Pillars of Creation Destroyed

anthemaniac writes with news about the Pillars of Creation, an iconic structure in the Eagle Nebula some 7,000 light-years distant. The Hubble Space Telescope's image of this structure is one of the most widely recognized astronomy images ever captured. Now a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that the pillars probably toppled 6,000 years ago. From the article: "Astronomers think [a] supernova's shock wave knocked the pillars down about 6,000 years ago. But because light from that region of the sky takes 7,000 years to reach us, the majestic pillars will appear intact to observers on Earth for another 1,000 years or so.'"

Comments

Philosophy is not faith

[Pfhorrest]

A philosophical position is not the same thing as an article of faith. While you could argue that a given philosophical position is not "proven", inasmuch as you (or perhaps someone besides yourself) may not be convinced by the arguments in it's favor, others may find the argument absolutely convincing such that any disagreement with it seems necessarily irrational.

I wouldn't call myself an atheist exactly (I'm a sort of pantheist), but I'm certainly a naturalist, so lets look at that first "article of faith" you listed:

1) that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter)

I assume by "natural" or "material" phenomena, you (or they) mean observable phenomena, as in 'observable in principle'; you could by some means, perhaps not *yet* technologically possible, empirically tell whether or not that phenomena in fact occurred. That is, there is some observation you could make, some experiment you could do, that perhaps we are presently unable to do due to practical limits, which would tell you whether the sentence describing that phenomenon was true.

Given that that is what is meant by that, it seems patently absurd to conclude that anything non-natural exists (which is the same thing as to say that there are unknowable truths), on the basis that:

(A) Conceivability is possibility (and vice versa). Something is logically possible if and only if it could be conceived of; if you couldn't even conceive of what it would be for something to be the case, then you clearly have no idea what it even is that is in question, and so that non-idea cannot possibly be true.

(B) One can only conceive what one could, hypothetically, perceive. Consider someone asks you to conceive of "a foo upon a fweep". You have some rough notion of something placed on something else, but in order to conceive of these things, you have to ask "what is a foo?" and "what is a fweep?", and the descriptions which follow in response must ultimately cache out in some sort of perceptual terms (it looks like this, it sounds like this, it feels like this, etc). So to conceive of something, you must understand what it woud be to perceive it; thus, you could only conceive what you could (if such a thing existed) perceive. (As an aside, this does not mean that you must undertake the act of consciously imagining something every time you are asked to conceive of it; it is merely enough to note that "yes, that is a sort of perception I could have; now what about it?")

From A and B, it deductively follows that the only things logically possible are things which are perceivable (a.k.a. observable); so if "natural" or "material" phenomena are understood to be just such observable phenomena, as it seems they are, then it deductively follows that only natural/material phenomena are logically possible. From there, the atheist can perhaps derive his other two items of doctrine, but my point here is not to defend atheism; it is to defend philosophy from the accusation that it is mere baseless comparison of different articles of faith.

Now... maybe you can find some flaw in my argument there. Maybe my premises A and B are false somehow, and I've overlooked something. Maybe my understanding of "natural" or "material" phenomena is not correct, and those terms rightly denote something other than what I take them to. Maybe you can't find any flaws but you just don't buy it anyway. The point is, there is good, some (like I) would say irrefutable evidence to support such a position. I certainly consider such a thing quite easily proven; I have just done so. So to accept naturalism is hardly an article of faith; and it seems that something like atheism - or at least, something quite unlike the supernaturalist theism common to most modern major religions - logically follows from such a position. So the atheist (of a certain variety at least) has good grounds by which to claim that his position is not one of faith.

Now, there are some logical arguments for the existence of God as well, which I'm sure you're aware of; the ontol