I think the official term is mood swing. The more guilty one feels about thinking spiritually for “dessert”, the more one resolves to think rationally for “the next meal’s main course”.

BTW those heuristics like “compression” (is that a term that philosophers of science use now, or just your coinage?) that we have developed because of their practical helpfulness in everyday explaining (i.e., from foundational givens like laws into things like what stars act like) shouldn’t be expected to have the same applicability outside their region of known usefulness.

It’s an explanation if it provides compression. That is, if you can show that many quantities can be explained by a few, then you’ve provided an explanation for the value those many quantities take by highlighting relationships between them.

As for why there must always be an explanation, this is simply because if an unexplainable entity is ever proposed, then it cannot be an explanation for anything, because by its unexplainable nature it could potentially explain anything. This unrestricted quality prevents it from offering the compression required for an explanation.

P.S. Wasn’t going to comment further until I saw #83, but as long as I am here … thanks to Colin and Electric Dragon for the news about Wilson’s Theorem. Colin’s initial comment was slightly remiss in recollection, as ED pointed out, but still sufficed to let me find Wilson’s Theorem in my google search. (I guess I will have to stop calling it “JimV’s Theorem”.) My proof is different and less direct than the one I found from the search, but contains a number of other terms which are also only divisible by primes – as I said, I was looking for something else and stumbled on it more or less by accident, which made me wonder how much mathematical progress is accidental and hence explicitly materialistic in origin.

(As self-judge, I rule my comment OT, and sentence myself to one week without further blog commenting.)

because if something operates or is, there must be a way to describe how it operates, why it is.

Actually, a religious realist (that is, someone who believes in “God, but not a book”) can be more attuned to this requirement than an atheist, because he admits to having a tendency to neglect it.

Okay, that’s fine. But that just begs the question as to why these laws. As a result, it still doesn’t explain anything.

Otis,

No, actually, attempting to identify deficiencies of materialism and attempting to use a god as an explanation are closely intertwined. Using a god is just one possible way of trying to get around materialism. But it’s a logically unsound thing to do: materialism is simply an inevitable consequence of existence. Why do I say this?

I say this because I define materialism as this: materialism is the refusal to resort to any explanations that require hypothetical entities that cannot be understood by their very definition. That is to say, even if we were to make a thought experiment to build the most elaborate, powerful instruments we could dream up in our wildest imaginations, these non-materialistic hypothetical entities would still elude understanding (caveat: by understanding here I don’t mean intuitive understanding, but simply the ability to describe how/why the thing in question works or is the way it is).

So, why is this nonsense? It’s nonsense simply because if something operates or is, there must be a way to describe how it operates, why it is. The absolute best argument you can offer against this is that there are some aspects of the natural world that we do not understand (that’s the argument you have put forward, in fact). But simply not knowing certain facts does in no way indicate that we should give up by referencing an illogical explanation that cannot itself ever be explained, even in principle.

As for the Bible, suffice it to say that that text is so absurdly wrong on so many levels that it just boggles my mind that anybody thinks it offers any level of reliability.

P.S. You may have a first cause objection to my claim that the only possible universe is a fully-materialistic one. This objection fails because one needs only have a fundamental law that explains itself to get around the problem of an uncaused fundamental cause.