It's a good question and I don't think it has an easy answer. On the one hand, if laws aren't truly "global" (i.e., could hold only at particular times and/or places), then we have a potential problem of arbitrariness. I'm pretty sure this is a true generalization: All men born in Canada and typing an answer on December 27, 2014 in the city of Washington DC to a question about laws on askphilosophers are wearing cotton sweaters. On the other hand, I'm quite sure that it's not a law of nature and I can't imagine why anyone would think otherwise. You could just stipulate that all true generalizations are laws of nature, but that seems truly arbitrary, and in particular it seems to ignore all the reasons we think it's worth looking for laws of nature. So from a certain point of view, requiring that laws of nature can't be restricted to particular places or times seems like a way of avoiding rather than introducing arbitrariness. That said, it hardly follows that we would never have...

Here's a sort of rule-of-thumb answer that I find useful. Roughly, we should ask ourselves how surprising the evidence would be if the hypothesis were not true. Suppose the question is whether Harvey robbed the bank. Our evidence for Harvey being the thief is that a witness saw him outside the bank around the time of the robbery. If Harvey really is the robber, this isn't unlikely, but suppose Harvey works in the barber shop on the block where the bank is, and the time he was seen was a few minutes before opening time for the barber shop. Then seeing him outside the bank wouldn't be surprising even if he wasn't the robber. It's not strong evidence. On the other hand, suppose the evidence is that a search of Harvey's apartment turns up a large bag of bills whose serial numbers identify them as the ones that were stolen.Then things look bad for Harvey. If he wasn't the robber, it would be surprising to find the money in his apartment. (Of course, this isn't conclusive proof. Maybe someone has planted the...

It's an interesting question, and I think it's best considered the context of times and settings in which the idea of magic was taken seriously. I also doubt that there's a lot to be gained by looking for a full-blown definition, but we can learn something by looking at broad commonalities. First on the bit about magic words and rabbits. If it turned out that saying the right words in the right way could make rabbits appear in hats, then we would have discovered a new regularity in the world, though whether we had discovered a new law of physics is a lot more doubtful. After all, the regularities of the special sciences aren't usually classed as laws of physics, even though physics has to be consistent with them.* We might want to say that this regularity is "natural" because all the events take place in nature (saying the words, the rabbit appearing...) but it wouldn't follow that it wasn't magical. Older notions of magic explicitly included a concept of natural magic. What counted as ...

No inconsistency. Your computer works whether you accept the quantum story that explains its microprocessors or not. You might run a risk of unreasonableness; the evidence for the things you mention is pretty good, and the same might hold for whatever gets included in your "etc." And if some of the things falling under your "etc." are routine parts of the science we use to produce the technologies you rely on, someone might wonder whether the success of those technologies doesn't give you good reason to accept the science. But consistency is not a very high bar, and though inconsistent views are arguably unreasonable, unreasonable views can be consistent.

I'm not sure there's a fundamental difference between science and non-science. But the point about falsifiability isn't that a true theory can be proven false. It's that scientific theories can be tested, and we know what sorts of results would count against the theory in principle Keep in mind that even a theory that's survived a long string of rigorous tests might still be overthrown. The point of the falsifiability requirement is that we know what sorts of results would count against the theory - whether or not they ever turn up. One more point, though. It's one thing to say we know what would count against a theory. It's another to say that some particular bit of evidence would refute a theory conclusively. Things are seldom if ever that simple.

How about neither? Let's start with religion, about which only a few words. Some forms of religion are dogmatic and deeply invested in doubtful beliefs, but it's a mistake to think all religion is like that, contrary to the persistent insistence of some apologists for atheism. And "science" writ large hasn't settled whether everything is a product of deterministic forces, let alone about what that would imply if it were true. On the first point: it's open to serious doubt whether quantum processes are deterministic. And it's simply not true that the macro-world would be sealed off from all quantum indeterminism. More important, it's simply not settled that determinism has the dire implications you suppose it has. Most philosophers, I'd guess, accept some version of compatibilism, according to which physical determinism and human freedom can coexist. A bit of searching around this website will find various discussions. Here's one that might be helpful. Of course, it might be that the...

The way you begin your question hints at a problem we'll get to below, but before that, let me suggest a distinction. It's one thing to presuppose or assume something; it's another thing for it to be a matter of convention. There's a lot to be said on the matter of convention; there's not just one idea under that umbrella. But let's take an example from philosophy of space and time. Adolph Grünbaum argued many years ago that given our usual view of space and time, lengths are a matter of convention. The gist of the idea was this: if space and time are continuous, then any two lines contain the same number of points. In Grünbaum's view, that meant there is nothing in space and time themselves to ground the difference between different possible standards for assigning lengths. We have to pick one (think of it as deciding what counts as a ruler) and only after we've done that do questions about lengths have answers. If Grünbaum were right (I'm not convinced, but that's not our issue), then there would...

There are several questions in what you've asked, all of them interesting. I'm going to single out one of them. If I read you correctly, one thing you're asking is why we can describe the universe using math and logic -- why the universe "fits" our rules of math and logic. We can begin our stab at an answer by noticing that this fact -- that the universe can be described using math and logic -- is weaker than it might seem. Imagine a computer screen of 1024 by 768 pixels, for a total of 786,432 pixels. For simplicity, imagine that each pixel is simply ether off or on; ignore color. Then there are 2 786,432 possible patterns that could show up on the screen. Most of those are a jumble -- not "logical" or orderly in any interesting way. However, each can, in principle, be described. An exhaustive list stating for each pixel whether it's off or on would do. So the fact that the screen can be described using math/logic doesn't really constrain things much at all. Some number of pixels will be on...

It's quite right that more or less any detailed fact is improbable in its detail, but not automatically in need of explanation on that account. But we need to be careful lest we turn that point into a rejection of the need to explain anything. I don't have a set of criteria to offer, but we do take some cases of apparently improbable structure to call out for explanation. We don't always say: well things had to be arranged in some way; might as well be this way as any other. We also tend to see the fact that some hypothesis makes sense of apparently diverse facts in a unified, elegant way as a scientific virtue (though hardly the only one.) Whether we should say anything of this sort about the "fine-tuning" hypothesis is another matter; it may well be that we shouldn't. But let's consider a comparison: we could say that morphological similarities among species are a brute fact, needing no explanation. But we take the fact that evolution makes sense of these similarities to count in favor of...

I think the simple answer is that any probabilities we come up with here are pretty much meaningless. Probability calculations ade only as good as the information we feed into them, and it's hard to see what a well-formed question would be like here - not least since it would require some way of quantifying how hard the universe is to understand. Perhaps there's some clever way to come up with a calculation, but let me turn to your other issue - the brain/pancreas thing. To my inexpert eye, brains and pancreases hace a certain superficial resemblance, but neuroscientists will be able to tell you in a good deal of detail why the brain is better suited to computing than the pancreas is. The real point here is that our casual impressions on such matters aren't really worth very much. After all, a casual look at my iPad makes it pretty mysterious that it could be used to write this response, but that's exaclry what it let me do.