I hope these posts of mine are appropriate for this discussion board. I am in my first class here at HACS, and I am finding discussion on Blackboard difficult to generate. Anyway, here is my post.

I’ve started listening to “The Atheism Tapes” on Netflix. First, is the interview with English Philosopher Colin McGinn. I’ve hear these arguments before from Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. What strikes me usually is a sort of vitriol against “belief” which colors their arguments from an emotional stance. Often they are couched in ways that seem reasonable, but they do not encompass a proof against God anymore than Anselm’s Ontological Argument proves God’s existence.

In McGinn’s interview, he seems to find a vantage in logical positivism which works form the assumption that observational evidence is the basis for knowledge of the world, and that the use of a logical constructs is the basis of epistemology, thus what we can “believe in.”

This is a trap I myself fell into while studying philosophy as an undergrad. I tried to take any argument down to a formal logical character so that if it didn’t come out valid, then it wasn’t believable. In my “philosophy for theologians” class we have seen some of the trouble with such a standing point. For one, logic is one way of making sense of the world and of ourselves, but it is not inclusive as a philosophical system, but rather a tool to get us to a place where we can make mature moves from experience into that which is not found from our own experience, sensual or rational.

Of course, we include faith to make our arguments against such limited views, but I’m not sure that is even needed to refute a stance as the logical positivist takes. But this leaves us both at a place of proof for belief. It does not say that the logical-positivist-atheist has made the final point on the matter.
My point being that, though I still require faith to believe in God, I don’t see that lack of faith as a proof against God’s existence.

David