Plato, Kant, Thomas, Augustine, and Jesus all posited a (post) hellenic worldview whereby behind everything in the physical world, there existed ideas, the non-material, the noumenal, God. Something Other, something not like what we see. From our life experience and our own human being/existence, we know that Being must exist.
Plato posited that there was a realm of the Forms whereby every essence existed in a non-material state. This means that when I use the word "is", the concept is a universal one that people can actually understand. The fact that no one can define "Being" is proof that we use in every language concepts that are beyond our explanation.
Crazily enough one deity is rumored to have said "I am who I am" - interpretted by many as "I am Being", and that for every human being, it is possible to say of this deity "in Him we live and move and breathe and have our being".
If Being (invisible world) is the whiteboard, Becoming (visible material world) is the writing on it. Without Being, Nietzsche rightly said, we can only speak in verbs. There are no nouns. You are not essentially anything, you are an accidental cluster of atoms constantly in flux until you die.... oh, and by the way. You weren't caused.... figure that out.
Accepting that all of existence and your own personal life does not follow logic (because logic necessitates causation which would require an existant non-material 'spiritual' entity to have created time and matter), accepting such a worldview would mean that everything is meaningless, there is no truth, there can be no true emotion between people. There can only be chemistry and biology and physics, and again remember none of those sciences can follow any pattern as this would imply logic or meaning. That is one alternative. It's as I've said objectively illogical (as it would be since logic doesn't exist). It's rather like a paranoid person who says all the world is conspiring against them, and then another person trying to explain to them that this is not true. The more the rational person explains, the more the paranoid person believes they are vindicated. (I stole that one from Chesterton).
For the rest of humanity, that isn't ready to kiss away Love, Meaning, Human Rights, and Reason, there exists another possibility in the invisible world. That's personally why I'd rather be a Platonist, or an Idealist, or an Aristotelian, or a Thomist, or a Jew, or a Deist, or a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Morman, or a worshipper of the Flying Spagetti Monster (provided he was immaterial) than be a materialist.
For the philosopher, Materialism is a joke, the phrase "the material world is the only reality" disproves materialism (language implies reason, which implies non-material principles, more "invisible" reality). Similarly a "God's eye view" of the world that claims God doesn't exist is impossible, as it would be a universal statement in a universe without universal truth! (oft repeated but true nonetheless).
Thus one can say "I don't think the (realm of the Forms/God/Noumenal/Ideal) exists" but the statement must be understood as an illogical claim, based on either emotion or unjustified opinion.
Humanities: 1 , Material Sciences: 0
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Before I get to writing anything, let me tell you that I didn't read the whole thing. I only read the first couple paragraphs 'cause the rest was hard to wrap my head around. BUT today in class our teacher described the digital art world as having an interface and having a database. I took it as a metaphor for life and words. Interface is the image, what we see. Database is the information behind it. So I think I get it now. We have the objects, and we have the meaning behind it, which is separate. But the thing I don't see is how this would prove the existence of God. All I see is the existence of an "invisible world".
We should talk about it sometime.
The argument from the non-material causation of the material world gets you a God. Not the Christian God, but a God. An immaterial eternal creative spirit.
It's difficult to sum up here, but the Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Leibniz) all used reason to prove the attributes of God. In the end you get to something between Deism and Theism. This is "negative theology" / the via negativa. We know by reason alone what God is, by knowing what he/she/it isn't.
THEN we begin with positive theology, where we examine things like Revelation (Bible v. Qu'ran v. Vedas, etc).
But all this was simply to show that logically "something" beyond us must exist by logical necessity. That an infinite spiritual deity holds everything together and is rather like a mind or the rules of logic. As Lewis said 'not so much that we see it, but that by it, we are able to see everything else'
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