mburns's Journal: God is ...

If there are truths that are logically accidental, and they do not reduce to historical accident in their context, then I may as well apply the word God to them in that context.

I do not see analytical justification for this exigency in any scientific context though. The rationalist philosophers, Spinoza and Leibniz, did not write of God in this sense. They dismissed this sense with their principles of possibility and plenitude (respectively). I differ with them by not using the word, God, to designate a plenitude of logical possibility. After all, there is nothing suitable to worship concerning logical possibility.

And I need to argue that historical accident does not demonstrate divine power, since the contrary accident can and does happen elsewhere in history, even in an alternative universe.

Isaac Newton was a radical theist, and his method of science, by contrast with the rationalists, was entwined with theism. He was an alchemical sort of theist; he pursued the secret formulae for benefits that were left for his loyal and diligent followers by a clever and arbitrary God.

So I claim that the philosophy of falsificationism falls into the dead end of implicit theism (and deism reduces to theism by the evidence of quantum mechanics). And this philosophy also misrepresents the nature of the science of physics, and it actively obstructs the enterprise.

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Michael J. Burns