Zowie! That would be a really tragic decision. Science is not concerned with the supernatural. It’s like thinking that a saw is useless because you’ve discovered that a hammer works better with nails.
Falsifiable definition? 
What is the “falsifiable definition” of any word? Science does not falsify definitions; it falsifies hypotheses. (Note that the principle of falsification is itself not falsifiable.)
Falsifiable theory-
Substantive definition-
Whatever.
Heh, actually I like how Dawkins put it in “The Blind Watchmaker” (IIRC); he compared evolution to the Jewish Exodus, saying that instead of setting up camp for year and then moving 100 feet (or whatever) for fourty years, that it was more realistic to think of evolution as blinding go through the desert and only *after * fourty years did the Jews leave the desert.
Some astrophycists now favor a model of the universe in which space is flat and infinite.
And saying that time may be infinite and may have existed before the big bang.
That’s real, isn’t it?
OK, God is a something. Something that is infinite. What? I have no idea. That doesn’t make the definition bad.
Lights are anything that emit waves in the visible range.
What? I don’t care. Bring me anything - a hot dog, love, the concept of time - and I’ll tell you if it’s a light. The definition doesn’t need to say anything about the substance.
To put it in software terms (that’s what I do), you need to know something about that something at run-time, not at compile time. When you want to test if something is God, we’ll know what the thing is. You don’t need to know to construct the test. The rule to determine if it’s God is only concerned with the adjectives that describe it.
Things are mostly coherent. Contradictory stuff exists in our real universe.
Sure, if you show me something that is infinitely smart, infinitely ripped and as timeless as Bing Crosby’s voice.
What if God didn’t exist for a time, went back in time, and then existed for that time?
Depends. Sell me.
If you want to throw those things into the God definition, sure. They’re by nature unscientific concepts. I don’t need those in a definition. Once it’s got my three, I’m ready to put a fork in it. But it doesn’t matter. We’ve already got a quality of God that makes Ips unfalsifiable, why not throw in an infinite number?
I’ve never heard that; what I have heard is that astrophyscists think that while space is finite, that it can continually expand perhaps to an infinite distance-which I don’t agree with and certianly don’t think provides evidence that infinite exists.
I could be wrong though.
No, actually it isn’t. Time did not exist before the big bang, because as Einstein showed, both time and space are relative and you can not have space without time or time without space. There was no before the big bang, because time came into existence with the big bang. So saying what happened before the big bang is nonsensical because it depends on time which arrose with the big bang.
Yes it does, actually. For instance, what if God was something inexistent? If your statement was phrased that way, it would work; ie, God is something that couldn’t exist in an infinite amount of time.
Basically…
That definition also provides support for my point-if you define anything as ‘light’ then the concept of ‘light’ is rendered meaningless.
Well, I would point out that God is outside of the natural and therefore what tests would you think of running on God? The point is, you are assuming God is or can be omnipotent-you’ve given no reason why this is necessarily so.
Not really. It might exist in our minds or due to our ignorance about something, but there is nothing in the universe that breaks the law of identity.
How could it?
Here’s the key, you can’t show me that. In fact, we know of nothing in this universe that could be similar to that.
Lot’s of what if’s you have there. How exactly would God ‘not exist’ and then suddenly ‘exist’? How would God accomplish that?
Heh, that’s the point, I can’t. 
They are more then just unscientific concepts, they are unspecific concepts. The thing is, if you don’t postulate that God is supernatural/immaterial/eternal then you run into a whole host of other logical problems.
What three definitions does God have?
Well you can add whatever you’d like to the God concept, my point is that all God is a meaningless concept.
Hey Bup, just keep in mind that I’m not out here to convince you. I’m just stating what I think are pertinant issues. At best my goal is to get you to see where I’m coming from.
I have enjoyed our discussion (and hope it continues), as I’ve said, it’s kept me thinking and I hope it’s done the same for you.
Looking back I think I misunderstood you here:
My point is: How can you tell me if it’s a light, because you know:
Which are physical characteristics that can be tested.
Do we have anything like this for God?
No.
You say we have the omnimax definition, which can’t be tested, can’t exist in reality (they are contradictory), etc.
Those aren’t compariable to something that ‘emits waves in the visible range’.
If it were demonstrated that something could be moved without the application of force, through some sort of supernatural means, then F=ma, for instance, goes out the window. Now it could be true sometimes, but you would never know. Perhaps the force you think is being applied is not, and the object is moving through magic. If you do an experiment, measuring the acceleration from a given force applied to a given mass, and you don’t get the expected results, did you screw up or is your lab partner a witch? Repeatability gets tossed too. Do semiconductors work according to the laws we have discovered, or are there a bunch of Maxell’s demons pushing electrons around? I think you underestimate the impact that proof of the supernatural would have.
Not at all. The intervention would be in the application, not the force. The force would be merely spontaneous rather than applied, and would still equal the mass times the acceleration.
You screwed up.
Science is incapable of proving the supernatural. It does not deal with the supernatural anymore than it deals with the analytic — e.g., you use logic, not science, to prove that 1 + 1 = 2. Science studies phenomena, not noumena. Epistemology is all about the right tool for the right job. The appropriate epistemology for the supernatural is revelation.
Really? If that happened, I’d have the dilemma of a lifetime: do I bow down before the ultimate tyrant, or do I suffer the ultimate punishment?
I don’t know what I’d decide. It’s an incredibly tough choice.
My favorite question about an omnipotent, omniscient God is this:
I can choose to do something other that what I’m expecting I’ll do (for example, I expect to go home tonight and eat dinner–but instead I could drive to Raleigh and eat dinner there). In this respect, am I more powerful than God?
In other words, can God choose to do something other than what he expects to do?
If so, then he is not omniscient: his knowledge of the future is incomplete.
If not, then he is not omnipotent: he is locked into a course of action from which he may not waver.
Daniel
Not to speak for anyone but myself…
Equally powerful.
Well, no. Just as His omnipotence is not disqualified for the “inability” to make a square circle, so His omniscience is not disqualified for the “inability” to make your decisions on your behalf. I quotate “inability” because it is actually a matter of His choice, in the one instance to maintain the tautology of sensibleness, and in the other to maintain the integrity of free moral agency. Or, maybe a more down to earth analogy is that just because you have a spy camera doesn’t mean you’re compelled to turn it on. Sometimes, there are things you just don’t want to know.
One of us isn’t understanding the other.
If I understand you, you’re saying that God COULD choose to make me do something I don’t expect, but WON’T do that. But if that’s what you’re saying, it doesn’t address what I was asking.
I wasn’t asking whether God was equally powerful (i.e., could make decisions for me that would surprise me). I was asking whether God was equally powerful (i.e., could make decisions for himself that would surprise himself).
If that’s not what you’re saying, then could you explain it again? I didn’t follow.
As an aside, I’ve given you all kinds of shit in the past for what I’ve seen as needlessly vicious posting. In the past couple weeks, it’s seemed to me that you’ve really toned that down. I don’t know whether you give two shits about my perceptions, but I’ve definitely appreciated what I’ve seen as a much less vicious posting style, and have been meaning to mention it to you.
Daniel
I guess I’m just getting too old to climb every hill with swords ablazing.
Oh, okay, sorry. Yes, that too certainly (as I see it). But He is driven by aesthetics, just as we are, and His favored aesthetic is goodness. It’s what turns Him on. He can in theory choose evil over goodness, for example, just as I can in theory choose a Mercedes over a Rolls Royce (assuming I could afford either one). But that just would never happen. Everybody goes after what they most treasure, and God is no exception. That’s what Jesus meant when He said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.”
Just curious, but how do you think you have an even general grasp of what a God would want? What its movites would be, what it values above other things? In other words, since you can’t communicate with it at all, how would you know what this God wanted/felt/thought, etc… ?
How do you know that he’s not driven by caprice rather than aesthetics? How do you know that his aesthetic isn’t suffering instead of goodness? How do you know that God’s a He and not an It, or a She?
No disrespect intended, I’m just somewhat baffled.
No disrespect taken. I use “He” as a matter of tradition, but I do use “She” from time to time (especially if someone else is doing so), and I’ve nothing against using “It”. It’s all just third person nominative case.
With respect to where I derive my understanding, I believe that I derive it directly from Him. I do, however, examine whatever understanding He gives me with other epistemologies, especially logic — since the topics are often analytical in nature. In any case, that’s why I qualify what I say with “speaking for myself” and “as I see it” and so on.
Sounds like you’re a Gnostic, am I wrong?
Meatros, since there’s a similar enough thread in GD, and since I agree with this pit rant, I won’t post anymore here.
Really? Or are you assuming that there is a force applied by some other means? Yes, there are many ways of applying forces that may not be covered by presently known science, but which can fall under science (like the ever-popular tractor or pressor beam) but we’re talking supernatural here. A demonstrable and repeatable supernatural force would have impact on material objects without involving any known forces.
Well, if there is no known supernatural means of affecting the experiment, that’s a good assumption. (Amply borne out by personal experience, I might add.) But it’s not so good if your partner is Sabrina the teenage witch. Perhaps you do the experiment perfectly every time and she changes the results to mess with your head. Since supernatural influences would be impossible to control for using materialistic means, you could not even define a reproducible experiment. The best you could hope for is no influence - but even if you get repeatable results, it could be because the supernatural influence is fudging the numbers for you.
At the risk of repeating old discussions, science can be used to detect the influence of the supernatural, if not to prove it. Supernatural means can never make 1+1=2 since, as you say, this is not observational but mathematical. Now if one definition of the supernatural is that it is only detectable by revelation, and not by its impact on the material world, I quite agree that the existence of the supernatural will not impact science in any way. We have a basic disagreement on this point, so I don’t see it worth continuing this hijack any more.
Ask George Bush - according to him, God wanted him to be president, wanted him to attack Iraq, etc. He seems to be the person with the inside track on what “God” wants.