Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The thinking fucktard

Fucktard Tom Gilson, a.k.a. The "Thinking" Christian, makes several assertions about what atheism entails. All of them are incorrect. That atheism actually entails there is no "ultimate meaning, no ultimate morality, no ultimate beauty, no ultimate purpose for anything" is to assume what is a matter of controversy, that ultimate meaning, etc. by definition must come from a god. Depending on how the syllogism is formed, Gilson commits one of two different fallacies. Under the first form:

P1: If god exists, then there is ultimate meaning, etc.
P2: God exists
------
C: There is ultimate meaning

Gilson commits the logical fallacy of inferring the converse: It does not follow that the atheist, who denies P2 above, must conclude there is no ultimate meaning. Under the second form:

P1: If no god exists, then there is no ultimate meaning, etc.
P2: There is ultimate meaning
-------
C: God exists

In this case, the atheist denies the conclusion, which means she must deny one or both of the premises. But we cannot infer from a denial of the conclusion which premise she denies.

Now, it happens to be the case that many atheists (myself included) also happen to believe there is no "ultimate" meaning. But this is beside the point. The denial of ultimate meaning is not entailed by atheism; at best, they are both entailed by more fundamental premises or hypotheses. But, logically speaking, there is no direct logical or analytic connection between atheism and any question of "ultimate" meaning.

Now, this philosophical mistake is so common among blinkered slave-morality Christians that it doesn't really qualify as "fucktardery". What does qualify is this statement:
Atheism entails that humans and animals and plants and bacteria and rats and pigs and dogs and boys (google the last four) are ontologically the same thing.
This statement is so moronic and ridiculous that no sane person can take Gilson seriously or grant him minimal intellectual competence and good faith; we can only point and laugh.

[h/t to faithlessgod]
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1 comment:

  1. Martin Freedman6/16/09, 6:21 AM

    My reply to your first comment on my post said "You are quite right although I have not yet gone as far as you in labelling these as you have. "
    I do not know when you wrote this post but this is exactly what I had in mind ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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