The Logical Atheist

Would you think differently of God if he had told Abraham to go ahead with the sacrificial killing of Isaac rather than substituting the ram at the last minute?

This morning I enjoyed watching Robert Mayhew's lecture "Ayn Rand's Intransigent Atheism," which was given at last summer's Objectivist Conference, or OCON. In this examination of the cosmological argument, he says much of what I've tried to say on this blog. Mayhew, a professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University, points out that Ayn Rand called herself an "intransigent" but not a "militant" atheist. Her objective was not, in a primary sense, to argue against or reject belief in God, but to affirm reason as the only method of obtaining knowledge about what exists. One who is fully committed to reason is necessarily an atheist because no room is left for what people mean by God . Her use of the word intransigence indicated that the claims of theism could simply be dismissed as empty nonsense because they misuse the language by ignoring basic metaphysical truths that cannot be escaped without self-contradiction. Rand's orientation i...

In a new book two professors of psychology, Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer, seek to explain why what they call "science denial" is rampant today and how dangerous it is. They also give their account in a strange conversation with Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic  magazine, from whom we might have expected a tad more "skepticism" or at least some devil's advocacy. The views of all three are in some ways vague and even confused, but the condescension toward the unenlightened rubes who disagree with them on certain scientific controversies--primarily climate- and COVID-19-related--couldn't have been more clear. While Sinatra and Hofer smear a large and diverse group of people as "science deniers," they undercut their own claim when they admit that no one actually rejects science per se. So their sensational but misleading title and broad statements are designed not to inform but rather to sell books to their progressive-minded audience. The ru...

[A]dmitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it. --Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason:  Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology , 1794-1807 

[Religion] is essentially a scheme to bend the extraordinary to man's uses--a plan of attack upon the powers which seem to control and condition it. All religions, whatever their superficial differences, have that purpose at bottom, and so all of them are fundamentally alike. What the Bakua medicine-man seeks to accomplish by rattling stones in a cocoanut-shell, or the Tibetan lama  by whirling his prayer-wheel, or the Yakut shaman  by going into a sweat-bath, or the Crow Indian devotee by chopping off a finger is precisely what the Pope seeks to accomplish by saying Mass in St. Peter's. All desire, first, to attract the notice of the gods, and, second, to induce them to be amiable. The differences in method of approach, however radical they may appear superficially, are of little consequence in essence.  --H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods , 1930 

Readers of this blog have now become familiar with the views of Elihu Palmer (1764-1806) through the long series of quotes I've posted from his book, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species . Palmer was an American deist and founder of the Deistical Society of New York and similar organizations. As a deist, of course, he was no atheist. Nor was he an agnostic. He seemed quite certain that the universe had a creator. You'd think that a creator of the universe would have had to precede and exist apart from its creation--that it was supernatural--but deists rejected that idea. It has been suggested that since the word supernatural  was a term of disparagement among deists, they must have believed that the deity was thoroughly natural, simply part of the system of cause and effect in which things necessarily happened because of the nature of the entities that exist. It's as if this unique natural being created ...

The highest intellectual joy consists in the discovery of truth; a knowledge of this truth will constantly tend to the practice of an exalted virtue; this virtue will serve as the stable foundation of human happiness, the immortal guarantee of the felicity of the intelligent world. Reason anticipates a progress, which all the powers of superstition can never arrest. Let reason then perform her faithful duty, and ignorance, fanaticism, and misery, will be banished from the earth. A new age, the true millennium will then commence; the standard of truth and of science will then be erected among the nations of the world, and man, the unlimited proprietor of his own person, may applaud himself in the result of his energies, contemplate with indescribable satisfaction the universal improvement and happiness of the human race.  --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species