Logical Absolutes

[Belacqua]

So, if the contention is: why are these seemingly immutable facts about reality the way that they are or, “why is reality the way that it is?” then yes. I agree, the answer to that as far as we can tell is “we don’t know, and we may never know.” 

Sure, that seems reasonable. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's not an interesting question.

But, appealing to a god simply kicks the can further down the road. Why is god’s immutable nature the way that it is? The theist’s response is, “because that’s what god is.”

Well, you make it sound as if they just arbitrarily posit the existence of a god in order to answer an unanswerable question. I don't know, maybe the people in that podcast are guilty of that. But there are elaborate arguments and logical chains which lead some people to conclusions about the need for a Ground of Being, an actualization of all potentialities, which accounts for the existence of unchanging immaterial laws. 

So there's a lot to deal with before we reject their conclusions. 

[...] there needs to be something thing we’re referring to in order for that concept to be coherent, no? [...] 
Without a thing or things existing, there isn’t a fact of any thing to be able to know and then describe.

Yes, I think we're talking about how things behave in the existing world. It's hard to imagine any rules existing in a world where nothing existed, because rules are something, and therefore if there are rules there are something. 

And of course you're using "reality" in a particular way. You'd have to show that immaterial laws, not grounded in matter, are not somehow also "reality."

Hmm. I’d say it’s the burden of someone asserting the possibility and/or existence of immaterial laws to demonstrate that.

Are the laws of logic, math, and nature not somehow part of reality? I'm pretty sure they're real. 
 

But they don’t come from anywhere. They just are.

This is what they call "brute facts" in philosophy. "Why are things this way? They just are."

Or, “they are, but we don’t yet know why,” which again, is not a problem that is solved by theism.

That's fine -- I'm comfortable with "we don't know." 

I think you've shifted the thread topic from the existence of logical absolutes to the assertion that logical absolutes can't be solved by theism. So it's gone from a metaphysical argument about the relation of logical and mathematical rules to matter, to a more typical (for this forum) assertion that there certainly won't be an explanation that includes God. 

So that will require a whole lot more discussion about how people conceive of God, and the arguments for God as metaphysical grounding, if we want to avoid just begging the question.