Betty Boop and you made the original assertion of cause and effect and the supernatural. You have the burden of proof not me. You are the one begging the question.
What is the question we're begging, LeGrande? Can you put it into so many words?
Or are we just supposed to guess?
Okay, I'll take a stab at it.
You exclude the supernatural in principle. About IT we are forbidden to ask questions. [How Marxian of you.] You are entirely skeptical about causal relations in principle. Nothing "causes" anything. In fact, nothing happens in reality; the only stuff that happens is "in my head." And nothing can be proved about any relation between that "stuff" and the natural world that exists outside of my mind.
The classical philosophers — preeminently Plato — would have described this situation as fundamentally "disordered." The Greek (Koine) word for this psychospiritual condition (as they diagnosed it) was anoia.
Eric Voegelin has pointed out that the word anoia is virtually untranslatable into modern English. That's because English words are relentlessly denotative, and Greek words are not.
With Greek words, you have the surface level meaning, which can vary with context. But such words point to a deeper-level, integrative meaning.
For instance, anoia, at the surface means "folly, oblivion." But one cannot grasp what the "folly" or "oblivion" consists of, without appreciating the deeper meaning of the word, which is: "Forgetfulness of one's partnership in the community of being and, consequently, the transformation of assertive participation into self-assertion." [Citation to Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol 5: "In Search of Order," Baton Rouge: LSU Press (1987), p. 43.]
And so the thought has occurred to me that LeGrande is having a field day, reprising Hegel's original divertissement, his original "party trick," which he laid out in Phaenomonologie: There is no cause and effect; there is only the process of thesis and antithesis, culminating in a transitory "synthesis," which becomes the next "thesis," inviting an "antithesis" in the next iteration of the process, etc., ad infinitum. It's a totally pointless exercise, because it leads no where: These are operations in the human mind exclusively; they do not refer to — even deny — anything going on in the natural world. Indeed, the entire point of the exercise is to divorce ones self from the natural, to curl back into the pleasant experiences of a dreamer, who never has to measure up to anything outside the realm of his own desires. In the end, Hegel's greatest desire was arguably the desire for self-divinization....
Well, I'm sure that's all as clear as mud!
Thanks so much for writing, LeGrande!
My first comment to you was based on your assertion that "True science (and reality) doesn't have 'causes', 'purposes', 'ends', 'goals', etc., people do."
By your own standard, you are the one who is begging the question and has the burden of proof.