To keep this simple, for the theist the chosen authority is typically a holy book, and for the atheist the chosen authority is typically human reason.

So the question should be, can either holy books or human reason be proven qualified to make meaningful credible statements about the most fundamental nature of everything everywhere (scope of God concept)?

Once such a challenge is applied in an even handed manner to the chosen authorities of all parties, it should soon become apparent that no one on any side can prove the qualifications of their chosen authority for questions of such enormous scale. And then the entire God debate collapses of it's own extremely bloated weight.

Except that it doesn't collapse because everyone on every side has memorized a collection of supposedly clever arguments which they love to recite again and again and again. To a significant degree, we aren't even actually interested in the subject itself, but rather in the process of discussing it.

The God debate is a children's merry-go-round to nowhere, with carnival music and blinking lights which simulate the experience of movement, even though the merry-go-round is going endlessly round and round in the same small circle, for at least 500 years now.

Einstein claimed that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of stupidity. Welcome to the God debate.

Yet upon further examination it is only nature that can be trusted over a competing causation in the supernatural. The concept of eternal life thus remains a distinct possibility; this good news.

Yes, but of course. The fact is known with 100% certainty, by logical proof, as demonstrated by nature and by Revelation too, with all intelligence and all cogent, lucid, and communicative speech.

"It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another -- but of course, it is not likely. " - Wittgenstein, commenting on his own Philosophical Investigations.

Well, you force one more word from me.

One thing I recall pretty clearly from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1951) was that he viewed metaphysics as something that erroneously arose out of our misunderstanding of how "language games" are played -- thereby clearly rejecting the legitimacy of metaphysical science.

If this is your "gift horse," I must politely refuse it.

>"And Wittgenstein did not in his later writings state that his early views were essentially wrong."

I suggest you reread the opening pages of his Philosophical Investigations.

This may not be a total 180 on everything he had written, but it comes closer to it than any other philosopher I have ever seen. It is certainly what I was taught about his writings in grad school at the University of Notre Dame.

Frankly, Wittgenstein is still a moving force behind must of the analytic school that dominates much English speaking philosophy today -- and I have neither the time nor inclination to spend time debating his approach. I am sure you will tell me that I am naive and simply wrong, but we may simply have to agree to disagree.

Wittgenstein may think that all metaphysicians are simply bewitched by their sloppy use of language, but I do not. I can understand why someone coming from a scientific/mathematical background would be highly impressed by his analysis. But I suffered through one grad course in his PI and I don't intend to do it any more.

I realize fully that from the analytic perspective my much beloved metaphysics is viewed as simply a pseudoscience.

On the other hand, our differences are fundamental since I would argue that natural science itself entails many philosophical presuppositions which it assumes and that mathematics addresses formal relations in total abstraction from such realities as efficient, material, and final causes.

So, you may have the last word.

Your crypticisms may be intelligible to you, but that does not mean they are as such to others.

Remember that Wittgenstein is the philosopher who had the honesty to admit in his Philosophical Investigations that everything he wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was essentially wrong.

Maybe he should have written yet another sequel -- posthumously.