Benjamin Cain
2 min readApr 6, 2021

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I'm not sure that, by criticizing the concept of infinity and so forth, you're focusing on the heart of this article. The article is more sociological and analytical than metaphysical.

The point I'm driving at is that when theism is watered down to being equivalent to epistemic foundationalism, atheism becomes trivially impossible unless the atheist argues for antifoundationalism. God would be equivalent to the absolute core of reality the knowledge of which would end all further explanation. Antifoundationalism entails the endlessness of explanation (even if explanations end up being mere stories as a consequence, as in postmodernism).

I then show that the instrumental aspect of science is consistent with antifoundationalism, at the cost of making science diabolical or Luciferian, in terms of its technological impact on nature. I then briefly go through some metaphysical possibilities to complement the endlessness of scientific explanation.

You want to say these absolute concepts (nothingness, eternity, pure being, etc) are meaningless or contrary to our experience anyway. I agree that they make for pseudo-explanations in so far as science provides the standard. But they may serve a social function in reminding us that our cognitive powers are limited. These absolute concepts would be like drapes we lay across that which is alien and beyond our ken. They're placeholders that imply something like cosmicism, mysterianism, or some type of mysticism.

The issue here is the old problem of the One and the Many. The more you focus on either of them, the harder it is to include and to make sense of the other. Monists, for example, have difficulty explaining change, just as cosmologists search for an explanation of the breaking of the initial "symmetry" before the Big Bang, or just as Gnostics tried to explain why the pleroma would have "fallen." (or how evil entered a world created by a benevolent all-powerful God).

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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