Scientism & Philosophical Arguments

[Whateverist]

That said, if you choose to believe that reality is intelligible and that the intellect is reliable, then it is reasonable to apply the Principle of Sufficient Reason and ask the following questions. Why is reality intelligible and what makes people capable of reason? But of course, these are questions someone ideologically committed to atheism dares not ask.

Rather than ask "Why is reality intelligible" don't we all just assume it may be at least in some cases? If experience hadn't shown it so, why would we continue with it? And just because we have managed to figure a few useful things out doesn't guarantee that we are ready to judge the applicability of intelligence to all of reality. You jump too quickly to absolutes.

As for what makes people capable of reason, why single out humans? You might as well ask it of the entire animal kingdom. Why, when creatures evolve the sensory capacity to perceive aspects of their environment, do they also evolve some ability to judge the significance of what is perceived as well as the ability to act accordingly? We aren't a special case except insofar as we wield symbolic language with which to communicate with others of our kind and to bewilder ourselves in the way you do.

[Esquilax]

Asking questions as double negatives makes it more difficult for readers to understand your questions. It’s either lazy writing, sloppy thinking, or disingenuous. More simply stated, the question actually asked is the following:

Actually, it was "why would reality be unintelligible if not designed by a god?" which seems to be what you're all about, without ever actually justifying. You seem to think the intelligibility of reality is some huge problem for us, implying that you believe an undesigned universe would be completely random, chaotic and unintelligible; I've seen you intimate things similar to that before, and many other theists do too, but the thing is, I've never seen any of you explain why you think that is. You all seem content to just presuppose it as the case and lob this vague and ill defined "problem" at us anyway.

Regarding the way I initially framed the question, yes, I accept that it was unclear. I make mistakes occasionally too.

That answers your question but I’m pretty sure you meant the question rhetorically in order to assert that the intelligibility of reality is a brute fact. Yet brute fact comes in three different flavors: 1) those that need no explanation, 2) those that have no explanation, and 3) those that cannot be explained.

So which did you have in mind?

I'm more trying to get you to explain why you regard the idea that reality requires a designing mind to be intelligible at all to be so obvious that it shows up time and time again in your argumentation. I see the intelligibility of the universe as what it is, a valid observation that must have some explanation, I just can't understand why a sort of natural consistency is so way out there and crazy for you that you're sufficiently convinced that intelligibility isn't just an observation, but is in fact evidence in itself for god.

That said, I don't really know why I bother asking these things anyway, since your eventual answer will most likely just contain a sequence of philosophical jargon without any justification as to why any of that is important in the first place.