Too Much Information?

Readers may wonder if I've exceeded this blog's self-chosen mandate by venturing into ethics, knowledge theory, and philosophy in general. I don't think so, and here's why. Theists often demand that atheists explain how, without God, we can know things, including right and wrong. As far as I'm concerned, those questions license me to talk about knowledge of all kinds, including knowledge of values, that is, ethics.

Theists have long attributed all sorts of things to God. Descartes thought that but for an all-benevolent God, he could not trust his senses or even his thoughts. ("I think therefore I am" is based on a fallacy: the primacy of consciousness. He should have said, reflecting the primacy of existence, "The world and I are, therefore I think.") Since God wouldn't fool him, Descartes said, he can use his senses and his rational faculty to learn about the world. 

The common attribution of morality to God needs no elaboration here because every atheist has gotten into an argument over this issue at one time or another. Alas some atheists respond to the theists by asserting, quite erroneously, that since no God exists, neither does morality exist as anything more than a subjective social convention or subjective individual preference. I've addressed this disastrous fallacy in various posts. 

So, yes, I've used atheism as a wedge into general philosophy it. I hope you enjoy it.  

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