By "don't run too far afield with this" I meant that there are conditions and caveats I did not specify that will limit its usefulness to how I know you will try and apply it. If you do not grok it, it could easily lead to naive conclusions that cannot be supported with it.
I do not see the reason for your postulate, "and God is completely external to our universe." Do you mean to say that the only way we can get a good understanding (or any understanding at all) of the universe is to evict God from it -- which seemingly is Laplace's method?
You have it backward. If God was not completely external, it would have consequences that are not in evidence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but Laplace was correct in his observation that we have yet to observe any such consequences that would lead us to rationally assert an external God monkeying with the internals of the system. All assertions of higher interactive beings have this problem; nothing about the system requires or suggests their existence. Whether or not they objectively exist is immaterial if their existence has no measurable perceivable consequence; it is the same reason the purple elephant that lives under my bed is immaterial. The purple elephant's objective existence has no material impact on my life or the universe and so it really is a null belief as it has no use in any calculus.
Null beliefs are neither true nor false, they are simply null. Beliefs that are either true or false in some fashion have consequences, but null beliefs have no consequences except for the amount of time spent considering them. A rational and economical person does not waste time on null beliefs because they are all equally silly.
You are making the common mistake of conflating a belief with no value (i.e. it never has use in a rational calculus) with a belief that something is false (which does have a use in a rational calculus). I can accept that anything might be true, but the astronomical majority of those "anything"s have no utility in a rational analysis because they rely on null priors that makes their truth undecidable.
“Null beliefs” are epitomized by your figure of the purple elephant hiding under the bed, tortoise – right?
Oh my. Let me start off by saying that I think you have written a truly beautiful, cogent, thoroughly admirable article here, tortoise. Yet at the same time I say this, I have to add that I disagree with almost every point you make.
It all apparently boils down to the dreaded “observer problem” I gather. What is “null” for you is somehow very “un-null,” that is to say very alive for me. Does that necessarily make me an irrational and uneconomical person? Or might it suggest instead that the evidence we qualify as valid is different for you and me respectively?
My method requires me to consider any empirical evidence that bears on the problem under consideration. A whole lot of that admittedly comes from outside of science per se.
To illustrate, on the problem of God and man’s relations with God, I have to look at the human cultural record -- especially since science is mainly silent on this point. On that basis, it is manifest that humans have been known to have direct, that is immediate, experiences of God’s contacts with human beings that are sensible, perceptible to the human beings involved in such communications.
To the extent that such experiences are recorded in extant documents, I have to admit them as empirical evidence of the existence of God. Obviously, the Bible itself is evidence of such communications to any fair-minded person. But what is amazing to me is that the earliest record that I’m aware of in which such experiences are documented predates both classical Athens and Judeo-Christian Jerusalem. I here refer to the “Dispute of a Man, Who Contemplates Suicide, With His Soul,” which dates to 2000 B.C. from the First Intermediate Period of ancient Egypt. It makes crystal clear that the unknown author of this piece understood he had a foundational relationship to a God beyond the cosmos – not to a purple elephant hiding under his bed.
It is further crystal clear to me that this unknown author did not understand his experience as an engagement with anything “null.” Rather, he understood that his own life, and the meaning thereof, was somehow conjoined with the Truth of the deity that he had “contacted” in his own soul.
“Fashionable” modern science seems to give short shrift to such universal human experiences. But nonetheless, still science is not legitimately in a position to say that such experiences are “illusions,” or “nullities.” The universality of such experiences, across evolutionary time (history) and cultures, to my mind constitutes undeniable empirical evidence of their actual validity.
Your beautiful piece would be even more beautiful, had you the insight and/or wherewithal to grant the evidence of actual human history. Or so it seems to me. But I imagine that will not happen for you, until/unless you cease your resistance to the possibility of epiphanies of the type represented in the ancient Egyptian “Dispute.”
Still I value and even cherish your thoughts in regard to the question at hand here. Thank you ever so much for writing, dear tortoise!