(July 30, 2013 at 10:19 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Or serves as both the source and support of natural laws. Transcendent principles need not override or contradict natural order. From my perspective, the fact that the physical universe follows natural laws and does not fall into absurdity serves as ample justification for the belief in deity.
Its risky to bandy about concepts without fully understanding their implications. As i said before, and you did not disagree - natural laws are descriptions of how reality works. Reality is the source and support of natural laws. So, from your perspective, if the transcendent principles are to be the source and support of natural laws, then that would require the hypothetical supernatural to be the source and support of reality. Ignoring for the moment that this position has absolutely no justification for it, for the supernatural to be identified as distinct and transcendent to the natural and not just an unknown extension of it, it would have to work in a manner that reality doesn't. If the transcendent principle are actually going to be transcendent to the natural laws, then the object of their description must behave differently than nature. And any description of this different behavior (supernatural law) would necessarily contradict or override the natural law.
The second thing you do not understand is the basis of concepts like order, chaos or absurdity. As I said, nature works in a particular way, we observe how it works and then we come up with natural laws to describe it. The concepts of order and absurdity come after this. If something works according to natural laws, then we regard it as orderly and if it goes against them, we call it absurd. Those concepts are based on our perception. If what you regard as "falling into absurdity" right now was actually how the physical universe behaved, then that would become a part of the natural laws and would no longer be considered absurd. The findings of quantum mechanics would be a good example here. Intuitively, we found the results as absurd because they seem to go against the known laws of nature. However, since we found out that nature does behave in that manner, we expanded th elaws of nature to accommodate those findings.
