The Logical Atheist

Once again we were urged to pray for the people in the path of danger, this time Hurricane Laura. And again, I have to ask: really? Do those who do such urging ever think about what they are saying? Would an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity really need to hear from us before deciding whether to keep people safe from Mother Nature, which after all is supposedly the deity's creation and fully under its control? No matter how hard I try, I can make no sense of this. Is the deity so narcissistic or whatever that it would let people die horrible deaths or suffer devastating damage unless lots of people pleaded for it not to happen? If that is the case, I would like to hear why this deity is worthy of adoration and worship.

Surely, [Bertrand] Russell could scarcely have denied that the world which he believed in as a philosopher [i.e., a world of sense-data rather than material objects] was hardly the world which he lived in as a human being. Thus imagine Russell shaking hands with a friend, or haranguing a mass meeting in condemnation of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Doubtless in such circumstances he might have stuck to his philosophical conviction that any statements he might make concerning the people and things in the immediate situation confronting him were reducible by definitions-in-use to statements only about sense data and not about people and things at all. Yet no less doubtless would it appear that even Russell could hardly have been so committed to his own philosophy as to assume in his attitudes and behavior, even if not in his thoughts, that the people and things that he was having to do with were but so many groupings and series of sense data. --Henry B. Veatch, Aristotle: A C...

What is it that Aristotle has to say philosophically that is so decidedly worth listening to, and particularly now? The answer is so elementary as to seem, initially, either question-begging or implausible. It is simply that, on the basis of our common sense, most of us would take to be the case what Aristotle in his philosophy straightforwardly affirms actually is the case. To put it another way, Aristotle is,  par excellence , the philosopher of common sense. Unfortunately, the term common sense  has become so hackneyed as to be comparatively uninformative. In an Aristotelian context it could even be misleading, since there the expression common sense  has become a standard translation of one of Aristotle's own technical terms in his psychology. Perhaps, then one might do better to fall back upon one of Abraham Lincoln's oft-quoted pronouncements that accurately sums up what is both the consistent and persistent thrust of Aristotle's philosophy. It is Lincoln's remark...

According to the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, the government is God's appointed agent on earth, and each of us owes it allegiance and obedience. If that's so--and I for one don't believe either part of that statement--I'd like some believer to explain what God had in mind when he arranged things so that one of the two major-party clowns running for president will be elected in November. Is He having a laugh?

Early Greece had only a weak idea of what was "sinful" because there were no god-sent commandments to break.  --Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

Readers may wonder if I've exceeded this blog's self-chosen mandate by venturing into ethics, knowledge theory, and philosophy in general. I don't think so, and here's why. Theists often demand that atheists explain how, without God, we can know things, including right and wrong. As far as I'm concerned, those questions license me to talk about knowledge of all kinds, including knowledge of values, that is, ethics. Theists have long attributed all sorts of things to God. Descartes thought that but for an all-benevolent God, he could not trust his senses or even his thoughts. ("I think therefore I am" is based on a fallacy: the primacy of consciousness. He should have said, reflecting the primacy of existence, "The world and I are, therefore I think.") Since God wouldn't fool him, Descartes said, he can use his senses and his rational faculty to learn about the world.  The common attribution of morality to God needs no elaboration here because...

Aristotle (385-323 BCE) Atheists properly balk at the question Why are we here?  because unless this is a request for a description of human reproduction, the question implies that a transcendent intelligence placed us here for a reason--a most flagrant case of question-begging. On the other hand, Aristotle and his fellow Greek philosophers had a notion that human beings, as creatures with a nature significantly different from other living and nonliving things, had a proper way of to live appropriate to that nature; that is, a function. He used the term final cause  in this respect,  by which he meant the ultimate end, or telos , toward which a thing tends under normal circumstances precisely because it is the kind of thing it is.  Think of the relationship between an acorn and oak tree, though unlike a human being, an acorn does not act to fulfill its function. Think further of the relationship between the eye and sight. These are not evidences of intelligent design...