Circular Argument Quotes

Time, the moon, arguments, and, most of all, coins. All good things are circular.

If you think you're going to have a thoughtful discussion with someone who is toxic, be prepared for epic mindfuckery rather than conversational mindfulness. Malignant narcissists and sociopaths use word salad, circular conversations, ad hominem arguments, projection and gas lighting to disorient you and get you off track should you ever disagree with them or challenge them in any way. They do this in order to discredit, confuse and frustrate you, distract you from the main problem and make you feel guilty for being a human being with actual thoughts and feelings that might differ from their own. In their eyes, you are the problem if you happen to exist.

Scientists and theologians can’t offer better than circular arguments, because there are no other kinds of arguments. Bible believers quote the Bible, and scientists quote other scientists. How do either scientists or theologians answer this question about the accuracy of their conclusions: “In reference to what?

I have no interest in anything so frivolous as the bona fide religion or mankind's pathetic debate over whose version of the church is correct. Circular arguments over the semantics of faith hold no interest for me. Those are questions answered only through death!

This threatens to become a circular argument,” Holmes said. “I know it’s there because it’s all that explains the facts. My wife tells me that astronomers posit the existence of an invisible planet by the effects it has on the orbit of other celestial bodies. Thus do I posit the existence of this object.

To the skeptic all arguments are circular.

Until recently it has been assumed that in similar cases in the Scandinavian homelands, exotic and imported artefacts buried with women were gifts from men. This is especially so in western Norway, where artefacts looted from Britain and Ireland have mostly been found in women’s graves. But the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials. The recurring problem is trying to work out whether it was the object or its owner who travelled. When it comes to women in the Viking Age, the conclusion has almost always been the former, which has had an enormous impact on how we have viewed women’s agency – their involvement and individual participation – in the entire period. Partly the issue is that the interpretation of the objects has been based on a number of assumptions that lead to circular arguments, a serpent biting its own tail, going right the way back to the start of the Viking Age.

The marginal utility of money to any individual, i.e., the marginal utility derivable from the goods that can be obtained with the given quantity of money or that must be surrendered for the required money, presupposes a certain exchange-value of the money; so the latter cannot be derived from the former. 1 Those who have realized the significance of historically-transmitted values in the determination of the objective exchange-value of money will not find great difficulty in escaping from this apparently circular argument.

Let us, thusly, embrace the assumption that to each advocate of a respective paradigm within his respective bubble, the phenomenological gaps between himself and those in neighboring bubbles are insurmountable. The resident of a given bubble has become so inured to the echoes of his own ‘truth’ as to abandon all terms of commonality with the ‘truths’ of others outside his bubble. The internal terms, concepts, definitions and assumptions underlying each paradigm are different and incommensurate with those of their external counterparts. And so, to debate them would be tantamount to speaking through one another without much mutual understanding. In their communities, they speak different words, abide by different sets of logic, axioms and propositions from those of other communities; they, thusly, do not understand the terminology upholding other paradigms beside their own, and many attempts at translation have become lost in circular discourse for there exists no equivalency of terms. Thus, any gaps between bubbles of paradigm are beyond traversal; all arguments between them remain perplexing and irreconcilable. There, then, evolves, among them, a strong tendency to seek out information that only serves to confirm their own biases, and, in the process, to otherize any alien paradigms as hotbeds of disinformation.

Hermaphroditic species such as flatworms go to bizarre lengths to avoid being inseminated, fighting pitched battles with their penises, their semen burning gaping holes in the vanquished. This is lively natural history, but it is circular as an argument, as it takes for granted that there are greater biological costs to being female.

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language. Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph. Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.' These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of... Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives. This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland.

Causality is the most critical pillar of scientific inference in the Western world. Revealing a cause amounts to an explanation. However, other cultures that do not rely on cause-and-effect arguments can also arrive at valid scientific conclusions. The concept of causation is especially problematic in self-organized systems with amplifying-damping feedback loops, such as the brain. Causes in such systems are often circular or multidirectional; events are not caused but emerge from the interaction of multiple elements.

The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. As long as people had only the haziest concept of what a mind was or how it might work, the metaphor of a blank slate inscribed by the environment did not seem too outrageous. But as soon as one starts to think seriously about what kind of computation enables a system to see, think, speak, and plan, the problem with blank slates becomes all too obvious: they don’t do anything. The inscriptions will sit there forever unless something notices patterns in them, combines them with patterns learned at other times, uses the combinations to scribble new thoughts onto the slate, and reads the results to guide behavior toward goals. Locke recognized this problem and alluded to something called “the understanding,” which looked at the inscriptions on the white paper and carried out the recognizing, reflecting, and associating. But of course explaining how the mind understands by invoking something called “the understanding” is circular. This argument against the Blank Slate was stated pithily by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in a reply to Locke. Leibniz repeated the empiricist motto “There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses,” then added, “except the intellect itself.”8

Some theist fall in this categories Using: 1. **Circular Reasoning**: Assuming the conclusion in the premise, essentially restating the same idea without providing new information. 2. **Argument from Ignorance**: Asserting something as true simply because it hasn't been proven false, or vice versa. 3. **Appeal to Authority**: Using the opinion or testimony of an authority figure as evidence in an argument. 4. **False Dichotomy**: Presenting an argument as though there are only two options when there could be more. 5. **Argument from Personal Incredulity**: Rejecting a claim because one finds it difficult to understand or believe. Those are most fallacies which believers use

Most people-all, in fact, who regard the whole heaven as finite-say it lies at the centre. But the Italian philosophers known as Pythagoreans take the contrary view. At the centre, they say, is fire, and the earth is one of the stars, creating night and day by its circular motion about the centre. They further construct another earth in opposition to ours to which they give the name counterearth. In all this they are not seeking for theories and causes to account for observed facts, but rather forcing their observations and trying to accommodate them to certain theories and opinions of their own. But there are many others who would agree that it is wrong to give the earth the central position, looking for confirmation rather to theory than to the facts of observation. Their view is that the most precious place befits the most precious thing: but fire, they say, is more precious than earth, and the limit than the intermediate, and the circumference and the centre are limits. Reasoning on this basis they take the view that it is not earth that lies at the centre of the sphere, but rather fire. The Pythagoreans have a further reason. They hold that the most important part of the world, which is the centre, should be most strictly guarded, and name it, or rather the fire which occupies that place, the 'Guardhouse of Zeus', as if the word 'centre' were quite unequivocal, and the centre of the mathematical figure were always the same with that of the thing or the natural centre. But it is better to conceive of the case of the whole heaven as analogous to that of animals, in which the centre of the animal and that of the body are different. For this reason they have no need to be so disturbed about the world, or to call in a guard for its centre: rather let them look for the centre in the other sense and tell us what it is like and where nature has set it. That centre will be something primary and precious; but to the mere position we should give the last place rather than the first. For the middle is what is defined, and what defines it is the limit, and that which contains or limits is more precious than that which is limited, see ing that the latter is the matter and the former the essence of the system. (2-13-1) There are similar disputes about the shape of the earth. Some think it is spherical, others that it is flat and drum-shaped. For evidence they bring the fact that, as the sun rises and sets, the part concealed by the earth shows a straight and not a curved edge, whereas if the earth were spherical the line of section would have to be circular. In this they leave out of account the great distance of the sun from the earth and the great size of the circumference, which, seen from a distance on these apparently small circles appears straight. Such an appearance ought not to make them doubt the circular shape of the earth. But they have another argument. They say that because it is at rest, the earth must necessarily have this shape. For there are many different ways in which the movement or rest of the earth has been conceived. (2-13-3)

In this they resemble any reasonable being who does an unreasonable thing and justifies it with reasons. War, for example. My species has a great many good reasons for making war, though none of them is as good as the reason for not making war. Our most rational and scientific justifications-for instance, that we are an aggressive species-are perfectly circular: we make war because we make war. Our justifications for making a particular war (such as: our people must have more land and more wealth, or: our people must have more power, or: our people must obey out deity's orders to crush the sacrilegious infidel) all come down to the same thing: we must make war because we must. We have no choice. We have no freedom. This argument is not ultimately satisfactory to the reasoning mind, which desires freedom.

It is the custom in Germany for students to pass from one university to another during the course of their studies—a custom, incidentally, which no other country has. But it would be false to assume that this variety in instruction is a safeguard afainst uniformity of outlook, for although the professors of the various universities fight among themselves, they are all, fundamentally and at heart, in complete agreement. I came to realise this clearly through my contacts with the economists. This must have been about 1929. At that time we published a paper on certain aspects of the economic problem. Immediately a whole company of national economists of all sorts, and from a variety of universities, joined forces and signed a circular in which they unaminously condemned our economic proposals. I made one attempt to have a serious discussion with one of the most renowned of them, and one who was regarded by his colleagues as a revolutionary in economic thought Zwiedineck. The results were disastrous! At the time the State had floated a loan of two million seven hundred thousand marks for the construction of a road. I told Zwiedineck that I regarded this way of financing a project as foolish in the extreme. The life of the road in question would be some fifteen years ; but the amortisation of the capital involved would continue for eighty years. What the Government was really doing was to evade an immediate financial obligation by transferring the charges to the men of the next generation and, indeed, of the generation after. I insisted that nothing could be more unsound, and that what the Government should really do was to take radical steps to reduce the rate of interest and thus to render capital more fluid. I next argued that the gold standard, the fixing of rates of exchange and so forth were shibboleths which I had never regarded and never would regard as weighty and immutable principles of economy. Money, to me, was simply a token of exchange for work done, and its value depended absolutely on the value of the work accomplished. Where money did not represent services rendered, I insisted, it had no value at all. Zwiedineck was horrified and very excited. Such ideas, he declared, would upset the accepted economic principles of the entire world, and the putting of them into practice would cause a breakdown of the world's political economy. When, later, after our assumption of power, I put my theories into practice, the economists were not in the least discountenanced, but calmly set to work to prove by scientific argument that my theories were, indeed, sound economy !

A Christian theist, while conceding that the argument for God's existence is circular, nevertheless will claim that the argument is sound and persuasive. For he devoutly believes that his position is true, and he believes that it can be clearly recognized as such. He believes that God made men to think in terms of this circularity, rather than in terms of some competing circularity.

Finding witches not only explained evil, it also was tangible evidence of God’s existence. As the sixteenth-century Cambridge theologian Roger Hutchinson argued, in a polished bit of circular reasoning, “If there be a God, as we most steadfastly must believe, verily there is a Devil also; and if there be a Devil, there is no surer argument, no stronger proof, no plainer evidence, that there is a God.”13 And, conversely, as noted in a seventeenth-century witch trial, “Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. If neither possession nor witchcraft [exists], why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God.

in the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove. Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational.

How then does a Christian, or anyone else, choose among the various claims for absolute authorities? Ultimately the truthfulness of the Bible will commend itself as being far more persuasive than other religious books (such as the Book of Mormon or the Qur’an), or than any other intellectual constructions of the human mind (such as logic, human reason, sense experience, scientific methodology, etc.). It will be more persuasive because in the actual experience of life, all of these other candidates for ultimate authority are seen to be inconsistent or to have shortcomings that disqualify them, while the Bible will be seen to be fully in accord with all that we know about the world around us, about ourselves, and about God. The Bible will commend itself as being persuasive in this way, that is, if we are thinking rightly about the nature of reality, our perception of it and of ourselves, and our perception of God. The trouble is that because of sin our perception and analysis of God and creation is faulty. Sin is ultimately irrational, and sin makes us think incorrectly about God and about creation. Thus, in a world free from sin, the Bible would commend itself convincingly to all people as God’s Word. But because sin distorts people’s perception of reality, they do not recognize Scripture for what it really is. Therefore it requires the work of the Holy Spirit, overcoming the effects of sin, to enable us to be persuaded that the Bible is indeed the Word of God and that the claims it makes for itself are true. Thus, in another sense, the argument for the Bible as God’s Word and our ultimate authority is not a typical circular argument. The process of persuasion is perhaps better likened to a spiral in which increasing knowledge of Scripture and increasingly correct understanding of God and creation tend to supplement one another in a harmonious way, each tending to confirm the accuracy of the other. This is not to say that our knowledge of the world around us serves as a higher authority than Scripture, but rather that such knowledge, if it is correct knowledge, continues to give greater and greater assurance and deeper conviction that the Bible is the only truly ultimate authority and that other competing claims for ultimate authority are false.

both a consequential and circular sense, that in order to be an observer of the universe, the universe must create the conditions for the observer to exist. Therefore, if you are observing, you will fundamentally find that conditions are perfect for you to have been created. There is no other option. For the universe to have developed a sentience to observe itself with, it must first possess the laws of physics and precise conditions that allow for sentience to evolve. No consciousness before consciousness, and yet the consciousness appears inevitable by no other logic than we are conscious. We know that all knowledge is already inherent in the universe, waiting to be revealed. Many have argued that the universe is itself unaware of the consciousnesses it has created. But this is fundamentally a flawed argument, for are we not part of the universe? Are we ourselves not to be considered conscious because it is only our brains that are conscious, not our entire bodies? You are the universe. Be

Avoid triggering subjects and derail catastrophic conversations. Narcissists enjoy using circular conversations, meaningless word salad and countless contradictions to mess with your mind, deflect your attention off their abuse and keep you off balance. They'll deny saying something, they'll contradict something they said earlier, they'll bring in irrational arguments and they'll continue to break your boundaries in a way that leaves you inevitably frustrated. This keeps the focus off the narcissist's actual behavior and leaves you wasting precious energy and time trying to figure out what's actually being said. Think of it as looking through garbage trying to extract gems. Except, there are no gems. You're just becoming a hoarder of the narcissist's useless "crazy-making" tactics.

After many circular arguments, he looked at me, sighed, and smiled. He said, “You are a smart woman. What you say makes sense—in the ways of the world. But God’s ways are not our ways. You must not lean on your own understanding. You seem to have a good heart; but the heart is fickle. Faith is about trusting.” Do not think. Do not feel. Do not know. Mistrust your own heart and mind, and trust us. That is faith. He wanted me to believe that trusting him was trusting God. But he was not my connection to God. My heart and mind were my connections to God. If I shut those down, I’d be trusting the men who led this church instead of trusting God. I’d be relying on their understanding. The

Fundamentalist Christianity rests on circular reasoning and pat answers. The belief system is brilliantly constructed to provide its own support — if you don’t look too closely at the logic. It is a closed system, satisfied with its own internal evidence of truth. It is closed in that any information or argument from outside is rejected a priori because, as discussed above, it is a “lie,” not of the “truth.” All questions are answered within the belief system itself, usually with circular reasoning, for example: Whoever knows God listens to us, and he who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:6)

With too much time, even the most unshakable decision will be reconsidered. Arguments turn circular; the same points occur over and over again without more real information being added to the debate. More time leads to more doubt. More doubt leads to more anxiety. More anxiety makes the decision fall apart.

We hold it to be true that circular reasoning is the only reasoning that is possible to finite man...We must go round and round a thing to see more of its dimensions and to know more about it, in general, unless we are larger than that which we are investigating. Unless we are larger than God we cannot reason about Him by any other way, than by a transcendental or circular argument.

you’re convinced scarce things are fairly allocated—but it’s the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.

Some, like the cleric, took a moral or theological approach and made the circular argument that, since only humans were endowed with the ability to think, a computer couldn't possibly be thinking no matter how much it appeared to. Others simply quizzed it on trivia, not realizing that memory is one of the more trivial functions of sentience.

I think paranoia is an unavoidable moment in the discovery of truth for a variety of reasons. First, you could say that paranoia is the structure of 'knowledge' as a chain of signifiers: S1 --> S2 --> S3, etc. That is, just as knowledge works by perpetually adding new signifiers, so paranoia is characterised by the endless work of adding new connections. In McCarthyism, we discover that x is friends with y who has a business in z which has been the recipient of Soviet bloc investment. Or that a is a supporter of the Palestinian cause which often also gets the support of b who is friendly with c who has said antisemitic things. That's the logic of paranoia. And it's why you might find it difficult to argue with conspiracy theorists however absurd their claims are because, as soon as you knock down one part of their argument, they can invoke dozens of other supports which don't have to hang coherently together. Second, perhaps you could say that paranoia is a moment in the discovery of truth in the Cartesian/Augustinian sense: to arrive at certainty, you have to suppose that everything you perceive is the result of deception by an evil demon (of which the contemporary equivalent is the Matrix, or better yet the Truman Show). Or, at a stretch, in the sense Hegel discusses in the Phenomology: there is a moment when the object appears to have a deeper 'essence' that is not accessible in its appearance. In a manner of speaking, you feel the object is deceiving you, until you press forward and discover the the indecipherable 'essence' is actually in the form of the object's appearance. But this suggests that the "labour of the negative", as Hegel calls it, necessitates a moment of solipsistic despair, panic, the sense of being at the centre of an entirely simulated reality that is motivated by some nefarious Other's bad libido. [...] So, [in society today] paranoia might be unavoidable. But obviously it's a very, very bad place to get stuck. Politically, the logic is most often turned against the Left by its opponents, and within the Left usually appears as a disintegrative moment, when it starts operating as a circular firing-squad, and you get practices of snitch-jacketing or ill-founded 'calling out'. But more fundamentally, it's bad hermeneutics. Being stuck in paranoia means fortifying oneself against doubt, so that all evidence essentially becomes evidence for a delusional structure of certitude. It means that we lose the capacity for critical thinking, for the labour of the negative through which any lucid totalisation might be possible. The reparative moment comes when we stop making 'connections', and instead introduce the cut, the disconnect. That's when we say, "look, this argument might often be used for bad purposes, or it might be wrong in its current articulation, but there are ways to think with it to make a better argument." Or, "x might be friends with y, but that doesn't mean x approves of or was complicit in anything wicked that y has done, and actually everything we know about x makes such complicity racingly unlikely." And so on. The cut is reparative because it militates against the tendency toward social decomposition. The cut is the starting point for a critical procedure that takes all of the reasons for paranoia into account, fully acknowledges their force, but then integrates them into a strategy for repairing the social link.

I am saddened by those who ride the merry-go-round of circular arguments, repeatedly passing me by again and again not because they have a superior argument, but because I didn’t get on.

According to Apollonius, if a man is destined to be a carpenter, he will be one, even if you cut his arms off at birth. If destined to win the race at Olympia, so he will, even if you break both his legs the night before. And if meant to be a great painter, so he will be, even if you blind him. Ha! I should like to see any one of those examples tested in the real world. I can tell you how it would turn out. Oh, I know the counter-argument: if you do blind some poor fellow, that means he was not destined by the Fates to paint. So it’s just a circular argument, of no practical use to anyone. Fate is what happens. What happens is Fate. Put aside silly books, I say, and get along with the business of living. Show me the god who rewards a loyal follower, and tell me how to please him.

The man who can’t believe his senses and the man who can’t believe anything but his senses are both insane, but their insanity isn’t proven by any flaw in their argument. It is proven by the enormous mess of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves in separate boxes, painted on the inside with the sun and the stars. They are both unable to get out–the materialist into the health and happiness of Heaven, and the self-believer into even the health and happiness of Earth. Their position makes enough sense; in a way, it is infinitely logical, just as a penny is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a bad infinity, an eternity of slavery.

Wittgenstein may have seen the necessity and function of presuppositional certainties, but he was wrongly led to think that epistemological reasoning had to be abandoned at this point between differing philosophers. Where did he go wrong? I propose that it was with a confusion here: 'I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness.' This observation is true-for Wittgenstein and many others. But it does not properly imply either that one should not, or that one cannot, be satisfied (intellectually, not merely emotionally) with the correctness of his presupposition (or worldview) in the face of skepticism or a competing system. That one does not verify or prove his presupposition in any ordinary manner (i.e., the like hypotheses to be experimentally and logically tested-which would be deceptively circular since the presuppositions themselves set the standards and starting point for verification) does not mean that some cannot be seen to be wrong and others right; it simply indicates that philosophical argumentation here must take a different, yet legitimate, track-namely, examining which presuppositions provide the necessary preconditions for any intelligent reasoning and which presuppositions scuttle man's epistemic endeavors. Wittgenstein (and others) may not have satisfied himself about the correctness of his presuppositions precisely because they were not correct. In that case, he could avoid reforming his thinking and admitting error by placing everyone in the same (sinking) ship of presuppositional arbitrariness, that is, by teaching that one's certainties were not a matter of truth and intellectual grounding but sociological conditioning.

Dad and Mom were tough on intellectual ideas they disagreed with, but not on people. Ideas interested Dad, not theology per se. If he was lecturing on art, music, cultural trends, he stuck to the subject. He hated circular arguments that depended on the Bible when used against secular people who didn’t acknowledge biblical authority. He believed that you should argue on a level playing field, where both people stay on common ground. “What’s the point of quoting the Bible to people who don’t believe it’s true?” Dad would say. In

is based on the Jesus who spoke incessantly about orphans and widows, demilitarization, immigrants, the sick, the outcast, and the poor—are you choosing abortion and gayness to hang your hat upon?” After many circular arguments, he looked at me, sighed, and smiled. He said, “You are a smart woman. What you say makes sense—in the ways of the world. But God’s ways are not our ways. You must not lean on your own understanding. You seem to have a good heart; but the heart is fickle. Faith is about trusting.” Do not think. Do not feel. Do not know. Mistrust your own heart and mind, and trust us. That is faith. He wanted me to believe that trusting him was trusting God. But he was not my connection to God. My heart and mind were my connections to God. If I shut those down, I’d be trusting the men who led this church instead of trusting God. I’d be relying on their understanding.

The arguments given against the possibility of miracles are circular; they beg the question by assuming (what is to be proven) that all events have natural causes. This is not only false but is also contrary to science, which has always allowed for intelligent causes (in archeology, forensic science, cryptology, the SETI program, and information theory). And

In addition to the confirmation bias and circular reasoning of the worldview-assumption filter, the Münchausen trilemma eliminates any natural way of reaching the truth. Every argument needs true premises, and those premises require an additional argument to prove them. The result is an infinite regression of unproven proofs.

A road that is circular never has an end. And while I don’t drive down any of those kinds of roads, I’ve certainly found myself in a lot of those kinds of arguments.

The Beast considered these arguments circular, but she discovered also that she was unhappy. Boys didn’t interest her. She fell in love with a girl. The girl disapproved, and she found that she was now the object of ridicule. She became more and more solitary and turned to books. But the books made it clear that men loved women, and women loved men, and men rode off and had all sorts of adventures and women stayed at home. ‘I know what it is,’ she said one day, ‘I know what is wrong: I am not human. The only story that fits me at all is the one about the Beast. But the Beast doesn’t change from a Beast to a human because of its love. It’s just the reverse. And the Beast isn’t fierce. It’s extremely gentle. It loves Beauty, but it lives alone and dies alone.’ And that’s what she did. Her

My purpose in saying all of this is to make a simple but necessary point. One of the more persistent and inexcusable rhetorical conceits that corrupt the current popular debates over belief in God is the claim that they constitute an argument between faith and reason or between religion and science. They constitute, in fact, only a contest between different pictures of the world: theism and naturalism (this seems the most satisfactory and comprehensive term, at any rate), each of which involves a number of basic metaphysical convictions; and the latter is by far the less rationally defensible of the two. Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not then there can be no “natural” confirmation of the fact). Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. And naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking: physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything. There is something here of the mystical.

In a sense, then, I am assuming the truth of a perfectly circular argument: it makes sense to believe in God if one believes in the real power of reason, because one is justified in believing in reason if one believes in God. Or, to phrase the matter in a less recursive form, it makes sense to believe in both reason and God, and it may make a kind of nonsensical sense to believe in neither, but it is ultimately contradictory to believe in one but not the other. An honest and self-aware atheism, therefore, should proudly recognize itself as the quintessential expression of heroic irrationalism: a purely and ecstatically absurd venture of faith, a triumphant trust in the absurdity of all things. But most of us already know this anyway. If there is no God, then of course the universe is ultimately absurd, in the very precise sense that it is irreducible to any more comprehensive “equation.” It is glorious, terrible, beautiful, horrifying—all of that—but in the end it is also quite, quite meaningless.