The Logical Atheist

Do the Hebrew Bible and New Testament provide grounds not only for abstaining from believing in God but, further, for affirmatively believing that God does not exist? I think so. The list of moral outrages detailed in the sacred texts is so long that it ought to prompt believers to engage in the intellectual process that Auburn University philosopher Roderick T. Long (adapting John Rawls's phrase) calls "reflective equilibration." This is the procedure (used by Socrates) in which a person who encounters a logical disturbance in his web of belief undertakes to adjust at least one of the constituent beliefs in order to restore equilibrium to the web. Equilibrium, which will likely be temporary because new evidence in empirical matters can always arise, consists in the constituent ideas not conflicting with one another; they need not affirmatively support one another, but they must not conflict. This is "negative coherence," and it seems to be the best way to acq...

"The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything," G. K. Chesterton is purported to have said . (As is often the case with famous quotations, this one apparently has not been found in the written record.) Was the famous writer and Christian correct? I would say: it depends. Depends on what? On why a particular person stops believing in the existence of God. If someone stops believing in the Abrahamic God because it failed to fulfill what the person was--and still is --looking for in a deity, then such a person might well embrace a substitute god, even a worldly one like the state and especially the total state complete with a fuhrer. I think that probably describes many people. If, on the other hand, a person abandons belief in God because of a commitment to reason, then  that  person will not be in the market for an alternative god, even a worldly one like the state or a fuhrer. He will understand that reason and logic simply do not permit contradictions ...

I don’t know why the God question is so enmeshed with all of these other social issues, but it is. It shouldn’t be. It’s OK to be a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. I don’t think there is a God, or any sort of anthropomorphic being who needs to be worshipped, who listens to prayers, who keeps a moral scoreboard that will be settled in the end, or who cares one iota about who wins the Super Bowl. There is no afterlife. We just die, and that’s it.   Which is why what we do in this life matters so much—and why how we treat others in the here and now is more important than how they might be treated in some hereafter that may or may not exist. --Michael Shermer, "Why I Am an Atheist"

Greek myth was folk wisdom, the narrative glue that bonded communities together, not the hectoring of a priest seeking to dictate how, what, and why you should believe in gods. It was often moralistic, certainly, but it could also be playful, funny, and experimental. Myths, after all, were first and foremost stories, not homilies. Yet there was too, or so I have argued, a philosophical dimension to such stories. Although they end up reaffirming the power of the gods by showing them beating down the upstart humans who challenge them, theomachies [battles against or among gods] also explore (albeit temporarily and provisionally) the possibility that the divine order might be overthrown and that humans could live self-sufficiently, without the gods. That tells us that such atheistic ideas were current enough in contemporary culture to be worth exploring, and countering, in myth. How these ideas were expressed in wider culture we can only guess. --Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism ...

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...