On logic and atheism

Dr. Hector Avalos6/02/2013 3:05 AM

My statement refers to my inability to verify your claim with my five senses and/or logic, which are the instruments I normally use in my every day life to verify the reality of claims.

I am assuming that Steve, you, and I agree that our five senses and/or logic can give reliable data.

Hector’s appeal to logic raises a troublesome question. From a secular standpoint, what does Avalos suppose logic is? How does he ground logic? What’s his ontology of logic?

Does he regard logic as just a systematic description of how our finite, contingent, timebound simian brains happen to think? If so, how does he distinguish a logical brain from an illogical brain? Two different brains can arrive at opposite conclusions. If logic mirrors the brain, what adjudicates one brain from another?

What about a brain that’s high on LSD? Is that a reliable brain? He can’t very well say a brain that’s high on LSD is malfunctioning, for natural selection is not a goal-oriented process. Methodological naturalism banishes teleological explanations from natural science.