Yes - for Christians Jesus is/was God so if you accept that Christians believe what they say they believe then their God has been a physical being who was indistinguishable until after his resurrections from other human beings. (Note - I am not saying that they consider him as only a physical being and that they don't think there are non-material components and characteristics of their god).
So as I said your generalisation was a generalisation too far since it is contradicted by the beliefs that Christians claim they hold.
As I said previously, I don't consider the belief that Jesus was God incarnate and he was materially present in our world 2000 years ago to be equivalent to a belief that Jesus/God will act in the world today in a physically detectable manner other than through the actions of his disciples. However, you've made it clear you disagree. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point.
Not exactly, but your second paragraph comes close enough to understanding what I'm getting at that I almost don't need to explain any better.
I guess the connection I see, though, isn't so much specific to the case of the vacuum as to knowledge in general. The claim that there is a god is to me no different from any other claim. The question is whether or not it is more difficult to test.
I think here is where we differ. I don't find the claim that there is a God to be an experimentally testable one - it's more like the claim that justice exists or beauty exists rather than a claim like teapots orbiting Saturn exist.
For example, there are multitudes of defintions for justice and they are not all coherent and some are mutually exclusive. Does this mean that justice does not exist in reality, only as an idealized concept in human brains? You could pick a particular definition and check whether or not anything exists that fits that definition, but you could never find anything you could physically and objectively measure, not even with the most senstive of instruments. Does that mean you can conclude that justice does not exist? Or only that that particular definition of justice doesn't have a current physical instantiation in our world? No surprise there - after all justice doesn't have a material existance. How many definitions of justice would you test and discard before concluding that justice doesn't exist because it has no material properties? Might some people reasonably hold that the ideal of justice is worth keeping even if they can't find a single confirmatory example of justice physically existing in our world? If you replace the word "justice" with the word "god" do any of your answers change? If so, why?
I don't think it necessarily is. The point Hobbes is making (or at least the point Zimmer attributes to him, it doesn't really matter for our sake whether he made it or not) seems to be that experiment is useless because there's always some other hypothesis that can account for your results.
The point I think that you're making with god is that experiments that seek to find whether god exists are useless because there's always some hypothesis under which we can still fit a god in to the universe. God is in the gaps that we haven't or can't look at, or maybe has no effects at all.
Everytime you patch up a gap, at least two more smaller gaps appear. I know Christians, indeed entire churches that are perfectly content to allow God to exist in the Gaps and accept scientific evidence without concern. "God is still there" is how one man I respect put it.
The problem here is that once you've tested a hypothesis and it's come up wanting, you can always change it in a way that would allow it to still fit the data.
Why do you consider this a problem? Isn't it a good thing that scientists are willing to change their hypothesis as data comes in that doesn't fit it? Eventually, they may grow weary of continually refitting it and throw it away. Or they may discover that one of their adjusted hypotheses is correct. Either way, I don't see this as a problem with either science or theology. It's when people claim they have the Truth with a capital T and are unwilling to change it in accordance with new evidence that I think a problem arises - and again, that can be true of either scientists and theologians. Now, theology is far more likely to be resistant to such changes, but it seems to me that you're complaining about when people are willing to change and adjust their theology rather than when they don't.
Maybe always is too strong, but I think it's pretty close to accurate.
Regardless, it's still always true that there will be some other hypothesis that could easily be dreamed up that would fit all the experimental results.
Ah! I've been having a hard time making myself clear until now, but I think this helps. What I'm saying is that yes, you can't experimentally test to see which of those is true - but the same will be true of any scientific claim - there will always be an alternative hypothesis which is not compatible with the one you've tentatively accepted based on the experiment, but which you also won't be able to eliminate based on your experimental data, or in fact any future experiments. I think that's basically the point Hobbes was making, and I think your point here is only a special case of it.
So the question becomes "How do we choose between two different hypotheses when both are consistent with experiment?"
Edit: This question is not specific to the issue of god, but is one that science faces (and deals with quite well I think) every day.
I think that the best answer is to run another experiment to try and distinguish between the two. Not always possible, but unless and until that can be done, we must accept that both hypotheses are possible. And I think the concept of God, much like the concepts of justice and beauty are inherently not testable by science. You can't reasonably expect to find physically objective evidence for the existance of such things.
