The Logical Atheist

Neither brains nor souls reflect, intend, deliberate, analyze, think, rank, choose, and act. Persons do. Brains are not atheists. Persons are. Souls are not theists. Persons are. If your worldview keeps you from distinguishing persons from brains and souls, you ought to think about revising your worldview. If your model clashes with undeniable facts -- facts you cannot deny without self-contradiction -- you might want to take a new look at your model. "A myth is, of course, not a fairy story," Gilbert Ryle wrote in The Concept of Mind . "It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them." When atheists deny plain facts instead of providing naturalist explanations for those facts, they discredit the cause of secularism.

We must note the main source of confusion in the skeptical approach: the equation of knowledge and certainty with infallibility . When the skeptic claims that every knowledge claim should be doubted because man is capable of making mistakes, he is simply pointing out the obvious: that man is a fallible being. No one, not even the most resolute antiskeptic, will deny the point that man is fallible. (We must wonder, though, how the skeptic arrived at this knowledge. Is he certain  that man is fallible?)    The skeptic fails to realize that it precisely man's fallibility that generates the need for a science of knowledge. If man were infallible -- if all knowledge were given to him without the slightest possibility of error -- then the need for epistemological guidelines with which to verify ideas, with which to sort the true from the false, would not arise....  The skeptic ... starts from the same premise -- that man is fallible -- and uses it to argue that man can nev...

When a person does something voluntarily, in the sense that he does it on purpose or is trying to to do it, his action certainly reflects some quality or qualities of mind, since (it is more than a verbal point to say) he is in some degree and in one fashion or another minding what he is doing. It follows also that, if linguistically equipped, he can then tell, without research or conjecture, what he has been trying to accomplish. But ... these implications of voluntariness do not carry with them the double-life corollaries often assumed. To frown intentionally is not to do one thing on one's forehead and another thing in a second metaphorical place; nor is it to do one thing with one's brow-muscles and another thing with some non-bodily organ. In particular, it is not to bring about a frown on one's forehead by first bringing about a frown-causing exertion of some occult non-muscle. 'He frowned intentionally' does not report the occurrence of two episodes. It repor...

There is no need that I should go through the whole Pentateuch. If anyone pays attention to the way in which all the histories and precepts in these five books are set down promiscuously and without order, with no regard for dates; and further, how the same story is often repeated, sometimes in a different version, he will easily, I say, discern that all the materials were promiscuously collected and heaped together, in order that they might at some subsequent time be more readily examined and reduced to order. Not only these five books, but also the narratives contained in the remaining seven, going down to the destruction of the city [Jerusalem], are compiled in the same way. For who does not see that in Judges ii:6 a new historian is being quoted, who had also written of the deeds of Joshua, and that his words are simply copied? For after our historian has stated in the last chapter of the book of Joshua that Joshua died and was buried, and has promised, in the first chapter of Judg...

My summary of Gilbert Ryle ( The Concept of Mind , chapter 3, The Will ):  Denying freedom on the grounds of causality is like denying that the chessboard is an arena for surprise, innovation, purposiveness, aimlessness, attentiveness, inattentiveness, alertness, dullness, mindfulness, unmindfulness, determination, fecklessness, creativity, brilliance, foolishness, and stupidity because it is strictly "governed" by internal rules as well as the laws of physics. Those rules and laws "govern" the game but do not "ordain" the moves. If this is true of the chessboard, one can readily see that it is also true of the proverbial billiard table. Ryle's project was not to establish that the features I've listed exist; everyone knows them when they see them. He did not, he said, "intend to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess." In other words, the source of those things i...

Skeptics either have valid reasons for their universal doubting, or they have no valid reasons for it. If they have valid reasons, they surely know something that is valid, and they no longer are real skeptics. If they have no valid reasons, they have no reason to doubt. In the first case their position is inconsistent, and in the second case their position is irrational. Whichever way they turn, their position is untenable. --Celestine N. Bittle, Reality and the Mind , 1936

As I note here , when George H. Smith, in Atheism: The Case Against God , constructed a dialogue between a skeptic and an antiskeptic, the theist was the skeptic. That may be counterintuitive, but it shouldn't be. Smith explains that many theists, including career theologians, are happy to present what look like reason-based arguments for God for as long as they can. But as soon as they run into the wall of logic, as inevitably they must, they will abandon -- nay, turn against -- reason and become open skeptics. (The best ones, after pushing reason as far as they can, then proclaim the limit of reason without actually rejecting it. Aquinas and Maimonides come to mind.) I think it was philosopher Antony Flew who said that theists treat debates with atheists like a tennis game in which the net is dropped when it's their turn to hit the ball. Just so. When beaten by reason, those theists will demand that atheists prove that it is efficacious. They will even have the audacity to as...