Naturalistic Accounts

We pray because we believe the Divine Will recommends and demands it. The possibility for a naturalistic account of the psychological benefits of prayer is not a problem for us; for although we tend to speak of prayer in terms of the divine--e.g. that God wants us to pray, that God communicates to us in prayer--we do so because such and only such is our belief, not because it is also our belief that a complete knowledge of the human mind would reveal some miraculous subversion of the natural order during prayer.

Consider analogously our tendency to speak of the commandments in terms of Divine Will, even though we do not believe we obtain the knowledge of particular commandments by a miraculous infusion. On the contrary, the prohibition of murder for example is the clearest case of natural law. Hence naturalistic accounts of the genesis of this and other moral norms are not problematic by their possibility, and by their actuality can even be, while not the whole truth, at least wholly true, in so far as they are properly naturalistic. That is, so long as they remain positively natural and not negatively supernatural.

Cosm

The point of the cosmological proof is not to show that a personal deity exists, but merely to show that at least one thing exists that is not natural. An atheist may even grasp the validity of this proof but fail to grasp the full import of this supernatural unknowability. He readily grants that we will never know the "cause" of the big bang, but he nevertheless imagines that this cause is still simply on the order of (similar to) the objects of science, and he is deluded in this way because he can explain its unknowability in physical terms i.e. the loss of information at a singularity. But to be deluded in this way is to fail to recognize that the cosmological proof performed this exact same function with mere medieval science--explaining the unknowability of the root cause of existence simply from the readily available facts of the physical world, the natural facts of cause and effect. It is also to fail to understand that human knowledge of the natural world is utterly dependent on causation, and where the rules of causation can be shown not to apply, therein the human intellect is brought to its knees before a terrible unsoundable mystery.

The cosmological proof is a proof in the truest sense of the word--it is not an argument. Rather it is a distillation of an argument to its clearest and most rigid essentials. The argument it distills is the same one that most with any philisophical inclination will tend to use to explain and justify their belief in God--starting with something like "I cannot explain my own existence," or "I know I did not create myself," and continuing with the observation that objective scientific knowledge does nothing to satisfy one's innermost desire to explain one's own existence because one's own existence is so radically unlike any sort of objective existence that may fall under the scope of science. Here, the careful will be sure to note that it is not merely "a psychological hole" that begs to be filled blindly, but rather an intellectually honest demand that there should be an explanation for this mystery that cannot be scientifically objective because the mystery cannot even be framed in scientifically objective terms--and yet it most certainly remains. Furthermore, for those truly honest withemselves, there is no psychological comfort whatsoever to be found in the mere blind acceptance of a God whom others claim to fill the missing knowledge of their origination. We really need to know--for sure--the relation between the cause of our existence and our existence. Is it on our side? Can we sympathize with it? Does it sympathize with us??