With matters of etiquette, such as which hand to use for the fork, or matters of personal preference, such as which wrist to use for one's watch, I don't think "Why?" questions are intellectually substantial enough to be worth asking more than once or twice. But philosophical and scientific questions are intellectually much more substantial, much deeper. There it makes excellent sense to keep asking "Why?" questions for as long as those questions remain well-posed. You're right that we don't want a loop -- a circle -- of "Why?" questions, because in that case a question reappears after it has already been adequately answered. But a loop is different from a regress of questions, which may be finitely long or indefinitely long. On whether an indefinitely long regress is always something to avoid, see this SEP entry .

As I understand it, the distinction between brute facts and other facts is that a brute fact has no explanation (not simply an explanation we fail to know) whereas any other fact has an explanation (even if we don't know the explanation). Contingent facts could have been otherwise: they could have failed to be facts. Noncontingent facts couldn't have been otherwise: they couldn't have failed to be facts. Given the history of scientific explanation, I see no reason to accept the existence of brute contingent facts. Many contingent facts that seemed to resist explanation were later explained. I see no reason to think that many of the facts that now seem to resist explanation won't themselves later be explained. One way for every contingent fact to have an explanation is for there to be an endless regress of contingent facts. I see nothing wrong with such a regress. Assuming that the existence and nature of our universe are both contingent, they would be explained by an endless regress of contingent...

I'm not sure I would use quite the verb "perceive" to describe our cognitive grasp of natural laws, but I don't see any reason why we can't discover at least some natural laws, including those that have shaped our ability to perceive (or discover). That is, I don't see any reason why a natural law's having shaped our ability to perceive should make that natural law especially hard for us to discover. It's not as if we should think of natural laws as having purposely shaped our ability to perceive in order to keep themselves hidden from us.

I would question your assumption that positions, magnitudes, etc., whose measure is irrational "cannot be precisely described mathematically." Consider a simple-minded example: In a given frame of reference, some point-particle is located exactly pi centimeters away from some other point-particle. I think that counts as a precise mathematical description of the distance between the two particles, even though it uses an irrational (indeed, transcendental) number, pi, to describe the distance. It's true that any physical measurement of that distance -- say, 3.14159 cm -- will be precise to only finitely many decimal places and therefore will be only an approximation of the actual distance. But the description "pi centimeters apart" is itself perfectly precise, despite the irrationality of pi.

Good questions. The philosopher David Lewis (1941-2001) rightly insisted on distinguishing two kinds of ontological simplicity or parsimony: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative parsimony concerns the sheer number of postulated entities; qualitative parsimony concerns the number of different kinds of postulated entities. Lewis argued that only qualitative parsimony matters. It's not the sheer number of (say) electrons but the number of different kinds of subatomic particle posited by a theory that makes the theory parsimonious or not, compared to its rivals. (Maintaining this line required Lewis to treat "the actual world" as an indexical phrase and to hold that each of us has flesh-and-blood "counterparts" in nondenumerably many other universes.) All else being equal, then, theories that posit deities are qualitatively less parsimonious than theories that don't, because (I take it) deities are supposed to be of a different kind entirely from the phenomena that they're invoked to explain....

Your question raises a number of philosophical and scientific issues. You'll find them expertly discussed in this short and reasonably priced book by Alfred R. Mele, one of the world's leading authorities on the topic: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/free-9780199371624. Enjoy.

For an accessible and up-to-date discussion of these issues, I recommend Time, Language, and Ontology (OUP, 2015) by Joshua Mozersky. The author's interview at 3:AM Magazine contains a good overview of the book.

I confess I don't see a skeptical problem here. It's true that any perspective I could occupy, no matter how broad, will be my perspective when I occupy it. But that truth is just a tautology: it's implied by everything, including by theism as much as by naturalism. It makes no difference to either of those positions. Importantly, it doesn't imply that I can't achieve objective knowledge. From my perspective, elephants are bigger than mice: I perceive them that way. The fact that I perceive things that way doesn't imply that elephants aren't objectively bigger than mice, i.e., bigger than mice regardless of anyone's perception of them. Nor does it imply that I can't know that they're objectively bigger. To the objection, "But how can you know that you know this about elephants and mice?" one can reply with one's favorite theory of knowledge, which will explain how one knows anything, including how one knows that one knows that elephants are bigger than mice. In short, I don't see...

There's a lot going on in your question, and I doubt that my response will cover all of it. But I'll say, first, that it begs the question against Hawking to demand that he explain "the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world" if by "creativity" you mean something beyond the everyday creativity acknowledged by both sides of the debate (such as the creativity of human agents). Hawking doesn't accept the assumption that (for example) the laws of physics are the result of someone's creativity. Second, Hawking would likely question your inference from the premise "All created things, such as the jet engine, require creators" to the conclusion "The laws of physics require a creator." The premise is true, but it doesn't imply the conclusion. Third, it's not clear from your description of Hawking's view that he alleges a conflict between theism and the laws of physics. Rather, if I understand your description, Hawking claims that theism isn't necessary to explain what we observe. Now, if...

I'm not sure why Tyson, Hawking, Krauss, Dawkins, Coyne, Feynman, et al. , express so much contempt for philosophy. But my best guess is that they're ignorant -- unaware -- of what philosophy is when it's done well, perhaps because they received little or no academic training in philosophy when they were undergraduate students. (By the time they reached graduate school in the sciences, it may have been too late for them to get that training even if they had been interested in getting it.) I don't think they're using different definitions, at least not systematically. Krauss does claim that physics has redefined the words "something" and "nothing," but I think he's deeply mistaken (see Question 4759 ). In general, I find that when non-philosophers, including scientists, reason about philosophical issues, they do so sloppily: making elementary mistakes in inference, conflating concepts that ought to be kept distinct, and so on. That's unfortunate but not surprising, since reasoning well about...