The Logical Atheist

Naturalism has the priority over supernaturalism, not because it is the more economical of two explanations, but because it is the only framework in which explanation is possible.... [T]he contest between naturalism and supernaturalism is not a battle between two rival modes of explanation, in which naturalism is selected because it is a better or more economical mode of explanation. Rather, naturalism is selected because it is the only possible  method of explanation. Naturalism is the only context in which the concept of explanation has meaning.   Once the theist removes himself from the framework of natural causality and the general principles or "laws" by which man comprehends the universe, he forfeits his epistemological right to the concept of explanation and precludes the possibility of explaining anything. --George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God , 1974

Skeptical atheists (who might better be called evidentialist atheists) like to say, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think that obscures a fallacy committed by theists and many atheists alike. I agree with the principle, except for the caveat I will discuss shortly. I would put it this way: the evidence you require for a proposition ought to vary with its plausibility. Remember the three burdens that any sponsor of a proposition must bear: 1) the burden of coherence, 2) the burden of plausibility, and 3) the burden of proof. You don't get to #2 before meeting #1, and you don't get to #3 until you meet #2. If a proposition contains no logical contradiction, then we can move on to plausibility. Logical possibility doesn't guarantee material possibility. It makes sense to require stronger evidence for a less plausible or implausible proposition than for a more plausible proposition. That's just common sense, and most people understand it i...

What's the deal with prayer? Think about it: it seems aimed at getting Yahweh to do what he otherwise would not have done. Let's leave out the football players who pray for victory and stuff like that. We'll confine ourselves to serious things: praying that your very sick child will recover, or that you'll be able to feed your family, or that we won't go to war. Why would Yahweh need to be prayed to about such things? Doesn't the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe know the right thing to do without being begged by suffering supplicants? And besides, wouldn't Yahweh have foreseen the whole thing: the tragedy, the prayerful response, and his own response? Is this a game he plays, sort of like the cruel game he and the devil played with regard to Job? I just don't get it. By the way, whenever a pope is deathly ill and looks to be heading to his great reward, I hear Catholics urged to pray for him. Come again? If we...

From George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God , in which he presents an invented dialogue between a Christian who resorts to skepticism to rebut rational arguments against the existence of the supernatural and an atheist antiskeptic. That's right; in Smith's view the Christian is the skeptic, in the philosophical sense of believing that reason is unable to yield knowledge about reality. By attacking reason the skeptic imagines he can clear the way for revelation and other nonrational justifications for his beliefs. He goes so far as to reject the reliability of the senses, which are at the base of our knowledge. Of course, he cannot attack the senses without at least implicitly relying on sensory evidence. Here is an excerpt: Skeptic : "But don't you agree that all we ever have direct awareness of is immediate sense data?" Antiskeptic:  "No. What we have direct awareness of is reality, and we are given this awareness through perception. Perception ...

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...