The Logical Atheist

When atheists and theists argue, sooner or later someone will pull the old brain-in-the-vat trick. Typically, the atheist will criticize the theist for offering unfalsifiable arguments for God and use the brain-in-the-vat as an analogy, saying something like, "If we were all brains in vats (or living in Keanu Reeves's  Matrix ), we couldn't possibly know it. So it wouldn't matter." How that refutes the theist, I'm not sure, but it's certainly true that any empirical theory that is said to be consistent with any and all conceivable states of affairs is worth little. It tells us nothing if it rules out nothing. But more can be said on the brain/vat matter. First, in serious discussion no room exists for the arbitrary. An assertion proffered without a smidgen of evidence is inadmissible. As I've said before , "what if ...?" in itself is not an argument. The brain-in-the-vat "challenge" is supposed to introduce doubt about what we have ...

Christian apologists like William Lane Craig insist that what God supplies -- and which nothing else can provide -- is objective  morality. What does he mean? He defines objectivity  as "independent of human opinion." But that gets us nowhere because it raises this question: is Craig's so-called objective morality independent of God's opinion? It couldn't be because on Craig's terms nothing would be outside of God for it to refer to. All that God could be said to supply, then, is its own subjective capricious commandments: "Thou shalt not kill (because that's how I feel ... today. Check back with me tomorrow for possible updates.)" The term objective  suggests a frame of reference -- reality -- beyond whoever expounds a proposition, including a moral proposition. But God by definition would have no such frame of reference. Therefore, his moral pronouncements would be no more objective than anyone else's. (An apologist might respond that, bei...

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,...