So what is the affect on physics and ethics; nature, by some kind (What kind? Where kind is the operative word in all senses.) of God? How are they different than if they weren’t instantiated by God?
The effect is a two-step affair. The nature of the hypotheses in ethics or physics is controlled by the view one takes of the basic nature of reality. This means that the hypotheses within a certain discipline are conditioned by how one sees that discipline relating to the rest of reality. The view of the basic nature of reality, in turn, is conditioned by some divinity belief or other.
The first step has been argued for by a quite a number of scientists and philosophers. I already cited some of them: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, in the 20th cent. alone. The second step has been noticed at times (Durkheim, Weber) but was given its most extensive defense by Herman Dooyeweerd of the Free U. of Amsterdam also in the 20th cent.
His point was not to prove God’s existence, but to point to a distinctive (systematically non-reductionist) agenda Christians should take in making and evaluating theories.
All that has nothing to do with what a scientist is thinking about when he’s at work, ir what scientists might to might not say about their work. The vast majority of them don’t think about such broader issues and don’t want to. These broader issues have been taken up extensively in the 20th century by philosophy of science and by epistemology.
Some scientists have also puzzled about these issues. A I said, opine of them was Einstein who wrote that whenever he reflected on the nature of reality he felt challenged by the critique of materialism put forward by Berkeley (d 1793). Einstein’s own view was, by contrast, very close to that of Descartes (d 1650).
And just in case it’s not clear, my answer to the question asked near the outset of this exchange about condensation, is that condensation is not a theory at all. We may make a theory about it, but it is an observed fact in the world. It’s when we put forward some hypothesis - either an entity or a relation - that we are engaged in theory-making. And this happens across the board. There are theories not only in physics & biology, but also in math, logic, linguistics, sociology, economics, jurisprudence, & ethics, etc.
As to the question about what kind of God, my answer has to take the view of religious belief I mentioned earlier. Anything regarded as the self-existent origin of all else is thereby regarded as divine. This need not be personal; there may be more than one; it may not be worshipped.
The difference such a belief makes for theories is that one may take some aspect of the cosmos as the basic nature of reality. The Xn view rejects that. The true basic nature of reality is not mathematical or spatial, or physical or logical or any mix-and-match combinations of them. Instead it is simply: to depend on God. In this way all the reductionist views are rejected. On this view there are natures of types of things in the world, but no nature of the entire cosmos other than to depend on God.
I want to add a post script to my last comment: I was using “uncaused” in a much more inclusive sense, a sense equivalent to “unconditionally nondependent.” I did not mean what you meant, namely, “having no immediate cause occasioning it.”
I have pointed to examples before, but let me cite just one of them in reply.
Ernst Mach wrote that atoms & subatomic particles are no more real, external physical objects than are tables and chairs. He called all such beliefs “matters for laughter,” and regarded all such putative entities as “useful fictions.” They’re use is that when we have one set of perceptions the useful fictions lead us to expect another set of perceptions that usually follows from the first set. But he also believed there after no such things as laws, since they too are not perceptions. So the first set can’t be used to calculate what the next set will be (this was the view of Hume a century before Mach).
If you believed atoms & the subatomic realm to be a fiction, would you spend your time with experiments to confirm their existence?
Here’s another. Heisenberg wrote (in Physics and Philosophy) that logic doesn’t apply to the Q world, only math does. He also said that when the nature of all reality is finally discovered it will turn out to be an “eternal mathematical law for motion.” To that remark he added: “This fits with the Pythagorean religion” which has never been proven, “but I and a number of my colleagues” share this belief. This view allows contradictions to be true in the Q realm.
Both these views are reductionist (in different senses) and are incompatible with what we see as the Xn non-reductionist view of reality.
Aseity is a good term for what you are describing.
An uncaused cause can be contingent or necessary in being. A contingent uncaused cause as an explanation for the universe, while philosophically possible, merely begs the question of whether there can be an infinite number of them. Like the cause of this universe as the effect of something that happens in another universe. Are an infinite number of universes philosophically possible?
It depends on how big it is: if it’s boundless, only one is possible; if it’s bounded [finite], an infinite number are possible.
Luckily, Rutherford did think they were real and spent time discovering them, most notably the atomic nucleus.
Do you think Rutherford’s experiment worked because he believed in atomic nuclei, that if Mach did the Rutherford’s experiment he wouldn’t get the same results?
That’s contradictory. Math is logic. If by logic Heisenberg meant human intuition, then I would agree.
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Houston, we have a problem – imagining that an infinite number of things can exist or whether an infinite number of real things can actually exist sometime in the future. (Hint: the future does not exist – all you have is now.)
Oh, and we’re not talking about the conceptual infinite number of geometric points on a line between zero and pick a number.
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No, he meant what we mean by “logic.” He said it applied only to language.
The theory that math & logic are identical has been refuted many times. Russell, e.g., claimed that math was just a shorthand way of writing logic and that logic could express the same concept without any idea of quantity - which is patently false. The existential quantifier is read: “there is at least one x such that…” and the symbol for class membership is read: “is a member of” where “a” is an obvious synonym for “one.”
There are number of senses of “necessity.” The existence of God is an unconditional nondependnece, not guaranteed by any laws since God created all the laws.
That multiple universes are logically possible means only that the idea is not self-contradictory.
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Answer the question.
I.e. tell us a coherent story in which the history of religion changes the facts of gravitation or abiogenesis or consciousness now.
As above. . .
By whom? Nature is of natural self existent origin from natural sempiternity. What’s divine about that? Apart from its tone?
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Gentlemen: As I said early on, I must now leave this discussion. I will be out of the US for 3 weeks, until March 5th.
If any of you would like to pick it up again when I return, you know how to do it!
Ciao!,
Roy
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The number may proceed to infinity, but can it become actually infinite?
Hope you have a great trip! Look forward to having you back around.
Gracias adios… as I heard my mother in law say, and I thought she was kicking me out 
(gracias a Dios)
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- What a difference an accent mark makes, eh?
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We’ll be waiting mate. Bon voyage. Veilige reis.
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Thank you! We’ll be where its nice & warm: St Maarten.
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This is the ideology of the age.
If an event is uncaused, it cannot have an explanation.
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