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Thank you oh so very much for posting your metaxy essay! It is such a wonderful, informative essay! And thanks to all of you for this excellent sidebar discussion of it!

I strongly agree that one must choose. I'd venture that one always chooses whether or not he realizes that is what he has done. Ultimately, a metaphysical naturalist (atheist) must believe in an infinity of something (space/time) to reject God, the Creator.

Once he accepts that there was a beginning - which is required by all accepted theories of cosmology - he is faced with the theological question. A god-within-the-cosmos can only either be an imagining or a collective of other existents.

I find it so interesting that the problem of the observer comes up in both Einsteinian Relativity and quantum physics, but theorists of Newtonian mechanics seem to suggest that what occurs "in-between" the scales of the very, very large (Relativity) and the very, very small (QM) goes on completely independently of any observer. Causal determinism rules the show.

So very, very true! This is a huge gap in science. Considering the observer is woefully inconvenient for many disciplines, and as we have pointed out several times on another thread it really comes to focus when looking at the notion that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. The physical laws, quantum mechanics and relativity don't just quit working inside the skull!

Anyhoot, it seems to me the "big picture" cannot be seen in the appearance of things; this is only the "surface presentation" of a reality that goes down to very, very deep roots.... Perhaps ultimate reality is mathematical in form -- as Pythagoras and Plato suggested. Funny thing is, we can't "see" pi, for instance; yet we know it's "there."

So very, very true. The universe is astonishingly mathematical. That alone should give anyone pause when choosing what they will believe.