Dear Resident Theists

[Whateverist]

Once you appeal to causes outside the known universe and the natural laws to which it conforms you have already given up the game.

So if we were flatland'ers confounded by a robbery that happened without any apparent break in, you would say anyone who claimed to see a '3-D hand' just before the disappearance of the treasure had given up any serious attempt to understand what had happened?

I hate reasoning involving extra dimensions but what I really mean to say has more to do with scale. Haven't people continually had to expand the scale of what they took to be the ultimate? The sky as an outer sphere - too small. 'The' galaxy - too small. 'The' universe - at least possibly too small. Once we understood that there were a multitude of galaxies and that they all seemed to be accelerating from a common point, then 'our' universe began to make sense.

But just as galaxies are enormously distant from one another so might other universes with their own centers. We will never be in a position to detect another universe nor to rule them out. Doesn't mean they're not there however.

Any such cause is by definition supernatural. I find it either disingenuous or downright stupid to ridicule people who openly accept the possibility of the supernatural when they themselves tacitly accept it.

If there is a structure to a multiverse, very likely we will never know what it is. But that doesn't mean it is supernatural. What is really disingenuous is to assert that speculation on the structure of the cosmos implies acceptance of anything supernatural. It is only those who appeal to the supernatural that have given up the game.