Proof and evidence will always equal Science

[Ferrocyanide]

There is another 'closer to' option. The God of Classical theism may better be described as something more like the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Does the PNC exist?  If so, based on what evidence? Or is it something from which we reason rather than to which we reason. Everyone has first priciples even if they are only tacitly aware of them. I am sincerely curoius...

Could many atheists defend their first principles using the same standard by which they judge theistic first principles?

So God is a principle of logic? Or of math? In what way does such deserve the word 'God'? Does it have *any* of the porperties usually assigned to deities? Knowledge? Nope. Intentional? Nope. Power to create? Nope.

This feels to me like an even worse version of identifying God with the universe. Sure, you can do it, but at that point it seems that you are just abusing language.

Oh, and to answer your question: the PNC, like all logic and math, is a rule of language more than anything else. There are paraconsistent logics out there that are perfectly workable.

So, no, PNC doesn't exist in any way different than language. It's a convention.

As for first principles, I tend to hold them all as tentative. let's face it, solipsism is internally consistent. There is no *logical* way to argue against it. So an assumption is made about that. After that, there are assumptions about whether memory is accurate at all, whether the patterns I see are valid,, etc. Then we get to testability of ideas, eliminating those that are wrong.

Yes, there are a number of first principles that pretty much everyone adopts, whether or not they believe in a deity.

Which gets to the question of whether the God assumption actually gives any usable information. Is it really an assumption that helps in a way similar to how getting out of solipsism helps? From what I have seen, the answer to that is no.

If the god that Neo-Scholastic is talking about is a principle, then it doesn’t exist, just like emotions, numbers, names, languages, songs, stories, colors, ideas, designs, information, logic do not exist on their own.

I’ve already given the example with music, but here it is again.

Music can be recorded on a vinyl record. It can be present as an analog signal on a cassette’s tape, it could be in the form as digital information on a hard disk.
It is information and information can be copied from medium to medium. The medium is made of atoms. (Unless if you use light pulses to represent the information or an electrical signal or some other type of field).

We can destroy the tapes, the vinyl records, the hard drives. Where did the atoms go? They are still here. (Conservation of matter and energy rule from physics).
Where did the information go? It was destroyed/scrambled. (No conservation of information).

In order for such things to exist, such as the design of a chair, you need atoms. A certain group of atoms can represent the “chair”.

Such things do not have an effect on reality. For example, you will never see the number 5 walking down the street, kicking a ball.
Music does not go around and push air molecules and other atoms around.

The law of non-contradiction doesn’t wear a policeman’s hat and suit and go around town, looking for violators.

The law of non-contradiction is just logic and you can make logic real by implementing it with atoms.
For example, we can design a CPU that executes the bitwise OR operation.
00010001 OR 10001000 => 10011001

PNC is not implemented at the CPU level but you can write a program that executes PNC. We call that an implementation.