George H. Smith

I sadly must report the death of George H. Smith on April 8. He was 73 and had been in poor health. Smith will be no stranger to readers of this blog, which was inspired by his writings. I was fortunate to have known George since the 1970s and to have had many conversations with him. He was self-educated and nothing short of brilliant.

He wrote perhaps the best book ever on why belief in gods or God is not just mistaken but illogical: Atheism: The Case against God (1974). (The 2016 edition has a foreword by Lawrence Krauss.) Smith wrote two other books that deal with the philosophy and history of freethought: Why Atheism? (2000) and Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (1991). He also wrote dozens of essays on the intellectual history of individualism, liberty, and anarchism. Many of these can be found at Libertarianism.org. Some of his essays have been compiled as books, available at Amazon. 

As I've pointed out often, Smith's work in my view is far superior to that of the so-called "new atheists," for whom the god question is an empirical rather than a philosophical matter. In fact, Atheism is as much a general work on epistemology as it is on atheism -- which is as it should be. One important message of his work is that philosophical skepticism is not aligned with atheism. In Smith's view, it is the theists who are the ultimate skeptics since they believe in a realm that is inherently off-limits to reason. The conviction about the logical impossibility of a supernatural realm, Smith wrote, comes not from skepticism but from hard-headed reason grounded in the self-evidence of existence, identity, and consciousness. 

I enthusiastically recommend his work. I'll miss George.