No reason justifies disbelief.

[bennyboy]

Sure.  You can say something like "You can't ask what caused the Big Bang, because causality is time-dependent, and the math breaks down in a singularity, which means there was no such thing as time before time.  Asking what caused it is a broken question."

Well, I think "why", and "how" are different types of questions. We may never discover all the "hows" of reality, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is a "why" question that needs answering.  Why is a water molecule two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom? That's a malformed question. I'm not saying there's no more to be learned about reality simply because science may never have access to it.  I'm merely saying the way the question is being asked may be malformed.

I wouldn't agree, first of all, that that particular question IS malformed.  I could learn a great deal about the material Universe by trying to answer that question.  I suspect that I'd end up discovering a chain of successive proximate causes, leading back perhaps to the four basic forces present in our Universe but not further.

I'd summarize the instinct to label certain questions as malformed in this in this way: brute facts may not be subject to questions about causation, because they ultimately provide all the answers ABOUT causation, and circles are bad.

That's why I compare the discarding of certain questions as malformed as a philosophical "Goddidit."  If a child asks a chain of why questions, starting say with "Why is the sky blue?"  You can talk about photons, about the properties of oxygen that give it a blue color, about the properties of atoms in general or about quantum mechanics.  But eventually, you have to stop the process and say: "That's just the way it is.  Seeking further is pointless."