We don't know what the universe is.
Yes we do.
View attachment 31027
And so did our ancestors. In a couple millenia that chart will likely become the equivalent of earth, air, fire and water, as our knowledge expands.
Nope. Our ancestors didn't know. We do.
Understanding the boundaries of knowledge is as much a part of modern physics as understanding the way things within those boundaries behave and interact.
As I said before:
It's possible (even probable) that the SM is wrong; But it isn't possible that it's wrong enough to permit an unknown interaction between any currently unproven entities and material objects of human scale and temperature.
Gravity turned out to be wrong; But that meant that we had to find a better model for extreme cases such as the exact orbit of Mercury about the Sun. It didn't mean some stuff turned out to be able to fall upwards.
Gravity was known not to be quite right, but even before Einstein came up with a better model, Newton's model was known to be right enough to make accurate predictions on sufficiently small scales and at sufficiently low energies/velocities.
We know that the SM isn't a complete description of reality. But we ALSO know that it's impossible for it to be sufficiently wrong at human surviable energies and scales for a new particle or force to interact with humans (or their planet) non-destructively, and that's sufficient to rule out the phenomena I mentioned on my earlier post.
A desperate enough theist could throw all of god's supposed interactions with Earth under the bus; Dump pretty much every religion in history, and declare that their god was involved ONLY with creation, and hasn't interacted in any way with it since. It's true that the SM doesn't rule out such a pseudo-god. But the First Law of Thermodynamics says that mass energy cannot be created nor destroyed, which doesn't only rule out a creator god, it rules out a creation event.
I am completely comfortable with the idea that everything has always existed and will always exist, in accordance with the First Law. Anyone who wants to suggest otherwise is in the unenviable position of needing to explain why the First Law shouldn't apply to this one specific event, despite observably applying everywhere and everywhen else.
And even if they can clear this very high hurdle, they need to provide a reason for belief in their pseudo-god, and cannot base that reasoning on any putative interaction of such a pseudo-god with any post-creation aspect of reality (due to the constraints of the SM).
Some ideas are just ridiculous. Gods are amongst those ideas, and physics demonstrates this just as well for gods as it does for other ridiculous ideas, like moons made from dairy products.
When someone says "The moon is not made of cheese", we don't ask for mathematical levels of proof, not least because such levels of proof don't exist outside of mathematics. You can't PROVE that the moon isn't comprised mostly of Stilton. But that doesn't imply that you should seriously entertain the idea that it might be, nor that you should consider anyone making such a claim to be sane, reasonable, or worthy of your attention.
