Thanks, Sentient, for your invitation to visit the thread. In my opinion, Eris has captured the essence of the dilemma facing any debate about science (or any other epistemology): it is necessary to step outside the discipline into its parent’s branch in order to avoid a futile exercise in self-referential discussions about tautologies. Remember that, propositionally, if A is false and B is true, then A implies B is always true — a tautology by definition. To put it another way, an examination of scientific data is impossible without rules of examination that are themselves not part of the data.
That’s why science (along with every other philosophical discipline) is built upon an unprovable principle (in the case of science, it is falsifiability). Every philosophical construct, including science, must have at its root certain undefined terms and unproven assertions. Otherwise, the entire structure is circular as each term and proposition must eventually refer back to itself.
It therefore behooves us to speak of scientific matters metaphorically when applying them outside the discipline of science itself. This is precisely what all the great scientists (Einstein, Hawking, et al) do, even when they discuss science among one another. After all, F=MA doesn’t mean very much without some sort of reference to a thing that has M. In and of itself, an equation, no matter how simple or complex, is a self-referential entity — this side over here is identical to that side over there.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll leave the above as is. I’d like to return to the comments made in the Opening Post, since I am one of the theists to whom it made reference. I’ll rely on the hope that few will see returning to the original topic as a hijack. Nevertheless, what follows all has to do with what Eris has just covered.
Well.
There is a difference (subtle but crucial) between something that does not exist, and something that is undefined. Division by zero, for example is undefined but it does exist. To demonstrate this to your satisfaction, solve the following where x = 5: y = 1 / (x - 5). It isn’t that there is no such thing as division by zero; rather, it is that division by zero is undefined. It isn’t that the equation above does not exist, but merely that you have no rule or set of rules within the epistemological context of mathematics that will solve it. Likewise, “outside the universe” is not something that does not exist, but rather something that you cannot define within the epistemological context of cosmology.
That is not to say that it cannot be defined at all whatsoever. Take division by zero again. It is fortunate that it is merely undefined rather than nonexistent, or else building a calculator would be impossible lest we leave out either the operation of division or else the number zero. What we do instead is devise a rule that is outside the context of mathematics: “division by zero” shall be defined as an error condition.
Likewise, we can define “outside the universe” so long as we are “outside cosmology”. Within cosmology, the universe is all there is, and so to speak of something outside it doesn’t make any sense (it is undefined). But that does not mean that whatever is undefined is invalid. Cosmology, like all other reason-based disciplines, is built upon a foundation of undefined terms. The whole of Peanoan mathematics is built upon the undefined term “successor” Again, we must at some point abandon defining terms, or else our entire set of definitions will reference one another like one massive knot of tautology.
One such undefined term in cosmology is “universe”. No one is really sure what it means and, in fact, were you to attempt to define it, you would necessarily change the face of cosmology itself. The term is generally accepted to mean “all that exists”, but that is a working, not a formal, definition, just as in math, the term successor is generally accepted to mean “a number that follows another”. But you can see how formally defining successor would merely leave you with more undefined terms — what is meant by “follows”? Continue this exercise long enough, and eventually you will return in some way to reference “successor”. Thus, successor means successor and is left formally undefined.
Defining the universe informally as all that exists is just about the best you’re going to be able to do without at some point deriving that the universe means the universe. But just as I can make a calculator where “division by zero” is defined, so I can make a philosophical statement where “outside the universe” is defined. Since it seems acceptable that what is within the universe may be called “natural”, I can define what is not within the universe as “supernatural” — i.e., by attaching a prefix that means beyond.
Such a construction is not at all unprecedented in the philosophical disciplines. Sticking with math — merely because mathematics is one of the philosophical disciplines that scientists often respect — there are myriad examples of constructing new sets of rules to define that which was undefined within another set of rules, one of which is the complex number system which is used to establish a set of rules for numbers that are not defined within the set of real numbers. Another example is the Cantor sets (like Aleph-Null) which are used to establish a set of rules for cardinals that are undefined outside infinity.
Note that in the above cases, defining something by wrapping it in a superset does not mean that what is defined is meaningless. Imaginary numbers are not meaningless, and neither is the one-to-one correspondence between the set of even integers and the set of all integers. They are merely meaningless within the subsets themselves. Thus, the epistemic problem of what is “outside the universe” exists only within a discipline where “outside the universe” is undefined. If we establish that the universal set of existence, E, is the union of what exists in S and what exists in U, then we have not rendered existence meaningless. We have merely defined existence in a superset of U.
Therefore, your insistence that there is no such thing as “outside the universe” is arbitrary and does nothing to relieve what you describe as the “numerous inconsistencies” of basic cosmology.
Moreover, it is possible to describe things that are “outside the universe”. For example, nowhere in the cosmological universe does there exist a circle that is described as having a circumference whose ratio is [symbol]p[/symbol] because space is necessarily curved, and nowhere in the universe does there exist a Euclidean plane. And yet I can provide reams of discussion, examination, and usage of circles described that way. It is not something that is inconceivable and yet, cosmologically speaking, such a circle must be left as undefined. Likewise, I can speak of other supernatural entities besides circles — oh, say, G, for example — that can be described using rule sets from various philosophical disciplines. I can’t use cosmology to describe G because G is undefined within that small set. But neither can I use cosmology to describe a triangle whose angles sum to 180 degrees. The inability to describe the supernatural cosmologically is not a swipe at either the supernatural or cosmology. It is just the nature of epistemic bounds.
I hadn’t intended to be so long-winded, but nevertheless here it is. To spare you from further torture, I’ll stop now in case there is anything you wish to debate about what I’ve said so far. Besides, my wrists hurt and I have work to do.
Thanks again for the invitation. 
