[tortoise]

Oddly put, but your response is essentially the correct refutation of the argument that since everything must have a cause, there must be a God, else, where did the universe come from?

Part of the problem with this discussion is definitions. The way most people view causality in the universe is pretty simple and based in the classical physical universe that we observe every day. However, the REAL scientific definitions get very weird because they have to deal with mathematics and conditions that add new degrees of freedom to causality that are really beyond the average human experience, though easily measurable in a good laboratory.

Many of the conservation and causality laws that we all learned in basic physics are actually "white lies"; they aren't really true and are adaptations of the real mathematics with all the strange stuff removed. To a certain extent this makes sense, as it makes it much easier to learn a practical approximation that is perfectly applicable for what most people would use it for. Only physicists and the occasional engineer have to burden themselves with the real equations.

[tim politicus]

I disagree to the extent that any definative qualitative or quantitative assertion can be said to be false, not quite ‘jiveing’ with observable or measurable reality.

All that amount to saying is that there is no such thing as a perfect circle. True, materially speaking. But cognatively, the only way we know what a cirle is, is by comparison to a ‘perfect’ idea of a circle.

Well, the same holds true for ANY other idea by which we are actually ABLE to get a functioning grasp of just what is going on; whether thermodynamics or Newtonian physics or even current particle physics.

They are all ideas, and so, in comparison with ‘the-real-thing-in-itself’, you could say they are all 'white lies'. In fact, in that view, everything said is a white lie, lacking perfect correspendence with the ‘object-in-itself’.

So then, if these are all 'white lies', just how do you suppose we have any idea of what is true? Do our ideas ever appoximate reality? How can that be?

[Goblins]

Many of the conservation and causality laws that we all learned in basic physics are actually "white lies"; they aren't really true and are adaptations of the real mathematics with all the strange stuff removed.

From my point of view the white lies come with the real mathematics and the creation of fictitious forces.