Atheism Undermines Knowledge

[Lord Privy Seal]

LPS, for now let’s take what you say as given: that appealing to transcendent principles “kicks the can down the road”.

Since you're arguing that atheism (as opposed to, say, reductionism) is what "undermines knowledge," then it seems to me rather disingenuous for you to say you're appealing to some kind of generic "transcendent principles" rather than the counter-position to atheism: theism. It's very common for theists to employ a bait-and-switch technique. They start out arguing for something generic, a blank screen onto which anything can be projected (which also has the useful properties of a set of goal posts on wheels): a "First Cause," a "Greatest Conceivable Being," an "Intelligent Designer," a "Formal Cause," etc., and so forth. Then, after casting their invocation syllogism, they tack on at the end, "And this [First Cause/Greatest Conceivable Being/Intelligent Designer/Formal Cause/Etc.] we call God [the one I learned about in Sunday School and my personal favorite--what a coincidence!]" Now, maybe you're not doing that here, but I hope you'll pardon me if my B.S. Detector goes to yellow alert.

I think I could make a fairly good case for "transcendent principles," but such principles would not be interchangeable with "a male Middle Eastern deity who is prone to anger and violence, and had very strong aversions to a long list of human behaviors including wearing clothes of blended fibers and eating shrimp wrapped in bacon, but he got better (or not, depending on who you ask)." To the contrary, any person--especially a really superduperduper person--is high atop Mt. Improbable (being a complex system), and cannot serve as the ontological base. A person cannot exist apart from principles like natural regularity, but natural regularity can apply even if there are no persons.

My response is that curiousity and rational inquiry is all about seeking deeper and more thorough understanding of the world. Let me give an example:

I’m in my car with three of my friends: a mechanic, a physicist, and a priest.

A mechanic, a physicist, a priest, and a Swedenborgian got into a car. The cab driver looked at them and said, "What is this, a joke?!"

>snip<
Then the priest says, “And here I thought the car started because we want to go bowling.”

Can you think of any significant difference between the priest giving that answer, vs. saying, "The car starts by the power of Hephaestus"?

And I’m saying if we call the laws of physics a brute fact, then we have stopped short. There is more to be known, especially with respect to why the law of cause and effects works.

I question the validity of the question. What does it mean to ask "why the law of cause and effects works?" Whatever you propose as your answer ends up being a cause of cause and effect, which is self-contradictory. Without a principle of cause and effect, your proposed "transcendent principle" can't cause anything. The principle of cause and effect has to be operative before there can be such a thing as a particular cause or effect.

"Cause and effect" is a corollary of "existence" (existents exist) and "identity" (an existent is itself; it cannot be itself and not-itself at the same time and in the same respect). An existent entity exhibits certain properties that make it what it is, and not something else. These properties have effects in interaction with other entities; otherwise there would be no distinction between the properties and the absence of the properties. Thus, natural regularity and causality.

"Existence" and "identity" are, as far as I can tell, irreducible and axiomatic. It doesn't make sense to speak of a god/-dess or anything else "creating" or "causing" existence and identity, because the deity would have to exist and have identity as a deity, not a rutabaga, as a particular deity and not some other, and have properties including the ability to "create" or "cause" other things. Can you make a case for a deity that doesn't exist, isn't anything in particular, and has no properties, yet invents existence, causes causality and identifies identity?

In addition, positing the existence of god or transcendent influences will not stop reasoned inquiry. One unique feature of the Christian thought is the belief that god can be known. “God did it” is not the end of my curiosity; it is the beginning. God did it, but I still want to know how, why and understand more about His nature.

Well, OK, but that kinda blows most of the arguments for "God" out of the water. Once "God" is dissected to figure out how he works, what it is that makes his component parts integrate and interact so as to form him instead of Isis, what those components are composed of and so on until you get down to some kind of irreducible Simplicity, "equation that fits on a T-shirt," or whatever, you've demonstrated that "God" is not the First Cause (because now you know what causes him to be him and not somebody or something else), the Intelligent Designer (because now you've figured out where his "design" came from), the source of regularity (because you've uncovered the basis of his own regularity), and so forth. Which means that all of those arguments that were supposed to get us to "God" have taken us right on past him to whatever the irreducible and axiomatic bedrock of reality turns out to be. Which means in turn that you've just yanked the rug out from under all of your proposed reasons for believing in "God" in the first place.

Your only alternative to this is to do the very thing you said you won't do: turn "God" into a thought-stopper, so you don't ask who or what created him, who/what fine-tuned the nature of the spirit realm so that he could exist, who/what is his formal cause, etc..