u/JerseyFlight

I just carry some kibble on me. At first I would just feed them a bunch of food. I don’t do that anymore. Now I only feed them when they fly up to me expecting it.

I just keep it in a produce bag. I don’t carry that much, because I’ll just throw a small handful. I suspect when winter returns I’ll be getting a lot more crows expecting it.

And, in the winter, I’ll probably do several larger feeds like I used to do.

It matters, because the semantic sophistry that sits at the base of dialectic, captures the motivation and belief of intellectuals, thereby biasing them against reason. To reason with a dialectic thinker is not to reason, it is to be confronted with an authoritarian narrative.

It matters because intellectuals adopt this narrative and then go on to wield it against truth. They are brought into bondage by it. It blinds them to reason. It sabotages their capacity to think rationally.

It matters because the narrative of dialectic generates irrationality in the world— has, and continues, to generate vast irrationality in the world! And this generative aspect of dialectic functions through the appearance and form of its semantic structure. So to expose and refute this structure is important for the recovery of truth.

Dialectic is, in this sense, like an intellectual anti-intellectualism. It raises the thinker up only to turn him against the very reason that raised him up in first place.

Hence, thought becomes a free-for-all, and subjectivity dominates through the narrative of contradiction as truth. Thinkers delusionally believe themselves to be wandering in the deep, when in truth, they’re really just wandering in confusion and generating obscurities.

“Looking more closely at this tedious effect produced by such truth [the law of identity], we see that the beginning, ‘The plant is—,’ sets out to say something, to bring forward a further determination. But since only the same thing is repeated [“a plant is a plant is a plant”], the opposite has happened, nothing has emerged. Such identical talk therefore contradicts itself. Identity, instead of being in its own self truth and absolute truth, is consequently the very opposite; instead of being the unmoved simple, it is the passage beyond itself into the dissolution of itself.” Hegel, The Science of Logic § 880: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl409.htm#HL2_411b

TL;DR: The identity of the “plant” (A), never becomes its attribute “green” (B). And B is itself its own distinct identity (B=B). Therefore, both stable identities are necessary to make any point about their relationship, proving that identity never dissolves.

Hegel’s argument here is not a profound uncovering of contradiction but a sophisticated verbal deception resting on equivocation, a straw man, and a performative self-contradiction. It fails under precise analysis of terms, predication, and the requirements of coherent discourse.

Hegel begins with “The plant is—” and claims that any attempt to add a determination (e.g., “The plant is green”) results in mere repetition or dissolution of identity. This treats identity as demanding (and only being able to produce) strict numerical identity, while simultaneously faulting it for failing to deliver new content.

In “The plant is green,” for example, “The plant” functions as subject (A): a stable referent with its identity. “Green” functions as predicate (B): an attribute. “Is” is the predicative copula, expressing instantiation or possession of a property, not absolute identity between subject and predicate.

No competent thinker would claim A = B here (“the plant is the greenness”). The statement asserts a relation: A possesses property B. A remains A throughout. B remains B (greenness has its own identity, applicable to other things). The proposition enriches our knowledge of A without negating or dissolving it. Determination emerges precisely because identities are stable enough to relate; precisely because a determination is an identity that can be contrasted with other identities.

To say "the plant is green," we must first know what "plant" means and what "green" means. If the identity of "plant" is fluid or dissolving mid-sentence, and if the identity of "green" is not fixed (B=B), then the statement "the plant is green" carries zero information. It becomes a shifting fog colliding with another shifting fog.

We can only generate the relation because both terms are stubbornly, ruthlessly self-identical. The identity of the plant is what allows it to hold the property of greenness without turning into greenness itself.

Hegel looks at A=A and says, "Look how boring and empty this is! It doesn't tell us anything new!"

This is like looking at a passport and complaining that it doesn't contain a detailed travel itinerary. A passport isn't supposed to tell you where you are going; it establishes who you are so that you can go places. The Law of Identity doesn't claim to be an exhaustive description of reality; it is the minimal baseline of sanity required to make any description at all.

Hegel’s opening claim compounds the error: “‘The plant is—,’ sets out to say something, to bring forward a further determination.” This is a serious distortion. The plant (A) does not “set out” to do anything; a subject term in a proposition has no independent teleological drive. And again, any further determination about the plant is only possible because the plant remains strictly identical with itself (A=A). If A were to dissolve or pass beyond itself in the act of predication, there would be no stable referent left for the determination to attach to. The very possibility of saying anything informative about the plant requires that its identity be preserved as the unmoved anchor of itself. Hegel inverts this: he treats the necessary stability of A as a failure, when it is in fact, the precondition for all meaningful discourse about it.

By conflating predication with failed identity, Hegel creates a pseudo-contradiction. Classical logic (and ordinary language) never required the subject to “pass beyond itself into dissolution” to bear predicates. The plant’s identity (A=A) is a stable identity enabling further determinations. We never abandon A. We accumulate compatible identities and relations around it.

Let: A₁ = the plant (stable identity). B = green (its own identity, B=B). Relation: A₁ bears property B. The full proposition is a network of stable identities: A₁ remains A₁, B remains B. Nothing “dissolves.”

Hegel admits a “further determination is required” yet treats its addition as proof that identity was empty or self-refuting. This is incoherent. The Law of Identity was never meant to be an exhaustive encyclopedia of the plant; it is the minimal condition for coherent reference and predication. Without it, “further determinations” could not attach to anything specific.

Hegel’s move (demanding that the identity of “plant” alone generate all content without relations, then declaring failure) attacks a straw man. No serious defender of identity claims concepts exist in total isolation with zero relations or attributes. Identity is the foundation for relating; it does not preclude relations. Hegel imputes an absurd hyper-isolation (which few, if any, philosophers have actually held) and then “discovers” that it fails.

Hegel’s entire passage, and his system, presupposes the very stability of identity he claims dissolves. The word “plant” must retain its identity across the sentence for his critique to have a target. “Identical talk,” “contradicts itself,” and “dissolution” must each maintain strict identity (A=A) for his claim to be intelligible. If identity truly passes “into the dissolution of itself,” his propositions lose determinate meaning mid-argument, and everything he says becomes nonsense.

Hegel uses the Law of Identity with full rigor to argue that it is “the very opposite.” Which simply demonstrates that dialectical subtlety is self-undermining and self-refuting.

One cannot coherently attack the conditions of coherence while relying on them. Everything Hegel states deploys identities (A, B, relations). The plant never loses its A; otherwise, relating it to B would be impossible, and his sentence would fail.

Hegel’s deeper agenda is to subordinate logic to his theory of dialectical metaphysics (which is basically what philosophy does in general, much like theology, it seeks to assert, not establish, the absoluteness of a narrative about reality. This narrative is then treated as a standard of orthodoxy, even pitting it above logic).

Hegel’s “dialectical identity” dissolves precise distinctions into impossible contradictions, not through logic, but through a narrative about logic. The result is not deeper truth but a loss of truth: propositions that sound profound precisely because they blur the boundaries needed for truth-evaluation.

Hegel does not refute or “sublate” identity; he performs a kind of linguistic theater on it, which is what most philosophy is. The Law of Identity is not tedious emptiness, but the irrefutable simple prerequisite for any meaningful determination, relation, or discourse (including Hegel’s own). His passage exposes the instability not of identity, but of his attempt to transcend it while depending on it at every step. The plant is A. It remains A. Predicates attach without dissolution. Reading Hegel logically doesn’t lead to sophistry’s defeat of logic; it leads to logic’s exposure and defeat of sophistry.

And that’s why reading Hegel still has value, because if you read him as a Reasoner, you will simply see Logic sharpen and become more powerful in itself as it applies itself to that which seeks to negate it.

A Hegelian can either accept the accuracy of the logic that is demonstrated here and admit Hegel committed an error, or they can reject the Law of Identity and admit they are no longer speaking a language that values precision, accuracy, and truth. In which case, they can’t even find the footing to level a stable objection against this refutation!

I don’t much like the word validity (because it only refers to form) so maybe we ask, when is philosophy valuable?

The answer is simple: when it intelligently uses reason (not against reason to destroy reason) but to expand knowledge with reason.

Philosophy that uses reason correctly, and creatively (this introduces a new element) to refute error and expand knowledge, has value.

The problem with this is that Critical Thinking already does this with far more precision and less confusion and vanity, whereas philosophy entangles itself in jargon and irrelevant semantics, often departing from reason.

I don’t make the rules of reason, they are not mine, they do not belong to me. I can’t overturn reason simply because I don’t like its conclusions. Where a contradiction emerges, there error exists.

All I can do is follow logic where it leads. Contradictory claims are false, if they’re not, then they’re also false! (And one can’t make a single sound point, or produce a valid objection).

You should try following logic where it leads. It’s easy to do this by critically reading theology and philosophy, because they live by contradicting reason.

Philosophers get upset at me for applying reason to their philosophy, but the rules of logic are not my rules, they are rules also presupposed by philosophers, but philosophers want the special pleading right of being able to violate them and still maintain an image of themselves as rational. They deeply resent having this image shattered.

This is why I do not see philosophy as rational, and why I make a distinction between a Reasoner and a Philosopher— because it’s a necessary distinction drawn by reason itself. For how can any philosophy that departs from the laws of logic be rational?

This means that one is left claiming that no philosophy departs from the laws of logic, or that philosophy is a logic superior to the laws of logic. In every case, logic wins out over philosophy:

Either philosophy submits to it, making use of it, in which case, philosophy is not reason. Or philosophy tries to prove its superiority to the laws of logic, which is impossible, because to do this it has to use the laws of logic.

Thus, philosophy is caught in a permanent state of theft: it must steal the tools of the Reasoner just to construct the arguments that deny them.

“The ethos of speaking truth to power encourages intellectuals to think that such truths have been established before inquiry has even begun. It replaces a difficult epistemictask—finding out what is true, where power lies, and how truth and power interact in specific cases—with the simpler, more self-flattering goal of summoning intellectual courage.”

Wouldn’t one have to always be climbing mountains and looking down from the heights, instead of getting tangled in the willows and swamps?

What does it mean to do this in practical terms?

In order to thrive as a thinker doesn’t one simply have to know how to think, which to say, reason, and also apply that reason?

But if a thriving thinker is a flowing Reasoner, then what exactly is the Reasoner flowing through? What exactly must he apply reason against?

Can one be a thriving thinker without being a flowing Reasoner?

It would seem that one must in some way be undeceived and emancipated by reason in order to be a thriving thinker.

This implies that there is deception in which we are automatically entangled, and reason must flow through this deception and set us free.

The claim that reason leads to God fails at the very first step of definition. When logical arguments are used to deduce a 'First Cause,' reason must immediately demand a strict clarification of what 'God' actually means. It is here that the house of cards collapses.

The apologist invariably shifts from a vague, metaphysical placeholder to a specific, personal deity, stocked with a detailed list of attributes. But once this definition is brought to light, reason demands justification: the apologist must prove that this 'God' is a mind-independent reality, rather than a mere primate abstraction, a fairy tale projection of the human mind.

Because reason requires both logical coherence and empirical verification, it cannot accept a deity that exists solely within the confines of wordplay. Without evidence, the definition remains a human invention, and the argument falls apart.

Reason is actually the enemy of God, precisely because reason demands specificity about God. (Luther understood this quite well).

If we simply approach the question rationally and honestly, we find that reason dictates what we must do. And what we must do, to be rational, is define exactly what we mean by God. But this leaves us clenching a deity that cannot withstand the scrutiny of reason.

It is irrational to argue: “the Bible says God is a Trinity, therefore God is a Trinity.”

But this is the argumentative form that all Christians are left with because they cannot deduce the attributes of their desired God from the universe.

[If one wanted to use reason to arrive at the conclusion of the existence of a God, at best, they would only be able to arrive at the speculation of a pantheon of mysterious and imperfect builders (likely psychopathic beyond psychopathic, and likely long extinct) or some kind of pantheistic biological machine.]

This post isn’t just an argument against the existence of God from reason, it’s an argument that reason, in its very essence, stands diametrically opposed to theology.

The so-called “New Atheism” is, fundamentally, a form of Scientific Skepticism. This distinction matters, because many of the criticisms directed against it arise not from science, but from assumptions internal to philosophy itself, particularly the assumption that philosophical analysis is an authoritative or superior mode of inquiry.

One of the standard charges leveled against the “New Atheism,” especially by apologists and religious intellectuals, is that it is “shallow,” “unsophisticated,” or lacking in “depth.” But what exactly is meant by these accusations?

What critics generally mean is that the “New Atheism” does not engage theology through the technical framework of contemporary analytic philosophy (the style associated with “Christian philosophers” such as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, William Alston, Peter Van Inwagen and J. P. Moreland).

In other words, the criticism is not merely that New Atheist arguments are wrong; it is that they do not participate in or reflect a particular philosophical form. They are judged “superficial” because they do not mirror the conventions, terminology, and argumentative structures of analytic philosophy.

But this raises an important question: is substance being identified with actual explanatory power, or merely with stylistic sophistication?

Too often, what is being praised as “depth” is simply conformity to a complex philosophical form. The analytic style itself (dense terminology, layered abstractions, technical epistemology) comes to function as a marker of profundity independently of whether the conclusions reached are persuasive, evidentially grounded, or even coherent.

What is occurring, then, is frequently less an evaluation of argumentative merit than a reflexive deference to a recognized intellectual form. This can be seen clearly in the work of Alvin Plantinga himself (and this is Planting’s simplified version):

“To recount the essential features of the [Aquinas/Calvin epistemology] model: the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit working in concord with God’s teaching in Scripture is a cognitive process or belief-producing mechanism that produces in us the beliefs constituting faith, as well as a host of other beliefs. These beliefs, of course, will seem to the believer to be true: that is part of what it is for them to be beliefs. They will have the internal feature of belief, of seeming to be true; and they can have this to various degrees. Second, according to the model, these beliefs will be justified; they will also have at least two further kinds of virtues. In the first place, they are rational, in the sense that the believer’s response to the experience she has (given prior belief) is within the range permitted by rationality, that is, by proper function; there is nothing pathological there. And in the second place, the beliefs in question will have warrant: they will be produced by cognitive processes functioning properly in an appropriate environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. To be sure, the process in question is not like the ordinary belief-producing mechanisms we have just by virtue of creation; it will be by a special work of the Holy Spirit.” Alvin Plantinga, “Knowledge and Christian Belief” p.67, Eerdmans Publishing 2015

The question is not whether this passage is sophisticated in form. The question is whether its content and claims can be substantiated by, correspond to, evidence/explanatory substance, or whether the appearance of rigor is being generated primarily by technical vocabulary and philosophical architecture.

The “New Atheists” reject this sophistry because they do not regard theological claims as problems solvable through increasingly elaborate conceptual analysis. They approach religion instead as a set of empirical, psychological, historical, and sociological phenomena, subjects better addressed through scientific skepticism than through the semantics of metaphysical speculation. (No matter how complex the form, evidence is still required for extraordinary claims).

For that reason, accusations of “shallowness” often amount to little more than the complaint that scientific skeptics refuse to play by the rules of analytic theology.

I never learned virtue as a Christian, I only learned it after I read Socrates. I had a caring heart, but I didn’t understand how virtue worked. As A. C. Grayling’s “Good Book” says, “Character is what you are in the dark.”

Christianity teaches obedience, it doesn’t teach morality.

In Socratic virtue, if you harm another, you actually harm the quality and substance of your own character, which is true. One’s virtue is then leveraged by a commitment to the highest development of self. In Christianity it’s just obedience to God, and eye-service to one’s fellow believers. There is an idealist coercion aspect of losing rewards in heaven. Not to mention the morality is permeated with authoritarian superstitions, and superficial, external conformities.

It’s not complicated:

1. They attack identity by using the authority of identity, and they’re not aware of this. (Attacking truth while special pleading it for themselves and their claims).

2. They claim that identity is “insignificant,” a mere “tautology,” even through they use it to establish and give meaning to everything they consider to be significant— including their claim that identity is just a “mere, insignificant tautology.”

3. They manufacture complex linguistic mazes and paradoxes to confound the pursuit of truth. When cornered by logic, a sophist won't concede; they will pivot to semantic games, obfuscation, or clever paradoxes designed to make the listener doubt reality itself. They weaponize intellectual exhaustion, treating a debate not as a pursuit of truth, but as a game of rhetorical Calvinball* where they rewrite the rules mid-sentence to ensure they can never be held accountable to any standard apart from their shifting subjectivity.

4. Egoistic indifference to their own contradictions. They decouple words from reality, treating language entirely as a tool for power and compliance. To a sophist, words don't have stable meanings rooted in facts; they have utility. They will happily redefine a word on the fly, exploit ambiguities, or use emotionally charged buzzwords to manipulate an audience. Because they don't believe in an objective truth to begin with, communication isn't about sharing or discovering knowledge, it's about winning compliance, securing status, and dominating the narrative.

*Calvinball is a fictional game from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where players make up rules on the fly and are not allowed to play the same way twice. The term is now used metaphorically to describe situations where rules are self-servingly changed as you go.

“…Christian belief does not come by way of arguments from other beliefs. Rather, the fundamental idea is that God provides us human beings with faculties or belief-producing processes that yield these beliefs and are successfully aimed at the truth; when they work the way they were designed to in the sort of environment for which they were designed, the result is knowledge or wanted belief.” Alvin Plantinga, “Knowledge and Christian Belief” p.89, Eerdmans Publishing 2015

These are all theological conclusions drawn from the Protestant or Catholic Canon. The source of the “knowledge” that Plantinga (considered one of the greatest “Christian philosophers” to ever live) is here drawing from, is not reason, but theological interpretations of specific Biblical passages, or assertions made by theologians.

This is Christian Apologetic’s grand climax, when all the jargon and sophisticated philosophical form is said and done, it’s just a direct pivot to Fideism!

Christianity had once met its match, but Luther revived it with his scripturalism (Nietzsche complained about this). But scripturalism had also met its match as science began to establish its epistemological authority in the world. Christianity was rolling downward to its grave, but then philosophy came alone, specifically Analytical Philosophy, and provided it with a new sophist form that it is still monopolizing to this day.

Analytical Philosophy is the sophist form that is legitimately used by theists*: Plantinga, Swinburne, William Lane Craig and many others, have all found subterfuge in the abstractness of this form. And because humans bias abstract complexity, assuming it to be proof of greater and deeper truth, the form alone has been enough to insinuate the validity and intellectual legitimacy of the claims of Christianity. (People like Alex O’Connor have added to this public image of legitimacy).

Don’t get me wrong, Christianity is still rolling down to its grave, per empirical evidence, but this is partly because its social practice is archaic and diametrically opposed to the short attention span of social media culture.

The more important question is, what happens to these individuals who impulsively reject Christianity when they actually pay attention to its apologetics? (Many get indoctrinated into it). Most people do not reject Christianity at this level, they don’t even know that this level exists. They just don’t like sitting in Church listening to people make archaic declarations from a book they can’t relate to. Because Christianity has clashed with modern egoism, therefore it is highly unappealing to the modern egoistic man.

There’s a reason why philosophy empowered the discourse of theism, while Critical Thinking and Scientific Skepticism did not, and do not, and this is because philosophy is itself a theological form.

*Theists were even conscious of this form. In 1998 the book, “The Analytic Theist” appeared, Eerdmans Publishing Company

We say it is the love of wisdom, then here is foundational wisdom:

Those who are wise must first of all take heed to the body, because we are the body. (And we can get more specific in articulating this): we are what we consume.

In order to think well we need the right nutrients. We also need quality sleep and exercise. Health is the platform on which the life of the mind lives and moves and has its being.

Suppose we establish

Premise 1

Premise 2

&

Premise 3

Now these premises must be accepted by:

Human Psychology.

And just that quickly

reason has met its limit, which is not actually reason’s limit, but man’s limit for reason.

Outside of natural disaster and disease, this is possibly the most cyclical truth of our reality.