Goldfish Cosmology

A goldfish in a tank universe hasn't awareness of physics beyond the horizons of the tank. It hasn't faith in a creator and doesn't believe in metaphysic's speculation about aether beyond the observable horizon or that extra dimensions exist. It's water medium is made of entangled loopy strings that synthesize the material it breathes.

 It reflects sometimes late at night on the origin of the universe tank. It's best guess is that loopy strings oozed as virtual particles from nothingness ( a controversial concept) and were drawn together by gravity, becoming entangled, infinitely concentrated and made into mash at a singularity that broke apart faster than light evolving a universal medium of water and little delicious seahorses to eat. Then the fish has a shot of bourbon before floating off to sleep.

Faith and the Dynamics of Opposition

Faith is still reasonable though it encounters the fight dynamic of faithless expressions intended to reinforce the choice of unbelief. The faithless believe that is intelligent.

Many believe in Multiverses. Matrix, Holographic extra dimensional universes, dark matter and an infinite omniscient God actualizing every possible universe in his mind a priori as a quantum, virtual fact with an apparent 3rd dimensional Higgs Field facilitating iterative functions of mass and energy.

The oldest poem in the English language is the Hymn of Caedmon- an illiterate goat herder/genius … “Now [we] must honour the guardian of heaven, the might of the architect, and his purpose, the work of the father of glory as he, the eternal lord, established the beginning of wonders; he first created for the children of men heaven as a roof, the holy creator then the guardian of mankind, the eternal lord, afterwards” … (Updated to modern English).

Faith in Jesus Christ is pragmatic and historically supported. Empiricism is somewhat dated i.m.o. Cf. Quine's 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. Concepts include any sort of thought, as phenomena. Perhaps a good contemporary dynamic tension is between physics and metaphysics. It is interesting that Kant's categories remain relevant in relation to physics and metaphysics.

Metaphysics in effect means greater physics. its role is inductive rather than deductive so far as it relates to what may be observed. About empiricism- people tend to misunderstand what it was. Read A.J. Ayer's 'Language, Truth and Logic' and then Quine's 'The Two Dogmas of Empiricism' for a better idea of the relationship epistemology has with empiricism, language, knowledge and percepts. Quine demonstrated that empiricism was wrong about its epistemic foundation.

There isn't a direct tie- a necessary tie, between matter and propositions made with thought about matter (or energy etc.) or anything else that imbues a verifiable truth to empirical propositions. An interesting point to consider though is that of computer programming and writing code from mind and thought that can be converted or made into part of reality. One structures ordered languages to perform tasks that are actualized in the objective world.

Maybe Quine would have taken a position like Sartre at that point, or even Bishop Berkeley. Neither implied that man is impotent and incapable of acting in-the-world. The range of human freedom to act is included within the given realm of possible experiences. God could have written code for the Universe or sentient beings in it in a comparable way without the limits given to human knowledge.