The Logical Atheist

Readers of this blog have now become familiar with the views of Elihu Palmer (1764-1806) through the long series of quotes I've posted from his book, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species . Palmer was an American deist and founder of the Deistical Society of New York and similar organizations. As a deist, of course, he was no atheist. Nor was he an agnostic. He seemed quite certain that the universe had a creator. You'd think that a creator of the universe would have had to precede and exist apart from its creation--that it was supernatural--but deists rejected that idea. It has been suggested that since the word supernatural  was a term of disparagement among deists, they must have believed that the deity was thoroughly natural, simply part of the system of cause and effect in which things necessarily happened because of the nature of the entities that exist. It's as if this unique natural being created ...

Theists say that since science cannot explain the origin of matter from nothing, God must be the cause. Did it ever occur to them that the origin of matter can't be explained because it had no origin? In one form of another it just always was. In other words, there never was nothing, which--hello?--being no thing , cannot exist. If an eternal God is said to be conceivable, why not an eternal material universe? Take that, kalamites .