The Logical Atheist

Okay, this is a pet peeve of mine: people who say we can discover the truth about the world but not "Capital-T Truth." I usually hear YouTube skeptical theists (from whom I of course distinguish logical atheists) say things like this all the time. So what's wrong with it? I think I know what they mean. They want to say that we human beings can't be omniscient or infallible, which is of course true. If we were either of these things we would have no use of reason or logic--which precisely are methods that fallible beings need to if they are to reliably acquire knowledge. To the classical God, reason and logic would be superfluous. It would already and automatically have all the knowledge that could be had. So it's ridiculous to fault reason for not guaranteeing perfect knowledge. That misses the whole point. We cannot deny that new evidence could come to our attention tomorrow that would require us to modify or even jettison an empirical belief. (This principle doe...

"If, now, we could find something which you could unhesitatingly recognize not only as existing but also as superior to our reason," St. Augustine asked in Free Choice of the Will , "would you have any hesitation in calling it, whatever it may be, God?" See anything wrong with this? Note the word recognize . The word has more than one sense, and I'm certain Augustine didn't mean the sense of seeing a familiar face or hearing a familiar tune. He must mean the sense of understanding. So my question is: how could we understand that something is superior to our reason? Reason is our means of understanding; it is understanding. If something were superior to reason, reason could not demonstrate it or lead to such understanding. It wouldn't require demonstration or understanding. As someone (Richard Dawkins, I think) put it, if you make an argument that faith is superior to reason, you've already lost the debate. But wait--we might interpret this another w...

God forbid! Well, I shouldn't have thought so, but Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long has me thinking again. Or, to be more precise, he again has me thinking that the theist/atheist dichotomy is false, like so many hoary philosophical dichotomies (e.g., realism versus nominalism), in that it can be transcended or synthesized. (See his paper  "God and Human Attitudes: 33 Years Later" .) Long's paper is a look at James Rachels's  "God and Human Attitudes"  (1971), in which Rachels argued that God by definition would have to be worthy of worship, yet "[n]o being could possibly be a fitting object of worship" because that would require us to subordinate our moral agency and our consciences. Yet, Long argues, medieval Scholastics regarded God as identical with truth, being, and goodness; these were not merely properties that God possessed, they were what God was ....  God is something like the logical structure of reality. On this view, the...

Theism seemed to have scored a major victory almost 20 years ago when respected English philosopher Antony Flew, for decades the leading academic atheist and author of God and Philosophy  and other important works, announced he was a deist, although he was inconsistent on this point. (For example, his draft of a new introduction to the 2005 edition of  God and Philosophy  contained a declaration of deism--but  he deleted  it just before the book went to press.) At this time Flew was in his last years and would soon be known to be suffering dementia. All of this culminated in a book, There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind , published in 2009 and actually ghostwritten by Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese (some of whose work was re-ghostwritten at the publisher's direction by another Christian apologist).  To this day Christians who keep up with such things hail the "conversion" of Flew, with much help from obituarists a...

The philosopher G. E. Moore famously demonstrated the existence of a mind-independent world by raising his right hand and saying, "This is a hand," and then raising his left hand and saying, "This is another hand." So, Moore continued, at least two things external to the mind exist. QED. Not every philosopher was won over by the argument, and Moore's proof has been debated ever since. Wittgenstein devoted much of his final time on earth to scribbling notes about Moore's approach, which were collected posthumously in On Certainty . Wittgenstein didn't so much disagree with Moore as explore the grammar--or logic--of sentences like, "I know this is my hand": if you can't not know something, can you really be said to know it?--that sort of thing. In other words, the negation of nonsense is also nonsense. It's a thought-provoking volume, which I've quoted occasionally on this blog. The thing I want to note here is that Moore got at some...

Kneeling down or groveling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity.   --Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Principles of Virtue

Dedicated to those who think a dichotomy exists between analytic, or conceptual, statements ("Bachelors are unmarried men.") and synthetic, or empirical, statements ("That dog is brown.): As traditionally understood, analytic truths are linguistic stipulations, and therefore have no factual commitments, whereas synthetic truths do have factual commitments, and so are not merely stipulative. Neither of these descriptions characterizes conceptual truths as [Ludwig] Wittgenstein understands them. For Wittgenstein, a conceptual (or, as he would say, “grammatical”) proposition is indeed stipulative, and so in a certain sense lacks factual content; so it would be misleading to call it “synthetic.”   Is 252 = 625 a fact of experience? You’d like to say: “No.”—Why isn’t it?—“Because, by the rules, it can’t be otherwise.”—And why so?—Because that is the meaning of the rules. Because that is the procedure on which we build all judging.... Following a rule is a human activity. [Wit...