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Replying to DrNoGods in post #383]
Not sure I follow this. I know that a married bachelor cannot exist because of the unambiguous definition of the words married, and bachelor. Those definitions would seem to be more like axioms than empirical evidence, but no reasoning is involved in rejecting the existence of a married bachelor because simple definition prevents it.
How would you come to conclude that the definitions contradict each other if you didn't have the ability to reason? That is, without the ability to reason, you would be ignorance of what contradiction is. You wouldn't be able to conclude that a marriage bachelor cannot exist unless you reasoned first that the two definitions are in conflict.
I wouldn't argue that your view is unreasonable. Humans have often attributed things they don't understand to god beings (probably the first and most fundamental reason people have invented so many gods over the millennia). As science has progressed, the number of gods has decreased and I believe monotheism still covers well over half of the world's religious populations today (Abrahamic religions alone being some 50-55% of the total). Arguments for a "necessary being" appear to be based on philosophical ideas similar to the various ontological arguments:
We are getting closer to our disagreement. For me it is not about not understanding things and plugging God in. There are questions that science just cannot ever answer, such as what exactly is change? Why is there anything at all? Is there purpose?
For these kinds of questions, we need metaphysics because we need to come up with first principles. Now whatever first principles we come up with, we need to follow them to their logical conclusions, so long as the end result doesn't contradict scientific data but can offer an explanation for all that data.
One of the first principles I start with is that change is a potential being actualized by something actual. I haven't found a better first principle that explains what change is and results in a metaphysics that explains scientific data and answers the big questions. Anyway, this leads to scholastic metaphysics.
As a logical consequence, the being that is existence itself, that is purely actual emerges. If I don't like that consequence I can go back to the drawing board and find new first principles and see what the logical consequence of that model might be.
Interestingly enough, the models that successfully avoid such a necessary being tend to have what I think is a far less believable consequence: something came to exist spontaneously and the properties the first things have (simples) are just there by brute fact without any explanation at all.
Nah, I will stick to the model that doesn't have as a consequence spontaneous existence and properties that have no explanation for why they are the way they are.
BTW, have you ever looked into the alternative natural models that try to avoid God? Do you see the consequences being more believable than a purely actual actualizer?
Or do you take the position of, excuse my harshness, that of a lazy person that goes, well, I don't care about all that.
