The Logical Atheist

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.)

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...

Why the world began, or why life began ... I think are pseudo questions, because I can't imagine what an answer would look like. --W.V.O. Quine, Talking Philosophy (Brian Magee)