God’s existence is supposed to be inexplicable or beyond our comprehension, and he’s supposed to have created the universe by a miracle. So that’s where theistic explanations end. An eternal, infinite agent who’s also the Supreme Being in relation to everything else in the universe is hardly an “agent” in the same sense as the kind we’re familiar with. The agency isn’t the problem. The identification of the First Cause as a living, intelligent agent, and the explicit appeal to miracles are the problems.
If you don’t think God is an inexplicable brute fact, then why does God exist at all? Why does he exist as he does? What explains why there’s a God rather than nothing? You can’t appeal to anything besides God to explain God, so that would seem to make him an inexplicable brute fact.
I don’t think it’s a logical consequence of methodological naturalism that scientific explanations will eventually run into inexplicable brute facts. I pointed out that I argue otherwise in “Atheism and the Endlessness of Explanation.” It depends on the objective nature of reality, of course, on whether there are infinite levels of reality, but it depends also on the nature of science. Is science a neutral, passive endeavour or does it have a pragmatic agenda that wouldn’t settle for inexplicable brute facts?
You’re wanting to say that science necessarily ends in positing inexplicable brute facts (virtual miracles), so that the naturalist has no reason to reject theism when theism does the same. On the contrary, science does the opposite: it explains X by positing Y, so it answers one question by raising another. To naturalize something is precisely to reduce one thing to something else, which shows that the explanandum isn’t an inexplicable brute fact. Then the scientist must do the same for the explanans, turning it into an explanandum by positing another explanans.
Far from implying that there’s a brute level in nature, the naturalist treats the universe as having infinite levels to be explained and to do the explaining. That’s why critics rejected Lawrence Krauss’s claim to have scientifically explained how something came from nothing. The “nothing” he posited wasn’t really nothing but another layer of contingent things.
The constants wouldn’t be “derived from theory.” The theory would be adequate to the objective relation between the constants and some explanans, to something that explains why they’re as they are. Naturalizing the constants would be explaining why there’s no further mystery about them. But of course, the scientists would only be setting themselves the new task of having to naturalize the conditions that led to the constants, and so on and so on forever.
Again, the underlying question here is whether this is all there is to explanation or whether the human mind requires a non-naturalistic, absolute kind of answer that doesn’t just posit more finite, contingent levels of things. The universality of religion suggests we wouldn’t settle for an infinite series of contingent, explicable things.
The leap from ignorance is the positing of an intelligent designer to account for the constants when we don’t know for certain that those are the constants, because that level of physics is unfinished. That’s the very definition of a God of the gaps argument. The gap is between Einsteinian and quantum physics.
I engaged in no ad hominem. The fallacious personal attack is when someone lays weight in an argument on a mere irrelevant personal attack. Instead of doing that, I explained where I see problems in your argument. And I’ve done so again in this comment.
Moreover, you’re the one who brought up “ignorance” in your earlier comment when you said that the naturalist appeals to “unknown physics,” to “promissory naturalism,” and thus “to ignorance to reject knowledge. It appeals to a future physics to reject our best current knowledge.” I was just correcting that allegation of yours. If there’s a God of the gaps argument here, it’s the theist who’s appealing to the current ignorance in physics.
Instead of having to appeal to superior future physics, the naturalist can just confess that the matter of the constants is currently mysterious due to certain unknowns at that level of science. Instead of wishing the mystery away, by appealing to a functional miracle (to God or to future physics), the naturalist can live with the mystery, the uncertainty, and the doubt (while cheering on scientists in their attempt to explain these things).
