Question About Something

[JESTERKING45]

I was wondering if any of you had seen this article by Dinesh D'Souza I found it a while ago and given objectivists disgust at Kant in general I was wondering if anyone on the forum knew of it.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1017/p09s06-coop.html

[eriatarka]

Kant's argument for the existence of God is dubious even within the confines of his own philosophy (it seems to contradict the first critique), but even if it were true, it denies that any positive knowledge can be gained about God. This means that very little of Christianity could be treated as being meaningful - all that could be said is that 'some godlike entity exists', but this entity wouldnt necessarily have anything to do with the Christian God. Its a bit like the Argument from Design or the cosmologial argument - even if it were true that the universe had to have a creator, this doesnt imply that anything in the Bible is accurate. And in the case of Kant its even worse since his argument essentially denies that most of the Bible can be true, since its not possible to have positive knowledge about noumena.

Like most of Kant's philosophy, his argument for God is purely formal. He thought that he had found a proof of God, but the 'god' that can be proved by this method is only a formal construction rather than something which positive characteristics can be ascribed to. So it can be taken as a defence of theism in an abstract sense, but it certainly cant be used to defend Christianity.

Edited September 18, 2008 by eriatarka

[Thomas M. Miovas Jr.]

I was wondering if any of you had seen this article by Dinesh D'Souza I found it a while ago and given Objectivists disgust at Kant in general I was wondering if anyone on the forum knew of it.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1017/p09s06-coop.html

It does show the evil of Kant and of his followers, since neither gives any evidence whatsoever for what they are talking about; basically the whole neumena realm must be taken on faith, since there is no evidence.

In short, it is complete bs.

And bs cannot be taken as the proper foundation for anything.

Just as the Christians claim that God exists and have no evidence or no proof; so too, does Kant have no evidence and no proof of his assertions that there is a neumena world, or that our senses are not accurate regarding the nature of reality.

The evil behind such assertions is to get one to turn away from this earth and all of its splendor -- to say, in effect, OK you see something, but you can never say with certainty that it is real. But notice that both Kant and D'Souza expect you to grasp their words with perception and to be able to think about it without questioning whether or not they said those things.

The refutation is that there is no evidence for either God or the Neumena world -- zip, nada, nothing.

[brian0918]

D'Souza is a hack, nothing more. I've seen several of his debates, lectures, etc. He goes for emotionalism, stringing together grammatically-correct - but incoherent - sentences that get the audiences going wild. His opponents (e.g. Hitchens) are left trying to unravel his nonsense, and not surprisingly, they don't know where to begin.

Edited September 18, 2008 by brian0918