(November 20, 2013 at 7:52 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Only if you think it is delusion to believe that miracles are possible. I do not believe the universe is causally closed and known physical laws may not be unequivocally binding. The only difference between a miracle and a physical law is that physical laws happen regularly and miracles are one-shot deals.
(Personally, I do not like applying legal concepts to scientific ones. The term ‘physical law’ implies governance by an entity actively enforcing the law. In reality, what we call laws are really, from a scientific perspective empirically strong propensities.)
Bingo! Scientific laws are descriptive not normative. They do not determine what actually happens in reality any more than a paper map determines the shape of the shoreline. I’d be very interested in hearing how a materialist accounts for the existence of such laws, but that may be a topic for a different time.