Re: Following through

My assertion would be tautologous of I were using the word existence as semantically equivalent to existing in space and time, but I am using it in a slightly different sense - so that it would not be nonsense to say (as, for example, Descartes would say) that my mind exists as a subject of thought, but is nowhere in space. It would be false (in my view), but not nonsense. I think the non-tautologous character of what I assert is shown in what it excludes from existence: non-material selves, non-natural agencies and properties, non-spatial monads or noumena, disembodied spirits, God. These entities have been held to exist; I deny their existence. There is no invisible world of subjects and agents beyond the physical. Oddly enough, LA has not opposed any of these objects to my thesis, but has concentrated on abstractions like "the laws of logic" and suchlike. I presume that he does think there are non-material subjects, but that's something that only he can answer. Abstract entities bring in other issues, but I would not wish to assert existence of them as one would of material objects and persons. Of course, a theologian like Tillich would deny that God exists as well. He would say that God is not a being but rather Being Itself (capitalised). This, I would argue, is nonsense, unintelligible. Actually, this is also David Bentley Hart's official position, though he is more rhapsodic than Tillich. Reading Hart is like swimming in treacle. Sweet at first, but viscous, tiring and quickly making you long for dry land. The sense in which I identified as an Andersonian realist is simply that I approve of his insistence that things exist in only one way, that clearly formulated propositions are either true or false (there are no 'degrees of truth'), that there are no 'levels of reality', with some levels being 'more real' than others, etc. I like the clarity of this. I haven't been following LA's exchange with Monkey. I believe that atoms are real - I am not an instrumentalist. Of course, that does not mean that atoms are how we picture them, or even that we are capable of picturing them (as they actually are) at all. Our knowledge of their properties is abstract, structural and mathematical. But this is a whole area on its own in the philosophy of physics.