Background
I was raised in the Churches of Christ and my family is all very serious about Christianity. About 3 years ago, I started to ask some hard questions, and the answers from other Christians were very unsatisfying. I used to believe that the Bible was, you know, inspired by a loving God, but its endorsement of genocide, the abuse of slaves, and the mistreatment of women and children really started to bother me.
I set out to study these issues as much as I could. I stayed up past midnight for weeks reading what Christians have to say, and this process triggered a real crisis of faith. What started out as a search for answers on Biblical genocide led me to places like commonsenseatheism.com. I learned that the Bible has serious credibility problems on lots of issues that no one ever told me about. Wow.
My Question
Now I'm pretty sure that the God of the Bible is man-made and Jesus of Nazareth was probably a failed prophet, but I don't have good reasons to reject the supernatural all together. I'm working through the sequences, but this process is slow. I will probably struggle with this question for months, maybe longer.
Excluding the Supernatural was interesting, but it left me wanting a more thorough explanation. Where do you think I should go from here? Should I just continue reading the sequences, and re-read them until the ideas gel? I'm coming from 30 years of Sunday School level thinking. It's not like I grew up with words like "epistemology" and "epiphenomenalism". If there is no supernatural, and I can be confident about that, I will need to re-evaluate a lot of things. My worldview is up for grabs.
So were the cases where, as a matter of fact, science has posited a new property or force (spin, colour charge, etc) illegitimate?
We have evidence that the N fundamentals of physics nonetheless interrelate.
ETA
Many explanations in terms of "let's say it is fundamental" have failed, but that does not mean the correct number of fundamentals is 0.
I have no idea why you're asking me that. That is: I see no reason why what you're commenting on gives any reason to think I might answer yes to it.
Yup. And the richness of their interrelations is what makes it appropriate to classify them all as part of the same physical reality; and the level of detail in our ideas about those fundamentals is (part of) what makes our thinking about them scientific. So far, every attempt at postulating c... (read more)