Author: Bill Vallicella

What is Behind the Terminological Mischief of the ‘Negative Atheists’?

Joseph A. suggests it's all about politics:
 
You ask in your latest post "So what's going on here?"

 
The New Atheists are largely motivated by politics, not philosophy. So, what they try to zero in on is the most effective way to advance their cause, in the public and private sphere. And that means being on defense as little as possible, honesty or reasonableness be damned.
 
It's an anecdote, but it's been my experience that New Atheists (who seem to principally be behind all these weird re-definitions of atheism) hate being on defense. That's the fun of being a skeptic after all – you risk nothing, and whoever you're talking with risks everything — so long as you can frame the conversation as "You are making a claim, and I am not". You can criticize, mock, argue, whatever you wish, and so long as you avoid the right moves, you'll have no risk of having the same come back to you. But key to that is to avoid being thought of as making claims. Someone who says "There is no God", makes a claim. Therefore, that position is avoided, at least superficially. (In my opinion, often dishonestly.)
 
After all, who wants to be in the hot seat? And where would any person who wants to advance their political cause rather be – the questioned, or the questioner? Cynically, and spoken more out of personal experience than out of any hard data, but that's how I see the answer to your question. This is all about politics, and it has been from the start. (I'm differentiating here between actual agnostics or more intellectual atheists, and New Atheists.)
 
This is as good an explanation as I can think of.  The point, I take it, is not that the New Atheism as such is solely politically motivated — which is  not the case — but that the 'redefinitional gambit' is.

Against Terminological Mischief: ‘Negative Atheism’ and ‘Negative Nominalism’

This from the seemingly reputable site, Investigating Atheism:

More recently, atheists have argued that atheism only denotes a lack of theistic belief, rather than the active denial or claims of certainty it is often associated with.

I'm having a hard time seeing what point there could be in arguing that "atheism only denotes a lack of theistic belief."  Note first that atheism cannot be identified with the lack of theistic belief, i.e., the mere absence of the belief that God exists, for that would imply that cabbages and tire irons are atheists.  Note second that it won't do to say that atheism is the lack of theistic belief in persons, for there are persons incapable of forming beliefs.  Charitably interpreted, then, the idea must be that atheism is the lack of theistic belief in persons capable of forming and maintaining beliefs. 

But this cannot be right either, and for a very simple reason.  Atheism is something people discuss, debate, argue for, argue against, draw conclusions from, believe, disbelieve, entertain, and so on.  Atheism, in other words, is a PROPOSITION: it is something that can be either true or false, that can be the object of such propositional attitudes as belief and disbelief, and can stand in such logical relations to other propositions as entailment, consistency, and inconsistency.  But one cannot discuss, debate, argue for, . . . believe, etc. a lack of something.  Atheism redefined as the lack of theistic belief is a PROPERTY of certain persons. Now a proposition is not a property.  Atheism is a proposition and  for this reason cannot be redefined as a property.

Someone who understands this might nevertheless maintain that 'negative atheism' is a proposition, namely, the proposition that there are people capable of forming and maintaining beliefs who simply lack the belief that God exists.  Admittedly, one could use 'atheism' as the label for the proposition that there are such people.  But then atheism so defined would be trivially true.  After all, no one denies that there are people capable of beliefs who lack the belief that God exists.  Furthermore, if 'atheism' is so defined, then theism would be the view that there are persons capable of belief who have the belief that God exists.  But then theism, too, would be trivially true.  And if both are true, then they cannot be logical contradictories of each other as they must be if the terms are to mean anything useful.

Now what is the point of the terminological mischief perpetrated by these 'negative atheists'?  It is terminological mischief because we have just seen it ruin two perfectly good words, 'atheism' and 'theism.'  If atheism and theism are worth discussing, then atheism is the view that God does not exist and theism is the view that God does exist. ((I am assuming that by 'God' we understand that being who is the main target of the venom of militant atheists, namely, the God of the Abrahamic religions. We are not talking about Spinoza's deus sive natura or anything of that order.)

Consider the parallel case of a nominalist who for whatever reason does not want to be taken to be asserting any positive thesis.  So instead of adhering to the standard understanding of 'nominalism' according to which it is the view that there are no universals and that particulars alone exist, he proposes to redefine 'nominalism' as the absence of the belief that there are universals. 

But now the same problems arise.  One cannot argue for or against nominalism if it is merely a lack of belief.  And if you say that nominalism is the proposition that some people lack the belief in universals then that is true, but not worth arguing for or against.  One does not argue for or against a trivially true thesis that all accept.

So what's going on here? 

Libertarians and Drug Legalization

Libertarians often argue that drug legalization would not lead to increased drug use.  I find that preposterous, and you should too.  There are at least three groups of people who are dissuaded from drug use by its being illegal.

1. There are those who respect the law because it is the law.  'It's against the law' carries weight with them; it has 'dissuasive force.'  For these people the mere fact that X is illegal suffices for them to refrain from doing X.  It doesn't matter for the purposes of my argument how many of these people there are or whether they are justified in respecting the law just because it is the law.  The point is that there are such people and that the mere illegality of doing X supplies a motive for their not doing X. 

Now suppose the legal prohibition on doing X is removed.  Will every one in this first class begin doing X?  Of course not.  The point is that some will.  So it should already be clear to anyone with common sense and no ideological axe to grind that drug legalization will lead to increased use.

2. There are those who may or may not respect the law because it is the law, but fear the consequences of getting caught breaking it.  These people don't like rude encounters with cops, jail time, fines, loss of reputation, etc.  Among these people are libertarians who favor legalization and have no respect for current drug laws but obey the current laws out of fear of the consequences of breaking them.

3. There are also those who are quite confident that they can avoid the consequences of breaking the drug laws, but fear the consequences of contact with drug dealers. They fear being cheated out of their money, being given diluted or poisoned product, etc.

Now take the logical sum, or union, of the three classes just menioned.  The membership of that union is significant. Legalize drugs and some of those people will begin using drugs.  And of those who begin, some will end up abusing them, becoming addicted, etc.

Therefore, it is utterly preposterous to claim as libertarians typically do that drug legalization will not lead to increased use.  So why do people like Ron Paul  make this claim?  It is hard to figure.  Why say something stupid that makes your case weaker than it is?  Is it just knee-jerk oppositionalism? (I can't find my  old post on knee-jerk oppositionalism, but I'll keep looking.) 

Why did Paul say, "How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would."?  That's just a dumbass thing to say.  Paul is assuming that whether one does X or not has nothing to do with whether X is legally permissible or legally impermissible.  He is assuming that people who use drugs will use them no matter the law says, and that people who do not use drugs will refrain from using them no matter what the law says.  That is a bit of silliness which lies beneath refutation.  So again I ask:  why do libertarians maintain extremist stupidities when there are intelligent  things they can say?

After all, libertarians do have a case.  So my advice to them would be to concede the obvious — that legalization will result in greater use — and then argue that the benefits of legalization outweigh the costs.  They will then come across, not as fanatical deniers of the obvious, but as reasonable people who understand the complexity of the issue.

As for Ron Paul, I'm afraid he has already blown his 2012 chances with his remarks on heroin.  It's too bad.  The country needs to move in the libertarian direction after decades and decades of socialist drift.  But the American people do not cotton to fanatics and the doctrinaire. 

Ayn Rand on “Existence Exists”

Whether one calls it a renaissance or a recrudescence, Rand is on a roll.  The Randian resurgence doesn't please David Bentley Hart whose First Things attack piece contains the following:

And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is “rational” or “objective” or “real.” Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an “-ism.” Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like “existence is identity” and “consciousness is identification,” all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error.

Pleonasm and bombast aside, "Maxims . . . gathered from the damp fenlands of vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error" is on the mark.  I will illustrate with the famous Randianism, "Existence exists." 

1. There are at least two sensible ways of construing 'Existence exists.'  (a) That in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists.  For example, if one thought of existence as a property of existing things, and one were a realist about properties, then it would make sense for that person to say that existence exists.  He would mean by it that the property of existence exists.  (b) Existing things exist. Instead of taking 'existence' as denoting that in virtue of which existing things exist, one could take it as a term that applies to whatever exists.  Accordingly, existence is whatever exists.  To say that existence exists would then mean that existing things exist, or whatever exists exists.  But then the dictum would be a tautology.  Of course existing things exist, what else would they be 'doing'?  Breathing things breath.  Running things run.  Whatever is in orbit is in orbit.

2.  From Rand's texts it is clear that she intends neither the (a) nor the (b) construal.  What she is trying to say is something non-tautological: that the things that exist exist and have the attributes they have independently of us.  Here we read, "The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity." Rand is advancing a version of metaphysical realism.  Existence EXISTS! (Pound the lectern, stamp the foot, flare the nostrils.)  In other words, the things that exist — yonder mountain, the setting sun — EXIST! where that means that they are real in sublime independence of our thinking and doing and talking, and indeed of any being's thinking and doing.  The problem, of course, is that Rand chooses to express herself in an inept and idiosyncratic way using the ambiguous sentence, 'Existence exists.'  A careful writer does not package non-tautological claims in sentences the form of which is tautological. 

That whatever exists exists independently of any consciousness, including a divine consciousness if there is one, is a substantive metaphysical claim, as can be seen from the fact that it rules out every form of idealism.  'Existing things exist,' however, is a barefaced tautology that rules out nothing.

3.  But the problem is not merely infelicity of expression.  Even though Rand wants to advance a substantive non-tautological thesis, a thesis of metaphysical realism, she thinks she can accomplish this by either inferring it from or conflating it with the Law of Identity.  The law states that for any x, x = x.  As Rand puts it, "A =A."  Well of course.  There is nothing controversial here. But Rand thinks that one can straightaway move to a substantive thesis that is controversial, namely, metaphysical realism according to which things exist and have the natures they have independently of any consciousness.  My point is not that metaphysical realism is false; my point is that denying it is not equivalent to denying the Law of Identity.  The problem is that Rand packs a hell of a lot into the the law in question, a lot of stuff that doesn't belong there. She puts the following in the mouth of Galt:

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

 [. . .]

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

So the disasters of the 20th century originated in the evasion by people like Hitler and Stalin of the fact that A is A!  This is just silly.  How can the disasters of the 2oth century be laid at the door step of a miserable tautology?  Suppose we grant that everything that exists is self-identical and that everything that is self-identical exists. (The first half of the assertion is uncontroversial, but the second half is not and will be contested by followers of Alexius von Meionong.)  But suppose we grant it.  I myself believe it is true.  By what process of reasoning does one arrive at such substantive Randian claims as that (1) Whatever exists exists independently of any consciousness and (2) There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it—and no alternative to it?

The denials of these two propositions are consistent with the Law of Identity and Rand's explication of existence in terms of this law.  So the propositions cannot be validly inferred from the law. 

Note finally that if there is no alternative to existence, then it is necessarily the case that something exists.  For to say that there is no alternative to existence is to say that it is impossible that there be nothing at all.  But 'to exist = to be self-identical' is consistent with each thing's existence being contingent, and the whole lot of them being contingent.  Therefore, one cannot validly infer 'There is no alternative to existence' from 'To exist = to be self-identical.'

From this  we see how slovenly the Randian/Peikoffian 'reasoning' is.  The game they play is the following. They advance substantive metaphysical claims in the guise of tautologies.  The self-evidence of the latter they illicitly ascribe to the former.  This allows them to pass off their sayings as axioms that every rational person must accept. If you patiently expose their confusions as I just did, they resort to invective and name-calling.

Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist

When I lived with my parents, I watched a television, theirs. But when I got out on my own, I owned no TV, first for reasons of poverty, and later, after nailing down a philosophy teaching gig, for reasons of inertia and elitism. The life of the mind is a magnificent thing, but it can breed a certain arrogance: one fancies oneself vastly superior to the ordinary boob who doesn't read books, can't write or think   beyond the utilitarian, and sucks on the glass tit for the little cognitive pablum his impoverished pate can absorb. It's not called the boob tube for nothing. You will have noticed the dual sense of 'boob.'

My period of tubelessness included the whole of the 1970s and roughly the first third of the 1980s. Once I got the teaching job, I was able to afford a stereo system. (I still have the tuner, a Pioneer SX-880.  The Technics turntable doesn't see much use, though, despite my holding on to all my albums from the '60s and beyond.)  I gave myself a classical music education and listened to the FM band. My tuner was usually set to WYSO, Yellow Springs, Ohio, an ultraliberal enclave and home to Antioch College.  WYSO was an NPR affiliate and that is where I got most of my news and commentary. That and The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, to both of which I subscribed. In those days I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to the AM band.  As you can see, I was a bit of a liberal.  But experience and hard thinking have a way of making conservatives out of liberals.

But then a lovely creature entered my life. She came without a dowry but with a TV. Thus the tube entered my life and I joined the booboisie, to extend a neologism introduced by H. L. Mencken.  But it was now the mid-80s and cable was the thing. Brian Lamb and the cable providers made possible C-Span, and this brings me to my main point.

No TV, no C-Span. Therein lies the main reason for owning a TV.

There are several other reasons, of course, but that is the main one. I suppose I am still an elitist, but an elitist of a different sort.  Before, my elitism was manifested by a rejection of TV tout court; now by a selection of perhaps 20 out of 200 channels as worth viewing. The Hitler Channel, more commonly know as the History Channel, is worth a visit. I recently discovered the Documentary Channel which, despite its leftist leanings, is a source of some outstanding documentaries. I'm not talking about docu-drama bullshit, such as one might find on MSM networks, but hard-core documentaries containing lengthy interviews with interesting characters.

And then there are those Twilight Zone marathons, on New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July.  It is a good time to be alive.

Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

I see that R. P. Wolff has a blog, The Philosopher's Stone.  His post Anarchism and Marxism caught my eye.  In it he addresses the question of the logical consistency of his anarchism and his Marxism.   The answer of course depends on how Wolff employs these terms.

First of all, when I call myself an anarchist, I mean just exactly what I explained in my little book In Defense of Anarchism. I deny that there is or could be a de jure legitimate state. That is the sum and substance of what I call in that book my "philosophical anarchism." This is a limited claim, but not at all a trivial one. [. . .]

My Marxism, as I have many times explained, is not a form of secular religious faith, but a conviction that Marx was correct when he argued that capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the working class.

Clearly, *A de jure legitimate state is impossible* and *Capitalism rests essentially on the exploitation of the  working class* are logically consistent propositions.  So if these propositions capture what is meant by 'anarchism' and 'Marxism,' then one can be both an anarchist and a Marxist.

So far, so good.  But suppose one accepts the second proposition.  Wouldn't one naturally want to bring about political change and eliminate capitalism and with it the exploitation of the working class?  (As Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.")  Now the implementation of this change and the maintenance of a a socialist order requires the coercive power of the state and with it the violation of the autonomy of all those who resist. 

This fact brings us to a much more interesting consistency question:  How could an anarchist (in Wolff's sense), consistently with his anarchism, be a Marxist in any full-blooded sense of the term?  In a full-blooded sense, a Marxist is not one who merely maintains the thesis that capitalism by its very nature exploits workers, but one who works to seize control of the state apparatus for the purpose of implementing the elimination of capitalism.  The following  two propositions are plainly inconsistent: *The state as such lacks moral justification* and *The state possess moral justification when its coercive power is employed to eliminate capitalism and usher in socialism.*

Now that is the inconsistency that bothers me.  Wolff appears to address it at the end of his post:

I can see no conflict whatsoever between philosophical anarchism and Marxian socialism. The citizens of a socialist society, were one ever to come into existence [Gott sei dank!], would have no more obligation to obey the laws of that state, merely because it was socialist, than they have now to obey the laws of the United States, merely because America is (let us grant for the sake of argument) democratic. Both groups of citizens would stand under the universal duty of judging for themselves whether what the laws command is something that on independent grounds it is good to do. There is no duty, prima facie or otherwise, to obey the law simply because it is the law.

There is something unsatisfactory about this answer.  Wolff obviously wants a socialist society.  But good Kantian that he is, Wolff must appreciate that to will the end is to will the means.  The end is a socialist order; the means is the imposition of  socialism and the eradication of capitalism by means of the coercive power of the state.  (You would have to be quite the utopian off in Cloud Cuckoo Land to suppose that socialism could be brought about in any other way.  And of course once the socialist state has total control, it won't "wither away.")  So it seems Wolff must will and thus find morally acceptable the state apparatus that enforces and maintains socialism.  But then his Marxism contradicts his anarchism.  For these two propositions are logically inconsistent: *No state is morally justified* and *States that enforce and maintain socialism are morally justified.*

The bit about there being no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law seems not to the point.  The point is that if socialism is morally superior to capitalism, and the only route to socialism is via the state's exercise of its coercive power, then one who  wills and works for the implementation of socialism must will and work for and find morally acceptable the existence of a socialist state.

Or maybe Wolff's position just boils down to the triviality that whatever order comes about, whether capitalist, socialist, mixed, or anything else,  there would be no duty to obey the law simply because it is the law.  But then he hasn't shown the consistency of anarchism and Marxism in any full-blooded sense of these terms.

I summarize Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism here , here, and here. 

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of  philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther."

Leo Strauss on Reading and Writing

 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing:

     It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a
     rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful
     writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to
     be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself.
     Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to
     write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good
     books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully
     written. (Quoted from Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method:
     A Reading of Spinoza's Ethics, Princeton University Press, 1988,
     p. ii.)

   "We learn to write by reading."  This is why reading good books is
   essential to becoming a good writer.

A Reader Needs Advice on Assembling a Philosophical Toolkit

I'm an avid reader of your blog and have really enjoyed the in-depth analysis of a myriad of issues and assorted ideas. It really is one of a kind!

That being said, I'm emailing to get some advice on how I should further my philosophical studies. I've decided on political science as a major and philosophy as a minor. I hope to pursue my studies far beyond the undergraduate level, mostly in political philosophy. The problem I'm starting to have is when I really try to dissect some of your posts for their technical content, I find that I am unfamiliar with a lot of the philosophical tools that you use in your writings, tools that we undergraduates are not really acquainted with, and so I was wondering if you'd be able to direct me to some resources that would enable me to get to the next level.

So far I've looked far and wide for introductory books that would house something similar to what I've described above, perhaps a compilation of commonly used analytical techniques (if that's what you would call them), but I have come up with virtually nothing.

For some reason, I have this feeling that you're going to tell me that there aren't any such resources, and that the job of the philosopher is to comb through analytic philosophy (or even before) from its inception and pick out strategies that philosophers have introduced, often in ambiguous ways, over a large span of time, and refine them so they are somewhat usable. Is the creation of a toolkit a matter of hitting the books (something I don't mind) or is it really a bottom-up, creative endeavor?

P.S. Your posts regarding politics are a breath of fresh air.

I'm hoping that my readers can be of some assistance here.  There are probably some recent handbooks of which I am not aware.  But I know of some older books that should be useful.  One is Richard L. Purtill, A Logical Introduction to Philosophy.  Another is Jay F. Rosenberg, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners.  And you may want to take a look at John Passmore, Philosophical Reasoning and Douglas N. Walton, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation.

Are Atheists Theologians?

This from a reader:

I’m e-mailing you with this question because it’s bothered me for a while and I think you are more than capable of giving me a better understand of it. “Can atheists rationally ignore theology? Further, if they do need to study it, quite how much should they study, and which aspect(s) of it?” Many atheists think that studying theology would simply waste their time, whereas I now think that no rational person’s atheism is complete without engaging with the best theology on offer.

Well of course you are right:  any atheist who does not engage with a sophisticated conception of God is simply attacking a straw man and may be ignored for that very reason.  I see little point is discussions with atheists who liken God to a flying spaghetti monster or a celestial teapot.  Let them first show that they have mastered the complexities of a sophisticated God conception, and that they have respect for, and some understanding of, the religious sensibility, and then we will talk with them. If they polemicize, or are disrespectful or dismissive, then they are best ignored.

My own position is that atheism is a kind of rival theology (atheology?), just as every disbelief is a kind of rival belief, and that no atheist can rationally afford to ignore theology.

Here you have to be careful.  Suppose S disbelieves that p.  (For example, Jones disbelieves that Osama is dead.) It does not follow that Jones believes that ~p.  For it may be that S neither believes that p nor believes that ~p.  If one neither accepts nor rejects the proposition that Osama is dead, then one could be said to disbelieve that Osama is dead without believing that he is alive.  So there are two modes of disbelief with respect to a proposition p.  Either one believes that ~p or one suspends judgment with respect to p.  So I don't agree that every disbelief is a kind of rival belief.

In fact, every atheist is implicitly a theologian. For instance, Thomas Aquinas believes that God is simple, and Richard Dawkins believes that God is complex. Dawkins and Aquinas seem to compete in the same arena and talk on the same subject, so aren’t they both theologians, albeit rival ones? Further, every informed atheist must hold that the arguments that are meant to establish the existence of God fail. To think this is to engage positively with theology. Not to think this is to fail to rationally found one’s atheism. An atheist who is ignorant of theology, in my view, is rather like someone who disbelieves in the planets but is ignorant of astronomy. Atheists who do not take God and theology seriously do not take their own atheism seriously either.

Here again you have to be careful.  It is not as if there exists an x such that x = God and that Aquinas and Dawkins have contradictory beliefs about this one entity, x.  They are not disagreeing in the way two theologians might disagree over say,  divine foreknowledge or the filioque, or divine simplicity.   These theologians disagree, not about the existence of God, but about his exact nature.  By contrast, Aquinas and Dawkins are not presupposing a common subject matter about whose attributes they disagree.  So it is highly misleading if not outright wrong to say that Aquinas and Dawkins are rival theologians.  For Aquinas, theology has a subject matter; for Dawkins it does not.  So they do not "talk on the same subject."

It helps if you distinguish concepts of God from God.  For Aquinas, there really is an entity which some of those concepts are concepts of, even though no concept could be adequate to the divine reality.  For Dawkins, however, nothing that could reasonably count as a God concept is a concept of anything.

I think you have the right idea, but you are putting it in the wrong way.  You are right that serious and intellectually responsible atheists must address themselves to the most sophisticated conceptions of theists.  In this sense they must "engage positively with theology."  But that is not to say that "every atheist is implicitly a theologian."  Atheists deny the existence of God.  So for them there cannot be any theology, any study of God, as a legitimate inquiry into a domain of reality.  And please note that one can deny the existence of God without in any obvious way presupposing the existence of God.  How?  In the same way one denies the existence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  One cannot predicate nonexistence of Pegasus without presupposing the existence of Pegasus.  But one can predicate noninstantiation of the concept winged horse of such and such a description without presupposing the existence of Pegasus,  And so it is with the denial of God.  The atheist simply claims that no God concept is instantiated.  So I deny that atheism is a species of theology.  It is a rejection of all theology.

I also deny here and here that atheism is a religion, though I grant that it is like a religion in some ways. 

Moonsets and Microclimates

One advantage the early riser has over his opposite number is that he is better placed to enjoy certain celestial and atmospheric phenomena. One morning the moonset over the hills behind my house was unusually entrancing. The moon was at its fullest and the sky at it clearest. The Morning Star, that overworked example of so many philosophy of language dissertations, was in the vicinity of the moon, at least phenomenologically. The conjunction put me in mind of the Turkish flag which depicts Venus and a crescent moon in similar proximity. It was on such a crescent-mooned night that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) began the Kurtulus Savasi (the War of Independence) that brought into being the Republic of Turkey. Or so I was once told by a Turkish girl.

And then a day or two later I was out hiking at first light. The trail took me down into a chilly streambed. Climbing out of the drainage was like walking into a warm house: the temperature differential was twenty degrees Fahrhenheit if it was two. It takes a hiker, one accompanied only by his shadow, to appreciate such phenomena properly. The trail runner and the mountain biker are working too hard and are too much claimed by the hazards under foot and wheel to attend to the subtle. And the hiker who brings company along will be snubbed by Nature who jealously hides her charms from the unworthy and the inattentive. Nature: "You bring society into my serene precincts? Then enjoy your society, you can't have me."

As for the windshield tourist — he may as well be on another planet.

Bluff Spring Loop, Superstition Wilderness, 6 May 2011

This is a 9.3 mile hike out of the Peralta Trailhead, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona.  I have done it countless times in both the clockwise and counterclockwise directions.  The route sports about 1260 feet of elevation gain according to David Mazel (Arizona Trails, Wilderness Press 1991, p. 47)  We commenced hiking at 6 AM on the dot and finished at 11:35.  The dialectics slowed down the peripatetics.  Clockwise takes the hiker up rather than down what the locals call "Heart Attack Hill"  when they are not calling it "Cardiac Hill."   I much prefer the uphill to the downhill, heart stress to knee strain, though we have it on the authority of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus that "The way up and the way down are the same." (Fragment 60)  A second advantage of the clockwise route is that fewer fellow hikers are encountered.  Human nature being what it is, the path of least resistance is preferred by the many.  The fewer of the many encountered the better, or so say I.  Here is the elevation profile in the easy counterclockwise direction:

Bluffspring_pro

Eschewing the Peripatetic approach to philosophy, Peter L. deemed us "crazy" for hiking in the desert in summer.  (High was near 100 Fahrenheit on the day in question.)  Hiking is a "delectable madness" as I seem to recall Colin Fletcher saying.  The first shot depicts the young philosopher Spencer Case at Miner's Summit standing before Miner's Needle while the second shows what the locals call "Cathedral Rock."

IMG_0833 IMG_0834

 

Ladderman Revisited

This post dated 17 November 2004 is from Ladderman  and ought to be preserved.  So I reproduce it here.

Maverick Philosopher posted a short sharp reply to the now common leftist claim that America is becoming a "theocracy" under President Bush. Excerpt:

"Hostility to religion, especially institutionalized religion, is a defining characteristic of the Left. We've known that since 1789. What is surprising, and truly bizarre, is the Left's going soft on militant Islam, the most virulent strain of religious bigotry ever to appear. It threatens all of their values. But their obsession with dissent is so great, dissent at all costs and against everything established, that they simply must denounce Bush and Co. as potential theocrats, all the while cozying up to militant Islam."

That must have had an awful lot of truth in it as it even got a bite from Ladderman, who was paranoid (or egotistical) enough to think that the post referred to him, even though he was not mentioned in it.

Ladderman's only substantial point in reply, however, is that some Christians WANT to have their values (such as opposition to abortion) enshrined in legislation. Wow! What news! You can certainly rely on Ladderman for the scoops! Many Christians have wanted that from the year dot but it does NOT mean that they are getting it or are going to get it. Wanting isn't getting and Bush's policy as given in the Presidential debates is thoroughly centrist: He wants to make alternatives to abortion more attractive but he certainly has no policy of getting abortion banned.

And in fact American law generally has undoubtedly been becoming more secular with every passing year. The Christian fundamentalists have LOST the battle on things like abortion, public prayer, public display of religious symbols and prohibition of homosexuality. But Ladderman (Leiter) is only a Law professor so I guess he hasn't noticed.

If he went to Saudi Arabia or Iran he would find out what a real theocracy is like. Ladderman's bile has totally cut him off from reality.