The Logical Atheist

If there were no truth (or Truth, as it is sometimes derisively put), we would have no need ever to revise our beliefs.

1. Fish don't know they're in water. 2. People aren't fish.

The new atheists, as opposed to an older generation of atheists, love to portray themselves as skeptics. But they should be careful. It is true that words like  skeptic have a narrow meaning in the sense of referring to doubt about a specific claim only. That's fine: language is a living, changing thing, and words can drift in various ways, such as narrowing and broadening. But skepticism (call it capital-S skepticism) has not lost its earlier radical meaning of universal principled doubt : the literal inability to know anything at all or anything about a particular matter. Atheists who defend reason ought to make clear that this is not what they embrace. After all, if we can't know, then what's the point of asking a believer for evidence of God's reality? What is evidence to a capital-S skeptic? It's an illusion. If in principle we cannot know, then evidence is a bogus category. There can be no such thing! Anyone's claim -- even a theist's -- is as good a...

If the disclosure of my thoughts and reflections resulting from a constant habit of contemplating Nature in her diversified relations and real modes of existence, can throw a single ray of light into the darkened intellect of man, it will increase my hopes of future progression, and essentially tranquillize the sensations of my heart. It ought to be perceived by every enlightened mind, that long- established prejudices are not to be suddenly eradicated; but by protruding the activity of intellect into the field of actual existence, some diminution of human misery may be reasonably expected. Man sees not with clearness, that his sufferings are frequently the consequences of his blind attachment to error and superstition; he seeks for their origin in the distant heavens, or the anger or resentment of supposed supernatural agents, while the truth often is, that his own prepossessions are the causes of his calamity.  --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development o...

I heartily recommend Robert Tracinski's "Why I Don't 'Believe' in 'Science.'" Please don't think you know what you'll find in it. Tracinski says things that are worth saying and digesting. Pertinent quote: Some people may use “I believe in science” as vague shorthand for confidence in the ability of the scientific method to achieve valid results, or maybe for the view that the universe is governed by natural laws which are discoverable through observation and reasoning. But the way most people use it today—especially in a political context—is pretty much the opposite. They use it as a way of declaring belief in a proposition which is outside their knowledge and which they do not understand. There are a lot of people these days who like things that sound science-y, but have little patience for actual science. These are the kind of people who gush when Elon Musk tells them he’s going to put a million people on Mars but seem less excited about di...

One cannot make experiments if there are not some things that one does not doubt. But that does not mean that one takes certain presuppositions on trust. When I write a letter and post it, I take it for granted that it will arrive--I expect this. If I make an experiment I do not doubt the existence of the apparatus before my eyes. I have plenty of doubt, but not  that . If I do a calculation I believe, without any doubts, that the figures on the paper aren't switching of their own accord, and I also trust my memory the whole time, and trust it without any reservation. The certainty here is the same as that of my never having been on the moon. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty  337

Who has the burden of proof? Those who proffer of an affirmative proposition, of course. It seems so straightforward. But is it? Maybe not. In fact, the burden is abundant, so there's plenty to go around. We need not be stingy with it. When atheists insists that theists justify their belief in God, they are implicitly asserting the affirmative propositions that theists (like everyone else) ought to hold only justified beliefs and that since belief in God is unjustified, theists ought to abandon their belief. Those are affirmative assertions. Why should one hold only justified beliefs, and why is belief in God unjustified? I can't see why atheists have no burden of proof here. If theists state their evidence (reason) for believing, the atheists may well say that the purported evidence is unconvincing. But why don't atheists bear a burden of proof here? They've put forth an affirmative position. One tricky thing about the burden of proof is that many negative statements,...

From its seeming  to me--or to everyone--to be so, it doesn't follow that it is  so.  What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty  2

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...

We must ask if this "principle of universal doubt" is itself certain, or is it open to doubt as well? If it is known with certainty, at least one thing is beyond doubt, which makes the principle false. If, however, the principle is open to doubt --  i.e. , if it is not certain -- then on what grounds can the skeptic claim greater plausibility for his theory than any other other? --George H. Smith,  Atheism: The Case Against God , 1974

We must note the main source of confusion in the skeptical approach: the equation of knowledge and certainty with infallibility . When the skeptic claims that every knowledge claim should be doubted because man is capable of making mistakes, he is simply pointing out the obvious: that man is a fallible being. No one, not even the most resolute antiskeptic, will deny the point that man is fallible. (We must wonder, though, how the skeptic arrived at this knowledge. Is he certain  that man is fallible?)    The skeptic fails to realize that it precisely man's fallibility that generates the need for a science of knowledge. If man were infallible -- if all knowledge were given to him without the slightest possibility of error -- then the need for epistemological guidelines with which to verify ideas, with which to sort the true from the false, would not arise....  The skeptic ... starts from the same premise -- that man is fallible -- and uses it to argue that man can nev...

When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or, second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about. If the atheist regards the second assumption as far more likely, if he suspects the theist of uttering nonsense, this is partially because the first assumption is appallingly convenient. The theist, in affirming the existence of an unknowable being, ... [has] an all-purpose excuse for exempting [his] claim[] from the burden of proof and the canons of critical scrutiny. George H. Smith, Why Atheism?  (2000)

The other day I heard a caller to an atheist talk show make this argument for the possibility of a supernatural being: what if a dimension exists that is beyond our ability to know and prove? After all, he said, in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions , Edwin Abbott Abbott described a world in which people could perceive only two dimensions. The third dimension, which we perceive easily, was simply beyond their range of awareness. It was real, but they could never know it. So what if, similarly, a fourth dimension exists that is in principle beyond our rage of awareness. The first thing to notice is that Abbott's satirical novella is fiction! How can it be used to get to the possibility of God or another dimension? More important, "What if ...?" is not an argument ... for anything. To turn it into an argument, one would have to show that what was being asserted as possible was in fact coherent and plausible (consistent with other things we know and at least somewhat lik...

It's a mistake to think that if God does not exist, then neither does morality. This is one of the worst legacies of supernaturalism. I'll start by pointing out that it's simply counterintuitive to think, with Dostoyevsky, that "if God does not exist everything is permitted." Yes, I'm appealing to intuition here, but I mean nothing mystical by that word. Call it common sense. Most of us grow up with a sense of how we should treat others and ourselves . Sometimes it's called the moral compass. Adam Smith and David Hume, two of the great Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, spoke favorably of our "moral sentiments," fellow-feeling, sympathy , and the like. None of that requires a supernatural supreme being. (Before Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations  he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments , which he revised until the time of death.) In a previous post I pointed out, using a quotation from Bertrand Russell , that attributing morality to God presents mor...

The logic of belief is a big subject, which I am only just beginning to think about. The literature is vast, and I have read little of it, though I hope to rectify that. Still, I've been thinking about this subject, and I figured that recording my thoughts would help me sort things out. I hope it might be interesting to others. I continue to find the concepts  belief and believe  fascinating. It seems clear that you can believe only that which you are convinced is the case. To believe is to be convinced; to be convinced is to believe. Believing is not an additional step you take after being convinced. When you understand why the solution to an algebra problem is x=2, you don't then  decide  to believe it. It's the same with the conclusion of any syllogism. If you are convinced that the premises are true and you see that the logical inference is valid, then you automatically believe the conclusion. Here's what follows: you can't believe something you don't ...

The stuff of college-dorm bull sessions includes questions like: How do I know I'm not just a brain in a vat in some lab? or How do I know the world didn't begin the day I was born? or How do I know that other people aren't really robots? or Could "The Matrix" be true? Contemplating these things can be fun, especially when under the influence of certain chemicals. But don't take them too seriously. Why not? Beyond the fun, such questions can be meant to raise doubts about fundamental beliefs regarding the world we experience every day and see no need to question. The one sowing the doubts feels that he has the advantage: he throws down a challenge, thinking he has put his listeners on the spot. Well, let's see you prove you're not just a brain in a vat! But the doubter, or skeptic, bears a responsibility that he can't escape so easily. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in On Certainty , "What we can ask is whether it can make sense t...

When I say I know X, I mean -- and I think most people would agree -- that I have a fair degree of confidence that X is the case and that this conviction is justified.* (It's always fair to ask why someone is confident.) But what does it mean to say, "I believe (in) X"? That seems to be a mushier claim. I'd like to try to sort this out. Let's start by acknowledging that many words have multiple senses. There is no platonic realm where we can look for the true  definition of words. Language is a living social institution, and words "move" over time. (I recommend linguist John McWhorter's enjoyable book Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still [Like, Literally] .) From the time of Samuel Johnson, dictionaries were descriptive, not prescriptive. They showed how words were commonly used, but not how they ought to be used. (Of course, if you want to communicate with other people, you'll want to infer prescription fr...