Well presumably Einstein’s theory of gravity does not apply to whether or not God has tummy aches because God’s tummy aches are not limited by gravity.
Right, but physical laws become pointless if we don’t know when we’re allowed to use them.
Is your contention that Reality (the sum of all that exists, including the universe and whatever else is above it) is completely knowable to humans in principle?
I think that if the universe really does obey rules (and I suspect I does), then the rules must be knowable. Your question sums up some of the questions of others, so let me address it further.
Suppose we have idealized dice, such that the results of each roll are random. If we rolled these dice several times and recorded the results, the sequence of numbers would have no statistical pattern in the sense that we wouldn’t be able to predict the next number of the sequence. You would be perfectly justified in saying that this sequence follows no rules–if it did, it wouldn’t be random.
But suppose someone else disagrees, and says that the dice do obey rules; he insists that there is a perspective one could adopt that would allow future entries of the series to be predicted. Now you would be very skeptical and would naturally ask what these rules are. The other person tells you that the rules aren’t known, and indeed they can’t even be known in principle. We can’t find them with empirical methods, or even with logic.
Frankly, I don’t see the difference between postulating unknowable rules and claiming that the rules don’t exist, so I think both people in this hypothetical scenario are actually in agreement. If there are rules,* they are necessarily the subject matter of logic *and ought to be provable in principle. To say the rules can’t be demonstrated is to say they don’t exist.
But perhaps I’m wrong, in which case one of these two requests could be met: 1) Name a situation in which results are unpredictable but the notion that there are unknowable rules could lead us astray. 2) Name a situation in which there are unknowable rules being obeyed but the notion that these rules don’t exist leads us astray. The two claims seem interchangeable to me.
Or, if you prefer, you may address my hypothetical scenario: If the other person is wrong about the dice following unknowable rules, then how could this be demonstrated (logically or empirically)?
But why should we believe that is valid? Why should the control of an unknowable being imply that what it controls is unknowable?
It wouldn’t imply that if the being didn’t interfere with what he controlled. But since this topic concerns miracles, I am assuming that God does indeed interfere with the universe for the sake of this thread. Since his interferences are unpredictable, they introduce uncertainty at every level of our understanding of the universe.
When there is a string tethering it to the ceiling, it does not drop to the ground. The law of universal gravitation still holds. When God acts to prevent it from falling, it does not drop to the ground either. But even that would not warrant the inference to “the laws of physics don’t exist” – even if, indeed, God’s activity in such a case is intrinsically unknowable.
I’m glad you brought that up. Here is my issue: Suppose I postulate a law of physics which is known to be incorrect in some cases–Hooke’s Law is a good example of a law that isn’t very general. We of course “know” that this law isn’t very general, but if miracles are allowed, we could be very wrong about this. Perhaps Hooke’s Law is more general than we thought, but God happens to suspend the law frequently.
In general, it would be impossible to tell the difference between 1) a law genuinely not being universal and 2) a law being universal but being perpetually suspended by God’s will. So this uncertainty is extremely relevant to physics.
