[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Mister Agenda]

This is the part that stood out for me that I want to expand upon:

It's not a matter of sensing and knowing. For starters, sensing is not a valid approach toward perceiving reality. One can sense anything and believe it to be real merely with the notion of allowing the imagination to rule over reason. Further, knowing must carry with it the empiricism to back it up. Otherwise, the inward subjectivity of knowing is just a confusion due to an entanglement with sensing.

Glad you caught that. Good reading of my rant. Yes, the gap between sensing and knowing refers to the ability to connect sense data and felt experience to a valid conitive map, i.e. one that meaningfully connects the the personal existent with what is other that itself. My point is that for all its flaws, Christianity served that function until the modern period when the authority of Scripture is no longer respected. We lost not just a god-of-the gaps but  god of THE gap... the bridge connecting all gaps. That is essentially what constitutes a Necessay Being. But we are starting with the premise that no being is necessary. So we are left with a problem because the connection between reality as experienced has no meaningful referent. A referent, the existence of which is accepted on faith..the existential choice to believe without evidence... that there is an intelligible order. Sure you can sense something, but how do you know if that something is significant?

It sounds like, just like the God of the gaps, the God of THE gap is a placeholder for our ignorance. I see you're defining the referent, which you deem very important, must be accepted on faith. The problem is you can accpet ANYTHING on faith.

It doesn't seem to me that you have to believe without evidence that there is an intelligible order. To a great degree, we've found inteligible order in nature. Physics, chemistry, and biology are predictable. Quantum physics is the wild west in comparison to things on a human scale, but it's still statistically predictable. Maybe all is chaos out past the observable universe, and it may even be the tiniest bits of everything that everything is made of are in some sense not really real; but it's not a leap of faith to discern order in the universe. It might be a leap of faith to assume order all the way down; but it doesn't damage me in any way not to take that as a given, on faith.

I think you want Chrisitainity to be more critically important than it is. It's not unimportant, it's a major influence on history and current events, but most of the world gets along fine without it. And I believe the pagan Greeks ought to get more credit for Western logic than many Christians tend to give them.