The Logical Atheist

Language doesn't block us from direct cognitive contact with reality. It facilitates that contact. Philosophers who express disagreement, by that fact alone, can't help but confirm it.

I just have one problem with God talk. It doesn't say anything. A sentence can be grammatical without being meaningful. I don't mean merely that it can be grammatical and wrong. I mean it can be grammatical and empty -- literally. It may seem otherwise, but examination will show that not to be the case. Take the sentence God exists . It appears meaningful. But is it? No, it is not. God here stands for a supernatural nonmaterial thing that has, sort of like us only better, a consciousness, a will, and a capacity to act, that is, to make things happen. And this entity is said to exist -- to be real -- again, sort of like us only better. The problem is that the concept  exist  here, while it may look like the concept you and I have used all our lives about things in the natural world, is actually nothing like it. God's supernatural "existence" is necessarily unlike anything we know or can know. The theist cashes in on familiar a word but admits he does not use ...

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...