Conversion

[Jon Paul]

You kidding me, right? Your argument is that science can't study after effects, and then you describe how science does precisely that through murder investigations. You know what they call it when they study murders, right? Forensic science.

No, my argument is that we can precisely empirically test things after the effect, without directly observing them.

If it has an effect, ANY KIND of effect, it can be examined by science and the scientific method. For instance, we KNOW dark matter exists even though we don't know what it is. We know it's there because we can study it's effects.

Of course. But what science cannot do is test a proposition that involves something that transcends the natural world, because science assumes methodological naturalism. Meaning that science is unwilling to test the proposition that "God exists", so long as it's scope of inquiry is limited to conclusions about the natural world.

Then I pray you do tell, in the most simplistic and easily digestable way possible, what is this testable and verifiable evidence one last time so that we can be quite sure of your reasoning in its entirety? I beg of you to convince me. Just lay it out and if it has any merit I'll be the first to entertain the ideas. But please, back up any assumptions you make.

By studying and collecting knowledge about the nature of the universe and natural phenomena, we can deduce logical conclusions and understand conceptual realities (e.g. as done in physics). Ultimately, this makes it possible to verify the existence of a necessary being after the effect, such as in the case of the argument from potentiality/actuality in my thread, which depends on empirical knowledge of the universe, or in the case of the Kalam cosmological argument (which someone else mentioned).