The Logical Atheist

What reality is is the one and only system of necessary connections. That is the causa sui , the thing that explains itself, outside of which nothing can be conceived. It is logic itself, not its rules but its applications -- and the vast and infinite system of logical entailments that are not merely abstract, as we usually conceive of them, but rather coated with the substance of being..... Outside of this infinite system of necessary connections there can be . . . nothing. This infinite system composes the the entire explanatory nexus, and were there to be anything outside of it, that something would be ipso facto inexplicable. And there can be nothing inexplicable in the universe -- this is the beating heart of Spinoza's rationalism -- no arbitrary elements that are simply there for no reason at all. The denial of a thing's explicability is tantamount to the denial of that thing's reality. To be is to be explicable. --Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Je...

Naturalism has the priority over supernaturalism, not because it is the more economical of two explanations, but because it is the only framework in which explanation is possible.... [T]he contest between naturalism and supernaturalism is not a battle between two rival modes of explanation, in which naturalism is selected because it is a better or more economical mode of explanation. Rather, naturalism is selected because it is the only possible  method of explanation. Naturalism is the only context in which the concept of explanation has meaning.   Once the theist removes himself from the framework of natural causality and the general principles or "laws" by which man comprehends the universe, he forfeits his epistemological right to the concept of explanation and precludes the possibility of explaining anything. --George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God , 1974