The Logical Atheist

Here's a story about Ludwig Wittgenstein, as related by Norman Malcolm, his student and friend. It's from Malcolm's book  Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958). On one walk he "gave" to me each tree that we passed, with the reservation that I was not to cut it down or do anything to it, or prevent the previous owners from doing anything to it: with those reservations it was henceforth mine. What is this curious recollection doing here? To see my reason, note what Wittgenstein did: to make a point, he changed some natural everyday words. He didn't merely redefine them; he obliterated them. If you give someone something with all those conditions, then you clearly haven't given it at all, have you? If you were the "recipient" under those conditions, you could not really claim that the trees were "yours." Concepts formed in a hierarchical context; that is, they depend logically on other concepts and fit into a structure. To understand some c...

Part of the modern intelligent-design argument for God goes like this: in the human world complex things like computer programs have been designed. In fact, they go on, we have no experience at all with such things that have not been designed. Therefore, when we find complex "coding" in the nonhuman world, say, DNA, it is reasonable to conclude -- indeed we have no rational alternative to concluding -- that a designer was responsible. That designer we call God. (An example is here at 13:45.) So observe the premise: no complex orderly processes exist in the human world that were not first designed by human beings .  But that's patent nonsense. At least since the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith, David Hume, et al.), and I'm sure going back to ancient Greece, philosophers have been aware of complex, orderly, and  undesigned  processes in the human world, society in general and the marketplace in particular. In 1782 one of those Scottish thinkers, Adam Ferguson, descr...

In the span of a one-hour program a well-known American atheist celebrity made two contradictory points: 1) that atheism is nothing more than a lack of belief in God and 2) that to exist in a supernatural respect is indistinguishable from not existing at all (my position). He expressed the second point rather well, especially since he typically refuses to assert that God does not exist because that would to impose on himself the burden of proof, which he strives never to do. I say points are contradictory because the idea supernatural is intrinsic to the idea God (or gods ). A thoroughly natural God would make no sense whatever. (Superman, recall, was not a supernatural being but simply a "strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men." No one in Metropolis mistook him for God. Hmm, did Superman believe in God?) So I don't think one can coherently say that atheism is nothing more than nonbelief (i.e., ...

From Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained :  I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical  effects of the brain's activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain -- but not impossible. [Emphasis added.] Well, actually it is impossible. The brain is not what we mean when we speak of the mental activities we attribute (metaphorically) to the mind. (Remember, mind  is a verb, not a noun.) Seeing cannot be reduced to anything physical. I see  a thing, dammit! What am I to make of a philosopher or neuroscientist or physicist who has the gall to tell me I'm not really seeing it, but rather my brain is up to such and such, say, sorting out "sense data"? Dennett commits what philosopher Gilbert Ryle -- Dennett's teacher! -- called a "category mistake." Any norm...

Well, as one who believes that the one and only reality necessarily is natural and godless, I can't actually resent God. But I can object to teaching vulnerable children and adults who are capable of knowing better that they must worship and adore the God described in the various holy books. Must worship ... or else. We know what "or else" means -- depending on the religious variant, it means death on the spot, eventual annihilation, or eternal spinning on the divine rotisserie. Some loving and merciful God, that. You don't have to read much of those books to be thankful that such a thing doesn't and couldn't exist. (Of course it's all fiction -- the greatest horror story ever told -- but the authors had reasons for telling those stories.) Tens of thousands were killed in God-commanded genocidal biblical wars; individuals, their families, and/or groups were burned to cinders or swallowed up by the earth merely for impudent thoughts and "murmurings,...

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...