Who says I’m talking strictly about the cosmological argument? The article’s about Flynn’s “best argument” for theism, which is that theism makes for a better overall explanation of things than naturalism.
You’re the one that doesn’t understand the PSR. The principle is epistemological since it’s about reason. It’s right there in the name of the principle, as is its main content. No, the principle isn’t that nothing comes from nothing. It’s that everything has a sufficient reason/cause for its existence. And what does “reason” mean? Or what is it that would discern a thing’s cause? You guessed it: our critical faculties.
As Leibniz says in the Monadology, this is one of two principles that ground "our reasonings."
And if it’s someone else’s critical faculties that are at issue, such as God’s, and we can’t hope to understand what that higher intelligence understands, then the PSR becomes a vacuous appeal to mystery that’s like my appeal to snarglefargle. Leibniz adds that "these reasons usually cannot be known by us," but he likely means there that we're only practically unable to determine the exact reasons for most things, not that the reasons are usually unintelligible to us.
Take your statement that “things which exist have a cause of their existence.” Does God exist and does he have a cause, or is he an exception to that principle? You say naturalists should be devastated by their lack of answers to the ultimate question of where the universe came from. Why wouldn’t theists be just as devastated by their lack of understanding of where God came from?
The reason you feel entitled to mock naturalism is that you’re dealing only with a strawman, like your strawman of my article, which misconstrues it as a botched response to the cosmological argument.
But why don’t we debate classical theism vs naturalism properly? You can email me at the address in my Medium profile, we can write some organized back-and-forth on those topics over email, and I’d be happy to post the exchange on my Medium page. I’d be interested only in a substantive dialogue/debate, without the distractions of personal attacks.
