Becoming an angry atheist

[Faith No More]

Let’s further explore your statement, shall we? What I hear you saying is that there is that something explains natural laws, but we cannot know what that something is. Hold that thought.

But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that there may be something that explains natural laws, but that whether there is or not is uncertain.

I didn’t just make the assumption. I also referenced the grandmaster skeptic’s (Hume’s) way of thinking. He showed that what you get when you abandon final cause is occasionalism, the absence of any rational principle for linking causes to their effects, i.e. no reason at all.

The clear alternative is that causality is directed by something, which you have already admitted above. Something capable of directing could be either intelligent or mindless. You say mindless. But, since intentional, directed, activity is associated with intelligence, it is reasonable to conclude that that which directs causality is an intelligent agent.

You'd have to flesh-out the argument that abandoning final cause leads to occasionalism for me to actually address that. I'm not familiar with it.

Regardless, there isn't sufficient justification to even assume the final cause exists, which is the fatal flaw in Aristotelian thinking. Every effect we see that has been caused by intelligence does have a final cause, but that final cause is as a result of the intelligence behind it. Since we are asking the question of whether or not intelligence is behind an effect, it is insufficient to assume that it must have a final cause because we know that final cause is a result of intelligence. It just comes down to begging the question again.