What is the state of belief of an atheist? An atheist is often defined as someone who does not believe in God. It is quite true that an atheist does not believe in God, but that is insufficient to define the state of belief of an atheist.
Some friends of mine have recently alerted me to some strange things my old sparring partner, Ken Aizawa, has been saying about my work on his blog (www.theboundsofcognition.blogspot.com).
Ken accuses me of being a proponent of what he calls revolutionary extended cognition. That is, I apparently believe that all cognitive processes are extended. This is a very strange and implausible view that I do not endorse, and never have endorsed.
"What triggers disgust? Paradoxically, disgust is both primitive and yet infused with civilization and its objects seem heterogeneous and without unifying principle (from corpses to feces to rats to body parts). McGinn suggests that death figures in objects we find disgusting, directly or indirectly, so that symbolism is at work in this most visceral of emotions. But the way death figures is subtle. Skeletons are not disgusting while rotting flesh is. McGinn argues that ultimately it is our incongruous nature as “embodied souls” that lies behind disgust"
Colin McGinn talks about Disgust and Death during the interview at University of Illinois. Press here to listen.
... It's about us. I've steered clear of commenting on this, because I really have better things to think about than an unfaithful golfer (not a real sport, by the way), staggering though his unfaithfulness might have been. But now I find myself interested - not in Tiger, he still bores me - but in everyone who is interested in Tiger. In The Philosopher and the Wolf, I talked about how vicious we apes are, and I got a lot of flak for it. But there is no better illustration of what I was talking about than the Tiger Woods affair.
Read the rest on Mark Rowlands blog
Colin McGinn: So the argument is simply, God is meant to be a being who is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, so how come there is suffering and pain in the world? Why does God allow it? God, obviously if he is all-good, thinks that it's bad that this should occur, would rather it didn't occur, like any decent person would rather it didn't occur, and yet he lets it occur. Now that would be OK if he didn't have the power to change it, but he's meant to be all-powerful. I mean we're told by religious people he intervenes all the time in various ways, so why doesn't he intervene to prevent the death of a child, or the torture of a prisoner? He doesn't do it. So you don't want to conclude from that, "Well God is actually quite bad... quite a bad person.". That's a conceivable conclusion you might draw. But what you conclude from it is the combination of these two characteristics is inconsistent. He's all-good and he's allpowerful - you need all-knowing too of course because he has to know what's going on but it's essentially the conflict between being all-good and all-powerful and the existence of evil. The standard reply to that, the apologists of religion will give the reply, "God created human beings with free will.". Now there's the question, why did he do that, knowing the results were going to be horrific? That was a pretty wicked thing to do to start with. But let's put that one aside. The problem with that argument is that not all suffering in the world comes from the exercise of human will. Much of it comes from human... not human, natural catastrophes, or disease, accidents... All sorts of things can cause tremendous suffering in humans... You know, someones born with a genetic disease, no human being had any role in whatsoever in creating that. That comes from nature - God's creation of course, we're told. So God created a world in which it was inevitable there'd be tremendous suffering on the part of completely innocent human beings.
Jonathan Miller: But there might be religious argument to the effect that he created this obstacle course...
Colin McGinn: Yep...
Jonathan Miller: ...for his created creatures endowed with free will in order to bring out the best in them.
Colin McGinn: Yes... and I always... this one to me brings out to me the sort of... hard-hearted, immoral side of this way of thinking about things. Because just think about what's being said when somebody says that. You've got the innocent child with some terrible disease, and God's up there saying, "I really need to test some people here. The obstacle course needs to be put there. Let me just pick on this two year old girl, put her through this terrible ordeal, and I'll test the other people.". I mean, if any human being had told you that's what they'd done - suppose I decided, in my wisdom, "I need to test some people here. I need to improve their moral characters, so I'm going to do this terrible thing to their child.", you know, you'd think I was the wickedest person it the world to do that. Well why isn't God? If that's what God does, I have no respect for him. I think it's a wicked thing to do.
What is the state of belief of an atheist? An atheist is often defined as someone who does not believe in God. It is quite true that an atheist does not believe in God, but that is insufficient to define the state of belief of an atheist. A tree or a rock or a lizard does not believe in God either--but it would be bizarre to describe such beings as atheists. This is because they are not believers at all, in anything. And even a dog or a chimpanzee, which plausibly do have beliefs, are hardly to be characterized as atheists. Furthermore, an agnostic does not believe in God either, since he suspends belief on the question. What is missing, obviously, is the fact that an atheist disbelieves in the existence of God—he believes that there is no God.
Read the rest on Colin McGinn blog
Taylor's argument seems to go like this:
(1) The meaning of life cannot be found in purpose (the dilemma - see The Meaning of Life Part 1)
(2) Therefore, it must be found in something else.
(3) To see what, we should revisit the reworked version of the Sisyphus' myth.
Read the rest on Mark Rowlands blog
It had been dawning on me that it was a defect in my tennis game that I wasn't getting to the ball early enough, in time to set up properly and hit with control (the strokes themselves were okay). Watching Melanie Oudin play brought this home to me:
Read the rest on Colin McGinn blog
I should reiterate, I'm in broad agreement with the Bekoff and Pierce thesis that some non-human animals are moral beings in the sense explained the previous blog. Here, I'm going to try and anticipate some of the objections philosophers are going to raise. To make things a little more concrete, consider one of Bekoff's and Pierce's examples:
Read the rest on Mark Rowlands blog