This is simply not true. None of us are in a vacuum; everything relates to everything else, no matter how minutely.
That statement addresses ontological connectedness, not methodological competence—which means it fails to address the point I made (about you criticizing a field for failing to answer a question it does not, by definition, claim to answer). I made an epistemic point about the scope and limits of science. You responded with a metaphysical platitude about the interconnectedness of reality. A swing and a miss. Interconnectedness does not convert metaphysical questions into empirical ones.
Science cannot investigate ‘nothing’ prior to spacetime because science, by definition, operates within a spatiotemporal framework.
Have you ever noticed that the more remote the time period the more dogmatic a science becomes?
No, I have noticed precisely the opposite. Science is far more dogmatic about what can be observed or replicated (here and now) than about what can only be inferred (a billion years ago). Evolutionary theories and hypotheses about events hundreds of millions of years ago are chock full of hedging language like “plausibly,” “might have,” “it’s possible that,” and so on. This is especially true regarding possible high-energy conditions of the early universe—things like the “colliding sheets” of brane cosmology—ideas which are openly labeled as speculative and held provisionally and tentatively. They are debated, published, critiqued, and often abandoned.
What you call “straining” is just the normal pain of a scientific field operating at the edge of observability. In paleontological debates about dinosaurs, we don’t judge it for lacking photographs. We understand that inference replaces direct access. Cosmology works the same way, just at a larger scale.
Although you claim to be familiar with Schaeffer, I have yet to see where you grasped the “split world of reality,” “the upper story leap,” etc.—which is most of his passion about basic views. It is what neo-orthodoxy is about, mostly in theology.
You seem to think that invoking Francis Schaeffer’s categories proves your case. It does not. The question is whether your critique of science actually tracks Schaeffer’s concern. He was opposing autonomous human reason which cages meaning in an irrational upper story, not disciplined empirical inquiry that acknowledges its methodological limits. You seem to be weaponizing his language while ignoring his actual target—which was neither Christians nor a biblical world-view. (For what it’s worth, Schaeffer is the one who launched my journey into presuppositional apologetics, which eventually led to Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen.)
So, then, because we have a propositional record/narrative with a secure custody that says there was a moment when physical reality started by an agent outside of that physical reality, we do not have the limitation you have mentioned.
We do have that limitation I mentioned. Presumably, this “propositional narrative with a secure custody” is the Bible, by which that agent communicates essential truths to us. Yes, the Bible tells us that this universe had a creator. But that’s exactly what I said, isn’t it? “Science, as methodologically empirical, is categorically incapable of answering [what caused the Big Bang]. That task belongs to metaphysics and
theology, not science” (emphasis added). Science cannot answer that question because it cannot operate independent of its own preconditions for intelligibility. “Science, by definition, operates within a spatiotemporal framework,” I pointed out, so it ceases to function apart from that framework.
[Joe Rogan and Stephen Meyer] can agree that an ‘infinitely’ small amount of mass was used to produce the result we now have.
That “infinitely” small amount of mass … is an amount of mass. That implies spatiotemporal dimensions and, thus, the very early universe (post-Planck epoch). Since the universe cannot create itself, that amount of mass can’t be what caused the universe. So, whatever question Rogan and Meyer were exploring, it couldn’t have been the cause of the universe—because that wasn’t it.
Yes, I would criticize any arithmetic that could not explain why numbers exist.
That would be a self-referentially incoherent position. It requires a methodology to justify the existence of what it already presupposes without relying on those presuppositions to do so, which is logically impossible. If your standard were applied consistently to every field of inquiry, no knowledge system could ever emerge.
Arithmetic is a methodology, mate, not an ontology. Distinctly different categories.
You are seriously fractured in your thinking.
You haven’t yet managed to demonstrate that.
And, given your statement above, it is a wildly ironic accusation.
I believe you said you knew what Lewis stated in [the] "Religion and Science" analogy about the coins that regularly accumulate in the office drawer. Even though a psychiatrist or detective has an explanation, they know what coins are and what counting is and what accumulation is.
They’re also conscious beings with intellect and will. There is no equivalence between them and arithmetic.
[The existence of numbers] must be explained, and refusing to do so is slop.
I agree their existence should be explained, but that’s not the job of arithmetic. You need an ontology for that.
The universe is far, far more coherent than what you are suggesting.
I haven’t suggested anything about the universe’s coherence.
Otherwise the text of Genesis 1 has things like two creations …
That does not follow. The book of Genesis has two creation narratives—chapters 1 and 2 separated by a
toledot formula—but Genesis 1 is a single liturgical creation narrative.
