On Sun, 24 Jul 2005 15:23:53 -0500 "Tommy Kelly"
<tkelly15450 at charter.net> writes:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> "I believe that someone in the thread used the word
> "deist," but I can't believe he/she was serious. That's simply an
> 18th-c
> euphemism for atheism."
>
>
> The person I said was deist, that being Martin Gardner, was
> incorrect. The
> correct term for Gardner would be fideism. But to say deist is a
> euphemism
> for atheism, strikes me as an odd statement.
Not so odd for the 18th century when it was still not very respectable to call oneself an atheist. People like Voltaire and most of his friends called themselves deists but lots of people, both then and now, have wondered if they were not really closet atheists.
Concerning Martin Gardner, as I understand him, he admits outright that no good rational case can be made for believing in the existence of God and he even concedes that the weight of the evidence may run against the existence of such a being, but he nevertheless believes in the existence of such a being anyway. His fideism seems to be an Americanized version of the fideisms of Pascal or Kiekegaard.
A rather funny position to be taken by a former student and assistant to the logical empiricist philosopher, Rudolf Carnap, but that's his position, nevertheless.
>
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