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 2 of 48)
16. i never comment on mr dinesh's thread.
i find his posts,
bloviated,ill thought and rarely educational.
on this occasion i commend him on using kant's argument to make the point of experienced reality,even if it is to hock his new book.
i also feel i should i should point out that mr dawkin's books tend to focus on religion and fundamentalism.mr dawkins on many occasions has stated quite openly that he does not know if their is a god,but he would need physical evidence to even consider the reality of god.
thats agnostic(literally means "not knowing",and in my travels i have never met a true atheist.
what happens in many of these debates is both sides conflate "religion" with "faith".kant's argument is a perfect example of exposing the limits of human understanding as it pertains to the five senses.he neither proves,nor disproves,he just points out the limits to expound possibilities.
brilliant!
carl jung spent most of his professional career exemplifying the typical archetypes,and expolring the further reaches of sensory perceptions,with grand,if not totally inconsistent results.
if the argument is about "faith",then there can never be a conclusive "victory" for either side of the argument,because "faith" is subjective.you either have "faith" or you dont,and if you dont,you are more likely an agnostic than an atheist.
if the argument is religion,then there is more than enough physical evidence to refute any kind empirical claim to a deities certainty.this is the avenue most used by people denouncing the existence of a creator.
it is rabid fundamentalism that leaves itself wide open to be eviscerated by a well informed debater,while faith is not,it is subjective solely to that person,and a person trying to attack that faith will always fail,because they themselves dont actually know or understand.
so while i tend to disagree with mr dinesh on most of his posts,i commend him for the use of kant.
the debate between mr hitchens and dinesh should prov interesting.
till next time..peace.
Enoch D.D.S
enoch at 10:31AM on Oct 19th 2007
17. Yet another convoluted retread of the same tired arguments from Christians; they stick their tongues out at science and assert the validity of their faith by pointing out that science can never know everything, as if that somehow proves that there is some alternate universe where their biblical characters reside.
The problem is 98% of Americans probably don't know who Kant is. Christian babble like this sounds intelligent to them, and they drink it up like wine from the Jesus cup. To Christians, stupidity is a supreme virtue, and they love to extoll their own godliness by being proud of their ignorance. "Oh, the human mind can never know the wonders of god! We are incapable of knowing so many things about the universe! Isn't it wonderful that we are so ignorant?"
Please, if science is so inadequate, by all means live your life without the benefits of science. Jesus may have raised the dead, but he didn't invent air conditioning, or the polio vaccine, or anything else useful. It's convenient to take full advantage of what science has given you, and never question why the airplane stays in the air, or the how the medicine makes you better, but when it comes to your silly religion, science becomes some inept monster trying to destroy the beauty of a magical god-filled universe that somehow exists but can never be perceived - as if such a universe, even if it did exist, would have any meaning to us at all.
Dinesh D'Stupid at 10:45AM on Oct 19th 2007
18. Nice poem, Chandler.
Linda at 10:45AM on Oct 19th 2007
19. Mr. Engelmann:
Um, why can neither a sense of morality nor a sense of beauty be accounted for without recourse to gods? For an example of a non-theistic account of the 'moral sense', see here:
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/07/12/universal-morality-and-the-morality-of-the-universe/
"Intellectual intuition", without *testing* of those intuitions, has not proven terribly reliable in the past, even with purely "phenomenal" (to echo your usage) things. For example, a flat Earth and a geocentric solar system are simple, intuitive... and wrong.
If you're going to depend on 'intuition' of things that can't be tested *at all*, *by definition*, then you would seem to be on very thin ice indeed.
Ray Ingles at 10:53AM on Oct 19th 2007
20. Sure, we can't "know." But what's the matter with believing in revelation?
joleary at 12:24PM on Oct 19th 2007
21. Sure, we can't know. But what's wrong with believing in revelation?
joleary at 12:26PM on Oct 19th 2007
22. Dinesh's obvious fascination with atheists is quite humorous, actually. As of late, almost half the titles of his "buy my book" blogs have included various incarnations of "atheists are icky". This fixation is the sign of a sad, sick mind that needs to constantly "prove" his moral superiority... merely proving to many of us that he needs to step away from the computer and stop seeing atheists around every corner trying to get him.
If I may quote the legendary thinker Sgt. Hulka from that great cinematic work addressing many and varied aspects of the human condition, Stripes: "Lighten up, Francis."
Greg at 11:13AM on Oct 19th 2007
23. The heading of Dinsesh's blog indicates desperation on his part, and those who "believe" as he does. That is, if one is unable to the issue or question on its merits, engage in "ad hominem" attacks. Would that such people take even an introductory course in logic (Logic 101), they might then recognize their error. As they are already absolutely certain that they are right, and even the remotest possibility of their being "wrong" does not exist, rest assured that they will not do so. Such is what happens when one is merely "schooled", and not educated. The gentleman may more himself into the Ann Coulter column where "thinking" is not required and "believing" is sufficient.
Robert I. Laitres at 11:16AM on Oct 19th 2007
24. I cannot believe AOL just let D'Souza use this site to constantly hawk his book. Geez, how many blogs has he done on this book?
Too damn many!
David S. at 11:20AM on Oct 19th 2007
25. Why is it that God-Believers keep jumping through the "hoops of logic" to try to prove there is a God--and in the same breath talk about how the existence of God doesn't have to be proved with logic.
Why is it that you demand true logic in living every other part of your life but then say that understanding the existence of God does not need logic?
Why not go with the absolute obvious fact --There is no God!
gd at 11:23AM on Oct 19th 2007
26. Dinesh wrote:
"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."
That I don’t know everything doesn’t mean that I don’t know anything. I'm quite sure that the earth is not a flat disk that rests on the back of a giant tortoise.
And, for the sake of argument, let’s say I don’t know anything for certain. There are at least some events that are overwhelmingly likely to have occurred. Some inferences are more reasonable than others. For example, I’m quite sure that the earth is not a flat disk that rests on the back of a giant tortoise.
Moreover, I think it’s unlikely that there are any Gods. I don’t know for certain that there aren’t any. But I think it’s unlikely.
Wes at 11:44AM on Oct 19th 2007
27. To me, in my egoticistical view. Egotistical, as I choose to present it to you here, The Word is such a energetic tool we use. The Word, is one aspect of that which we know as language. Yet, with these words I'm presenting to you as you read this, I hold out degrees of hope and trust that you will be able to understand; that they hold the same meaning, each in it's context, as they do for me. Yet, I am acutely aware that the ecology of each of these words I select, emerge from my own subjective ecological application of each. Truth, therefore, as a word for me is continually shaped by my ecology... I wonder how alone I am with this? How much energy has been engaged over the years in the development of what you understand as the truth. The commitment to the meaning you and I each have to this word. And how this commitment affets our relationship with each other?
Hew Manity at 1:04PM on Oct 20th 2007
28. BLACK STUDENTS BEING FORCED TO POSE FOR PICTURE SUPPORTING HILLARY WHILE THEY WERE STOPPED FROM CREATING A STUDENTS FOR OBAMA GROUP
FITSNews Exclusive - Clinton’s Claflin Crackdown
http://fitsnews.com/2007/10/18/fitsnews-exclusive-clintons-claflin-crackdown/
“STUDENTS FOR BARACK OBAMA” TOLD ATTENDING
HILLARY PRESS CONFERENCE WAS “PART OF CLASS”
Students at Claflin University, a historically black college in Orangeburg, S.C., are accusing the school's administration of prohibiting them from forming a "Students for Barack Obama" chapter, yet simultaneously compelling them to attend a press conference supporting his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
In fact, several students who serve as volunteers on Obama's presidential campaign tell FITSNews that they were coerced into holding Clinton signs and standing behind State Sen. John Matthews, who unveiled Clinton's higher education plan at a press conference held at the school last week.
Which would probably explain some of the unenthusiastic expressions visible in this photograph.
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/blog/view/?id=14620
Here's what we've been told ...
About three weeks ago, an honors student at Claflin University says she approached the administration about establishing a Students for Bar ack Obama chapter at the school. The student was told that she and fellow students could not form such a group on campus, but no reason was given for the school's decision.
Fast-forward to last week, when this same honors student says that she and other Obama supporters were in a class that was cancelled so that students could attend Sen. Matthews' presentation on behalf of the Clinton campaign. She and other scholarship students say they were "coerced by administrators" into standing behind Matthews during his address. About half of those students are Obama volunteers who felt they had "no choice" but to stand behind Matthews at the event.
Not surprisingly, Clinton stickers and placards were passed out while the Senator was making his presentation, and a sign-up form for the Clinton campaign was circulated, which many of the students said they felt they were obligated to sign.
Claflin is technically a private institution, but it receives millions of dol lars in government grants each year due to its historically-black designation.
According to a senior U.S. Department of Education official who spoke with FITSNews on the condition of anonymity...
"It stinks to high heaven," the official said. "Given that Claflin receives federal money and based on the school's clear support for Clinton and its efforts to limit support for Obama, this could be a violation of that prohibition. It could also be a potential violation of the First Amendment rights of free speech and free association...
Claflin University did not return repeated phone calls from FITSNews seeking comment. Clinton's campaign said it would look into allegations...
SEE STUDENTS WITH FROWNS
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/blog/view/?id=14620
BEING FORCED TO POSE FOR PICTURE SUPPORTING HILLARY WHILE THEY WERE STOPPED FROM CREATING A STUDENTS FOR OBAMA GROUP
THE PICTURE AT HILLARYS SITE IS PRESERVED IN MY BLOG BELOW
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/danielleclarke/CnzC
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Danielle Clarke at 12:09PM on Oct 19th 2007
29. Not having read the author's book, I might only guess at its conclusions, based on its title and this post-- something I won't bother to do. The post (my first exposure to Mr. D'Souza) speaks for itself. While it seems to me to be directed toward the undecided, it certainly has caused a ruckus among those who apparently think themselves to be intellectual.
Notable among the replies is the obvious pomposity, hostility and arrogance of all but one or two. How the ego is angered by the perceived threat of expressions that challenge its omnipotent authority.
Ever since God created man in His image and man chose to separate himself from God, mankind has felt the pain of that loss and ever seeks to create gods in man's image, attempting to satisfy the emptiness within. How vain, to think that the created being could ever fully comprehend the Creator-- we will see only what He chooses to reveal to us.
God has said in the Bible that His ways and thoughts infinitely exceed ours, that we must become as little children in order to see His kingdom, and that only through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ can anyone be saved from the consequence of his hostility toward God. Those who refuse this counsel from a loving Father in heaven pronounce their own doom.
al at 12:53PM on Oct 19th 2007
30. Did he seriously just try to use Kant to help his Christian cause?
A few quotes from Kant:
Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.
The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.
The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.
He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray.
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
Buggs at 12:14PM on Oct 19th 2007