The Logical Atheist

Dedicated to those who think a dichotomy exists between analytic, or conceptual, statements ("Bachelors are unmarried men.") and synthetic, or empirical, statements ("That dog is brown.): As traditionally understood, analytic truths are linguistic stipulations, and therefore have no factual commitments, whereas synthetic truths do have factual commitments, and so are not merely stipulative. Neither of these descriptions characterizes conceptual truths as [Ludwig] Wittgenstein understands them. For Wittgenstein, a conceptual (or, as he would say, “grammatical”) proposition is indeed stipulative, and so in a certain sense lacks factual content; so it would be misleading to call it “synthetic.”   Is 252 = 625 a fact of experience? You’d like to say: “No.”—Why isn’t it?—“Because, by the rules, it can’t be otherwise.”—And why so?—Because that is the meaning of the rules. Because that is the procedure on which we build all judging.... Following a rule is a human activity. [Wit...

Much philosophical and theological confusion reigns because people unwittingly engage concept-theft. It consists of using a concept to which one is not epistemologically "entitled" because the speaker denies its logical foundation. Thus the user has "stolen" it." For example, if you were to deny the legitimacy of the concept parent-- say, you believed new human beings came into existence way other than commonly thought--you would not be entitled to use the concept orphan  since orphan  logically depends on the concept (biological)  parent . Our concepts, constructed as they are from our identification of things in the world, exist (or ought to exist) in nonarbitrary, often hierarchical relationships with other concepts. The higher the level of abstraction (for example,  animal ), the more a concept subsumes other, lower level concepts ( dog , cat , etc.). A little thought shows this to be true. The term stolen concept  was coined by the philosophical novelist A...

To be honest all theistic propositions ought to being with this disclaimer: Warning : what I'm about to say will sound like English, but I won't really be speaking English. When I use words like exist , intelligence , design ,  being , good , and the like, they should not be mistaken for the homonyms that you know. Human beings form concepts ultimately from their sensory material (guided by the principles implicit in that experience, namely, the law of identity and its corollaries). Those concepts are then used to build wider and more abstract concepts based on shared characteristics. Concepts therefore cannot simply be ripped from this hierarchical context and applied to a realm that is said to be in principle beyond anyone's sensory experience, indeed beyond reality itself. Therefore, our normal concepts cannot be the same as the homonyms used to describe the "supernormal" or God. You've been cautioned.