Quine or no quine, Will Wilkinson seems to be unable to make a distinction between not believing in something and believing in not something.

I don't believe in God, and have no need for one, but that's not the same things as believing there is no God. I remain a skeptic.

Hi Rand, The point is that there is no such thing as believing in not something. There is no distinction to make. Quine or no quine, for sure. But Quine.

Like it or not--whether or not it seems nicer in mixed company to say you are a "skeptic"--if you don't actually believe in God, are an atheist.

Atheism simply is not the following incoherent pair of beliefs: (1) there exists something that goes by the description of God, which (2) does not exist. This sort of paradox of reference is what Quine calls "Plato's Beard," and the point of "On What There Is," one of the best philosophical essays of the last century, is that it is possible to say what is and is not after having shaved Plato's Beard.

I'm not sure there's a point to debating someone who demonstrates such stilted thinking. You are characterizing a belief in the nonexistence of something as simultaneously believing in the existence and nonexistence of said thing. Even if you equate potential existence with existence, that is logically invalid.

Evangelicals like Will can be so amusing.

The correct term for Rand's condition is Agnostic.

Personally I don't see how DNA ever "evolved" so the question is moot in my humble opinion.

Will has a point, and misses it at the same time.

The truth is that a great many people who call themselves atheists do indeed believe in God, but deny that belief as a matter of choice for one reason or another. One example would be Ted Turner, who "blames" God for the death of his sister, and decided to get his revenge by ... uh, basically by deciding God doesn't exist.

But to go from that to saying that therefore the "true" atheists are instead those who simply haven't decided one way or the other, is just nuts.

It seems to me (at 2:30 A.M.) that to only believe in the materialistic, naturalistic world is to also disbelieve the idea of free will. If everything that happens is the inevitable result of the operation of natural law on what came before, all our actions are predetermined.

I have read in places where Rand has talked about making choices. Either our ability to make choices is a "supernatural" uncaused cause, or we don't really make choices--we are just observing the natural outcomes as they happen.

I think that if you believe in our ability to make free choices, you also believe in something outside the natural, materialistic world. That wouldn't necessarily mean you believe in God, a specific entity, but it certainly forces you to consider more than the purely natural world.

(Of course, if you disagree, and you are right, both of our opinions are just the natural outcomes of the state of the neurons in our brains.)

It seems to me (at 2:30 A.M.) that to only believe in the materialistic, naturalistic world is to also disbelieve the idea of free will. If everything that happens is the inevitable result of the operation of natural law on what came before, all our actions are predetermined.

I knew you were going to say that. ;-)

Actually, that's the case only if you ignore quantum mechanics.

Heh. Caught me.

I have sometimes thought about whether quantum mechanics would provide a mechanism for free will where a purely deterministic view of the universe does not. As I understand it, the whole concept of probability waves is that something can exist as an actual range of possible values until something forces it to "choose" a particular value (while, by the way, often forcing some other value to become a probability wave instead of a value certain), a good example being that you can use probability waves to represent the position and energy of a quantum mechanical particle like an electron (or any particle--there's just a more indeterminism with the wee ones), and if you pin down the energy, you can only represent the position as the probability wave, and vice versa. This clearly gives a scientific basis for things not being purely deterministic--indeed, things are actually a range of possibilities until forced to be otherwise, and so forcing them can cause something else to be a range of possibilities.

This opens up a whole raft of questions. Are the activities of the brain, the workings of the neurons, quantum mechanical? Are some or many of my decisions actually so delicately balanced that if a few different probability waves had collapsed to different values I would have chosen differently? I know it sure feels that way about some decisions.

I'd think free will would be an evolutionary advantage. Quite convenient that nature happens to be such that we can have meat organs that use quantum mechanics to give us free will. (I know, old argument, but it's still awful lucky.)

I don't think quantum mechanics work to give us free will without believing in the "supernatural", however. Nothing in physics (that I know about anyway) determines how a probability wave collapses to a specific value. The value it collapses to is purely random, with probability determined by the probability wave. There is no free will in that, only random chance, and whatever happens, just happens--you didn't choose.

Unless, of course "you" have some "influence" over how those probability waves collapse inside the complex workings of your brain. I actually see quantum mechanics as exactly the interface mechanism whereby it would make sense for something "supernatural" to interact with the "natural" world, at least inside the workings of our head.

I think the random collapse of probability waves would mean that yes, you can't predict the future from the past with certainty, because it's all probabilities. But there is no free will in that; choice is an illusion; everything is random chance. If you want to believe in choice, once again, you have believe in an uncaused cause (yourself making choices) which can affect the collapse of those probability waves.

Of course this doesn't consider the idea of the "observer" and the observer's relationship to the probability wave, and I don't think I understand enough quantum mechanics to make sense of that in terms of free will. My understanding, such as it is, is that the "observer" is essentially whatever forces the probability wave to actually become a value (and possibly cause some other thing to become a probability wave). It seems to me that the whole concept of "observer" is loaded with determinism/randomism/free will implications.