Most believers are not committed to honest dialogue; they're too emotionally grounded in their belief system.

Our perception and inquiry is limited, as is our language.  We filter a whole lot out just to make sense of things.  A favorite quote:

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.        --Wittgenstein

Oh, Mt. Doom is located just outside Atlanta. Sherman was part of the fellowship. I always argue from Frodo

Only if we are making the same mistake of using words that are not defined properly.

Even something like "reason" or "meaning" can refer to wildly different concepts, and it's a mistake to allow theists, or anyone else, to interchange them at will.

Here's another mistake.  There is a reason.  You don't know it.   It's a very big difference.  "God did it" is a convoluted way of saying, "I have no idea how it happened, so I made up a word that describes my complete ignorance."

Atheists, by and large, are just smart enough to avoid the trap of making up things when they are ignorant.

"Meaning" assumes intelligence, and therefore begs the question.

"Reason" implies a cause, which may or may not involve intellect.  Cause and effect are intrinsically tied to time, which is intrinsically tied to space, and matter/energy.  We don't know the "cause" of this interconnectedness, but that doesn't mean there isn't a perfectly good reason for it.  That "cause" also has a perfectly good reason for being what it is.

If you mean to say there is an endless string of questions to be asked, and no possible way to answer all of them, then you are correct.  If, at any point, someone tries to insert an "answer" without following the proper chain of empirical discovery, you are entirely correct in labeling that answer a glossy coating for ignorance.

The danger in that is stopping the search for answers. If things just are the how or even the real answer becomes less important.

Just be honest.  At some point the correct answer is "I don't know" and there's nothing wrong with that, it doesn't mean god did it, it just means we need to keep thinking about it and gathering evidence.  Progress is good!

 In answer to this question though, I would say "I don't know.  However, as a counter question, why would there be nothing rather than something?  By what authority do you decree that something is less likely than nothing?"

I was trying to get you to recognize the double definition in this.  When a theist says, "a reason for existence," they mean a purpose.  Purpose and reason are different.

There is a reason that the universe exists.  There is no reason to assume a purpose.  A theist must first demonstrate intelligent design (sic!) before they can assert that there needs to be a purpose.

As for the reason, there's a reason there was um... what's it called... negative vacuum fluctuation.  Whatever that reason was, there was a reason for that to have happened.  No matter how far back we can ever go, there will be something before that, and the answer will always be, "I don't know."  If you happen to be a cosmologist, your answer will be, "I don't know.  I'm working on it, ok?"

Am I the only one who thinks it is rather arrogant for humans (especially theists) to expect answers for everything?

Why must everything be answered in a lifetime? It is a good thing to be inquisitive but to EXPECT answers leads to roads where people begin answer tough queries with easy answers (god did it). That is not how desperate we should be, we should be more willing to say, "I don't know, but I would love to try to find out". 

 For the first part:  Not really.  Our thirst for knowledge is a gift that has gotten us where we are today.

My point is that most people here expect there to be answers for everything - not that we will know them, but that they exist somewhere.  I think that sometimes there is no real answer, but that is not the prevailing idea here. 

How could you explain how/why the whole universe is, when the universe is all there is? 

Put simply, you believe there is reason for everything, I disagree.  However, assuming you are correct, what is the reason there is a reason for everything?

Hitting the brick wall in a discussion with a theist brings out the best and the worst on an even basis.

Answering "I don't know. Let's find out together." works both ways.

One person will look for an answer and another will pray for it.

Guess which one has a better chance of finding it? 

I was thinking of the questions

"Why is there gravity?" or "Why is the sky blue?"

not in the scientific sense (natural processes that explain the observation), but a philosophical sense where the question asks for reasons (motivation / intention) behind the natural phenomenon.

This is very similar to the discussion I was having recently where a theist was trying desparately to make language a justification for god. Because a thing can be shown to exist conceptually, he argued, then the conceptual becomes a justification for the empirical.

It's crap, of course.

The conceptual is just that -- bits of language forming abstracts in our heads that are really little more than the flow of electrons.

Why are there no married bachelors? Because that's the way we conceptualize "married" and "bachelor." There is no further justification needed, because both of these things are just symbols through which we interpret reality.

"Why does gravity exist?" seems really straight forward, but it's much more complicated than that. Everything in the physical universe, be it matter or energy, or time-space, is dependent in a natural way on something else, which shapes it into what it is. In the end, it's possible that the whole thing is a giant circle -- everything is because everything else is. While this may not seem to answer the question of "why," it's not because the answer is inadequate, but rather that the abstracts in the mind of the questioner don't conform to a meaningful reality.

Another, bass-ackwards way of looking at it is this: You can say, "It is the way it is because it's not some other way."

Or, "If it were another way, it wouldn't be the way it is."

These may seem simple, but philosophically, axioms "are" simply because they cannot "be" anything else.

[edit:]A=A. Why? Because asking the question forces the answer. proves the answer.

Retortion.

Crike. I'm leaving my edits up so you can see how tricky language is. "Proves" is the wrong word, too, because that implies deduction, and axioms are not deduction. They are before deduction.

The point is that you can ask "why" an axiom is all day long, and we can go through every logical facet of existence, and in the end, what it's going to come down to is that axioms "just are."

It's not the same as a theist saying god "just is." Even though the words are the same, the concepts behind them are vastly different. Why is A=A? Because there is no alternative. Why? Because all other alternatives are conceptually incoherent. Why? Because A=A is the only way concepts could exist. Why? (ad nauseum)

God, on the other hand, is not an axiom. It is purported to be an external reality which must, then, be dependent on other external realities to qualify as a reality. As such, it falls above the level of axiom and must be defended. Why? Because we can demonstrate that it cannot be defended through retortion. Why is that the way it is? Because only axioms can be defended through retortion. Why? Because if it were another way, it would be different.

You see what I'm doing?

All of these questions are not really the questions you think they are. You exist in a world where everything is linear. Where effect follows cause. You cannot see or feel or touch that which is beyond your observation, and your observation is linear. Nevertheless, reality is not linear in every sense. What you perceive is not the way things really are. Your body is mostly nothing. You are overwhelmingly non-existent. The "meaning" of your existence is dependent on your perspective -- your concept. This concept only exists because of other concepts, which are not dependent on your recognition.

And yet, the things you perceive are real. You do exist. The table is solid. There is a spoon.

But, the universe is simply nothing, interspersed with things we call subatomic particles (simply because we must call them something), and from the correct perspective, there is nothing else.

But, there is no spoon.

*****

Ok, that's enough of that. What I'm trying to show you is that you can go in philosophical circles until you die of boredom, and you won't get "answers" to your "questions" because your questions are symbols for things that don't represent reality, except through the very limited perception that allowed their formation.

Realization that naturalism is simply the conceptual analysis of the level of existence that we perceive goes a long way towards understanding that unanswerable questions are simply broken concepts, much in the way that the word "supernatural" is broken. The question itself is incoherent because its meaning is locked in a particular symbol that cannot address what it cannot be used to represent.

Hamby, I appreciate you for sticking with me - I really do. Again, I'm going to break it down to the very basics.

1. Everything in the universe is based on a few basic variables.

2. The existance of these variables have no cause - they just are the way they are.

3. This is giving me headaches.

4. On top of this, when I question a theist about the nature of God, when he inevitably is unable to answer why God is the way he is, how can I claim this as a significant point against theism?

Please, remember, I'm no theist. This stuff is just bothering me immensely.