One of the many problems HUMAN beings must deal with is that at no time is it possible for us the know "what something IS'.
We can only characterize. We cannot define the totality of anything.
We can only compare what we know of one thing to another thing.
When God Says "Let there be Light".
We automatically think He was speaking of the sun.
He said LIGHT.
We still do not know what LIGHT is.
Does that mean God Lied???
God knows everthing completely. When He speaks of the totality of something we have no way to Compare His statement to anything else we know.
Jesus said, "I am the Truth......"
We have been asking the same question since Pilot asked it. Are we closer to an answer or do we just say, "He lied"?
I would be most careful when claiming God "Lied". You and I don't know the whole story YET. We must still compare.
That is why science only deals with physical evidence and empirical methods. Following the evidence has been very useful for several centuries. It does not answer moral or theological questions, but it does result in a steady accumulation of knowledge.
Thank you so much for engaging meditations and insights!
seems a lot of folks are determined to misunderstand what I stated.
I will state it again:
whenever theories go beyond what is testable, there is no difference between such theories and supernatural explanations.
additionally:
Everything which is testable has always been testable and will always be testable (provided no change in basic conditions, of course) irrespective of the level of technology in man's arsenal.
This has -or so it would seem- led some folks to make some rather snarky assumptions and cast some rather stupid aspersions ("masters of the universe" et alia).
TRY TO READ WHAT IS STATED.
I'll help, with an illustration:
On an airstrip sit two objects.
One is a fuelled and fully functional top-of-the-line single-seat fighter aircraft.
The second is cube of an equivalent mass of basalt.
The aircraft is capable of being flown, irrespective of whether or not there is anyone on Earth capable of flying it. It is and shall remain flyable, independent of human know-how.
The basalt cube is not capable of being flown, ever, period, paragraph, full stop. It is and shall remain un-flyable, independent of human know-how.
That a thing is flyable in no way implies that humans will ever develop the capability to fly it. Humans fail all the time - no reason at all to assume they will succeed in doing a thing simply because it is doable.
Place the airfield as described above in pre-colonial New Guinea, and posit no foreign interference:
Odds are against any of the natives recognizing the plane as a vehicle, let alone that it can be flown, let alone figuring out how to fly it.
Indeed, as modern fighter aircraft more closely resemble sharks than birds, they could be more likely to think it a watercraft than an aircraft, if they see it as a craft at all.
BUT THE SAVAGES' LACK OF KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT DETERMINE WHICH OBJECT IS FLYABLE AND WHICH IS NOT.
Similarly with testability.
The technological achievement of science does not determine what is testable; it determines what tests we are cabable of making.
And just as familiarity with the principles of flight does allow a pilot to know an aircraft from an unflyable cube of basalt, so too does empirical science enable the scientist to tell a testable hypothesis from one which cannot be tested, ever.
In both cases, for pilot and scientist, there are gray areas - cases in which the thing under consideration *might* be flyable, in which an hypothesis *might* be testable. These things should neither be accepted nor rejected out of hand. They are interesting, potentially useful, potentially rubbish, but not immediately identifiably so.
The trick is to separate truly gray hypotheses from ones which, frankly, are cases in which people have, piecemeal and ad-hoc, built a plane around a cube of basalt.