Skiing in the Abyss, Wish You Were Here.

I'm out of the loop more, but The Black Book of Atheism is a tremendously huge project. God: A Critical Inquiry by Flew is very challenging just to understand a large number of his very sentences. Extremely germanic prose. So that's the first book whose arguments will be exhaustively documented in the book. It was originally titled God and Philosophy, if you're not familiar.

I don't really want to do Nielsen's Ethics Without God yet (Although that's what caused my intellectual epiphany-discovery of the criterial argument for the existence of God), so I'll pick a book of his that is more atheism proper, maybe Atheism and Philosophy, not sure yet.

But I can already see some blinks in God: A Critical Inquiry, which means I'm starting to smell blood in the water and get a rapid increase in bloodflow to the brain. Not a good sign for Flew's philosophy.

Don't get me wrong: I *love* Flew, as a person in fact, as well as writer and philosopher.

But back to the black book: I'm also memorizing it along with composing it. Of course the memorization can't even begin to keep up with the composition, but it icily wakes up the mind and disciplines it in a way nothing else can. Engage!

Also listening to mp3s of it using the text-to-speech program and my favorite ai voice, Mike16. Thanks to AT&T for that, in spite of other things about that company. So the mp3 sequence now is my notes of CraigVsHarris, notes on phaser's Last Superstition, and now the beginnings of The Black Book of Atheism, starting with notes on Flew's God book.

So what I do is compose and edit for a while, and then re-convert the longer text to mp3 and update my ipod and shuffle. Avoid those in the ear canal earbuds, by the way, if you don't want to suffer from earwax buildup and the intense headaches that comes with that. The resulting ear cleaning you have to get at an emergency room causes even worse pain, possibly the worst many of you will have ever experienced. lol

By the way, I often refer to Ed Feser as phaser now. lol He deserves the benefit of the notoriety of that nickname, and is definitely a street-fightin space-age theist. I've said it elsewhere: Edward Feser is the Jimi Hendrix of Thomism.

With the help of people like Edward Feser, Anthony Flew, and Kai Nielsen, I will *own* atheism before it's all over.

Ignorance of the Unctious

The only reason atheists have any influence is because most theists are stalwart ignoramuses, especially about precisely the metatheoretic and other oblique fallacies that are the *core* of atheistic objections to theism.

Gale is a pompous fraud who's obviously running scared and doesn't even realize he's committing one self-referential fallacy after another. Smith is a nice, serious, and I think earnest guy, but is cluelessly committing the Zeno trick fallacy I've outlined elsewhere. If this is the best they can do, then these people are pushovers, even though they are of course still kicking most dumbell theists' butts.

I want to know the specific names of the people who are funding this stupidass analytic mediocrity in educational institutions. Of course they might react by simply closing down philosophy departments, but that's a good thing that's already being done around the country. The philosophers couldn't justify themselves if their lives depended on it anyway. lol

Time to start contacting some people in the media, let'em know about a couple of big white elephants in philosophy, maybe three. They might need some fresh news in the God debate / gnu atheism area, who knows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKsdED_bV3M&feature=related

Facing It

The right course for anyone who cannot accept the mere voice of authority, but feels the imperative obligation to face the arguments and think freely, is to begin at the beginning and to see how far one can reconstruct one's case for belief in God, inference by inference on a secure foundation of irreducibly basic premises, as far as possible without any preliminary assumptions and with a resolute determination to know the worst.

--Highly redacted from Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 14.

Idol of the Circular

Christian theology without metaphysics is an illusion. However much some theologians may want to avoid the issue by talking about revelation, there comes a point when the question can no longer be evaded: Why believe in God at all? If the only grounds for belief in the Christian revelation are part of that alleged revelation, the theologians have cut themselves off from people who think about their beliefs. If there are no grounds for believing that a Christian scheme is preferable to some non-Christian one, the choice between Christianity and some other religion or none becomes arbitrary, irrational, even trivial.

--Slightly redacted from H. E. Root, "Beginning all over again" in Soundings, edited by A. R. Vidler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962), page 13, quoted in Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 13.

Why They're Already Gone

The types of questions which public school children ask cannot be answered satisfactorily by anyone who is not capable of answering them philosophically, because they are precisely those kinds of questions which modern philosophers ask.

--Redacted from John Wilson, Language and Christian Belief (London: Macmillan, 1958) page xiv. Quoted in Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 12.

Unintended Consequences

To the extent that faith has to be thought of as going beyond all reason, in the sense that it has to involve believing what you do not, and perhaps cannot know to be true, then if faith is to be reasonable at all, there must still be reasons of some kind, first for embarking on faith at all, and then again for choosing one faith rather than any other faith.

--Slightly redacted from Antony Flew, God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 8.

The Courage to Attack One's Own Convictions

"It is, of course, a matter of integrity and sincerity of intellectual purpose to try to make out all cases as strongly as possible. For, if we truly desire to learn the truth, then we must consider opposition positions at their strongest. That is why we have in our courts of justice rival advocates each doing the best they can for, respectively, plaintiff and defendant."

--Antony Flew (40 years before his conversion to Deism), God and Philosophy, 1966, page x.