Someone asked me on Quora what atheists think about the myth of the cave. I'm not an atheist, but I did have the following possibly responsive thoughts. The closest candidate for the title of God in THE REPUBLIC itself is the Idea of the Good. In another Platonic work, TIMAEUS, we learn of another figure Plato called the Demiurge, who actively fashioned the world. And the Abrahamic conception of God shared by the three great monotheisms is in effect a combination of Plato’s Idea of the Good and his Demiurge. The Good (upper case) is also the maker of the world, gazing upon it at each stage and saying “it is good" (lower case). But let us stay within the terms of the allegory of the cave, and so within THE REPUBLIC, as you suggest. A stray creature held as captive in the cave escapes, makes his way out and beholds the realities of the surface world. Then he comes to appreciate the uber-Reality that makes it possible for him to look at those realities, the Sun itself. Fi...
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Again: I'd like to transfer here something I wrote for Quora. (How many times have I done this? Well, there will likely be more.) Someone there asked, "What can an atheist gain from studying Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas?" I responded: Interestingly, Bertrand Russell -- a very outspokenly atheistic philosopher and historian of philosophy -- had great respect for St. Augustine as a philosopher. Perhaps his example answers your question. As you may know: one of the common arguments by pagan philosophers in Augustine's day, used against monotheism and views of creation ex nihilo, was this: there must have been a specific moment when God decided to create the world, and there must have been an infinity of moments of time before that. These Christians seem to believe that God made the creation decision at any arbitrary time during His self-sufficient aloneness. How is such a view sustainable? Augustine answers that argument with a theory of time. He said that...
The philosopher and blogger Brian Leiter recently wrote summarily, "Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche." For some of us in the peanut gallery, this raises the question: what the heck is a Straussian? The term arose in political philosophy and was in use back in the early 1970s, around the time Leo Strauss co-edited a textbook on the history of political philosophy with Joseph Cropsey. The term "Straussian" suggests several things. First, it is an approach to the classic texts of political philosophy that presumes that nearly every important philosopher in the canon was hiding something. Thus, texts must be read for their esoteric meaning. Second, related to this, the esoteric meaning was often irreligious. Political philosophy is full of thinkers who are in fact atheists but who have to hide the fact. Third, related to this in turn, Straussians suggest that these thinkers were right to hide the fact. Their own premise is that there is no God,...
William Lane Craig seems to have become the go-to guy for a certain sort of public function. He's the credentialed theistic philosopher who is up for a debate with the most prominent atheists of our day. Credentialed? Yes -- he has two PhDs, one in philosophy, one in theology, respectively from the University of Birmingham (1977) and the University of Munich (1984). Up for debating? Yes: as a high school student he was actually in the all-state (Iowa) debate team and he seems to have honed that craft since. [Is a debate team as an extracurricular activity a midwestern thing? I don't think it's big in the northeast.] The go-to guy? Yes, he has debated the late Christopher Hitchens as well as the very much with us Sam Harris and Lawrence M. Krauss. On an internet bulletin board to which I make occasional contributions, someone recently asked what Craig thinks of Immanuel Kant. I was happy to provide the answer. Not very highly. After all: it was Kant's posi...
Lawrence Krauss, who teaches physics at Arizona State University, also fancies himself a popularizer of science in the manner of Asimov or Sagan. In that spirit, he wrote A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING (2012). He argued therein that something could in fact come from nothing, and physics could explain why. In effect, he proposed to answer the age-old philosophical question "why is there something rather than nothing" in a thoroughly non-theistic way. The book made Krauss a big deal within what is nowadays broadly called the 'skeptic community.' Heck, no less a figure therein than Richard Dawkins wrote the afterword to Krauss' 2012 book. All well and good, except that his something-from-nothing effort doesn't hold up. Many bright people, without any taint of mysticism about them, have explained why, and science journalist John Horgan collected the key points in a column for Scientific American : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-lawrenc...
George H. Smith is a well-known atheist and libertarian writer, born in Japan in 1949. Smith is perhaps best known for Atheism: The Case Against God (1974) . I remember reading this long ago because it had a chapter combining and (unintelligently criticizing) two of the authors I most admire, Blaise Pascal and William James. Smith has become part of a heated controversy in recent days that involves ideas about liberty and feminism, and quite personal accusations involving a thinker/writer who describes herself as working “within the individualist-anarchist tradition,” and a person with whom Smith once had an intimate and a professional relationship, Wendy McElroy. McElroy, pictured here, has become very public in recent months as an opponent of the whole notion of a “rape culture” on campus, and the attendant notion that colleges as social micro-cosmos' have to ‘do something.’ Her advice to victims? “ Rape is a criminal offense, go to the police.” Pending the...
During the course of my last exchange with reader Henry on the Jamesian "will to believe" and related notions, I admitted that I had not done justice to the argument James is making in the final pages of VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, and I promised to try again on another day. So this may as well be the day. The material I have in mind begins in a minor key, in the middle of a chapter (Lecture XIX) unpretentiously titled "Other Characteristics." James had promised to treat of manifestations of religions his previous 18 lectures had neglected, and he had begun with its aesthetics, moving on to the practice and experience of prayer. Then he says, "The last aspect of religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence." He means by "the subconscious part" what we in the early 21st century more often call the "subliminal,...
I'll here continue yesterday's discussion on William James' skepticism about the argument from design, which was in turn continuing a discussion from the week before. In my recent exchange in the comments section of this blog with Henry, I observed that there has been an alliance, in the development of the philosophy of religion, between fideists and unbelievers. A fideist by standard definition is one who embraces a religious creed and who sees that embrace (Faith) as valuable in itself, and again who sees it as "in some sense independent of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason." James's essay on the "will to believe" is a rather moderate expression of fideism. He is certainly not advocating an adversarial relationship with reason, but he does argue that there are matters reason doesn't decide, and that in these matters an intellectualized expression of human will -- Faith -- may and in fact must step in. It is good that Faith ...
Below is my response to the question "is the teleological argument strong enough to convince an atheist?" within Yahoo!Answers: [The regular reader of the blog, or even someone who has just glimpsed at the title of this blog, will be unsurprised to see that the bulk of it consists of a quotation from the works of William James.] Obviously, if someone is an atheist, it is because that person has not been convinced by such arguments (all adult atheists have heard such arguments). So in a sense the answer is trivially "no." But you may want to know whether the argument has sufficient force to persuade an ideally rational atheist. I have to say that in its usual forms anyway, the argument seems to me rather week. William James put his finger on one of the weaknesses of the argument when he wrote (in a footnote to lecture 18 of VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE), " When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees th...
A dialogue. MYSTIC: I know there is a God. I have attained cosmic consciousness and have touched His face. ATHEIST: There are lots of problems with that, but I'll start with this -- the rest of us have no way of knowing that you aren't lying. MYSTIC: I don't care, dude. EPISTEMOLOGIST: But I care. If only a small portion of the human race has mystical experiences, and if they are locked up, so to speak, inside the consciousness of each one, then do they inform the rest of us at all? ATHEIST: That's what I said. EPISTEMOLOGIST: I heard you. BUT ... since our friend has gone off into his reveries and only you and I can talk.... MYSTIC: Om mani padme hummmmmmm EPISTEMOLOGIST: I'd like to point out that there is another side to this. The point in favor of an argument from mysticism to the existence of a God is that it IS an argument from experience. It is possible that some of them are lying, but it seems unlikely that all of them are lying. And if a...
A participant in Yahoo!Answers asks: "Who is the best atheist philosopher? Out of Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Democritus, etc. who is the greatest/best atheist philosopher of all time?" I answered thus: ----------------------------------------------- Since you've said "etc." I guess we can move beyond your list. I have to answer: George Santayana. A word of bias acknowledged: I'm a Jamesian pragmatist in philosophy myself, and I find reasonable an act of "will to believe" in a God whose existence I can not prove, as part of my effort to lead a productive and satisfying life on earth. But you didn't ask for best fideist. You asked for best atheist. And Santayana, who was something of a protégé of James, became that. He combined Plato in matters of value with Democritus in matters of existence, a fascinating combination. Here's a quote: "Now I was aware, at first in...
Gertrude Himmelfarb has a lengthy discussion of William James in a recent weekend issue of The Wall Street Journal. This discussion was apparently inspired by a recent book by the French philosopher, Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists. Botton thinks religion simply false (the world is just a mechanical push and pull of undesigned particles), but thinks that religions ( a word both plural in semantics and institutional in emphasis) valuable nonetheless, because they offer music, architectural achievement, rituals, community, feasts, etc. Atheism can't do that, and the failure of the old Comteans rather illustrates this point, so Botton thinks atheists should make their peace with religions. That is just a starting point for Himmelfarb, though, who wants to talk about James, not Botton. As Botton is an unorthodox sort of atheist, a neo-atheists if you will, James was an unorthodox sort of believer, a neo-believer. About half way into her essay (at a point...