Dillahunty’s latest video tackles a particularly onerous topic:

Atheist Debates - Theological Noncognitivism and Ignosticism

I say onerous because trying to be too dismissive of religious words is itself a problem.

We humans may all tend to think in certain patterns typical of our species, but there is a great deal of variation.

That there are many, perhaps most, humans who harbor religious ideas of “god” means we have to take such concept seriously.

We can’t just pretend we can call it all gibberish and be done with it.

Instead, we need to reason through the ideas with people.

I’m reading Carrier’s Proving History, as he refers to it so much as a prolegomena to his major book on the historicity of Jesus that I figured I really had to read it before I get too much into that latter book.

Proving History is very much about writing the most rigorous history one can, thus the use of Bayes Theorem as the mechanism for reasoning in the decision in what to believe as what truly happened in the past.

So if we are to take history seriously, and know we have to respond to religious people seriously, then Theological Noncognitivism isn’t sufficient.