The Logical Atheist

Determinist : You can't have free will because when you did X, you had to do X. Free will advocate : How do you know I had to do X? Determinist : Because that's what you did, isn't it?

People ought to be made to understand that they do not have free will because if they thought they had it, they would undertake purposive action, which they couldn't do because they have no free will.

[Despite what scientists and philosophers have believed since Descartes, Aristotelian] final causes are really neither so egregious nor so absurd as one might suppose. Of course, what has always been assumed to be wrong with them is that since a final (from the Latin, finis ) cause connotes an end or goal or purpose, to introduce final causes into nature and to suggest that such causes are among the necessary conditions even of the purely physical changes that take place in nature, is to conceive of such changes as if they were comparable to the purposive actions of human beings. And that is patently absurd: the wind doesn't blow, nor does water flow down hill, nor does fire burn, not do physical bodies move, for a purpose. So enough of that! Still, rather than being carried away by diatribes, let us look for a moment at the facts, so as to see not merely what Aristotle thought final causes are, but also how they function in an Aristotelian scheme of things.... [T]he moment we stop...

I see no inconsistency in being a realist about what there is, and a negative coherentist about what one is justified in believing about it. In any case, positive coherence and narrow foundationalism are no guarantee of truth either. That is, it is imperfectly consistent with a belief's being justified in any of these ways, that it be false. If we are to follow Descartes in taking the possibility of a belief's being false as incompatible with its being justified, we will end up in skepticism pretty quickly.  There are in general three ways to meet the skeptical challenge by bridging the gap between knowledge and objective reality. The first is to maintain extremely high standards for what will count as knowledge, and extremely high standards for what will count as objective reality, and nevertheless heroically attempt to bridge the gulf. This was Descartes' approach, and it is generally agreed that it failed. In its wake came two responses: One response, that of Berkeley, K...

Before anyone will be able to convince me that "Judeo-Christian" morality has been a great contribution to the world, he'll first have to explain why the Ten Commandments order us to keep the Sabbath and honor our parents, but don't prohibit us from keeping slaves or dishonoring our children.  He might also explain why we don't find this: "Thou shalt presume innocent those accused of an offense until proved guilty," seeing as how something like that appeared in the 18th-century BCE Code of Hammurabi hundreds of years before the Ten Commandments were said to have been given to Moses at Mount Sinai perhaps in the 13th century BCE: "If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death." (For the record, the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt and did not escape to Canaan through the desert, stopping at Sinai to pick up the two tablets. ...

In the latest edition of Talk Heathen , a project of the Atheist Center of Austin (ACA), host Eric Murphy suggested in a conversation with a self-described "agnostic theist" that logic is nothing more than a useful social contract rather an inescapable feature of the world, thought, and language. As he put it (at about 1:16:30). We're both operating on a set of assumptions. One of those assumptions is that the laws of logic hold.... I'm granting that to you in order to have this conversation and you're granting that to me in order to have this conversation. Moving from there, we can behave in a logical manner. Yes, it sucks we can't prove the laws of logic because we would need the laws of logic to prove it, but that doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater. It just means we understand and accept that we have a core set of assumptions that we're allowing each other to have in order to move forward in talking about the world. In precise te...

Theists say that since science cannot explain the origin of matter from nothing, God must be the cause. Did it ever occur to them that the origin of matter can't be explained because it had no origin? In one form of another it just always was. In other words, there never was nothing, which--hello?--being no thing , cannot exist. If an eternal God is said to be conceivable, why not an eternal material universe? Take that, kalamites .