Why? Defining the universe as something less than "all of everything there ever was or can be" does not force you to place a causative agent outside of it. The cause could be inside the known part of the universe - have you looked under every rock?Obvious Leo wrote:Yes it does. If the universe is not everything that exists then we assume the existence of a causal agent external to itSkip wrote: then we immediately define reality as unknowable
That doesn't necessarily follow.
And you don't even have to nominate a cause at all, inside or out, or anywhere else. Defining an apple as the fruit of a species of Rosacea domestica does not force you to give a cause for all fruit. You can make guesses, but you can quite happily grow and eat apples without that.
Exactly! Making your definition bigger won't give you the answer; making it smaller won't give you the answer. The cause is not in the definition at all. Probably, we'll never know.and even in principle nothing is knowable about such an external causal agent.
Well, yeah. And, because physicists are just as human as shamans, they make guesses about causes. The little ones, they can test and prove; the big ones, they invent math for."There is no reason you can't study parts of reality that are available, rather than the whole universe."
This is quite true and this is exactly what the science of physics does.