Guide to the Response to “Why I Became An Atheist”

My response to John Loftus’ book “Why I Became An Atheist” has taken the form of numerous posts.  This post will guide you through them.  I recommend they be read in the following order (after the list I describe why these posts and this order are important): Initial Review / Limits of Reason / The Subjective Truth Initial Review of “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus Introduction:  An Overview of the Limitations... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part XI: The Embarrassment of the Logical Positivists

The unabashed aim of the Logical Positivists - a group of philosophers including Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath, a.k.a. the Vienna Circle or the Logical Empiricists - was the complete and total destruction of the metaphysical (everything transcendental or “otherworldly” and of course, religion and theology), which they felt were tools of social and political conservatives.   It’s important to recognize that they... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part IX: G.E. Moore’s Attempt at Realism

Philosophers were impressed by G.E. Moore’s concentration on “method” even thought Moore confessed that, as far as method goes, “I never did know what it was.” Moore proposed to lead us out of the Kantian dilemma - the one where the knower affects the known, that is, where minds construct their experience rather than contemplate it - through a realism that posited that objects [sense data] can be experienced directly... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part VII: Kierkegaard’s Emphasis on Existence and Subjective Truth

Kant was engaged in reconciling the empiricists and the rationalists and so he acknowledged both the percept - the direct, experiential element in cognition - and the concept - the abstract, structural and relational element.  The percept and the concept act together to allow us to apprehend the phenomena.  But outside the categories of the mind and therefore outside of understanding are the noumena - things we cannot know. Hegel asserted that there... Read more

Smug, Complacent: The Pharisee and the Rational Atheist

Robert Paul Wolff, in About Philosophy, has captured the image quite well: “Couldn’t we perhaps look for a little bit of support from reason?   Mightn’t reason at least show that God’s promise is probable?  That the weight of evidence inclines us toward God’s promise?  That a reasonable man, as they say in the law courts, could tend to believe God’s promise? “Not a bit of it!  That is just what a fat,... Read more

The Starting Point of All Inquiry is the Human Condition

In his book, “Why I Became An Atheist,” John Loftus relates how one of his former teachers told him that “in order to get to God, we have to start with God.”  Loftus disagrees with this and so do I.  Loftus asserts that we should start from below, beginning with the world, but even that is assuming too much.  Why should I start with the world when I have a reality closer and more certain than the world - my self?  Not that... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part VI: Hegel’s Attempt to Restore the Metaphysical

It was Soren Kierkegaard who next led the attack against rationalism. But in order to understand Kierkegaard, we must understand Hegel. And in order to understand Hegel, we must recapitulate Kant. Kant, as you will recall, believed that the content of our ideas did indeed stem from realities which were independent of the human mind; but he also held that we can never fully know or conceive these realities because the mind is simply not equipped to... Read more

An Overview of the Limitations of Reason, Part V: The Rise of Romanticism

Romanticism came as a reaction to the Enlightenment, its rationalism and its conception of knowledge. It also arose to deal with the problems left in the wake of the collapse of the basic principles of the Age of Reason. Some important romantic philosophers and writers include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While Kant was struggling to keep... Read more

Gotcha

The new book by John Loftus, “Why I Became an Atheist” cites this challenge (from Mark Smith (of www.jcnot4me.com) for Christians : “[F]or the sake of argument let’s pretend that a time machine gets built. You and I hop in it, and travel back to the day before Easter, 33 A.D. We park it outside the tomb of Jesus. We wait. Easter morning rolls around, and nothing happens. We continue to wait. After several weeks of waiting, still nothing happens.... Read more

Reason Is Not King

William Lane Craig recently released the third edition of his book, “Reasonable Faith”. Here are some thoughts I had as I read the introduction. Craig states that apologetics is the branch of Christian theology that seeks to provide rational justification for the claims of the Christian faith. My initial reaction is, Why must the justification be rational? (And you say, So you think justification should be IR-rational?) No, I am questioning whether... Read more

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