Atheism, A Grim Position?

[JuliaL]

In my view there is an ultimate basis for value, grounded in God.

Defining God as the ultimate basis for value, the unmoved mover, the un-caused cause doesn't narrow the field to a personal god, particularly one who wants and deserves worship. There has to be more.

You mentioned ineffable.

For a reason. Ineffability potentially eliminates access to any attribute of God. If there is something unknown about him/her/it/them it may hide an unlimited number of alternative qualities. Not that without knowing everything, you know nothing, but when a primary characteristic of the subject of study is mystery....unknowns abound. Lack of evidence is not proof of absence. But the longer God goes without unambiguously showing him/her/it/them self(ves), the higher my intuitive suspicion that he just ain't there grows.

So now we get to religious experience. Another tough one. The great theologian Paul Tillich spoke of the "mystical a priori". Calvin spoke of "sensus divinitatis". Both reflect some sort of ontological and epistemic union with the divine.....I add to this dynamic with what I call an informed intuition.

Each of these, distilled and filtered through my worldview, reduce to "because it feels right," with more flowery language. I prefer to maintain my model of reality on those observations which have reliably been shown to be 'true' in the past. (note: my definition of truth is that a proposition contains truth in direct proportion to the degree to which that proposition correctly predicts the future.) This entails evidence shown to have been factual and a network of concepts (call it theory) which serves to bind the factual observations together. I cannot claim to know the future, only what appears to be the past. My faith lies in the belief that the future will closely resemble the past simply because it appears to have always done so (Hume acknowledged.)
In this context, I find the "because it feels right" rational to be highly suspect. What we observe about maladaptive minds, mental illness, psychedelic drugs, trans cranial magnetic stimulation of the sense of the transcendent etc. is more consistent with God (the more anthropomorphic, personal god of the major religions) being a mechanistic imaginary construct of brains which developed and served to keep us alive and reproducing (hence the concentration on sex.) Note, I am not claiming a teleology for this mechanism. Chemistry doesn't care if we have children, but we do. Those minds who didn't care one way or the other about getting through to the next generation were supplanted by those that did. And the ones that did are the ones that we see around us.

There does seem to be a need for something outside of our universe to have caused it. Big bang and all that. However it is not required to be a personal, intelligent entity. Every time we have looked where God should be, in the clouds, on the mountain tops, in the life essence of protoplasm, He wasn't there. I expect to find the same result if or when we are able to observe directly the factors reasonably able to be credited with kicking off the universe. It is possible we will never be able to look in that direction: flatlanders can't look up. But we may find evidences in our universe which at least hint at its cause: gravity as a bleed through from another dimension, whatever the hell dark matter & dark energy are. But at the bottom, I expect there will always be a limit to what we can observe, the directions we can see if you will. We have found ourselves to be very small in a very big universe. If God is still fixated on a very small patch of sand in the middle east, it doesn't show. It is rationally unwarranted to assume or claim that the places we can't look are the places which contain God though it may be socially advantageous to do so.

Thank you for your insightful and civil approach. I think that folks around here appreciate that though it is uncommon. Most theists we see dive in with hackneyed arguments about second law or un-caused cause. It becomes tiresomely repetitive. I think you're wrong if you believe in one of the internally contradictory gods, but at least you are examining carefully the reflex hammer before you hit yourself in the head with it.

Julia