On my last post I wrote about David Hume and how Hume's claim that "something can only be meaningful if it's empirically verifiable or true by definition" is self-defeating, it excludes itself because that statement is neither empirically verifiable nor true by definition. However another person Atheists like speaking of is Immanuel Kant.
Kant's impact has been more devastating to the Christian worldview than David Hume's. If Kant's philosophy is right, then there is no way to know anything about the real world, even empirically verifiable things. According to Kant the structure of your senses and your mind forms all sense data, so you never really know the thing in itself. You only know the thing to you after your mind and senses form it.
Another words, if we look at a tree, Kant is saying that the tree you think you are looking at appears the way it does because your mind is forming the sense data you're getting from the tree. You really don't know the tree in itself, you only know the phenomena your mind categorizes about the tree. In short, you "kant" know the real tree in itself, only the tree as it appears to you.
It's funny that the average person on the street doesn't doubt what he sees, but supposedly brilliant philosophers do. If you want to make the obvious seem obscure, just let a philosopher get ahold of it. C.S. Lewis wrote, "good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered." Kant's philosophy is bad philosophy, yet it has convinced many people that there is an unbridgeable gulf between them and the real world; that there's no way you can get any reliable knowledge about what the real world is really like, much less what God is really like.
Kant commits the same error as Hume, he violates the Law of Noncontradiction. He contradicts his own premise by saying that no one can know the real world while he claims to know something about it, namely that the real world is unknowable. Kant says the truth about the real world is that there are no truths about the real world.
Kant also makes another logical fallacy called the "nothing-but" fallacy. This is a fallacy because "nothing-but" statements imply "more than" knowledge. Kant says he knows the data that gets to his brain is nothing but phenomena. But in order to know this, he would have to be able to see more than just phenomena. In other words, in order to differentiate one thing from another thing, you have to be able to perceive where one ends and the other begins. For example, if you put a white a piece of paper on a black desk, the only way you can tell where the paper ends is by seeing some of the desk that borders it. The contrast between the paper and the desk allows you to see the boundaries of the paper. In order for Kant to differentiate the thing in the real world from that which his mind perceives, he would have to be able to see both. But this is exactly what he says can't be done! He says only the phenomena of the mind can be known, not the noumena (his term for the real world).
If there's no way to distinguish between the phenomena and noumena, then you can't see how they might differ. And if you can't see how they might differ, then it makes much more sense to assume that they are the same - in other words, that the idea in your mnd accurately represents te things in the real world.
Kant was wrong by saying that your mind doesn't mold the tree, the tree molds your mind. If Kant claims that he can't know anything about te real wolrd, then how does he know the real world is there? And secondly, his view is self-defeating because he claims that you can't know anything about the real world while asserting that he knows the real world is unknowable.
This is what happens when a beautiful theory meets a brutal gang of facts. This one more reason WHY I CAN'T BE AN ATHEIST!!
No comments:
Post a Comment