Atheist Fundamentalism

[Mudhammam]

Following Plotinus, I disagree with Schopenhauer's statement. God, or the All, may have something analgous to personality, but not personality as such. Personality, like other attributes, would ultimately be contingent on the first metaphysical principle. So I believe, and I think you would agree, that if one accepts the idea of a first metaphysical principle, then knowledge of it by creatures such as ourselves will always be partial and filtered through our limitations. I think we can know of the unmoved mover, but not the unmoved mover directly. Our knowledge seems confined to the intermediate forms that emanate from it.

What I accept about a "first metaphysical principle" is that it's as inconceivable as is the point where space ends or as the moment when time had a beginning. Simply because we can speculate, using our often fallacious means of comprehension, and carry logical deductions to extremes that amount to most lofty, general, empty, and poor concepts, in hopes of avoiding apparent conceptual paradoxes, does not give us license to assert the objective existence of a being or material substance that contains within it these features. Such a metaphysical monster is hardly distinguishable from the results we might find in attempting to conjure up pure non-existence in any meaningful sense.