The Logical Atheist

James Lindsay's lecture "Ending Atheism: There Is No God But 'God'" makes many good points. What I miss, however, is an acknowledgment that atheism can and ought to be more than simply the lack of a kind of belief, namely, in a supernatural creator of the universe. As I've argued many times on this blog, the very term  supernatural  is incoherent and a misuse of language. God  as a term, in other words, is fatally and conceptually flawed. Ayn Rand called such a term an "anti-concept." Nevertheless, Lindsay's lecture is worth hearing.

If there were no truth (or Truth, as it is sometimes derisively put), we would have no need ever to revise our beliefs.

Perhaps there should be a penalty for thinkers who violate the law of parsimony .

It is not a criticism of reason to acknowledge that no reasoning person or group can have a synoptic view of the world or of society that would enable him or it to rationally plan everything. The faculty of reason is packaged within individual human beings, and no mountaintop exists from which one could see and know all that it would take to plan a society or an economy in the interest of all its participants. The result of attempting to do so would inevitably be what Ludwig von Mises called "planned chaos." This is what F. A. Hayek, Mises's student, also worked so hard to explain. But when individuals operate and cooperate in a free society and marketplace, their small portion of knowledge, articulated and tacit, becomes accessible to all, mostly through the price system. Mises and Hayek showed this in the great socialist-calculation debate of the '20s and '30s. Reason is powerfully efficacious in that it enables us to perceive and understand the world that exist...

Does the cliche God works his will in mysterious ways really comfort you when contemplating the horrible things God does or lets happen (which is the same thing since he created the universe and knew the future): childhood cancer, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, fatal automobile accidents, wife-beating, child abuse, genocide, and the rest?

Human beings act. Moreover, they act with remarkable success much of the time in big and small ways. Think of the inventions and discoveries ranging from life-easing to life-saving technologies. That seems to suggest two alternative stories. First, that reality is just a figment of our individual, tribal, or universal imaginations. Or second, that reality is real, objective, out there -- and that we rational animals can know it if we exert the effort. I submit the first story is completely implausible, not to mention self-contradictory. That leaves the second one standing.

About that flood, did you still adore your God after learning that he drowned virtually every person in the world because some people had sinned in his subjective opinion? (I say  subjective  because God would have nothing outside himself to reference in making that judgment.)