Why does this descend into the argument for the existence of God? If we can not claim a reliable epistemological foundation, how can we start off to anything? Why does this descend into the argument for the existence of God? If we can not claim a reliable epistemological foundation, how can we start off to anything?
You make the statement that the theist has good reason to think his sense are reliable and the atheist has none, and then you ask why this descends into an argument over the existence of God? But, actually, I nowhere argued either that God exists or that he does not.
But I think that I do not need to assume God to have a warranted belief in the basic reliability of my senses. Why? Because they have proven to be reliable, when I feel my hand burning I pull it away as a reflex. But I know that that sense and reflex is reliable for protecting me from burning my hand. When I look outside and see it is pitch dark and reason that it can't be midday, I have found every single time that, in fact it was not midday. Now, I will wander a bit further away from what I know, but I think it is very reasonable to believe that it is at least possible that nature through evolution has endowed me with remarkably reliable senses and basic reasoning abilities.
I don't know that the way that I know that when it is pitch black out it is not midday, I won't call it knowledge, but reasonable belief. To seriously doubt the possibility of such is IMO to take 'brain in a vat', Zhuangzi's butterfly dream and other such skeptical thought experiments all too seriously.
Every single system of truth claims including science have its counterargument. I agree that "I think therefore I am" is fallacious, it puts the cart before the horse. "I am therefore I think" is a better start. After that, how can we go from...I am.
The more abstract the truth claims the more I am likely to doubt them. I think that is a rational principle. By the time you get as abstract as to try and imagine the nature of an eternal uncaused cause, I think it is reaonable to believe that that is exactly the kind of truth claim that may just require an unreachable level of justification. That is why I believe, but do not know that there is no knowledge of the metaphysical. Beliefs about it may be more or less reasonable, some may even be true, but none that I know reach the level of knowledge.
Do I believe there is external world? I guess I do. Can I justify it? In the manner of the most skeptical epistemology, no I cannot. Philosophically, we are all stuck here and wonder whether we can move on. Furthermore, if indeed we can justify it... Is it objectively true? Or is there even such a thing as objectively true? What is wrong with being self-refuting? And all that. Sigh...
I'd say forget the most skeptical epistemologies, they serve little purpose but perhaps to keep us from getting too big for our britches. You can have a very reasonable faith in the power of science to tell us a good great deal about objective, physical reality. Maybe, lets say it is innocent of being nonsense until proven guilty. If you believe that the intelligibility of the universe is proof of God, I don't think that is an unreasonable belief. However, I don't think it rises to the level of probabilty of being true to warrant as knowledge.
That is, OK, because besides objective reality, there is the even more interesting, meaningful but tricky realm of subjective reality. In this realm there may be no knowledge, but that leaves it wide and hospitable to belief and faith.
Here is what I believe. I believe there is a supreme being that is eternal and omnipotent in terms of whatever is possible within its own nature, though I certainly don't think I know its nature well enough to say much about it. I think it probably transcends human understanding and most if not all human categories of thought. Forget about arguing if it is personal or impersonal, good or evil, etc., etc. I think it probably behooves us to attribute positive characteristics too it though. It makes us feel good to think of it as a perfectly good person. Fine, just don't take that all too seriously, because its really hard to defend any of those attributes as belonging to an eternal being.
Some theologians say Deity is purely actual, but it makes more sense to me to think of it as pure potential. Yet, it exists actually, manifest also in the pyhsical universe which is its physical body. "The body is the temple of the holy spirit". According to the mystical traditions in almost every religion, it's mind also exists in the physical universe as the inner most mind or consciousness of every sentient being. Maybe God's mind within time and space is what causes matter to behave according to the laws that our minds are capable of extracting through science. Perhaps it is God's mind that collapses the wave functions necessary to make the universe exist and function. I'm out on a limb for sure, but none of that is particularly meaningful. It is what it is.
This view solves lots of problems for God. There is no problem of evil if you define evil as causing needless suffering on another, because the God of panentheism is one without other. How about the imperfection of the physical universe? Imperfect according to what? It is only imperfect according to some human judgement placed upon it. It is what it is. Perhaps it is not seem perfect to us then because God's omnipotence doesn't include the ability to do anything that we can imagine. We think we can imagine a better universe or better ways to do things, that doesn't mean it is possible. We only see a tiny fraction of all that exists within space and time and we know perhaps nothing about what is or isn't metaphysically possible, yet we think we can judge whether creation is worthy or not of God's bothering with it?
Another problem solved by the panentheist view is the problem that in theism God is the efficient cause of the universe, but creatio ex nihilo violates our idea that nothing comes from nothing. In panentheism God is both the efficient and the material cause.
It's true panentheism is not compatible with many orthodox Christian dogmas such as the idea that all the evil in the world is the result of a single act of disobedience by the first humans. But that is such an absurd notion anyway that I don't see how it has managed to survive this long after the lifting of the death penalty for questioning it.
Deity must be accountable for everything in creation including evil, but as I explained before that doesn't make Deity evil because whatever it is doing it is doing to itself. Do you see ethical problems arising from this? I do also, but not unresolvable ones. I'd like to explain, but I have some ethical duties to attend to right now myself.
Maybe later if you have any interest in my line of wooly mindedness.
