The Logical Atheist

It's belatedly come to my attention that James Randi , The Amazing Randi, renowned magician, escape artist, author, lecturer, and debunker of the paranormal, died Oct. 20 at the age of 92. The magic and atheist community will miss him badly. I got to known him in the late 1970s, during my days as a small-scale stage magician, when I interviewed him about his work at his home in northern New Jersey. We kept in touch for a while after that. He was a joyous man who loved this life. You can find many YouTube videos featuring him as a lecturer and talk-show guest. They are well-worth watching.

From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. --Albert Camus, The Rebel

When someone shows skepticism about certain claims to knowledge, what is required is that the ball be put firmly in his court. He is the one who must produce justification for his position. Skepticism without grounds is empty, and empty suggestions need not be regarded seriously.  --D. W. Hamlyn, The Theory of Knowledge

A wise man who has practised reasoning knows that he is fallible, and carries this conviction along with him in every judgment he forms. He knows likewise, that he is more liable to err in some cases than in others. He has a scale in this mind, by which he estimates his liableness to err, and by this he regulates the degree of his assent in his first judgment upon any point.... To pretend to prove by reasoning that there is no force in reason, does indeed look like a philosophical delirium. It is like a man's pretending to see clearly, that he himself and all other men are blind. --Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

I agree with George H. Smith that the word  correspondence  -- as in the  correspondence theory of the truth  -- "is a somewhat unfortunate choice of words." ( Why Atheism ) Smith writes that while true propositions -- statements that such and such is the case --  can be said to correspond to facts, the term is still fraught with ambiguity. He goes on to say that an idea , unlike a proposition, is best not spoken of those terms. "The theist may have an idea of God," he writes "and this idea may be clear or muddled, coherent or confused, logically consistent or self-contradictory -- but this idea, strictly speaking, can be neither true nor false. An idea neither affirms nor denies that something is a fact (to have an idea of God is not necessarily to affirm that God exists), so it makes no sense to evaluate the truth [or] falsity of an idea per se." This seems right. I can hold the idea unicorn without embracing the proposition unicorns exist . Corresponden...

This quotation below, demonstrating the ancient Greek philosophers' proof of an objective foundation for ethics, is dedicated to atheists who think that since in a godless world values must be subjective, we can establish morality with only an arbitrary starting point, say, the maximization of well-being or minimization of suffering. (See my "Should Humanists Be Utilitarians?" ) Because this is an admittedly arbitrary starting point, it surely cannot serve as a launch pad for a rational morality, for as Hume would say (erroneously), although reason can tell us if our means will get us to our ends, it can be no help in saying if our ends are worthwhile. Or: reason is merely a "slave to the passions" and ought to aspire to be nothing more.) Fortunately, an alternative is available to us, which is rooted in the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The quote is from  Roderick T. Long's  Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Ac...

Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd; never yet has a God been described so that a concept of him was made possible to human thought. --Annie Besant, "Why I Do Not Believe in God" (1887)