[part 1]

> Then just start with something, and if I don't agree with your assumptions then we can decide where to go from there. It doesn't have to be perfectly formal, but at least needs to flow via enumerated propositions.

Well, it's just that I have already tried that, and even the most basic concepts seem to be problematic. At its core it's pretty simple, actually, but I guess we'll just end up at exactly the same discussion we are already having:

1) Science says that untestable claims about reality are unreliable.

2) Religion says that certain untestable claims about reality are reliable.

3) Therefore, religion's claims as to the reliability of some claims about reality contradicts science's claims as to the reliability of those claims.

> Is it possible that a testable claim could be true and imply another claim that is not testable?

No.

> Flat earthers may say the same to anyone whom tells them that there is great evidence that the earth is an oblate spheroid. Simply thinking that evidence isn't sufficient doesn't mean that it isn't.

Yeah ... so? They are still wrong, and I am most likely not.

> Science is a method. Doing science is to use the scientific method.

No. "The scientific method" is a very naive conception of science that is possibly useful as a teaching device, but not much more.

You seem to insist on modeling science as a dogma. The problem is: It just isn't.

Doing science is to use whatever methods that deliver demonstrably reliable results and reject whatever methods that don't. There is no fixed method, because that in itself would be unreliable.

> The scientific method involves testing claims. Using the scientific method on non-testable claims is contradictory.

Then don't use "the scientific method"! It is well-established that untestable claims are unreliable (and I have explained at length why), and so science uses that knowledge to weed out unreliable claims. Weeding out unreliable claims is a very important part of doing science effectively.

> The scientific method and the claims it has proven can co-exist with claims that can't be tested so long as those claims don't contradict the scientific claims.

No, when science tells us that your claim is indistinguishable from stuff someone made up, then that is not consistent with you telling us that you know it to in fact be true. Either there is indeed a good reason to think it is in fact true, then science is wrong and needs to be corrected so it doesn't classify a reliable claim as unreliable, or there is not, then you are irrational when accepting it anyway.

All you are saying here is that it is reasonable to believe made-up nonsense as long as science hasn't disproved it yet. And just to make sure you don't misunderstand: I did not say that whatever model you propose is made-up nonsense. But as it is indistinguishable from made-up nonsense, either both your proposed model and made-up nonsense are reasonable to believe, or neither is, because you don't have the option to distinguish the indistinguishable.

> While those claims that can't be tested can co-exist with the scientific method, the incompatibility is in attempting to do science with those claims.

No, the incompatibility comes from the fact that both are claims about the same subject matter, namely reality, and that those claims are contradictory.

> I get what bootstrapping means in compiler terms, but regarding methods of discerning truth, the notion of bootstrapping would seem to fly in the face of Gödel.

All I mean is that you (kindof) have to make some assumption of sorts, because there is no way to prove ultimate reality or disprove hard solipsism. If someone insists that they are a brain in a vat, there is no way to prove to them that they are not. But still, most people are willing to accept that other people exist, at least as a useful model of the reality they experience, so you generally can build on that assumption to make convincing arguments.

> Still sounds like your relying on the assumption that our senses are reliable... Like, you wouldn't know that using your senses out performs ignoring your senses unless you were already relying on your senses to determine that.

You do know that by definition. Senses are, by definition, those inputs that reflect external reality. Ignoring all inputs about external reality cannot possibly be more successful at manipulating the external reality than using inputs about external reality. And mind you that that would include stuff like a "god sense", if that were a thing, and god were a part of reality that you could sense.

> Under this axiomatic context: Do distances, spaces, cardinalities, and sets symbolically or conceptually exist absent of any physical representation?

I don't know. I certainly don't see any reason to believe so.

> Explain how I haven't. You're just saying I haven't. Where is the misstep in my argument (formalized below)?

The primary problem with that whole argument is that it considers having an explanation a property of the thing to be explained, rather than of the subject (not) understanding the thing.

For one, that seems like an incoherent concept, but more importantly, it's just completely unhelpful. We were talking in the context of what we can know, and if we can't know something, it is completely irrelevant if it had some property of "having an explanation" that isn't accessible to us.

> Where did "'the measured change in state' is an effect 'of the potential of the universe to change state'" come from? I never stated this, thus you've made a straw-man and then drew comparisons with it to electrons, effectively making up the notion of me being incoherent.

Uh, well, I dunno, possibly I misunderstood something. Could you then provide a criterion by which to distinguish the physical from the non-physical, that could be applied to an arbitrary object to determine whether it is physical or non-physical, and that's not using just vague terminology that could eaily be interpreted in a dozen different ways?

> Another way to think of it. "A: X while Y". A is moral when "X: Throwing darts" and "Y: aiming at a dart board". You can modify Y to "aiming at someones face" and make A immoral with out changing X.

Sure. And what would be the analogue of "aiming at the dart board" in your abstract argument then? Wouldn't that be that it is moral to do what is moral when you think it is moral? So, it is immoral to do what is moral when you think it is immoral, and it is moral to do what is moral when you think it is moral. Or in other words: Whether something is moral is completely determined by whether you think it is moral, and whether it is moral has no effect on whether it is moral?

> Oh please. The objective definition incorporates subjective conditions. Ex: Define F as the set of propositions {A -> B, C -> D, A -> ~D, C -> ~B}. F is an objective framework which never changes, but what is derived from F is subject to the truth values of A, B, C, and D.

But what is your objective definition? There is no problem with having an objective definition that depends on subjective conditions. But there is a problem with having an objective definition that completely delegates to subjective conditions while also claiming to give evaluation results that are independent of (those) subjective conditions, which seems to be what you are doing.

There seems to be no situation in which your rule of "doing X is (im)moral if is you think it is (im)moral" would leave the morality of an action undefined, but you still claim that this is the exception to a rule that applies in other cases. What are those other cases?

> I'm curious. How do you think theists generally justify their position?

There isn't one justification, but still a somewhat limited set of justifications, that are all equally bad, but for different reasons. So, not really something I can answer in under a few dozen pages. But I guess the videos on Matt Dillahunty's youtube channel (SansDeity) do cover quite a lot of those, if you want to find out. They also had a counter-apologetics wiki at http://wiki.ironchariots.org/, but that's been offline for a while ... but, just looking into it, it seems like someone has put up a fork: https://religions.wiki/ --I guess that might be worth a look as well.

> False analogy. I'm claiming that everyone whom employs the methods of the saints achieves their goals of happiness. Your analogy would only be valid if everyone got rich with day trading, and if that were the case then that would be evidence that day trading generally makes people rich.

Well, possibly that is what you intended to claim, but you very much didn't. You wrote about saints as opposed to people who didn't use their methods, and you also didn't make the claim that all people who used those methods were saints. So, the analogy was perfectly fine.