lets look at a few examples, we have laws which goveren our country, but they dont produce criminals, or more precisly, they dont produce the people which they goveren, do they? [...] likewise, there are laws wich goveren the universe, but they did not produce the universe.
Um, you do realise that scientists' use of the word "law", to mean those equations or statements that predict the results of physical experiments, is a
metaphor, don't you? Most dictionaries have (at least) two definitions under "law", one for "law of the land" and the other for "law of nature". The two are quite different. I'm sure if scientists had anticipated that anyone would confuse the two, they'd have come up with some new word instead of co-opting "law". Perhaps they'd have used "quig". If you'd written "There are quigs which govern the universe, but they did not produce the universe" (although "describe" would have been a better word than "govern") then it looks a lot less obvious that they did not produce it.
(Apparently the ISO C++ standard deliberately avoids the terms "legal" and "illegal" constructs, because there are languages in which, if translated literally, it's genuinely confusing.)
at least I'll admit that what i belive has eliments of faith in it, how about you?
Indeed, my mental picture of the world relies on faith in the integrity of my perceptions and of my memories of my perceptions. So, I believe, does anyone's; it's hard to imagine any way of removing faith from those beliefs. That has, IMO, no bearing on whether or not it's a good idea to try and replace faith with logic or proof in those beliefs where it
is possible.
"what we called his thought was essentially a phenomenon of the same sort as his other secretions - the form which the vast irrational process of nature was bound to take at a particular point of space and time." - C.S. Lewis
Yes. And if we were all completely incorporeal beings, we could sit around -- or float around -- and debate our, entirely unanchored to physical reality, philosophical notions all day, with neither side able to get anywhere. Fortunately, we are not entirely incorporeal beings: we can perceive and interact with physical reality -- we can demonstrate physical laws to each other, and point at compelling evidence of events we were not present to witness. From these results, perceptible by all and demonstrable to all, we form the notion of scientific truth. (And why
can we? Because reasoning, even at the stage of IF I can break this branch off THEN I can get at the fruit on the end of it, is evolutionarily selective. Which, of course, is merely a suggestion of how natural selection itself could give rise to a capacity to search for truth, and not a suggestion that anyone's
personal belief in natural selection is superior or inferior to their
personal desire to seek the truth.)
So it is not IMO coincidental that "irrational" (by which I specifically mean, as I think Lewis did, "not micromanaged by any conscious or rational being") evolution gave rise to professors of anthropology who seek the truth through reason.
"Science does not preclude the fact that a creator exists, but it does preclude the fact that he interacts with us on a regular basis, unless he always does so in accordance with the rules of nature as we observe them, in which case, that creator would be no different than the nature of the universe itself."
but if you remember that He created the laws of nature, and furthermore, created the universe which interacts with them, then it is extreamly logical that He would interact with us and communicate with us through them.
I don't think you answered there the point which you were replying to. The point was, that if the predictions of the quigs of nature are coming true all the time, then this isn't really "interacting" as the creator has no choice about how things happen.
It strikes me that, if there was a sentient creator, He went out of His way to cover up the fact: patiently implementing quigs of nature for every scale of matter and every form of energy, tirelessly working out Hubble's constant and red shifts in order to use million-mile-wide open-frame fusion reactors
to make nice little speckles in the night sky, laboriously burying fake dinosaurs, and then just setting the clockwork going and walking away, resisting any temptation to tinker with it later. Faced with all the fake evidence for His non-existance that He planted, I think it's pretty clear that His intent was that we don't believe in Him. And I for one wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of a creator who plays practical jokes on that sort of scale.
Peter