Getting random stuff organised
Love is not an object, but an abstract noun describing a loosely-defined set of feelings and behaviours. And abstract nouns don’t ‘exist’ in the sense that objects exist; rather, they are instantiated by real objects and events. ‘Love’, of course, is instantiated every day, by atheists and theists, to atheists and theists, and all around atheists and …
Continue reading “Do atheists believe in love, why or why not?”
Which ‘Creator’ would that be? There are hundreds of Creation myths, and they all feature different protagonists, with different names, who have totally different fictional biographies. The deity of the Bible, for instance, already has a name which we can render into English as ‘Jehovah’, with a capital J. If you want to talk about that guy …
My claim to be a strong atheist, and to know that no gods exist, is founded on my understanding — as an educated and fluent speaker and writer of English — of the way that the word ‘know’ is used in ordinary English speech and writing. This allows me to make claims like the following, …
Continue reading “I am not an agnostic, because I understand what ‘know’ means”
Every argument which is advanced with the intention of proving God exists begins by attempting to redefine ‘proof’ or ‘God’ or ‘existence’ — and sometimes any two or even all three of these. In this post I’m going to look at the last of these terms — ‘existence’ — and examine what it means, particularly …
There is no such thing as a ‘universal’ truth; there’s just truth. And it’s not even a thing; it’s a property. Truth is a binary property of meaningful propositions. A proposition is true if it describes the state of affairs in the real world, and false if it doesn’t. If it doesn’t describe the real world …
Imagine the situation that would arise if physicists were subjected to the same demands for ‘proof’ of their claims that atheists are: “Prove that gravity exists!” “If it didn’t exist, you’d be floating in space.” “Well, prove that I’m not!” Getting into a situation like this is a sure sign that you’ve given your opponent …
Continue reading “‘Prove it!’ doesn’t mean ‘Make me say it’s true!’”
There’s a whole category of words in the English language which are surrounded by semantic confusion. One of these is ‘know’, which I’ve already discussed here: I am not an agnostic, because I know what ‘know’ means But other words of the same type also suffer from the same confusion. This time I want to …
In ordinary usage we think of sentences as having meaning, but philosophers like to abstract the idea of meaning from what sentences actually say. What we would describe as the ‘meaning’ of a sentence they call a ‘proposition’. This allows them to say that: Some sentences don‘t express any propositions. ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ is …
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