The Logical Atheist

Determinists--deniers of free will, that is--apparently don't listen to themselves or read their own words. If they did they'd see that we human beings have no escape from freedom-saturated language. Think of words like should , deliberate , presume , intend , and so on ad infinitum. It is just impossible to speak or think as though determinism were true. And that says a lot. Our freedom is self-evident. You cannot demonstrate it because to demonstrate anything both  presupposes  and requires  freedom. You confirm freedom each time you set out to disconfirm it. "Today I plan to write out my proof that we have no freedom." Nonsense!  In contrast, we are perfectly capable of getting through a day without using God-saturated language.

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.

Much philosophical and theological confusion reigns because people unwittingly engage concept-theft. It consists of using a concept to which one is not epistemologically "entitled" because the speaker denies its logical foundation. Thus the user has "stolen" it." For example, if you were to deny the legitimacy of the concept parent-- say, you believed new human beings came into existence way other than commonly thought--you would not be entitled to use the concept orphan  since orphan  logically depends on the concept (biological)  parent . Our concepts, constructed as they are from our identification of things in the world, exist (or ought to exist) in nonarbitrary, often hierarchical relationships with other concepts. The higher the level of abstraction (for example,  animal ), the more a concept subsumes other, lower level concepts ( dog , cat , etc.). A little thought shows this to be true. The term stolen concept  was coined by the philosophical novelist A...