[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Why not? What assurance is there that we are not just in a pocket of proximate order within a cosmic chaos.

Yep, you have a point. The universe is a big place, and stranger than we can imagine. 

Also it might be that the "pocket" is just wherever we happen to be... I'm sure you know the analogy of the metal detector: Guy buys a metal detector, goes to the beach, and finds a bunch of metal. He goes home and says, "Everything on the beach is metal." Because he has a tool which can only find one thing, he concludes that the one thing is all there is. 

So Nietzsche would probably say that since our minds evolved to perceive order (for survival, not for truth) then that's what we find. And science is just a tool of those minds' goals. So it means that there could be a whole lot of chaos also. 

@Belacqua, I often hear how classical demstrations for god have been refuted many times. The proported refutations generally challenge the validity of classical philosophy's assumptions. But after dispensing with all the foundational principles of classical philosophy to what does the debunker appeal to as foundational knowlege?

I think the people who declare classical theology null and void tend to be poorly informed. We've seen what most of the rebuttals look like here, and they tend to go rather badly. Every time the Five Ways come up, for example, we have to re-teach what the word "cause" means. 

And yes, a lot of the rebuttals tend to involve serious question-begging. "Because foundational knowledge only comes from science, only science gives foundational knowledge." That kind of thing. 

It's often difficult to get people to admit they even have unprovable but strongly-held metaphysical beliefs, if they just take it for granted that their metaphysical beliefs are true. Probably it doesn't even occur to them that these count as their a priori absolutes. 

There are better rebuttals, of course. I should probably buckle down and read what Kant argued on this subject, for example. But there are serious people who rebut Kant's rebuttals, too, so it's not as if the whole thing is cut and dried.