🚀 go-pugleaf

Don Kresch sighed, picked up his keyboard, and his creative muse
produced:
> 
> On Wed, 16 Sep 1998 06:26:25 GMT, in alt.atheism, wizkid@eskimo.com (J. Michael
> Phillips) etched in the space-time continuum
> 
> >On Tue, 15 Sep 1998 13:15:45 GMT, George Reese <borg@imaginary.com>
> >>
> >>While one cannot say if somethign exists outside the universe, one can
> >>certainly say that such things have no causal relation to our
> >>universe.  If they did, they would be part of our universe.
> >
> >That's not true.
> 
>         Yes, it most certainly is. To interact with anything in the universe, it
> must be part of the universe.

This is a question of what is meant by the term "universe".

> >If one causes a ripple in a pond, does one become
> >PART of the pond?
>         No, but one interacts with the pond and must obey the laws we have
> discovered about water, etc. 'Sides, it's matter, we're matter....we can
> interact with it. What about "gawd"?

There is no reason to assume that something which is not of this
universe be constrained to interact only under what seems to those of
this universe to be universal laws. In fact, it may well be the reverse.
E.g., energy conservation is not conserved in this case. If a three
dimensional being interacts with a two dimensional world, things that
are impossible in the two-dimensional world may happen.

> > Can one not make ripples in the pond from outside
> >the pond?
>         Yeah. The pond is of the universe. We are of the universe. Your point is
> flawed.

Sure, define universe as "everything that exists", and it includes any
putative deities. However, we would then want to ask if the continuum we
presently describe as the universe, is "everything that exists", and if
there were to be a deity, it clearly would not be. So, we would have to
use the word "continuum" instead.

Whether things that lie outside our continuum are constrained to obey
the laws within that continuum, then becomes an unsettled question, I'd
certainly not say it was obvious that they would.