The following is adapted from my new book What's So Great About Christianity. For more information about the book, see my website dineshdsouza.com.
Bestselling atheist tracts like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great portray religion as an unreasonable form of "blind faith," often leading to fanaticism and even violence. Some of these atheists call themselves "brights," implying that they are the smart people who base their opinions on reason and science and don't fall for silly superstitions. But for all their credentials and learning, the atheists have been duped by a fallacy. This may be called the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, and it was first pointed out by that great Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, that human knowledge is constrained not merely by how much reality is out there but also by the limited sensory apparatus of perception we bring to that reality.
Consider a tape recorder. Being the kind of instrument it is, a tape recorder can capture only one mode of reality: sound. Tape recorders can "hear" but they cannot see or touch or smell. Thus all aspects of reality that cannot be captured in sound are beyond the reach of a tape recorder. The same, Kant says, is true of human beings. The only way we apprehend reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality? What makes us think that there is no reality lies beyond our perception, reality that simply cannot be apprehended by our five senses?
Moreover, the reality we apprehend is merely our experience or "take" on reality. How can you know that your experience of things is in any way like the things-in-themselves? Normally you answer this question by considering the two things separately and then comparing them. I can tell if my daughter's drawing of her teacher looks like the teacher by placing the portrait and alongside the person. I compare the copy or portrait with the original.
Kant points out, however, that we can never compare our experience of reality to reality itself. All we have is the experience, and that's all we can ever have. We have only the copies, but we never have the originals. So we have no basis for presuming that the two are even comparable. When we equate experience and reality, we are making an unjustified leap.
It is essential to recognize that Kant isn't diminishing the importance of experience or what he called the phenomenal world. That world is very important, because it is the only one our senses and reason have access to. It is entirely rational for us to believe in this phenomenal world and to use science and reason to discover its operating principles. But Kant contended that science and reason apply to the world of phenomena, of things as they are experienced by us. Science and reason cannot penetrate what Kant termed the noumena: things as they are in themselves.
Some critics have understood Kant to be denying the existence of external reality or of arguing that all of reality is "in the mind." Kant emphatically rejects this. He insists that the noumenon obviously exists because it is what gives rise to phenomena. In other words, our experience is an experience of something. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the reality that we experience and reality itself. The important thing is not to establish which is more real, but to recognize that human reason operates only in the phenomenal domain of experience. We can know of the existence of the noumenal realm, but at this point reason has reached its limit.
In Kant's view, the limits of human reason cannot be erased by the passage of time or by further investigation and experimentation. Rather, they are intrinsic to the kind of beings that humans are, and to the kind of apparatus that we possess for perceiving reality. The implication of Kant's argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human beings. Put another way, there is a great deal that human beings simply will never know.
So powerful is Kant's argument here that his critics have been able to answer him only with derision. When I challenged Daniel Dennett to debunk Kant's argument, he posted an angry response on his website in which he said several people had already refuted Kant. But he didn't provide any refutations, and he didn't name any names. Basically Dennett was relying on the argumentum ad ignorantium-the argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience. In fact, there are no such refutations.
Although Kant's argument seems counterintuitive-in the way that some of the greatest ideas from Copernicus to Einstein are counterintuitive-no one who understands the central doctrines of the world's leading religions should have any difficulty grasping his main point. Kant's philosophical vision is entirely congruent with the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
It is a shared doctrine of those religions that the empirical world we humans inhabit is not the only world there is. Ours is a world of appearances only in which we see things in a limited and distorted way, "through a glass darkly," as the apostle Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians 13:12. Ours is a transient world that is dependent on a higher, timeless reality. That reality is of a completely different order from anything we know, it constitutes the only permanent reality there is, and it sustains our world and presents it to our senses. Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, this is where reason stops: it cannot on its own investigate or comprehend that domain.
Thus when Christopher Hitchens and other atheists routinely dismiss religious claims on the grounds that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," they are making what philosophers like to call a category mistake. We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.
When atheists summarily dismiss the immortality of the soul or the afterlife on the grounds that they have never found any empirical proofs for either, they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain which is entirely beyond the reach of experience. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.
Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith. But in showing the limits of reason, Kant's philosophy "opens the door to faith," as the philosopher himself noted.
So the new atheists and self-styled "brights" can do their strutting, but Kant has exposed their ignorant boast that atheism operates on a higher intellectual plane than theism. Rather, as Kant showed, reason must know its limits in order to be truly reasonable. The atheist foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while the theist at least knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend.
Reader Comments ( Page 13 of 48)
181. REALITY IS NOT WHAT MAN IMAGINES IT TO BE ,, THAT IS FICTION ,, ALL THINGS ARE SOME ONES CFEATION ,, WEATHER IT BE A PENCIL OR A SPACE STATION ,, EVIL DESTRUCTION EXISTS WITH IN THIS WORLD ,, WHAT IS IT'S OPPOSITE ,,, DIVINE CREATION ANY SCIENTIST WILL TELL YOU THER ARE POLAR OPPOSITES TO REALITY ,, GOD IS LOVE ,, EVIL IS DESTRUCTION THEROF ,, WAKE UP ,, UNFORGIVENESS IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL IT CAUSES WARS AND GANGS AND SEXUAL IMMORALITY --------------ECT ,, GET BACK TO RALITY PEOPLE.. GOD LOVE YOU AND WANTS TO PULL YOU OUT OF THE -------BIG LIE ,,,,,,,,THANK YOU VERY MUCH
the groov at 5:52AM on Oct 20th 2007
182. Ray:
"If you can believe in an eternal universe, you should have no problem believing in an eternal god."
I disagree here. We already know the universe exists. There's no reason to believe that it isn't effectively eternal (as far as those of us inside of it are concerned). I don't see a logical bridge to connect it to something like a God, that may or may not exist.
Tem at 5:47AM on Oct 20th 2007
183. Ray:
"Science has revised and reversed its position many times. Any who claims differently is an idiot or a liar! And YOU know it!!"
There's nothing negative about changes in scientific knowledge. In fact, the process deserves respect because it's flexible enough to change when new information is discovered.
Metaphorically, would you rather work with a person that never admitted they were wrong, and stubbornly went along the same course -- or someone that admitted pretty readily that they were long, learned from the experience, and bettered themselves?
Tem at 5:52AM on Oct 20th 2007
184. And by long, I mean wrong. I shouldn't be posting this early in the morning.
Tem at 5:53AM on Oct 20th 2007
185. BTW, if anyone is curious about what Dennett's actual response was, they can read it here:
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/Dsouza.htm
Ray Ingles at 7:24AM on Oct 20th 2007
186. Botts,
1. "Proof of god is all around us" is a blatant assertion. Unacceptable.
2. You committed a category error when you asked atheists to prove that they love someone.
Knight_of_BAAWA at 9:05AM on Oct 20th 2007
187. If we follow DINESH D’SOUZA’s line of reasoning, faith can operate with no restrictions at all, and the human mind can invent all sorts of emotionally satisfying religions that contradict each other with bloody abandon.
Raspy at 9:08AM on Oct 20th 2007
188. pathological liar ray,
You know full well that the burden of proof is solely and only upon theists, so don't even give me your whining and crying about "I asked you to blah blah waaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaah".
I find your utter disdain for honesty to be quite sad. So please: stop lying, ray. Stop lying.
Knight_of_BAAWA at 9:09AM on Oct 20th 2007
189. The opening argument that our understanding of reality will forever be limited to our 5 senses ignores that we continually expanded our ability to perceive things that were hidden to us in the past.
We are not limited to our 5 original senses. With the advent of sonar, radar, infrared, electron microscopes, x-rays, telescopes, satellites, and many more technologies we are able to percieve things that we would not otherwise be able to see, hear or touch. Even my car can tell me that I am about to back into another car – providing me with the ability to see round corners. We would be blind to these things, as if they existing outside of our reality, without scientific tools.
The overall argument is the same approach used by map makers who painted monsters beyond the horizon. Having traversed seas and lakes and rivers to reach land man assumed that beyond the horizon there must be monsters, rather than the logical assumption that he would find more water and more land. Ocean going vessels, which were a technological (scientific) breakthrough at the time, allowed us to go beyond our traditional boundaries. To suggest that beyond our current reality there is God is improbable, whereas the most probable discovery is that beyond current reality will be more wonderful reality.
Science is a candle in the dark providing light where there was none before and expanding our reality beyond our 5 senses.
s
Simon at 9:13AM on Oct 20th 2007
190. pathological liar ray,
If you have no problem believing in an eternal god, you should have no problem believing in an eternal universe.
See how your idiocy got turned around on you? Poor pathological liar ray.
Knight_of_BAAWA at 9:10AM on Oct 20th 2007
191. For all of you that do not believe in GOD...
If in doubt, just consider the birth of a child for example...
the tiniest living thing, and its apparatus to survive;
that along should give you clues of a beyond of
our comprehension supernatural creator,
namely our living GOD...
Jacques-Pierre at 9:23AM on Oct 20th 2007
192. The birth of a child in no way shows that there is a god. It's a natural process, not some miracle or gift from god. If you believe otherwise, you seriously need a refresher course in sex ed and human biology.
Knight_of_BAAWA at 10:05AM on Oct 20th 2007
193. I enjoyed your poem, Chandler. Thanks for posting it.
dungal1 at 11:01AM on Oct 20th 2007
194. Here's D'Souza's (and contemporary Christianity's) argument in a nutshell:
1. Atheists can no more "prove" there's no God than one can "prove" there's no such thing as a unicorn. The first one could, theoretically, turn up at any moment. So...
2. One can't say for absolute certain that there's no dimension to the universe beyond what we humans can apprehend with our senses-cum-reason. So...
3. It IS absolutely certain that, about 2000 years ago in the Middle East, something called "God" sent down a "savior" who became known as "Jesus Christ," and that anybody who doesn't subscribe to this belief forfeits "eternal life" in "heaven" and instead goes to "hell." (Obviously, you can change the particulars here and see the parallel argument of other religious beliefs.)
Obviously, getting from (2) to (3) requires considerable blind faith and acceptance of "scripture" as the "word" of this something called "God." Harcore atheists may indeed be a bit arrogant and overreaching in insisting that there's absolutely nothing in the universe that isn't, at subatomic bottom, material, but the logical holes in their arguments are tiny pinholes compared to the yawning chasm between (2) and (3).
And even if one accepts (2) and proceeds to religious belief from there, isn't it rather hubristic to assume that the next level up from us humans is a "supreme" being, rather than just a superior one? Why isn't it more probable that humanity is governed by something like those floating slabs in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," which are in turn controlled by a more superior being, which is in turn controlled by an even more superior being, and so on, as far out as a believer wants to string it?
slowbadhands at 10:18AM on Oct 20th 2007
195.
The dismay I have to believe that 'god is real' is why you force yourselves to stay in that box?. Unless the religious really do have some magical organ in close proximity to the heart called a soul that acts like a modem to god, You know nothing, I am overlooking. When it comes to empirical evidence of a deity's existence,Zero,nothing, power of prayer..imagined. The fact is, without faith leading you to an intuition that god is real. You would all agree with me.
You are a Christian because that is what you have be brainwashed to believe. If you were born in Utah chances are you'd be buying into the mormon delusion. Had you been born in Iran there is a good chance you would believe Mohammad rode a winged horse to heaven. Many 'brighter' people who can no longer compartmentalize their knowledge and reason from their beliefs and are finding the courage to come out of the closet and acknowledge that the emperor really has no clothes. With Atheism there is no need for mind baffling dribble, the truth is simple. LOL
Robert at 8:59AM on Oct 22nd 2007