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.

The philosopher Etienne Gilson said, "Natural law buries its undertakers." It's true. So does, naturally, reality. Everyone knows that reality is independent of our wishes as well as accessible to reason. Everyone looks both ways before crossing a busy street. Everyone who is not suicidal stays away from the edge of a cliff. Everyone knows what the term reality check means.

Human beings act. Moreover, they act with remarkable success much of the time in big and small ways. Think of the inventions and discoveries ranging from life-easing to life-saving technologies. That seems to suggest two alternative stories. First, that reality is just a figment of our individual, tribal, or universal imaginations. Or second, that reality is real, objective, out there -- and that we rational animals can know it if we exert the effort. I submit the first story is completely implausible, not to mention self-contradictory. That leaves the second one standing.

We don't infer reality from our consciousness of sense data. We infer sense data from our consciousness of reality. Our senses are not barriers to direct contact with the world. They are our  means of direct contact with the world. The sequence is reality -> consciousness -> sense data. (Ayn Rand got this right.)

If we could abandon, for a moment, every theistical idea, it would nevertheless remain substantially true, that the happiness of society must depend upon the exercise of equal and reciprocal justice. It would also be true, that benevolence is an amiable trait in the character of man; that the cultivation of his faculties is a duty imposed on him, because the faithful performance of his duty extends the circle of his real felicity; that vice is the bane of individual and social existence; that truth is to be preferred to falsehood, activity to indolence, temperance to debauchery, and, generally, that science and virtue claim pre-eminently over ignorance and vice, the universal attachment of the human race. All these, and many other particulars of a like nature, would stand as immortal monuments of the real nature of moral principles, even after cultivated intellect shall have performed the last solemn act of duty relative to the ancient regimen, and shall have recalled bewildered man to...

If a thousand Gods existed, or if nature existed independent of any, the moral relation between man and man would remain exactly the same in either case. Moral principle is the result of this relation, it is founded in the properties of our nature, and it is as indestructible as the basis on which it rests. --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806),  Principles of Nature; or, A Development of  the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species

This quotation below, demonstrating the ancient Greek philosophers' proof of an objective foundation for ethics, is dedicated to atheists who think that since in a godless world values must be subjective, we can establish morality with only an arbitrary starting point, say, the maximization of well-being or minimization of suffering. (See my "Should Humanists Be Utilitarians?" ) Because this is an admittedly arbitrary starting point, it surely cannot serve as a launch pad for a rational morality, for as Hume would say (erroneously), although reason can tell us if our means will get us to our ends, it can be no help in saying if our ends are worthwhile. Or: reason is merely a "slave to the passions" and ought to aspire to be nothing more.) Fortunately, an alternative is available to us, which is rooted in the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The quote is from  Roderick T. Long's  Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Ac...

Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine: people who say we can discover the truth about the world but not "Capital-T Truth." I usually hear YouTube skeptical theists (from whom I of course distinguish logical atheists) say things like this all the time. So what's wrong with it? I think I know what they mean. They want to say that we human beings can't be omniscient or infallible, which is of course true. If we were either of these things we would have no use of reason or logic--which precisely are methods that fallible beings need to if they are to reliably acquire knowledge. To the classical God, reason and logic would be superfluous. It would already and automatically have all the knowledge that could be had. So it's ridiculous to fault reason for not guaranteeing perfect knowledge. That misses the whole point. We cannot deny that new evidence could come to our attention tomorrow that would require us to modify or even jettison an empirical belief. (This principle doe...

The philosopher G. E. Moore famously demonstrated the existence of a mind-independent world by raising his right hand and saying, "This is a hand," and then raising his left hand and saying, "This is another hand." So, Moore continued, at least two things external to the mind exist. QED. Not every philosopher was won over by the argument, and Moore's proof has been debated ever since. Wittgenstein devoted much of his final time on earth to scribbling notes about Moore's approach, which were collected posthumously in On Certainty . Wittgenstein didn't so much disagree with Moore as explore the grammar--or logic--of sentences like, "I know this is my hand": if you can't not know something, can you really be said to know it?--that sort of thing. In other words, the negation of nonsense is also nonsense. It's a thought-provoking volume, which I've quoted occasionally on this blog. The thing I want to note here is that Moore got at some...

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.

When that long-anticipated superior alien race finally comes to earth, it will have a good laugh when it learns that a potentially productive segment of humanity has spent so much time arguing over whether a mind-independent reality actually exists.

Surely, [Bertrand] Russell could scarcely have denied that the world which he believed in as a philosopher [i.e., a world of sense-data rather than material objects] was hardly the world which he lived in as a human being. Thus imagine Russell shaking hands with a friend, or haranguing a mass meeting in condemnation of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Doubtless in such circumstances he might have stuck to his philosophical conviction that any statements he might make concerning the people and things in the immediate situation confronting him were reducible by definitions-in-use to statements only about sense data and not about people and things at all. Yet no less doubtless would it appear that even Russell could hardly have been so committed to his own philosophy as to assume in his attitudes and behavior, even if not in his thoughts, that the people and things that he was having to do with were but so many groupings and series of sense data. --Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A C...

If, as many "skeptical" atheists maintain, we cannot be certain about facts ("capital-T Truth") and if statements of value are subjective and noncognitive, then why should atheists care what theists believe and why they believe it? Moreover, what standing do atheists have that entitles them to talk theists out of their deeply held beliefs? If atheists want to be taken seriously, they need to grapple with these issues. Otherwise, their mission -- and many see it as a mission -- is doomed. Many theists get this, but the atheists I have in mind just plunge ahead, boasting of their edgy "skepticism." This is a sad state of affairs for those of us who are committed to reason, logic, and objectivity in fact and value since those values are key to a humane society. The atheists I'm thinking of seemed to be in the thrall of philosophers who have long been seriously challenged if not discredited entirely. On both counts -- fact and value -- that challenge dates...

I often hear theists on atheist call-in programs insist that their subjective experiences of God are meaningful and beyond scrutiny because all of us -- theists and atheists alike -- are prisoners in our own private subjective worlds. In other words, how can atheists reject the theist's claims when they are in the same subjectivist boat?  One quick response is that if this is true, how can we be communicating, that is, understanding each other? That requires a common frame of reference. (More on that below). Another is that this is the pathway to radical skepticism and solipsism: not only can I not really know anything about The Real World; I can't even know that anyone or anything exists but my own mind! That's a dead end no matter what you are seeking. It hardly proves the existence of God because it proves nothing whatsoever. In fact, it has a contradiction at its foundation. In the very act of asserting that we cannot know reality, the theist makes substantial knowledge...

Christian apologists like William Lane Craig insist that what God supplies -- and which nothing else can provide -- is objective  morality. What does he mean? He defines objectivity  as "independent of human opinion." But that gets us nowhere because it raises this question: is Craig's so-called objective morality independent of God's opinion? It couldn't be because on Craig's terms nothing would be outside of God for it to refer to. All that God could be said to supply, then, is its own subjective capricious commandments: "Thou shalt not kill (because that's how I feel ... today. Check back with me tomorrow for possible updates.)" The term objective  suggests a frame of reference -- reality -- beyond whoever expounds a proposition, including a moral proposition. But God by definition would have no such frame of reference. Therefore, his moral pronouncements would be no more objective than anyone else's. (An apologist might respond that, bei...