The Logical Atheist

The opposite of skepticism isn't faith or trust. It's confidence. In what? In reason, in one's cognitive faculty, and one's ability to evaluate evidence and arguments to some extent and to learn which experts can be trusted in specialized fields. Skepticism and faith (or dogmatism) are not opposed. It's the radical skeptic, demoralized by his self-confessed ignorance, who might embrace mysticism in search of a ray of hope. Without reason, he's left himself no alternative.

What could a world without entities-with-identities possibly be? No one can say because no one can think about what it would be. Indeed, the word be would lose all sense. That says a great deal about the starting point for metaphysics and epistemology. (Thank you, Aristotle, Spinoza, Rand, Wittgenstein, Roderick Long, and others.)

The double despotism of Church and state has borne so hard upon human existence, that man is sunk beneath its dreadful weight; but resuscitated nations are about to teach kings and tyrants a lesson awfully impressive, in regard to the destiny which awaits the aggregate injustice of the world. The period is at hand, in which kings and thrones, and priests and hierarchies, and the long catalogue of mischiefs which they have produced, shall be swept away from the face of the earth, and buried in the grave of everlasting destruction. Then will the era of human felicity, in which the heart of unfortunate man shall be consoled; then will appear the moment of national consolation, and universal freedom; then the empire of reason, of science, and of virtue, will extend over the whole earth, and man, emancipated from the barbarous despotism of antiquity, will assume to himself his true predicament in nature, and become a standing evidence of the divinity of thought and the unlimited power of hu...

Reason, which every kind of supernatural theology abhors; reason, which is the glory of our nature, is destined eventually, in the progress of future ages, to overturn the empire of superstition, and erect upon its ruins a fabric, against which the storms of despotism may beat in vain, against which superstition may reek her vengeance without effect, from which she will be obliged to retire in agonizing tortures.  --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species

It's often held that skepticism leads to atheism. But it can easily lead to religious faith. After all, if you reject reason and logic--which is what hardcore skepticism is all about--faith may appear as the only alternative if one wants to get through life. (Nihilism is an alternative, but many people have no stomach for it.) So radical doubt is by no means the path to follow. Doubt is a poor principle to live by. Doubt, properly conceived, is contextual; one should have a good reason to doubt. In fact, to reasonably doubt one proposition, you necessarily express confidence in other propositions. As has been said, you have to stand somewhere. You may try to reject reason, but you can't escape it, no matter how hard you try. Skepticism and religious faith (at least by one of its several definitions) both constitute the rejection of reason, so they have much in common. In fact, there is no atheist cause (in the sense of struggle), but there is a rationalist cause. Atheism, far ...

 

What reality is is the one and only system of necessary connections. That is the causa sui , the thing that explains itself, outside of which nothing can be conceived. It is logic itself, not its rules but its applications -- and the vast and infinite system of logical entailments that are not merely abstract, as we usually conceive of them, but rather coated with the substance of being..... Outside of this infinite system of necessary connections there can be . . . nothing. This infinite system composes the the entire explanatory nexus, and were there to be anything outside of it, that something would be ipso facto inexplicable. And there can be nothing inexplicable in the universe -- this is the beating heart of Spinoza's rationalism -- no arbitrary elements that are simply there for no reason at all. The denial of a thing's explicability is tantamount to the denial of that thing's reality. To be is to be explicable. --Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Je...

To think of logic as constraining something is to imagine, or try to imagine, how things would be without the constraint. Since neither talk of an illogical world nor talk of illogical thought can be made sense of, the whole question cannot be meaningfully asked and so may be dismissed in good conscience: "in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable.... We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either" (Wittgenstein).... It is a sign of confusion to say either that the logicality of the world has its source in the structure of thought or that the logicality of thought has its source in the structure of the world—as though the logicality of thought and the logicality of the world were two different facts that need to be hooked together, rather than being two sides of the same fact. We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is ...

Using a concept involves applying it to the real world. Since possessing a concept involves being able to use it, it follows that the possession of a concept commits us to applying that concept in various ways, and that these applications must be generally reliable and accurate in order for us to possess the concept at all. And from this it follows that one must assent to certain factual propositions employing the concept in order to count as possessing it in the first place, so that no "analytic' use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of "synthetic" uses of that same concept. Hence "propositions of the form of empirical propositions, and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language)” (Wittgenstein). But in this case it no longer makes sense to ask whether conceptual truths are "analytic" or "synthetic." The analytic/synthetic distinction itself presupposes a se...

Atheists undermine their strongest case when they restrain their confidence in logic because it is self-evident. That you must use the law of identity even in attempting to refute it is a feature not a bug.

"If, now, we could find something which you could unhesitatingly recognize not only as existing but also as superior to our reason," St. Augustine asked in Free Choice of the Will , "would you have any hesitation in calling it, whatever it may be, God?" See anything wrong with this? Note the word recognize . The word has more than one sense, and I'm certain Augustine didn't mean the sense of seeing a familiar face or hearing a familiar tune. He must mean the sense of understanding. So my question is: how could we understand that something is superior to our reason? Reason is our means of understanding; it is understanding. If something were superior to reason, reason could not demonstrate it or lead to such understanding. It wouldn't require demonstration or understanding. As someone (Richard Dawkins, I think) put it, if you make an argument that faith is superior to reason, you've already lost the debate. But wait--we might interpret this another w...

God forbid! Well, I shouldn't have thought so, but Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long has me thinking again. Or, to be more precise, he again has me thinking that the theist/atheist dichotomy is false, like so many hoary philosophical dichotomies (e.g., realism versus nominalism), in that it can be transcended or synthesized. (See his paper  "God and Human Attitudes: 33 Years Later" .) Long's paper is a look at James Rachels's  "God and Human Attitudes"  (1971), in which Rachels argued that God by definition would have to be worthy of worship, yet "[n]o being could possibly be a fitting object of worship" because that would require us to subordinate our moral agency and our consciences. Yet, Long argues, medieval Scholastics regarded God as identical with truth, being, and goodness; these were not merely properties that God possessed, they were what God was ....  God is something like the logical structure of reality. On this view, the...

Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically. It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an 'illogical' world would look like. It is as impossible to represent in language anything that 'contradicts logic' as it is in geometry to represent by its a coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the coordinates of a point that does not exist.... In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.... Self-evidence, which [Bertrand] Russell talked about so much, can be dispensable in logic, only because language itself prevents every logical mistake.--What makes logic a priori is the impossibility of illogical thought. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus   3.03, 3.031, 3.032, 5.473, 5.4731 (H/T: Roderick T. Long )      

If you intellectually challenge an idea required and presupposed by the very mental activity known as  intellectual challenging an idea --the validity, say, of logic and reason or the mind-independent external world or free will--then you've made an illegitimate move in the game of rational discourse. It would be like moving your king after checkmate.

For any argument to work, paraphrasing economist Bryan Caplan, the plausibility of its premises must be greater than that of the denial of its conclusion. Caplan continues: Since no premise has greater initial plausibility than "This is a hand," said [philosopher G. E.] Moore, it is in principle impossible for that claim to be overturned." I think that the same is true of the existence of free will. Nothing has greater initial plausibility than the premise "I have free will"; no scientific or philosophical argument will ever have greater initial plausibility. So how is it even coherent to argue against free will? Any valid argument showing that free will does not exist serves merely as a reductio ad absurdum of that argument's premises, not a disproof of the freedom of the will. 

In the latest edition of Talk Heathen , a project of the Atheist Center of Austin (ACA), host Eric Murphy suggested in a conversation with a self-described "agnostic theist" that logic is nothing more than a useful social contract rather an inescapable feature of the world, thought, and language. As he put it (at about 1:16:30). We're both operating on a set of assumptions. One of those assumptions is that the laws of logic hold.... I'm granting that to you in order to have this conversation and you're granting that to me in order to have this conversation. Moving from there, we can behave in a logical manner. Yes, it sucks we can't prove the laws of logic because we would need the laws of logic to prove it, but that doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater. It just means we understand and accept that we have a core set of assumptions that we're allowing each other to have in order to move forward in talking about the world. In precise te...

As I note here , when George H. Smith, in Atheism: The Case Against God , constructed a dialogue between a skeptic and an antiskeptic, the theist was the skeptic. That may be counterintuitive, but it shouldn't be. Smith explains that many theists, including career theologians, are happy to present what look like reason-based arguments for God for as long as they can. But as soon as they run into the wall of logic, as inevitably they must, they will abandon -- nay, turn against -- reason and become open skeptics. (The best ones, after pushing reason as far as they can, then proclaim the limit of reason without actually rejecting it. Aquinas and Maimonides come to mind.) I think it was philosopher Antony Flew who said that theists treat debates with atheists like a tennis game in which the net is dropped when it's their turn to hit the ball. Just so. When beaten by reason, those theists will demand that atheists prove that it is efficacious. They will even have the audacity to as...

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...

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 ...

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 ...