God is always an analogy (which is a perfectly mainstream theological concept) has nothing to do with such abuses.
To put it simple, to be analogical to some concept means to have something in common with it while being somewhat different - but not diametrically opposite!
A thing that is diametrically opposite to human understanding of freedom and goodness is no way analogical to the latter.
Nothing negating itself or an uncaused cause that is unaware of its action… a mindless mind?
I really don’t think such a “discomfort” is what is going on. I think it is just that when you look for some way to make a new scientific discovery, then it is natural to look at the past where we have seen a pattern of unification. This suggests finding a way to unite these two separate theories might be a way to make a contribution and thus to publish or get your PHD.
That is not how science works. It is just about explaining the data. From that we may piece together a story about how things happened in order to describe to people what science has discovered. But the logic of the story is not how science makes its discoveries. That sounds more like theology.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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