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...
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The "error" theory is a special case in the old debate between "cognitive" and 'non-cognitive" meta-ethical views. Cognitivism holds that there are moral properties or moral facts, and that the aim of normative ethical discourse is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them, in something like the same way that there are bodies and events we call "astronomical," (stars, planets, collisions, the collapse of a star into a black hole) and the aim of discussing "astronomy" is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them. For example, the wrongness of murder may be a fact in the world. If it is then the goal of the sentence "murder is wrong" is to name that fact. Non-cognitivists claim that there aren't any moral properties or facts, so they can't be described, rightly or wrongly. But it also generally adds that this doesn't mean normative ethical statements are wrong. It just means that su...