See Graham’s post here: If Intelligent Design Is “Pseudoscience,” Then Neo-Darwinism Might Be Too, and my comment on it. “Pseudoscience” has too much negative baggage for it to be a proper name for all the speculative scientistry out there that masquerades as plain vanilla science. Maybe we can blame the western world’s creepazoid falsifiability fetish, for tautologizing “science” with “truth,” but letting things go as they are continues to muddy the issue. There was a time, as people like to say, when science was nearly the same thing as engineering, where a man would propose and idea of how something would work, build something to test it repeatedly, and conclude if he was right or wrong, and it what way he was right or wrong. Everything would be shared so others could do the same experiments to verify. Things got worse when we created things to observe (sense) things that we couldn’t test against. Evolution and cosmology are highly-observant sciences—the former, especially—but we can only replicate observations. Whatever science can replicate “out there” in the universe on the smaller scale on Earth is reaching conclusions by dubious inference.
Similarly, see Catacomb Resident’s post here: “Distinct Shelf Life” (mirror here: “Distinct Shelf Life” on archive.org). The fact that God could have brought the universe into an already-used state. True, what we speculate about how things were could be accurate, but we’ll have no way of knowing they actually came to pass “in reality.” The point is, we can’t completely trust any of those conclusions we might come up with. We assume that things always were the way they are, or more accurately, things progress along the same paths, and in the same manner, as we see things unfold right now. If we’re just using our material minds, we have to assume that. We owe our continuing life to recognizing patterns and living as though those patterns will persist to where we can safely predict them. Things get tangled if you zoom out on generational, centuries-long patterns, which we don’t need to predict for our day-to-day survival. There was a subtle but significant shift in the supernatural world after the crucifixion, when God’s covenant was opened up to everyone, outside the bloodlines of Israel, and the rebellious sons of God who enjoyed post-Babel rule of the nations had to change their strategy of control. But we don’t know in what ways creation—the physical world, its laws and how we interact with it—was fundamentally changed. We assume it was the same as it is now, but I’m convinced it wasn’t. What’s more, I don’t exactly know in what way it wasn’t the same. The mind reels at the implications.
If you’re leading people in a prayer, it’s odd and little discomforting to bring in purely personal dialogue into it. You’re speaking for a group of individuals who probably don’t have insight into the leader’s private conversations with God, so everyone’s attention tends to wander or otherwise closing off their ears to the unexpected insertion of the leader’s private subject matter. That kind of conversation is best left with the leader’s out-loud conversations with God while he’s alone, or purely inside the dialogue he’s having with God in his head.
