A case for God

[Metacrock]

this is a post I put up today on CARM. it's an illustration of rational warrant.

Let's keep in mind that we are moving down the scale from the impossibly ridiculous "proof" which almost can't be had for anything, to rational warrant which makes more sense given the totally basic nature of God. God is too basic to reality to be given in the sense data, like the unified field or the laws of phsyics.

There are clues, correlates, co-determinate that atheists conveniently just leave out of all the discussions where they use the bromides about lack of proof. These are not "proofs" they are good reasons to think God is real.
Of course atheists wont even grant that level but that's ok we have demons-ted it they just want to forget it.

(1) religious experience agrees with the criteria we use to determine the reality of experiences; the criteria of epistemic judgement.

that criteria is:

regular
consistent
shared
promotes navigation in life or the world.

for each one of these it's been proved with empirical reserach that RE fits this criterion. Atheists want to ignore the implication that therefore it's rationally warranted to belief; sure becuase it fits the criteria we use to determine what's real. We should determine that it's real.


(2) Temporal beginning problem

Nothing can happen in a timeless void. there can be no change and no causation. If we begin form the process of nothing and assume something comes out of nothing then there is a violation of the basic law. Time is something so how could it ever get going out of a void of nothing?

If on the other hand we assume that there is some eternal necessary aspect of being that has always existed that gets everything else going at some point, that is basically a definition of God.

That's especially true when we consider Tillich's point that confronting our own temporal nature in the face of eternity evokes the sense of the numinous. So that means that if it is true that there has always been something that realization bring out of us the basic sense of God in an experiential fashion and thus offer a justifiable reaosn to beilef.

In fact nothing should ever actually come to be. The only way around this is to assume the suspension of the rules during some process of creation. What better than the author of the rules to suspend them? That implies a sense of mind an purpose in so doing.

(3) The depth of Being

Tillch says if you know being has depth you can't be an atheist. Depth means more to the nature of the case than just the surface level issue of weather or not something exists. So ti's not enough to say "we are here." the fact of it is there's more to being here than just the fact that we are here.

*the universal nature of truth.

*There's the modality of being (necessity and contingency)

* the sense of the numinous that arizes from the contrast between the temporal and the eternal.

(4) the explanatory nature of eternal necessary being (that that there is explanation for vacuum flux from where the first sub atomic particles emerge.



*these are actually the upshots of arguments I've making for years.

*Thomas Reid argument (epistemic judgement)

*temporal beginning argument

*the upshot of the cosmological argument with big bang cosmology