Epistemology is not 'idle curiosity' in my opinion.
No, not at all. Epistemology is exploring the limits of what we can know, and what we can't.
But just calling stuff we don't know "God" is not epistemology and doesn't ground anything. It's just substituting one unknown for another- with the exception that the new unknown carries a lot of hidden baggage that makes it not quite the same thing.
Let me see if I can explain it using the terminology of algebra broadly. Let X= "things we don't know yet", and let Y= "God". You are saying that X by itself is unacceptable as a grounding for our knowledge we have to date because we cannot ground stuff we know in things we don't know yet. OK. Seems fair enough. So to ground it, you are saying let X=Y. And you feel like THEN that creates a grounding for the things we know already.
So now there are 2 possibilities:
1) if X really is the same as Y, namely "things we don't know yet", how is that any kind of grounding? It's still the same thing. This God could be a God with who knows what agenda- capricious, malicious, incompetent, etc... who knows what? It could be a committee of gods- who are maybe disagreeing with each other and fighting over the agenda. Who knows? We are still left trying to ground what we do know in what we don't know yet. But if we can can ground the stuff we know in Y which we know nothing about, we can ground it in X, and just say we don't know yet, and we are going to keep trying to learn more as best we can, and leave it at that. That's how science works and how scientists think, as my Richard Feynman quote earlier showed: "we can live and not know everything".
Or, alternatively,
2) \I think your variable Y is really a Trojan horse loaded with all sorts of other baggage and hidden dangers, and you are just trying to sneak it in by trying to equate it to X. But it's really not. Y is loaded with tons of hidden baggage and assumptions: like that this God exists, and we know more about it than just being a synonym for stuff we don't know yet: Y is really a benevolant God, who wants the best for us, or who is the lawgiver of the universe which, if we just read the scriptures closely enough and follow the laws and commandments, will lead to a harmonious ability to live with his Natural Law. Or maybe you think that think that that's not ever possible, because this is a fallen universe and we can't ever live according to natural law no matter what we do- perhaps because because some woman we never met long ago ate an apple she wasn't supposed to, so now all we can do is live in a broken world and hope to get out of it to a better place by just saying "I believe" and worship this God- otherwise he threatens us with eternal hellfire. So we just see this world as a giant waiting room which we can't wait to leave. Whatever the case, this Y is really not the same thing as X. It comes with a lot of extra hidden baggage and added meanings- and perhaps that's why you think it helps clarify things more than just saying "X". But as you can see, then the whole argument falls apart at its root because then X=/= Y. You are talking about two very different things and trying to equate them.
So which of these are you arguing? (and if there's yet more options that I am not seeing here, feel free to add and we can discuss that instead, but these two are the only two options I see).
Sure and utilitarian philosophy has been used to commit the deadliest genocides in human history. Again I'm not sure if this is relevant for the discussion at hand.
How can it be utilitarian if it leads to unimaginable human pain and suffering?
