Toss a ball in the air and watch it spin. You ask why it spins and I tell you that it is because god is multiplying its state by a quarternion. Is that true? A

Toss a ball in the air and watch it spin. You ask why it spins and I tell you that it is because god is multiplying its state by a quarternion. Is that true? An equation can be perfectly descriptive without explaining anything, and just as easily used in a patently incorrect or at least unverifiable explanation. A new physics learner may be uncomfortable with this notion, as everything up to that point was taught as cause and effect, no difference between explanation and description. As in the example, the description could take a different form. God could use matrices. Or you could say that god prefers to minimize the lagrangian. Or you could simulate with finite element analysis and say that it is an emergent phenomenon of many points of mass all following a set of rules. Questions for each explanation abound. I think at the bottom of all of this there has to be an admission that the universe works in this particular manner because it wouldn’t exist for us any other way, and we do exist, so it must.