[split] Critical Thinking Skills

[Angrboda]

But time seems more then that, it seems part of reality.

What is the difference between 'reality' and the universe? It seems you are asserting a difference here, and it's not clear what that difference is.

---

For what it's worth, what is not a part of the universe would not necessarily be bound by the nature of the universe, so no special pleading is required as the two are not categorically comparable. The difficulty comes in that you've inserted an epistemic barrier which essentially prevents you from knowing anything at all about that not universe thing. As remarked earlier, I think the special pleading asserted is simply masking the problems with the first premise.

Furthermore, natural law is not an inherent property of the universe. All we know is that our mathematical models are consistent with observation. Yes, Humean skepticism is not necessarily a given, but there is nothing to prevent this consistency from being merely a convenient happenstance produced completely at random. (I have a variation on Platonic realism, a conjecture if you will; my conjecture is that, any randomly created universe is more likely than not to exhibit some sort of order that could be analogized to a natural law. Needless to say, it's something of groundless speculation, but it seems, at minimum, to comport with things like Ramsey's theory [any sufficiently large sequence will contain patterns].)