The Logical Atheist

We don't infer reality from our consciousness of sense data. We infer sense data from our consciousness of reality. Our senses are not barriers to direct contact with the world. They are our  means of direct contact with the world. The sequence is reality -> consciousness -> sense data. (Ayn Rand got this right.)

Would you think differently of God if he, as the supreme author of the moral commandments, one day commanded, "Thou shalt kill"? What's to stop him from doing so?

1. Fish don't know they're in water. 2. People aren't fish.

The new atheists, as opposed to an older generation of atheists, love to portray themselves as skeptics. But they should be careful. It is true that words like  skeptic have a narrow meaning in the sense of referring to doubt about a specific claim only. That's fine: language is a living, changing thing, and words can drift in various ways, such as narrowing and broadening. But skepticism (call it capital-S skepticism) has not lost its earlier radical meaning of universal principled doubt : the literal inability to know anything at all or anything about a particular matter. Atheists who defend reason ought to make clear that this is not what they embrace. After all, if we can't know, then what's the point of asking a believer for evidence of God's reality? What is evidence to a capital-S skeptic? It's an illusion. If in principle we cannot know, then evidence is a bogus category. There can be no such thing! Anyone's claim -- even a theist's -- is as good a...

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...