If You Want The Truth Rather Than

I Want Atheism To Be True And Am Made Uneasy By The Fact That Some Of The Most Intelligent And Well-informed People I Know Are Religious Believers. It Isn't Just That I Don't Believe In God And, Naturally, I Hope That I'm Right In My Belief. It's That I Hope There Is No God! I Don't Want There To Be A God; I Don't Want The Universe To Be Like That.

Fundamentally An Organism Has Conscious Mental States If And Only If There Is Something That It Is Like To Be That Organism--something It Is Like For The Organism.

Perhaps The Belief In God Is The Belief That The Universe Is Intelligible, But Not To Us.

If Life Is Not Real, Life Is Not Earnest, And The Grave Is Its Goal, Perhaps It's Ridiculous T Otake Ourselves So Seriously.

What We Take Ourselves To Be Doing When We Think About What Is The Case Or How We Should Act Is Something That Cannot Be Reconciled With A Reductive Naturalism, For Reasons Distinct From Those That Entail The Irreducibility Of Consciousness. It Is Not Merely The Subjectivity Of Thought But Its Capacity To Transcend Subjectivity And To Discover What Is Objectively The Case That Presents A Problem....thought And Reasoning Are Correct Or Incorrect In Virtue Of Something Independent Of The Thinker's Beliefs, And Even Independent Of The Community Of Thinkers To Which He Belongs. (p. 71)