The Logical Atheist

If there were no truth (or Truth, as it is sometimes derisively put), we would have no need ever to revise our beliefs.

The highest intellectual joy consists in the discovery of truth; a knowledge of this truth will constantly tend to the practice of an exalted virtue; this virtue will serve as the stable foundation of human happiness, the immortal guarantee of the felicity of the intelligent world. Reason anticipates a progress, which all the powers of superstition can never arrest. Let reason then perform her faithful duty, and ignorance, fanaticism, and misery, will be banished from the earth. A new age, the true millennium will then commence; the standard of truth and of science will then be erected among the nations of the world, and man, the unlimited proprietor of his own person, may applaud himself in the result of his energies, contemplate with indescribable satisfaction the universal improvement and happiness of the human race.  --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species  

Nothing is more difficult, while the mind is under the influence of prejudice, than to persuade it of the necessity of removing or destroying that prejudice; prejudice destroys the discerning power of the understanding, and conviction becomes impossible while the force of evidence necessary to produce it is not discovered. The same idea of right, the same ideas of truth, associate themselves with a prejudiced mind, as are to be found in the clearest operation of the most enlightened; and the fool is as confident in error, as the wise man standing on the broad basis of moral and natural truth. No hopes of reform can be entertained relative to such obstinate minds, until you can render them susceptible of the impressions of doubt or uncertainty; the man who never doubts, or calls in question the truth of any deduction which he has made, is but badly calculated for the development of real principle; there is no extension or perfection of mind which excludes the possibility of error, and i...

I agree with George H. Smith that the word  correspondence  -- as in the  correspondence theory of the truth  -- "is a somewhat unfortunate choice of words." ( Why Atheism ) Smith writes that while true propositions -- statements that such and such is the case --  can be said to correspond to facts, the term is still fraught with ambiguity. He goes on to say that an idea , unlike a proposition, is best not spoken of those terms. "The theist may have an idea of God," he writes "and this idea may be clear or muddled, coherent or confused, logically consistent or self-contradictory -- but this idea, strictly speaking, can be neither true nor false. An idea neither affirms nor denies that something is a fact (to have an idea of God is not necessarily to affirm that God exists), so it makes no sense to evaluate the truth [or] falsity of an idea per se." This seems right. I can hold the idea unicorn without embracing the proposition unicorns exist . Corresponden...

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...