Immanuel Kant Revisited

Dinesh D’Souza, author of a book to be out this week called “What’s so Great About Christianity” has an opinion piece on Yahoo entitled “What Atheists Kant Refute.”

In it D’Souza summarizes Kant’s arguments in “Critique of Pure Reason” that it is impossible for humanity and science to unmask the whole of reality due to the unlimited magnitude of reality and man’s limited sensory apparatus.

This, D’Souza claims, demonstrates that “it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.”

D’Souza goes on to say that when atheists dismiss the teachings of religion based upon a lack of evidence “they are asking for experiential evidence in a domain that is entirely beyond the reach of the senses. In this domain, Kant argues, the absence of such evidence cannot be used as the evidence for absence.”

The fundamental consequence of Kant’s argument, which D’Souza doesn’t mention, is that since we can only have knowledge of things within our range of experience then we can have no knowledge of God because God is beyond experience.

If God is beyond experience, then he’s also beyond our ability to determine if he exists or not which is why I’m an agnostic rather than an atheist. In my opinion atheists have arrived at a conclusion just as theists have.

Now let’s be a little careful about God versus religion. Like all religious adherents, D’Souza tends to equate the two but they are in fact very different things. Kant’s argument also refutes religion because all religions claim knowledge of that which is beyond knowledge. They claim knowledge of the nature of God!

Be that as it may, was Kant right? Maybe, but then again, maybe not, first let’s be a little careful about our definitions of reality. Kant makes several assumptions which are not necessarily true.

The first assumption is that the magnitude of reality is unlimited. Says who? I’ll admit that reality is GODAWFUL BIG but I’m not quite ready to concede that it isn’t finite.

The second assumption is that humanity would be limited by the sensory apparatus that it was born with. Clearly this is no longer true. Using sensors and other devices we can now detect events at the subatomic and inter-galactic levels. In the future, using more advanced sensors and hyper-fast computers, humanity will be able to detect, and therefore experience via proxy, all sorts of stuff that we can’t experience now. Perhaps even stuff that we can't even conceive of now.

Let's not fall into a "God of the Gaps" kind of fallacy here. Simply because we haven't detected it yet, doesn't mean it's beyond detection.

The third assumption is that something exists in reality beyond the material plane and beyond the capacity of humanities senses or sensor devices to experience.

Materialism claims this isn’t true and non-materialism, into which I will lump religion as well as those who believe in a wide range or paranormal or psychic phenomena, claim that reality does in fact extend beyond the material plane and therefore includes things that are non-detectable and non-measurable by human or artificial senses.

This gets us back to the question of can the absence of evidence be interpreted to mean evidence of absence? Well, in this particular case no it can’t. It fails the third prong of the Negative Evidence Principle test which asks whether evidence should have been found. If this part of “reality” is beyond human or sensor detection then the answer to this question has to be no.

But again, let’s be very careful. Kant’s argument simply opens the door for the postulation of things beyond the experiential senses. One still has to have a justification for the likelihood of the truth of the postulation. Otherwise one would have to accept the reasonableness of the postulation of the existence of everything from invisible pink unicorns to a plethora of non-measurable forces which randomly affect the material plane but which cannot be detected as the cause of that effect.

Obviously, that’s utterly ridiculous.

Kant’s justification for the postulation of the existence of God is that without God it isn’t possible to make sense out of science or morality.

Why the hell not?

Science is simply the process by which man applies his available sensory equipment to understanding those portions of reality that are within his immediate detection. Whether this portion represents a small or large percentage of the totality of reality is irrelevant. Science is simply the process by which man measures that which he can measure. The fact that there may be things beyond experience doesn’t imply that what is within experience can’t be consistent and discoverable.

This is all that science attempts to do. Detect and measure that which is within the experiential plane. WHY things are within the experiential plane may well fall into that area of reality that Kant claims is beyond human comprehension.

The idea that one needs God to make sense out morality has been addressed and refuted numerous times. Only under Divine Command Theory is God necessary for morality. Other moral systems, such as Ethical Relativism, Deontology and Utilitarianism, have no need of Him (Her? It?).

So I don’t think Kant’s argument is as friendly to religion as D’Souza would like it to be. Granted it spanks atheists a bit by rejecting the idea that the concept of God can be dismissed simply due to the lack of empirical evidence, but it also gives the lie to religions which claim to know the nature of God because, as a corollary of Kant’s argument, God is by definition beyond human experience.

Like I said before, that’s why I’m an agnostic.