If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Flannery OConnor
About This Quote

The philosopher and writer C.S. Lewis said: “If you live today, you breathe in nihilism; it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” The reason for this quote is that, in his time, Lewis was struggling with nihilism. His philosophy professor, Bertrand Russell, was a popularizer of the theory known as logical positivism.

According to logical positivism, nothing could be known except through sense experience. This meant that anything true about reality would have to be discovered by science (logic), but what science discovered would not be true (nihilism).

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