My argument for atheism +

[Belacqua]

The laws of mathematics as well as logic are descriptive. So, yes. They describe reality.

Yes, that seems right. It also makes me see that when I refer to this argument in the future, I shouldn't use the word "laws." I don't mean to talk about descriptions, and I certainly don't want to risk the misinterpretation that I am referring to commandments handed down by a demiurgic legislator, which the physical universe reads from tablets and obeys. 

Probably I should use a word like "regularities," "necessities," or just "the way things work." These are the "something" that isn't nothing. The order that I'm talking about. The Neoplatonists and Stoics used the word "Logos" for this. And of course John draws the idea into Christianity by declaring that "In the beginning was the Logos," and associating the way of things with Jesus.

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They're also an abstraction. Is God an abstraction?

I'm wary of the word "abstraction" because to me an abstraction is something that has been derived from -- abstracted from -- something more complete. It's true that the "laws" of nature are concepts we have abstracted from the real regularities of the world.

So if you write an academic paper you or your editor can write an abstract of the paper to put on the web site. Or the early abstract artists called themselves this because they always had in mind a model -- a person, situation, or mood -- from which they were abstracting a visual correlate. 

And it's true that people's concepts of God would be merely abstracted from the real God. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a real God behind the abstractions. Most theologians are careful to say that human concepts of God are always insufficient -- abstractions made by limited minds.

So I won't say that in theology God is abstracted from anything. In fact it's better to say that in these theories, everything else is abstracted from God. As far as I can tell, all the Greeks said that God is a non-material something from which the material world emanates. Kant merely updates this in line with Newton's physics, when he says that the noumenon is the world prior to the mind perceiving, interpreting, and abstracting it into phenomena. 

Kant, being a Christian, is comfortable with the fact that although we never have direct knowledge of the noumenon, we nonetheless can abstract knowledge from it, and have faith that in some way it has order and regularity -- he still believes in something like Logos.

It's Nietzsche who tosses Logos. He claims that the order and regularity we interpret and abstract from the real world is like a dream image --- a falsehood we require to live comfortably. The real, pre-interpreted, pre-abstracted world is, for him, Chaos. This is why Nietzscheans say that most scientists are not yet sufficiently atheist. By assuming that there is a Logos-like order behind phenomena -- even if it's not fully knowable to humans -- we are still full of faith.