The Logical Atheist

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...

"Skeptical" atheists often admonish their theistic interlocutors thus: you have a hypothesis, namely, that God exists. So get out there and try to confirm it empirically -- better yet, try to disprove it. When you've done either, get back to me. This is said to be the proper way to acquire knowledge and to dispose of erroneous beliefs. Ignoring the logical problem with any notion of the supernatural (as if...), which I've discussed several times, the skeptic's admonition depends on epistemological considerations that were demolished in 1951, notably by W.V.O. Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."  (It's, again, a case of basking in the light of a long-dead star.) Specifically, the simplistic admonition depends on the analytic/synthetic dichotomy , which holds that meaningful statements can be only one of two kinds: 1) analytic: necessarily true by definition (convention) and so, as tautologies, uninformative about the world (e.g., cats are domestica...