I think there is a differentiation between our thinking regarding the definition of "reason" as it is applied in this discussion here. My point in saying that God is reasonable is as a description of a characteristic of God which is evident in Him being that being which orders existence (his nature of course is totally incomprehensible to man, even as we can discern pieces of God's characteristics such as his goodness, infinite cognition, fidelity, reasonability and so forth). Its an observation that God brings things into order according to a divine creative reason, not that the order that exists is the only possible one or that God could only order things in the way he has chosen to do so. Thus applied, I obviously also don't mean reason (in reference to God "being reasonable" in the sense of "conforming to a standard of rationality". Thus why you are of course correct that "God said so" doesn't answer why something is rational, the why is not really the point of my statement, since I am referring to an essential archetype so to speak in the divine nature.
As to your question of "what determined God's nature". I see it as a begging the question somewhat. God by definition is an eternal being (ergo outside of time, which as we know through the laws of physics is bound up with the material and finite universe) and thus has no beginning. His nature therefore isn't caused or determined at all, since God is uncreated. This is why God is "I am what I am". "Divine reasonability" then would simply be a simple truth of the divine nature, which is reflected in the created universe in its order and harmony, and in the essential things we can say are reasonable.
OK. But there must be some reason why God has the nature he does rather than an alternative nature. If you accept the principle of sufficient reason, as I take most theists do, this must follow. The difference between God's nature and other natures is that the reason for God's having his nature is found in God's nature itself and not in something else (this is why God alone is a necessary being and uncreated). What I'm saying is that this seems to me a non-explanation. If your explanation of why the law of excluded middle holds is that it conforms with God's nature, and your explanation of why God's nature is the way it is is that it just is (or that God's nature is incomprehensible), then you haven't really explained why the law of excluded middle holds; at best you've just pushed the inexplicability back a stage. So this seems to me ultimately to come down to the same thing as the atheist's claim that the law of excluded middle just holds because it does. You've inserted God into the explanatory chain, but he's really just a sort of place-holder, because overall the explanation peters out in just the same way.
I'm not so sure where you objection lies to be honest, since all I am saying that if God is God than everything ultimately must come from Him (since God by definition is the uncreated being who "inhabits eternity": isaiah 57:15.)
Yes, but surely this means that all
things come from him - i.e. the created universe and all its contents. It's a big stretch to say that not only
things but also
abstract principles derive from God; I'm sure the biblical authors would all have agreed on the former but I doubt very much that any of them had the latter in mind. It's one thing to say that God created the physical universe, all the stars and planets, and every living thing, or at least the things that would develop into them; quite another to say that he created (or emanated, if you're attributing them to his nature rather than his will) the laws of logic.
If certain things are necessary, than something in the very essential being of God must lead God in the application of his will to construct things in a certain way. That isn't to say of course that the way the universe has been created is the only possible way it could be created. It also of course doesn't tell you anything different from the "just is' atheist explanation regarding the necessity of "necessary truths"...
OK, with you here.
save that the theist one avoids the absurdity of the atheist claim that the universe sprung forth spontaneously from nothing (noting that we know the universe had a beginning, and considering that no known law of physics provides a mechanism for the universe to cyclically re-big-bang itself [not mentioning that there isn't enough mass in the universe as far as we know to precipitate a big crunch anyway])
..but this seems to me to be heading off on a completely different direction. You're talking here about the physical universe rather than about necessary truths. The claim that atheism is incoherent because it can't explain the origins of the universe, whereas theism can, is a quite different claim from what we're talking about.
On this claim, though, I think you're wrong to say that we know the universe has a beginning; it would be more accurate to say that we know that the observable universe has a beginning. Assuming that the Big Bang account of the origins of the universe is correct, we don't know whether there were events before the Big Bang (perhaps operating under different physical laws); we also don't know if there are other regions of the universe quite separated from everything that derives from the Big Bang, and again perhaps operating under different physical laws; and we don't know whether there are other physical universes entirely, perhaps some of which existed at earlier times.
Even if the universe did have a beginning, you can't assume that it's absurd to say that it came out of nothing. It might seem counter-intuitive, but then everything physicists tell us about the structure of the universe and particularly the very early universe is counter-intuitive. We simply don't know whether universes are the kind of thing to need a cause, and appealing to the observation that all the things we see around us seem to have causes won't prove that they are, because universes are (or at least could be) very different sorts of things from their contents.
Thus why I say "unprincipled exception". The atheist here accepts that if his position is true there is no meaning or purpose in the cosmic sense, making every action or "thing' simple fact with no essential value, meaning or teleological end. Yet he then goes along with a delusion that essential morality exists and his existence has meaning and a teleological purpose "because we give it to ourselves", conveniently ignoring the reality that whatever meaning he gives to himself only exists in his mind and is pure opinion and thus cannot be essentially true at all.
Ah, but you're assuming here that value has to be objective to be true. If I consider my life to be meaningful and valuable, that means only that I value it. And the fact that I value it is an objective fact even if the evaluation is only in my head. Now you're saying that this doesn't count as value, because you're assuming that the value itself (rather than the act of evaluation) must be an objective fact. But that's just an assumption. The atheist will reject that assumption. You may disagree with this rejection, but there's nothing absurd about it, and there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory about the atheist's view (even if it's false).
If his existence is cosmically meaningless, than any "meaning" he ascribes to himself is equally meaningless in the broad scope of existence in turn. All he can really do anyway is prop up his morale as his life slowly whittles away with such vanities as "self-actualisation" and "participation in the workforce" seeing as if his atheism was true its oblivion for him upon his inevitable death.
Atheism doesn't necessarily entail no life after death - McTaggart is the most well-known example of a philosopher who denied the existence of God but was an idealist and believed in the immortality of the soul. But by and large you're probably right here. Of course the atheist will say (and I will agree) that the picture isn't really as bleak as you suggest, but then this is a matter of one's own values, so it's hard to debate about it.
I'd say this is just another unprincipled exception, of the kind that reeks of clasping at straws to explain what he knows to be true regarding acts of moral agency without acknowledging an origin in the divine creator. With maths and logic at least he can appeal to the fact that they are observable universally (1+1 always equals 2. The laws of maths are inalterable), with morality however he can point to no such universality in nature or indeed in many aspects amongst men (and he can't say they are fallen since he denies sin ofc), and thus to say morality is necessary (ignoring for now that one mans good is another's evil) as a brute fact (incontingent on a divine plan for humanity, and apart from the nature of the divine being [with sin being that which leads one away from said divinity]) would be to ascribe some particular character to mankind that doesn't exists with any other animal almost as if he believed man had a soul.
I don't think it's about ascribing properties to
mankind. The atheist believer in necessary moral facts would be more likely, I think, to appeal to conscience or to the innate moral sense that eighteenth-century philosophers placed so much faith in. How do we know that murder is immoral? Because we
just know it. Of course some people disagree, but these people are psychopaths. Now I agree with you that this is ultimately a rather weak explanation and a weak argument. How do we know that the common belief in the immorality of murder is actually knowledge and not just a widespread delusion? But perhaps the same thing can be said to the theist: you can't know that your belief that God reliably informs you about what's moral or immoral is actually true either. All you can do is trust that you're right in thinking that he seems to do so. So too the believer in the moral sense can trust that his moral sense is steering him aright. A bit feeble, yes, but it's not an inconsistent position.
How could he say murder is immoral for example, when in nature it is oft evident in the order of things as part of the survival of the fittest where one animal of the same species kills another be it for control of the group or due to pure competition? How could he say charity is a universal virtue when biological imperative would compel him to look after his own progeny and restrict resources to himself and his own as do most other animals, and when at a higher level he cannot ascribe essential worth to human beings since his atheism (as you agreed) precludes giving humans cosmic significance?
Morality isn't about (natural) facts, it's about values. The fact (supposing it is a fact) that charity runs counter to our biological imperatives is neither here nor there in considering whether charity is morally right or wrong, because whether it's morally right or wrong is a different sort of fact about it. So, at least, I think most ethicists would say.
As for essential worth, that too is distinct from cosmic significance. In the grand scheme of things humans have no particular significance, but it doesn't follow from this that they lack worth, at least to themselves. Now you can say that murder is wrong because it harms another person and robs them of their self-value, or something like that. You don't have to appeal to cosmic significance for this. No doubt you'll say that this is too weak and thin a concept to support the claim that murder is objectively wrong. But you're coming at it from a different angle and making assumptions that the atheist won't grant, namely that for something to have moral significance there must be some more objective and/or cosmic value that it's affecting. (Or something like that.) The question then is what support you can give to that kind of principle. But it doesn't seem to me that there's anything obviously incoherent about rejecting it.
Even if you reject all of this, consider this possibility: we're still talking here about moral truths being founded on other facts, such as the value of human beings or something like that. But one could coherently assert that there are necessary moral truths that are not founded on anything. It could simply be the case that, necessarily, murder is wrong, even though there's no particular value to human beings at all, either objective or subjective. Now that certainly seems pretty weird but it's not inconsistent. If you believe in moral facts at all, you're believing in something that many people think pretty weird in the first place (philosophers used to object to moral objectivism on the basis that supposed moral facts are too "queer" to accept, but for some reason they don't put it like that any more). One might say that if you're going to accept moral facts at all you might as well accept that they're necessarily true and have nothing to do with human value, but just are; this isn't making the position much weirder.
And it's not inconsistent with the atheist's denial of God, because the atheist is saying that God and morality aren't necessarily connected. If you think that one can believe in moral facts
only if you believe in God, because God is the only possible source of them, then certainly it would be a contradiction - but that's precisely what the atheist is denying. On this view, moral facts are just brute facts that aren't connected with God, with value, with purpose, or any of the other nice fluffy things that theists believe in. Again, this may be a weird view, or an unpalatable one, or an arbitrary one, but I don't think it's an incoherent one.
It just doesn't seem to me that saying there is necessary morality is intellectually honest from the atheist position, and indeed it really just looks to me like a cover for the emptiness of atheism as a philosophical mode of ordering ones life. (which is empirically observable btw in the fact that religious people are generally psychologically better off compared to their atheist counterparts[atheism also seems to be over-represented amongst those on the autism spectrum as well, although I digress])
Well, I don't know of any evidence that that's the case; even if it is, it might be that psychologically healthier people tend to become religious rather than that being religious tends to make you psychologically healthier (or that they tend to follow from some other common cause). But as you say, that's a digression.
None whatsoever. Creationism (not of course in the sense that God created the universe, but in that God created the universe in seven terrestrial days) was rejected as far back as St Augustine (who interpreted the creation narrative as a categorisation of didactic reasoning's within in a singular act of creation) and has only become prominent fairly recently, with the theological movements origin being in protestant circles.
This is true so far as it goes, but I would be wary of placing too much emphasis on it. Although non-literal accounts of the Genesis creation story were around at least since the time of Philo - i.e. before Christianity itself began - it doesn't follow that they were the majority view, even with the imprimatur of Augustine. I think that the vast majority of Christians in antiquity and the Middle Ages would have assumed that the Genesis account was literally true (even if it
also had allegorical or other spiritual meanings). After all, why wouldn't they? They had no alternative account of how the world was created, and no alternative to the notion of creation in the first place other than Aristotelian eternalism.
I would say that the real difference between early and medieval Christianity and modern Protestant creationism isn't that the latter take Genesis literally and the former didn't; it's that the latter take Genesis literally
in the face of the vast amount of evidence that it's not literally true whereas the most of the former took it literally
in the absence of such contradictory evidence.
but thats how I read both the science and Genesis. 
