Thinking further on my previous post which was just a quote from Schaeffer's True Spirituality:
Schaeffer's driving us back to a universe that is at root personal indicates that final questions are of 'the personal' and not of material.
So discussion of origins, for instance, with all that such discussions suggest for 'first philosohpy' and how we make an ontological structure of our world (that is our conceptualisation of the world...the world in our head) comes up as either a question that is finally personal; that is, related to God and thus the only connection we have in these terms is the creation account in Genesis 1, and its corollaries throughout the Bible, or is finally material, when, to my mind, the question recurses upon itself and becomes its own annhialator.
If ultimate questions are finally material, then there is no real ultimacy to them, as the question becomes merely an arrangement of material and has no meaning beyond that arrangement.
This then puts Satre's first question into an interesting light. I think it was Satre, who proposed that the basic philosophical question is "why is there something, rather than nothing?"
From a materialist perspective the question is strange. It seems to ask about reasons, which are an attribute of personal volition, rather than causes in a strick mechanistic causal sense. If it is mere the latter, then the question is highly uninteresting, becuase it will just give us matter 'all the way back' and so grind to a halt in a tiresome regress. That is, it will tell us nothing more than we (think we) know now: that material is all we've got! We end up where we start out.
However, if it is a question of reasons, then it is interesting. Only, how can it be answered if it is denied that the universe is finally personal?
A couple of articles that I think overlap:
Terry Mortenson on philosphical naturalism and Normal Geisler on beware of philosophy
