9 Quotes by James A. Lindsay

a very specific kind of nonsense

This prejudice you started with now looks like legitimate knowledge that can go straight in the classroom. It can go straight to activists or policy makers. It's a real problem.

Mathematics is a subject with a rather severe barrier to entry. In fact, it is common for mathematicians to struggle in their personal lives with the fact that it is almost impossible to have a normal conversation about their work with almost anyone – which is surprisingly lonely at times.

When considering the matter, it is important not to get taken in by the exchange of a possibility and a probability, or indeed a certainty. Apologists are quick to point out that there could possibly be an explanation for all of the suffering of the world and then conclude that there probably or definitely is one in God. Indeed, this is often the best line of defense that they have, and its goal is to obscure the reality that the probability of such explanations is abysmally low.

Axioms have to be judged against how “self-evident” they really are, how useful they are, how little they assume, and in other such ways. This, then, is why the theistic worldview axioms seemed more reasonable in the past than now; we now see that the purported existence of God is not self-evident, has limited utility with little or no explanatory power, and yet assumes an awful lot.

The philosophy of religion is a type of academic puffery centrally concerned with pretending theism is worth taking seriously on its own terms.

Mathematics provides a model of the world that we employ for our understanding of it, and this model shouldn’t be confused with the reality it helps us to understand. This also happens to be a substantial part of how I view the idea of “God” now as well. I think of each idea of “God” as an informal, very poorly defined abstraction, and I see belief in God as a way to try to make sense of the world by means of a reification of the “God” abstraction.

Among the advantages of anchoring on a perfect, eternal “God” is simplifying the process of ethical reasoning by essentially eliminating the ongoing requirement to assess and modify one’s own ethics.

For the vast majority of people, helping them to uproot their faith does them at least two major favors. First, it treats them as an intelligent adult capable of engaging in serious and critical thought. Second, it helps them be less wrong.