The Logical Atheist

I have no problem with someone who says he is "skeptical" of some proposition or theory. In everyday talk, that just means the person has doubts about a claim. It may not mean that he doubts  it, just that he has doubts about it, which seems different. The first seems to imply a rejection or a near-rejection of the claim; the second seems softer. "I doubt it" differs from "I have doubts about it." Be that as it may, I am dubious about using the term skepticism to mean mere doubt. Making doubt into a ism  is an entirely different ballgame. An ism  suggests a doctrine, and a doctrine based on doubt strikes me as strange. (For the same reason, the term  atheism  is weird because no doctrine flows merely from not believing in God.) In philosophy skepticism is the position that knowledge in general or knowledge of a particular kind is impossible . It does not mean a particular doubt about something. One cannot doubt everything, as Wittgenstein pointed out. Thi...

Belief in God (or any god) requires you to embrace notions completely foreign to everyday experience and language, which is rooted in that experience. What is a nonmaterial entity that is said to be infinite and unlimited? Our natural notion of entity  contains the elements of matter and therefore limits. To be is to be something . To be something is to have a finite set of attributes -- a nature -- by which we understand what an entity is capable of. (So-called nonmaterial things such as justice and love describe actions, feelings, and relations between living beings.)  But God falls outside of this framework, just as by definition it falls outside of reality. In other words, God and related concepts cannot be integrated with anything else we know. It requires one to disregard logic and context in certain matters. It requires one to engage in what George Orwell in  Nineteen Eighty-Four  called "doublethink." I don't see how that serves one's well-being. Tim Whi...

You hear this a lot. Theists want to know why atheists think people ought not to believe in God (or anything supernatural). Books could be written on the subject, but I will make just one point. Belief in God (I'm thinking here of the Abrahamic tradition) requires you to set aside your perceptions and rational moral judgment in favor of cliches like "God moves in mysterious ways." If you see bad things being done, know that they only appear to be bad from your worm's eye view. If you knew what God knows -- which of course you cannot -- you'd understand. In my book, that is enough to condemn theism.

The fears expressed by some moral philosophers that the advance of the natural sciences diminishes the field within which the moral virtues can be exercised rests on the assumption that there is some contradiction in saying that one and the same occurrence is governed both by mechanical laws and by moral principles, an assumption as baseless as the assumption that a golfer cannot at once conform to the law of ballistics and obey the rules of golf and play with elegance and skill. Not only is there plenty of room for purpose where everything is governed by mechanical laws, but there would be no place for purpose if things were not so governed. Predictability is a necessary condition of planning.... Physicists may one day have found the answers to all physical questions, but not all questions are physical questions.... The discoveries of the physical sciences no more rule out life, sentience, purpose or intelligence from presence in the world than do the rules of grammar extrude style or...

"It is of course undeniable that religion has dominated human culture as far back as we can trace it. The problem lies with the normative  claims built on that observation. Too often religious practice is imagined to be the regular state of affairs, needing no explanation, whereas any kind of deviation is seen as weird and remarkable. This view underpins the modernist mythology: the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world. This is a dangerous misprision. To the religious, it can can suggest that belief is somehow universal, essential to the human condition, and that creeping secularism is an unnatural state. Atheists, on the other hand, can be seduced into delusional self-congratulation, as if twenty-first-century middle-class westerners have been the only people throughout history capable of finding problems with religion." --Tim Whitmarsh,  Battling the Gods: Atheism in t...

"Atheism, we are so often told, is a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment: it would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth. This is a myth nurtured by both sides of the "new atheism" debate: adherents wish to present skepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science's progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent Western world consumed by capitalism. Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills.... There have been many [atheists] throughout history and across all cultures who have resisted belief in the divine." -- Tim Whitmarsh,  Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

The question is obviously ironic. What does should  or ought  mean if our actions are determined?  Should  presupposes the ability to deliberate and decide. But without a will -- the term free will  is redundant -- how could we make decisions? I've heard social scientists say something like this: since there is no free will, we ought to rethink the criminal justice system. We ought ? What does that mean if the premise is that the will is a delusion?  The reason I bring this up is that many atheists seem wary about free will. I think I can explain this wariness. Since atheists properly deny the existence of soul, or spirit, they think they're committed to what seems the only remaining alternative: materialist reductionism. They reject "the ghost in the machine" and embrace the machine alone. But they've thrown the will/mind baby out with the soul/spirit bathwater. I wrote this post, and you are reading it. Think of what those facts imply. How can they b...