The Logical Atheist

Est, ergo sum, ergo sum conscius et potest cogitare. (It is, therefore I am, therefore I am conscious and can think.)

When will the "skeptical" atheists, who seem to value doubt more than reason, get it? Explanation presupposes existence , not vice versa. How could it be otherwise? How could one imagine anything being the explanation for or cause  everything? If it were explanatory, it would have to exist in its own right and hence be part of existence. Or perhaps it created itself? Yet how could that be? It would defy logic.  Yet atheists who strike the skeptic's pose proudly declare that they do not know why existence exists -- as though it could do anything else. They would rather be ignorant than logical. That makes no sense. "The natural universe sets the context in which explanation is possible," George H. Smith writes in  Atheism: The Case Against God , "so the concept of explanation cannot legitimately be extended to the universe as a whole."

Christian philosophers themselves have acceded to the axiom, that from nothing, nothing can be made; if this be true, as it clearly is, the eternal duration of the earth, in some form or other, will follow as a necessary consequence. --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of  the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species

The philosopher G. E. Moore famously demonstrated the existence of a mind-independent world by raising his right hand and saying, "This is a hand," and then raising his left hand and saying, "This is another hand." So, Moore continued, at least two things external to the mind exist. QED. Not every philosopher was won over by the argument, and Moore's proof has been debated ever since. Wittgenstein devoted much of his final time on earth to scribbling notes about Moore's approach, which were collected posthumously in On Certainty . Wittgenstein didn't so much disagree with Moore as explore the grammar--or logic--of sentences like, "I know this is my hand": if you can't not know something, can you really be said to know it?--that sort of thing. In other words, the negation of nonsense is also nonsense. It's a thought-provoking volume, which I've quoted occasionally on this blog. The thing I want to note here is that Moore got at some...

Here's a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, as related by Norman Malcolm, his student and friend. It's from Malcolm's book  Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958). On one walk he "gave" to me each tree that we passed, with the reservation that I was not to cut it down or do anything to it, or prevent the previous owners from doing anything to it: with those reservations it was henceforth mine. What is this curious recollection doing here? To see my reason, note what Wittgenstein did: to make a point, he changed some natural everyday words. He didn't merely redefine them; he obliterated them. If you give someone something with all those conditions, then you clearly haven't given it at all, have you? If you were the "recipient" under those conditions, you could not really claim that the trees were "yours." Concepts formed in a hierarchical context; that is, they depend logically on other concepts and fit into a structure. To understand some c...