Atheism vs Christianity: Peter Slezak vs William Lane Craig
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analysis by Carl Baydala
Friends, here is another great debate concerning the existence of God. The debate is between Dr. Lane Craig and a Dr. Slezak. I have seen Mr. Craig in combat before and he is an expert at what he does. But, he is a Christian apologist, so his effect is minimal as you may expect. Dr. Slezak is a relative newcomer for me since I have never seen the man in debate before.
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At the forefront of any debate involving the existence of God is the idea of causation. For my money this is the crucial part of any debate concerning the existence of God. The proponents of the existence of God will always say that God created the universe, and that all the rest if history as we say. So, did God really create the universe and is that where it all started?
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Well, I personally, do not think that things are that easy to explain away. Christians do not apparently believe in the idea of infinity as we know it to be. Now, I have recently read that infinity is a mathematical impossibility so perhaps the Christians are falling back on this angle for their support as well. The study of infinity is an associated topic contained within the Cosmological Argument ( the world and the universe were created and exist; there must be a cause for this creation; God is the final cause and creator of all things ) as it supports the notion of a God. ( when you read about paradoxes the idea of infinity is debated as well. I do not think we should get carried away by this notion of the impossibility of infinity. Remember, we live in a finite world and we cannot transcend into the world of infinity and of its mysteries. If infinity does exist, then I am sure that it contains its own methods of understanding and rules of conduct for all concerned, including the Ominipotent One Himself, if He exists, that is ). Another area that the theists rely on is the study of Ontology. It is the study of Being and is the basis for the Ontological Argument
(Anselm’s ontological argument ): there is nothing greater conceived than God, therefore God exists; He is perfect, all-knowing and seeing and is just and perfectly moral. He is an ideal figure. You might to take time out to read about the Ontological and Cosmological Arguments for God's existence contained on the side bar.
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But, I have a problem with this notion of existence and God actually. If the Christians are saying that God has always existed then aren't they saying that infinity is possible as well? How can you have one without the other? You cannot have a universe coming into creation by the Hand of God all of a sudden and then deny that God has existed for all time in the same breath. He is an infinite Being of the past and will be an infinite Being into the future. To my mind that indicates the presence of something like infinity; therefore infinity exists ( even though we cannot imagine it, since we live in a finite world and cannot comprehend infinity ), but that does not mean that God necessarily exists, however.
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You have to remember that God is a concept - He or She or It is a creation of the human mind - the rational, idealist mind. No one knows for sure in what form God exists, if at all. We know that nature exists and that nature Herself or itself may be the cause of all that we know. ( Pantheism ) Nature, as God, is much more likely than the God of the Christians since it is readily knowable and therefore believable.
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Man only knows what he knows ( Epistemology ) and has two ways of arriving at this knowledge. Either by empirical methods, i.e., by discovery ( Empiricism ) or by just thinking about things ( Rationalism ) with any prior knowledge or experience. Things are simply known a priori and by common logic.
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The defenders of Christianity and of the concept of God must by definition be more rationalistic or idealistic in nature since they have no real concrete evidence of a God. The empirical data will not confirm one way or the other the existence of a God. So, the Christian apologist then must rely on his intellectual and reasoning skills to commit us to the belief in a God. If you are easily swayed then you are most likely a believer in something like Jesus Christ and the god Jehovah.
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An atheist on the other hand gives more weight to scientific evidence; he needs empirical proof to get him where he wants to be, or sometimes to get away from where he does not want to be, namely believing in a God.
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So, who is right and who is wrong? And, maybe to to point who is the more honest of the two - the Atheist or the Theist?
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We need to come back to how we know. As I pointed out above there are only two methods of knowing; we either think we know something or we actually do know something by experiencing it. The quality of that experience is another topic of debate and is not my concern here. I am talking about the knowing of things that we as humans understand as a group - to know. Nobody is capable of knowing God according to the idea and methodology of empiricism. We know know God because we think we know him via the method of idealism and rationalism, but is that good enough when when we are dealing with matters of the utmost importance? I think not.
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You might be interested in a more thorough analysis of the debate below:
Friends, here is a wonderful little video series on Medieval Philosophy. Contained within this short series of videos is some discussion concerning the arguments for the existence of God. You will learn the origins of some of our modern ideas about the existence of God by examining the beliefs of the medieval philosophers themselves. See for example St. Anselm's Ontological Argument found here:
Actually, all of these videos done by the host Magee are excellent in their content. They are direct, and Mr. Magee does not fail to get at the root of all of the things that we as students are interested in.
Friends, pictured above is a Spring Salmon. A couple of important things happened to me in the summer of 1964 and they both involve salmon. One event was a failure and the other was a success - I was fifteen years old and I was about to find out just what kind of a person I really was.
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My father decided that I should go up to northern B.C. in a gillnetter and see what commercial fishing was like. I really liked the idea and I was eager to go. I remember packing everything including my brand new 22 calibre rifle. I bought this weapon and bullets with no questions asked from a local store. Things were different back then. Why you could even smoke in restaurants and movies if you really wanted to.
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So, me and this elderly fisherman headed up north in this tiny gillnetter. We made our way up through Georgia Strait and into the Johnstone Straits too. There was a narrow gap along the way where the tides ran swift and when we got there the steering wheel cable broke and we were swirling around in a swift moving current. Now, that was pretty exciting indeed. But, we got out of it eventually and moved on. But, once we got to the northern tip of Vancouver Island we could go no farther because the winds were too high - the crossing of the open ocean would be unsafe and very dangerous - so like all of the other gillnetters we had to wait for the storm to pass. And pass it did.
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Eventually we crossed the open waters of Queen Charlotte Sound and I had my very first real experience with the Pacific Ocean. I remember the huge swells rolling in one after the other from the west - they were enormous and breathtaking. Being on that small boat was like riding on a giant roller coaster over water. I have never been afraid of water and I like boats and I like fishing. This was exciting. But, it didn't take me long to find out that I was a land lubber - I was getting seasick and it was just awful. I wanted to throw up constantly and all I could do was to lie down and hope that this night mare would end as fast as it started. But, there was no cure for this madness, and no medicine. I just had to ride it out and hope the hell I survived in one piece. I guess my mentor knew right off the bat that I was not going to be much use to him in the catching of the salmon. What a disaster and what a disappointment.
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But, we finally made it to a little fishing village called Klemtu which is in a protected area north of the open waters. I was glad to get back on land. We bought some smokes and some bullets for my rifle. I remember taking pop shots at the seals and other creatures swimming about. We did manage to get one fishing trip in before I would go home. But, it was a bad set if I recall and no salmon just a bunch of junk fish came in the net. I guess we got the wrong tide or something. I really did not know much about the intricacies and techniques of the trade and I never found out. So, things were going poorly all around it seemed. I cannot remember how long I lasted, but I do not think it was very long at all. My apprenticeship as a commercial fisherman was to going to come to a close and I knew that I would never fish salmon for a living. It just wasn't in me. I like the water, but this kind of ocean water and me did not see eye to eye.
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I remember taking a seaplane from some village and I think I flew down to Campbell River to catch a bigger plane to Vancouver. The details are a little sketchy now so I hope you don't hold that against me. But, I remember jumping into the bigger plane and I was packing my 22 caliber rifle and all of my other gear with me. Nobody said boo, so that was OK by me. Actually, I never thought much about it since once I got to Vancouver and took a bus home nobody cared that I was packing a rifle with me. Things were just different back then in 1964.
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Once I got home I found a nice surprise waiting for me. It was a big Spring salmon that I had won in a contest. I got a salmon and a carton of Sportsman cigarettes. That was my prize. I had written a little story and sent it in to the local television station. The show was called ' Tides and Trails ' and was hosted by Ted Peck. At the end of each segment of the show they would read out somebody's ' Tall tale '. Well, my tall tale had won while I was gone. My story was basically this: I was out fishing with a bunch of guys and we started to cook the fish after we caught them. But, we noticed that nobody had any salt to put on the fish, so we all started crying on the fish so as to get the salt from our eyes and onto the fish. That is the story line that won the contest. So, they read my story on television and I won the Salmon and the smokes. And, that was the beginning of my literary career. So, I may have failed in some manly endeavour, but it certainly was not the end of the world.
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Here is a sample of the kind of music I liked in 1964 when I was fifteen years old:
Friends, my topic this morning is manhood. Manhood is a very important issue for men. It is so important that I don't think any other thing is on the mind of a man more often than this crucial thing, except perhaps thinking about women. And, these things surely go hand in hand as I am sure you are all aware.
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The inspiration for my theme this morning was my stunning losses at the races yesterday evening. Quite simply, my harness racing triactor system let me down and I was zero for twelve races. That means I did not win a dime. Nothing. All I received was the entertainment value of the sport; that was my consolation prize if you will. But, I bucked up. Yes, friends the buck stopped on my desk and there was no one to blame but myself. I took the heat for the losses and I did it like a man. I was gracious to myself in my defeat. I did not swear or call out for an intifada on the world or of racing or of the drivers, owners, and their horses. No, I took my resounding defeat like a man. And, how did I do this? Well, I just assessed the situation and said to myself: this is how the racing gods conduct their business; they are testing me and my durability and I must not let them down - and I did not. I know my system is solid and when the horses are running in top form and conditions are favourable then I will win - and I know that I will win. It is just a matter of time and waiting, waiting for the right set of conditions to produce the desired results for me. Friends, I have faith in myself and my system. Our day will come and I will most likely recover all of my losses and then some. That is an act of faith in the racing gods, combined with being a man. Manhood is tough sometimes, but it is possible to be a man even under extreme conditions. Some men are beaten by the odds and some are not; the trick is to overcome the obstacles - by being a man. And, being a man means knowing what the odds are and what to do about them.
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Dear friends I hope I have made myself perfectly clear on this manhood issue. But, there is more. There is more because when you are talking about manhood you are automatically talking about women as well as I mentioned above. Now, sometimes situations with women can be really challenging. But, let the challenge be what it is - it is a chance to prove your manhood. And, the woman expects it of you so do not let her down. When women give you a hard time or perhaps even reject you for whatever reason, this is time for your manhood to shine as well. Assess the situation and realize what is going on between you and your woman. The love gods are in charge of this critical area just as the racing gods control your fortunes at the racetrack. Friends, I hope I don't have to spell it out for you. Be a man and let things be as they may. A woman will love you all the more if she sees that you are a man. A man waits his turn in love just as he must at the racetrack. Your day will come, but in the meantime you must be a man and accept your fate. Thanks for reading and have a nice day.
I hope I did not frighten you with my title - the death of innocence. But, I think that is what the period 1963 represents; things got a lot tougher and more serious more quickly after 1963. The Beatles and the death of Kennedy were to herald in a new era, but the new era had not yet arrived - but its messengers had. ..in just five years I would be in university and involved in student demonstrations. The enemy was the Vietnam War and authority and control and U.S. imperialism and even capitalism itself......It gets tough when you get older you know. Like, I was just counting on my fingers trying to figure out how old I was and what grade I was in at school in 1963. So, I think I have it boiled down to the fact that I was in grade nine and I was fourteen years old, in 1963 that is. I was looking at the music charts, you know the top 100 songs for the various years and it looks like this was the transition period, so to speak. Because in 1964 the Beatles hit the scene, starting out with their big hits She Loves You and I Want To Hold YourHand. But, in 1963 there were still a lot of songs that I could grab on to. This was also the year in which Kennedy was shot - Friday November 22, 1963. It is just one of those dates and days that I do not forget. Of course everybody thought Lee Harvey Oswald did it. But, now that we have the internet we tend to look at things a little differently of course.
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This was also the period of my first big crush on a girl. She kind of looked like the Mona Lisa now that I think about it. It was just one of those Platonic or puppy love kind of things I suppose, but they are very exciting when they happen of course; this was also the time that I drafted a ' Boyfriend - Girlfriend Contract '. I guess this girl inspired me to do that.
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.I did not really like the Beatles and the British invasion actually, when it actually happened, I mean. And I did not like the Rolling Stones and drugs and acid and all of that kind of stuff. These things were to make their appearance soon enough. I am an old love songs kind of person which I have already told you about of course and a group like Jerry andthe Pacemakers would garner my attention or even Hermans Hermits. There were no Beatles hits in the 1963 top 100 songs.
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Anyhow, here is just a sample of the kind of song that still grabbed my attention in 1963, and as I told you things were going to change quickly once the Beatles hit the scene.
Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort face off in a debate with the Rational Response Squad over the existence of God....
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Here is a further debate concerning the existence of God.
It is not your traditional participants that are engaging in the debate, but rather, people from the entertainment industry.
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In watching the first part of the debate, I found it to be rather
theatrical in its presentation. The believers in God were first to go and I felt like I was being sold a product. The main theme seems to be that God is the creator and that just about explains everything - everything created needs a creator. The blurb below explains the participants in the debate.
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Part two is largely composed of the moderator asking questions to each side of the debate. Evolution is a major focus of the discussion. The question of ' transitional forms ' is debated; where is the evidence that man evolved from something else? The question of the existence of Jesus Christ arises.
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Questions from the audience is the final part of the show. Did God create evil? Can atheistic nations produce values like the Christian ones? What is the fate of the nations who are not exposed to Christianity and the word of God? What if you are wrong and God does exist? Response: I would rather go to Hell than worship a tyrant. What about cancer and suffering? A very irate woman asks this question.
If the Lord created a perfect machine then how come things go wrong? Answer: we live in a fallen creation. Christian says: Jesus did exist and evidence of the Last Supper. The U.S. is the most Christian nation on earth, but there are many others who maintain better living conditions and social services and hav less crime and violence.
Consider this characterization of philosopher Spinoza:
" God thus has no existence separate and apart from the material world, which has not been created because it has always existed. He is "free"-to obey the laws of nature, and so on. In other words, "God" is only nature. This Pantheism of Spinoza is really a thinly-disguised materialism. Despite its peculiar form (probably an unsuccessful attempt to ward off accusations of atheism), this is head and shoulders above the mechanistic outlook of contemporary scientists. Instead of the mechanical conception of matter being moved by an external force, here we have matter which moves according to its own inherent laws, it is "its own cause."
Spinoza's primary work was something called " The Ethics ". In this book he outlines his philosophic system and explanation of life and God. The following quote pretty well sums things up for me. In the following you will understand that there is no God like the Christian imagines and no Teological concept to consider; there is no design or Divine Hand of God on earth or in the universe. The universe just is, always was, and always will be and will be these things under its own terms which it has established and will establish forever and ever upon all and everything. Infinity, therefore, does exist. ( my words ):
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" Spinoza's fundamental insight in Book One is that Nature is an indivisible, uncaused, substantial whole — in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by Nature with a deterministic necessity. This unified, unique, productive, necessary being just is what is meant by ‘God’. Because of the necessity inherent in Nature, there is no teleology in the universe. Nature does not act for any ends, and things do not exist for any set purposes. There are no "final causes" (to use the common Aristotelian phrase). God does not "do" things for the sake of anything else. The order of things just follows from God's essences with an inviolable determinism. All talk of God's purposes, intentions, goals, preferences or aims is just an anthropomorphizing fiction. All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one:that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God. (I, Appendix)
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God is not some goal-oriented planner who then judges things by how well they conform to his purposes. Things happen only because of Nature and its laws. "Nature has no end set before it … All things proceed by a certain eternal necessity of nature." To believe otherwise is to fall prey to the same superstitions that lie at the heart of the organized religions....."
The following encyclopaedia article is well-written and contains the basics of the important thoughts of David Hume and his contribution to knowledge and to philosophy. Remember, it was David Hume that woke up the Great Man himself, Emmanuel Kant, from his dogmatic slumbers. Read, for example, his thesis on the origin of ideas and matters related to causation. There are many quotes here from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
" The most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) — the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also well-known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, Hume's major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and deeply influential. Although many of Hume's contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Hume also awakened Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and “caused the scales to fall” from Jeremy Bentham's eyes. Charles Darwin counted Hume as a central influence, as did “Darwin's bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading Hume reflect not only the richness of their sources but also the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, as well as one of the most thoroughgoing exponents of philosophical naturalism. "
You can learn about how Hume treated the subject of religion by listening to the audio file below. On this site you will also be able to hear An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
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Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
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Please be patient. The files may take time to load. Click David Hume below.
In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, philosopher David Hume examines whether belief in God can be rational. The work takes the form of a debate between three characters: Cleanthes, who argues that the existence and nature of God can be empirically verified; Demea, who argues that God is completely beyond human knowledge; and Philo, a philosophical skeptic widely thought to represent Hume’s own beliefs.
. Much of the debate centers around Cleanthes’ presentation of the analogical argument from design. According to this argument, the complexity and beauty of the universe can only be explained by inferring an intelligent designer, in the same way that one would infer a designer if one came across an intricately complicated machine. Philo presents several objections to this argument, with rejoinders by Cleanthes and occasional interjections by Demea. (Summary by Leon Mire)
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You can read the Dialogues at the same time by clicking below:
To get at the root of the personality of Arthur Schopenhauer all you have to do is listen to the following audio files concerning his views on pessimism. He covers all the bases and, upon listening to these files, one becomes immediately associated with the philosopher's general mental condition.
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I would describe that condition as one of pragmatism and a genuine criticism of the system. He does not mince words and his views on the world rather match my own. The world is a cruel place and man is a creature that was planted upon this earth ( or developed as a function of nature ) and his business is to survive and not much more. Man is a never-satisfied creature and is constantly trying to serve his will or his inner being. And, the point of the whole exercise is that this will is never satisfied and that is because of the general make up of man himself. Man does not know who he is or where he is going and he is constantly on the hunt for meaning. There is no god and man has no god; he is left alone to survive and when he dies there is nothing more. Maybe this feature of life explains the actions of man and his behavior and outlook on life. And, not so indirectly, it explains the behavior of Schopenhauer as well.
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Schopenhauer takes time out to criticize the attitudes of his fellows and always finds time to put women in their place; he was not an admirer of women and their place in society after all. Misogyny and Arthur Schopenhauer go hand in hand and the man is never afraid to criticize women and explain for us what he thinks their role in society is and should be. More on women below.
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For me, Schopenhauer is a man worth listening to. His pessimism is a breath of fresh air because because he characterizes life as it is, and is crtitical of its pretensions; what it is pretended to be or how it is organized. He is rational and he is critical all in the same breath. I find nothing in his words that offend me greatly, except perhaps his rather hard description of women. Schopenhauer was a bachelor with a chip on his shoulder ( or so it would seem ) but, that should not give him license to criticize women the way he does. I think he could have taken time out to be a little more diplomatic in this regard. Women, after all are part of the human race. I do not think we should be in the business of subjugating them or exploiting them, but appreciating them instead. I am a bachelor myself, and I find nothing offensive about women at all. In fact, as a group, I rather like them. And, if the right one came along, i.e., that one special female who actually understands me and appreciates me, well, I might even get married to that person. But, these kinds of things are the business of the gods and not us mere mortals. I hope Mr. Schopenhauer is not offended by these remarks and will not hold them against me as form of blasphemy or the like. But, at any rate, any man who played the flute everyday and kept a couple of puppies as friends can't be all that bad.
Rene Descartes had been called The Father of Modern Philosophy. He got this term by breaking with the old methods as developed by the Scholastics and Aristotle. That may be so, but, he was still a bachelor philosopher. And, this fact qualifies him as a special interest philosopher for me.
Descartes was quite the lady’s man as well and he even fathered a child, a little girl who dies young. But, he never married and that is why I am highlighting Rene is this spot right now. I am including Rene Descartes as one of my personal philosophical friends because he never married. Here is a portrayal of the man here as concerns women:
" He was too wise a man to encumber himself with a wife; but as he was a man, he had the desires and appetites of a man; he therefore kept a good conditioned handsome woman that he liked, and by whom he had some children (I think two or three). 'Tis a pity, but coming from the brain of such a father, they should be well cultivated. ..."
Maybe I should be satisfied that I never married and take Descarte’s advice. Maybe it is simple better to deal with women from a distance and be satisfied with the status quo. Perhaps women really do get in the way of proper thinking and cannot allow that all important solitude and freedom to occur. But, then why did God create women in the first place? There must be a reason for their existence.
There were a couple of famous women in his life as well. One he communicate with professionally was a princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and the other was Queen Christina of Sweden. So, his was not without his chances as concerns the business of women. One wonders why the queen of Sweden had to get Rene up every day at 5:00AM in the chilly Swedish weather. This finally took a toll on him and he died as a result of the cold northern weather.
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His most famous phrase was: Cogito Ergo Sum. Which means: I think therefore I am. You will only be able to understand what he meant by this statement once you examine his methods for arriving at his ideas about the source of knowledge. His epistemology in other words. Descartes was a life-long Catholic and hence believed in God He believed that God was pure and could not deceive. . This fact will form part of his philosophy as well as we will see.
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Descartes wanted to introduce something new to philosophy in the early 1600's. He wanted to be skeptical about all knowledge; he wanted to doubt in order to prove that something existed. Nothing was to be taken for granted in his eyes. His thoughts that he developed are found in his major work: The Meditations.
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Descartes wanted to develop a systematic approach to knowledge. He wanted his method to be mechanistic like the sciences and like geometry. He wanted to be sure about his methods and to remove the possibility of doubt. The old school of thought relied on the senses, and according to Rene the senses were not reliable. You have to think of Descartes as a thinker, or a rationalist. He wants to reason his way to the truth and that he why he developed his system the way he did.
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The Internet Encyclopedia above provides an excellent summation of Descartes and of the Meditations.
When you start reading the Meditations you will find out in part two what the meaning of Cogito Ergo Sum means.
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After a successful foray into the life of Rene Descartes you should come away with the phrase Cogito Ergo Sum dancing in your brain. If you do not, then I suggest that you have not done enough reading on the man.
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The idea of thinking and what it means to be able to think should be the highlight of one’s knowledge as it relates to his work. He was a brilliant mathematician, natural philosopher, and metaphysician as well. He also seems to be quite the lady’s man as well. The wealthy and famous women were attracted to him. So, I say let this be a lesson to us bachelors: Women love power, and so it would seem a man with a brain that can produce powerful ideas. I suppose it always has, and will be like that. So, there is hope for all of us. Just keep thinking, and thinking hard, and the women will eventually find you. But, that does not necessarily mean that you should get married of course. Perhaps just surround yourself with beautiful women of means. That is what it looks like Rene did to keep his mind in shape.
Remember the television commercial from back in the sixties, you know, the Certs commercial? One girl is saying that Certs is a breath mint and the other is saying that Certs is a candy mint. And, the announcer says: " stop you're both right. " Well, that is what Kant said to the Rationalists and the Empiricists. But, in this case he would say that they were both wrong and both right. Each brand of philosophy had something to contribute of course to the understanding of knowledge and reality. But, both methods fell short according to Kant, and he supplied the missing ingredient; the make-up of the mind and how it perceives reality or its objects.
.HeHere is a fine written introduction to one of the most famous and important philosophers of all time: Immanuel Kant. And, of course, he is a bachelor philosopher.
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Immanuel Kant: a snapshot
Peter Herrisone-Kelly
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Immanuel Kant is widely acknowledged by philosophers of all persuasions to have been one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He is also notorious for being one of the most difficult to understand. The complexity of his prose, however, is due not to any wilful obscurantism. In reading Kant, one is aware of a thinker struggling to clothe in language ideas of the very highest level of complexity and profundity.
Born in 1724, Kant lived his entire life in the East Prussian town of Königsberg. He never married, though was a popular man who by all accounts led a life of the utmost order and regularity. His unique contribution to Western thought is his 'Critical Philosophy': a devastating and ingenious critique of both speculative rationalistic metaphysics and unfettered empiricism. And yet this monumental system of thought, as set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, stems from just one seemingly humble question: how are synthetic a priori truths possible?
Kant introduced the distinction between 'analytic' and 'synthetic' judgements. He characterises an analytic judgement as one in which 'the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A'. The favourite example of philosophers is 'All bachelors are unmarried'. Here, the predicate ('are unmarried') simply 'unpacks' the conceptual content of the subject ('bachelors'). A distinguishing feature of such propositions is that they they tell us nothing about the way the world is, but simply clarify what is involved in our concepts.
In the case of synthetic judgements, by contrast, Kant tells us that the predicate 'lies outside the [subject] concept'. An example might be 'All humans are under twenty feet tall'. Whilst this proposition is no doubt true, it is nonetheless certainly not a feature of the concept 'human' that anything falling under it is under twenty feet tall. Thus, 'All humans are under twenty feet tall' gives us a substantial piece of information about the world rather than our concepts.
It should be easy to see that analytic truths are a priori: that is, knowable independently of any particular experience. I do not have to carry out a survey of bachelors to find out that they are all unmarried. But how could any synthetic truth - one which gives us real information about the world - be a priori?
Kant was of course aware that the vast majority of synthetic truths are knowable only a posteriori - that they require verification through experience. 'All humans are under twenty feet tall' could never be known a priori. He held, however, that there exists a special class of propositions that are both informative and knowable independently of this or that experience. The truths of mathematics (perhaps most significantly those of geometry), he maintained, fall into this class, as do certain other propositions, such as 'Every event has a cause'.
There is nothing about the concept of 7+5 that dictates that it should be equal to 12, nor about the concept of a straight line that it should be the shortest distance between two points. And yet the propositions '7+5=12' and 'A straight line is the shortest distance between two points' are both knowable a priori. Similarly, it is not part of the concept of an event that it should have a cause, and yet we can know with absolute certainty, thinks Kant, that any event will be caused. But how can we know such truths a priori?
Kant's answer to this question is both radical and astonishing. Let us start with the case of geometry. There can only, thinks Kant, be one explanation of our a priori knowledge of the properties of space: the spatial properties of the world must be contributed by the knowing subject. That is, the world as it is in itself is not made up of objects arranged in space. Only the world as it appears to us is spatial, and this is precisely because space is nothing more than our way of representing the world to ourselves. In Kant's own terminology, space is nothing more than a 'form of intuition [i.e., perception]'. Kant employs a similar argument to conclude that time, too, is a mere form of intuition. Space and time are features of the phenomenal world - the world as it appears to us - only. The noumenal world - the world of things as they are in themselves - is aspatial and atemporal.
Similarly, causal relations have a subjective origin, being, as it were, 'projected' into the world by the experiencing consciousness. Consequently causation too is a feature only of the world of appearances, and not of the world independent of our cognitive faculties. However, whereas the forms of intuition are features of our faculty of sensibility (the passive faculty that receives sense-impressions), causation is one of twelve 'categories', or 'a priori concepts' imposed on sense impressions by the understanding (the active faculty of reason).
Kant's epistemology stands as a critique of both empiricism and rationalism. The empiricist view is wrong, since the mind is not a mere tabula rasa which passively receives knowledge of the world through the senses. The rationalist model of knowledge is just as mistaken, as reason alone can never give rise to knowledge, since knowledge demands both concepts and the raw data supplied by the senses. Thus speculative metaphysics - the attempt to achieve theoretical knowledge of non-empirical subjects such as the existence of God, freedom and immortality - inevitably falls into illusion. It aims to gain knowledge of the world as it is in itself, but theoretical knowledge can only be of the world as it appears.
But whilst Kant held that we have no theoretical knowledge of such things, he maintained that we can have a practical knowledge of them. Consider free will. When I consider my actions as constituents of the phenomenal world, I am obliged to regard them as produced by rigid deterministic laws, but when I consider those same actions as they are in the noumenal world I am not so obliged. I can have practical knowledge of that freedom, which I am required to postulate in order to account for my inescapable sense of myself as a responsible moral agent.
It seems to many that a choice has to be made between two apparently incompatible ways of looking at the world: the spiritual and ethical on the one hand, and the scientific on the other. If Kant is right, the dichotomy between these two ways of looking at the world is purely illusory. There is room in the world for both determinism and freedom, spirituality and science.
narrated by Charleton Heston. It is easy to listen to, entertaining, and informative. You will learn the basics of Kant's ideas and what the conflict and resolution was between the Rationalists and the Empiricists.
..was Kant's most important project. Certain commentators have categorized Kant as a poor writer as compared to other philosophers, and also hard to understand and to grasp. Well, thatmay be so, but if you listen to the following audio files, the man is not that difficult to understand; his thoughts do get exposed in a painless sort of way. The thing about Kant of course is the fact that most people are not going to read his Critique in its entirety or even listen to it. It is the same thing with the Bible and other writings such as Karl Marx's Das Kapital. Everyone has heard of these things, but hardly anyone takes the time to actually finish these works in their entirety. It is just the nature of the human animal I suppose, that we cannot find the time or the energy to complete such a project. Maybe that is why some of us become priests and professors, while the rest of us can only dream of acquiring the much sought after knowledge. But, I think you will find that if man has a will or other reason to complete something then he will find the time to do it. Here is the Critique in listening form via the Librivox site: ( commentary by Carl Baydala )
The following commentary is found on the Librivox website.
by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).Translated by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn (1830-1902).
The Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781 with a second edition in 1787, has been called the most influential and important philosophical text of the modern age.
Kant saw the Critique of Pure Reason as an attempt to bridge the gap between rationalism (there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience) and empiricism (sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge) and, in particular, to counter the radical empiricism of David Hume (our beliefs are purely the result of accumulated habits, developed in response to accumulated sense experiences). Using the methods of science, Kant demonstrates that though each mind may, indeed, create its own universe, those universes are guided by certain common laws, which are rationally discernable. (Summary by M.L. Cohen)
