The Logical Atheist

Doubt is not a principle or guide for life. To be taken seriously, doubt has to be specific and grounded. If I wore a badge of self-identity, it wouldn't say Skeptic  but Rationalist .

We must note the main source of confusion in the skeptical approach: the equation of knowledge and certainty with infallibility . When the skeptic claims that every knowledge claim should be doubted because man is capable of making mistakes, he is simply pointing out the obvious: that man is a fallible being. No one, not even the most resolute antiskeptic, will deny the point that man is fallible. (We must wonder, though, how the skeptic arrived at this knowledge. Is he certain  that man is fallible?)    The skeptic fails to realize that it precisely man's fallibility that generates the need for a science of knowledge. If man were infallible -- if all knowledge were given to him without the slightest possibility of error -- then the need for epistemological guidelines with which to verify ideas, with which to sort the true from the false, would not arise....  The skeptic ... starts from the same premise -- that man is fallible -- and uses it to argue that man can nev...

We've all heard the line "There are no atheists in foxholes," but are there any in pandemics? Before l I get to that, whenever hear the snide foxhole remark I immediately think of the comedian's one-liner: "I became an atheist because there are no atheists in foxholes." As an old antiwar activist, I can appreciate that. Anyway, I'm confident that atheists have been in foxholes, even though, fortunately, I've neither been in one nor have been anywhere near one. I'm confident about this, though, because we know there have been atheists on deathbeds. The late Christopher Hitchens comes to mind. As for pandemics, you just need to look on YouTube to find atheists persevering during these trying times. What we need during a pandemic are all kinds of people -- medical personnel, policymakers, and just regular folks -- who are uncompromisingly committed to reason. Atheism is really nothing more than an implication of such a commitment. Atheism is...