Ack.
> 
> No, I somehow pointed you down the wrong rabbit hole.
> 
> You'll never get Modern Warfare 4 to run on an NES. It doesn't matter how clever or tricky you think you are, as a designer you are a slave to your hardware. 
> 
> Even with recent tools, you WILL find things that you simply cannot do. Your vision will always need to be curtailed to what the hardware allows. Comparing yourself to God in this way is utterly fallacious.
> 
> Dhw just replied that he doesn't like the word "supernatural." Maybe you should both consider the definition I raised in this thread. Dhw, might I offer a mathematician's guidance? Let's just define the terms.
> 
> Supernatural-- adj. A phenomenon that is unexplainable according to known laws and observation.
> 
> Natural-- adj. A phenomenon that can be explained according to known known laws and observation.--Ok, we are slightly missing each other here. I don't disagree really, I am simply saying their is an underlying misconception. -Modernwarfare will never run on the NES, but saying that a God or UI is bound by the same rules that we are is akin to saying that the mind of the designer is bound by the same limitations as the platform which he must design his program to run in. IN other words, what you are saying is akin to saying that YOU are only capable of writing a program in C++ for a 32-Bit Celeron with 256mb of Ram simply because that is the platform that you have chosen to design your program for, despite the fact that your development machine was a I7 with 96GB of RAM and YOUR brain processes at far greater speeds. That is saying that you are incapable of writing in Java, Basic, Fortran, or Assembler just because you chose to write your design in C++. -Neither system is without its governing rules, but the rules governing the limitations of the designer are not inherently the same rule governing the design. One of the constant issues we run into in design is that our minds are capable of coming up with concepts that work in our head and on paper that are beyond the capabilities of the current level of technology. I am saying that the grand designer may be in the same situation. His reality, his limitations, are not necessarily the limitations of our reality.

Tony,
> 
> God is either above the laws of nature or he's not. If he's not above the laws of nature, then logically he's a part of the universe and is fully bound to its physical laws. God is "natural."
> 
> If God however IS above the laws of the universe, then--and only then--does he become abjectly unstudyable. He becomes "supernatural." 
> 
> In terms of your game designer analogy, you, the designer, are limited by hundreds of factors.
> 
> 1. Memory
> 2. Processor speed
> 3. BUS throughput
> 4. Inter-Device compatability
> 5. Computer language
> 6. System heat
> 7. Power consumption
> 8. GDDR memory
> 
> The level of contol you ultimately exert is created by a literally dumb, simple, and unintellgent automaton that has all the above (and many more) physical constraints--entirely beyond your capacity to [surpass]. You, the creator, are bound by--and cannot surpass--the physical laws governing the automaton your simulation is running on.
> 
> The only thing you can do is to run it on another machine, but all of those very real constraints move with you.
> 
> [EDITED]-
But I could design the game to run in flash, use almost no memory at all, and very little bandwidth. The point being, that while God might be limited by a set of laws it is not necessarily limited by the same laws that we are. I can design a game on paper that is not limited to any of the constraints that you mentioned, and yet create artificial constraints within the confines of the games design that are absolutely necessary for the game to work as intended.

If you stick with the strict definition of life from non-life, you have to come up with a working definition of what life actually is...-Not really. You don't have to have a definition of the natural numbers in order to perform integer arithmetic. I would argue that only by attempting to create life, can the definition be created. We're in a black box here.

Wait a second... after all this time when you have argued with me over the existence of dark matter/dark energy, and over the nebulous effects of gravity and how they are using imaginary data to make their numbers work, you are reversing your opinion because a magazine wrote an article on it?-?????-
I read the thread you responded to... (it has in fact, been 3 years) and have no idea what you're asking. Could you post the segment you responded to?

And science can't tell us anything at all about a 'creative force' because if such a creative force is 'supernatural' it is by definition outside of the problem domain of science, which is the physical world. The best you can say about a creator is 'maybe.' This is both because of ignorance of unknown properties of our universe, and for things we think we know. 
> 
> Look, god is supernatural or he's not. If he's not, he's subject to and not above the laws of the universe and therefore subject to scientific inquiry. If however he's supernatural, he is outside the physical universe and any claims that he/she/it affects the physical universe has to come up with a way that it could do that, (including defining at least some of its physical limits). 
> -Just out of curiosity, why does God have to be supernatural? Hell, for that matter, why do ghosts, spirits, ESP, OBE's or NDE's need to be any more supernatural than dark matter or dark energy, neither of which can be observed any more than God?-In fact, I would argue that there can not be anything at all that is unnatural if you are a proponent for intelligent design, because in order for a designer to implement the natural world then the designer itself must in fact be natural. -People misuse that word. Science says that dark matter and dark energy exist even though we have no direct evidence for their existence on the simple assertion that we observe something that doesn't make sense unless we ASSUME that they do exist. We mere mortals of the non-scientific realm, though less than dust beneath their academic heals, are expected to take that as the gospel truth. Yet, when someone says aliens, esp, NDE, OBE, God, or any other thing that can not be observed DIRECTLY we label it as supernatural and label the person a quack. -As to your assumption that the designer must in fact be subject to the laws, I do not necessarily agree. I can design rules for a game, as a game designer, and create a world in which entities come into existence, wink out of existence, and all within that world are subject to the rules which I created. However, I, as the designer, am not. I have my own rules, my own limitations, my own restrictions, and my own abilities that are far beyond the ken of the normal entities existing within that world. If I have that ability as a humble game designer, how much more so would the grand designer of life, the universe, and everything?

You have no right to confine my thought patterns to the agreed-to constraints of the scientific method. When I was in your position as a research fellow in cardiology and wrote papers with my boss we followed that agreement. We did not invoke supernatural interference to explain our results. But I'm not doing that now. I know the method and I can read the articles and understand from my previous knowledge, and I can reach my own conclusions to satisy me. 
> - The confinement isn't placed by me its placed by your hypothesis. 
 
If you say life either came about by chance or design, that's fine. However if you choose to define life's origin by THAT hypothesis, you need to be able to construct some kind of method to detect design, and to be able to differentiate it's effects from the effects of chance. However, the assumptions of the scientific method do not allow you to do this if you invoke a non-physical entity. (Defined by me as "supernatural.") You can "feel" there is a creator, but empirically you have constructed the question in such a way that it forces all supernatural entities out of the picture by virtue of the method involved to investigate it. You cannot use physical evidence to justify the existence of something that is not physical, therefore the constraint is placed by you--not me. - If god is supernatural, those are the only two options available that fit within those constraints. As a panentheist, you actually are close to one of them. - > Thare must a universe friendly to have life in order for life to evolve. We do not know that there any other universes around. We only can know this one, so we should stick to those considerations. John Leslie said God or multiple universes. Only two choices and that is right. The Big Bang is either a creation or came from something else, which we both agree we cannot study. Again two choices.
> - But only one is actually "studyable" (if that's a word!). Again... we need to be pragmatic. To me, even though I'm not a complete materialist--I only care about questions that are knowable. Supernatural design is not one of those. - > The probability of a friendly-for-life earth planet is a second issue. Either we are on the only one, or there are others, two choices. And finally the origin of life is extremely complex. I think we will find that a single-celled organism is so complex, that by the passive method of natural selection, 400 million years is not enough time for its development. Natural chance or design, two choices. Antony Flew is on my side. 
> 
> Have I made my point clear enough? - What is clear to me is that I'll be a pretty awful probability teacher. - What I synthesize from your view is this: We only have two options, Design or Chance. Because you feel the odds are so low, you err towards design--though for scientific reasons remain non-committal. (The exact--and i mean EXACT opposite of my position. I err towards chance and remain non-committal for philosophical reasons.) - My issue is that I just can't seem to get across what I'm talking about in terms of chance. - In the *worst-case* scenario, you have dice-style probability. (Because the alternative helps life become more probable as time moves forward. Perhaps this is where your designer lays--but it is indiscernible from chance.) - The problem is that there is no reason to assume that 400 million years is even needed; by chance you only need one success. The odds could be 1/2^1000 but if life came about by a die-roll, every toss of the dice produces an equal opportunity for that success to be rolled as any one of the failures. - You are right that we only have one knowable universe, but that actually underlies my point in that we can't attach probabilities on systems that we don't know anything about. (That's why I pretty much ignore numbers anytime someone throws one out there.)


> > I must disagree. Life occurred either by design OR by chance. 
> 
> False Dilemma. As you accept the scientific method, you accept the assumption that we cannot delineate from natural and supernatural. > >
> The probabilities that have to be considered in order are: 1)what are the chances for this universe to appear. Penrose calculated an estimate of 10 to the minus 300 prior to the initial conditions, and 10 to the minus 123 if the initial conditions known to cosmologists were present.2) the probabilities of the Earth to be as it is allowing an attempt at life. 3) Going from non-living organic molecules to an organized group of them allowing life. (These have been calculated by legitimate scientists and I'll get the particulars for you.)
 
> The legitimacy of the scientists isn't at stake when what they're talking about is literally undefinable. Being able to attach a probability of the universe arising by chance means that you have to have some idea of the distribution of universes at large and actually *know* how they get started in the first place. - > Furthermore, you don't need to explain the origin of the universe in order to explain the origin of life. 
 
> But by accepting the scientific method, you also exclude a supernatural designer, as above. - You have no right to confine my thought patterns to the agreed-to constraints of the scientific method. When I was in your position as a research fellow in cardiology and wrote papers with my boss we followed that agreement. We did not invoke supernatural interference to explain our results. But I'm not doing that now. I know the method and I can read the articles and understand from my previous knowledge, and I can reach my own conclusions to satisy me. - Thare must a universe friendly to have life in order for life to evolve. We do not know that there any other universes around. We only can know this one, so we should stick to those considerations. John Leslie said God or multiple universes. Only two choices and that is right. The Big Bang is either a creation or came from something else, which we both agree we cannot study. Again two choices. - The probability of a friendly-for-life earth planet is a second issue. Either we are on the only one, or there are others, two choices. And finally the origin of life is extremely complex. I think we will find that a single-celled organism is so complex, that by the passive method of natural selection, 400 million years is not enough time for its development. Natural chance or design, two choices. Antony Flew is on my side. - Have I made my point clear enough?