Forum:What atheists Kant refute

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Moved from Saloon Bar 19:17, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

What atheists Kant refute

I was searching through for the original quote of "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" and found this article. I thought it'd be an interesting one for people to read through and comment on. What it says is sort of true. But I have to stick with "sort of" because it misses one clear fact; if something is "outside the realms of the senses" then how can it exist or be real? How can it affect us? How does it influence us in a tangible way? It is therefore not real because it can not be detected by its effect (due to its self-confessed complete lack of effect) on the world. If it influences the real world in any way, whether by divine intervention, some case of intelligent design or talking to people, it can be detected - even if the vast body of what is causing it is outside the realm of reality (and I'm bending over backwards to accomodate the possibility with that statement) it must cross over into the real to have an effect and when it does, it can be detected and verified. Is there something wrong with this reasoning? Besides some sort of Goddidit type thing whereby an "omnipotent" being can easily influence the world and make itself undetectable, but by doing that it makes what it does look natural, and therefore it shifts itself into what I was talking about before, it doesn't look like it exists. Then you have to presume something exists... just to presume it exists. You get nowhere in terms of logic or evidence this way. ^theist 19:11, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, no. I disagree. There are many, many things in the world that indeed do exist but are entirely outside the realm of our senses. We just build instruments to augment our senses to translate their manifestations in to things we can sense, and hence we know they manifest and are real. The article just takes the reasonable and demonstrable premise and runs with it about a million miles beyond what is reasonable. Not just that there may be things that manifest that are beyond our current ability to sense, but that these things _certainly_ exist and that we should, in the total absence of evidence, have faith in their existence. A claim I think the I can accurately quote Dr. Bruce of the University of Woolloomooloo as saying "Bullshit." --JeevesMkII ^{The gentleman's gentleman at the other site} 19:47, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

When you say that instruments augment our senses, but they're still settled firmly in reality. Viewing something using UV instead of visible light is no different. Diffracting with x-rays is no different. Our eyes and ears are fundamentally no different to electron microscopes and spectrometers. ^theist 20:51, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

But do our senses and their extrapolation perceive everything? What about dark matter and dark energy, whatever they are? (Yes, I know, we still observe their effects on other perceivable things...) ħuman 22:36, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

I suppose that depends one what you want to call "direct" or "indirect" observation, I'm not sure that there's a difference when you get down to it, at least there's no sharp distinction. All observation is the effect that an object has on other things, we see the desk in front of us because it interferes with light, we spot black holes because of gravitational lensing, we identify organic chemicals by watching how the nuclei interact with transverse magnetic fields to induce a current in a receiver coil and so on. Even our eyes aren't direct as such - what our brains are really detecting is a photochemical dissociation reaction, not light, and even then the "image" that we see is compiled from multiple pieces of data, including memories, expectations and a little bit of informed imagination to fill in any gaps, hardly "direct". For anything that is real and tangible, there will always be a way of detecting it - because real and tangible things effect us, so we can detect these effects, ergo if we had no way of detecting it then it just wouldn't be real. Where that effect lies on a spectrum of "direct" and "indirect" isn't really an issue, particularly if you conclude that there's a very fuzzy distinction, if any, between the two. So yes, I think our senses and the tools we use to augment them can detect anything, because by definition if we can't in any way, then they don't exist. ^theist 11:20, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Wow, talk about deliberate obfuscation on D'Souza's part. It's true that Kant was no empiricist and did acknowledge the imperfection of sensory perception, but he certainly did not take the opposite stance and advanced a purely idealist concept. In fact, at the core of the Critique is a damning indictment of classical metaphysics, especially of the theological variety and its attempts to prove the actual existence of things such as god and the soul purely based on logical exploits. Developing a new, much more restricted and formalized metaphysical theory is the whole point of his book. The paragraph about phenomena and noumena starts out as a correct representation of Kant's thought, but then goes on to miss a central point in order to draw an unwarranted conclusion: in Kant's view, reason can indeed never access the noumena because its understanding will ultimately always be based on the phenomena (representations), and this is where he draws the boundary of metaphysical knowledge. That's exactly the reason why he does not make any statements about whether or not these noumena form an actual part of reality, as D'Souza wrongly claims. And it is even more idiotic and/or deceitful to claim the mantle of Kantian reasoning when you go on to ascribe very specific characteristics (those of Jehova or Allah, or about kinds of afterlives) to something which not only may or may not exist, but is by its very nature unknowable and unconnected to the reality with which we can interact. What this whole arguments boils down to is, unsurprisingly, "human knowledge is imperfect, therefore god". Nothing new here. Röstigraben (talk) 11:35, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

For the record, this is why I don't do philosophy. ^theist 12:46, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

You just did, and if we go by the Critique, Kant would mostly agree with you. The point is simply that it's unreasonable to accept Kant's definition of the limits of human knowledge and then go on to make positive statements about something that was explicitly defined as lying beyond these boundaries. In this case, I'd compare Kant's noumena to what Victor Stenger called a "possible" god - one that does not interact with reality in any way, is therefore unobservable and can't be disproven (or at least questioned) by pointing out the discrepancies between his supposed effect on reality and our observations. Of course, such a god would be totally irrelevant and nobody would bother to worship it. But as soon as you begin to ascribe certain properties to it, which all religions do, you move it into the realm of the knowable, turn it into something that should be observable, and whose actual existence can be assessed with our own senses or their extensions. That was your definition of reality, one that I agree with, and beyond which there is only abstraction and, finally, speculation. At best, Kant can be interpreted to make a case for agnosticism as far as reason is concerned, but he certainly doesn't lend any support to notions like "The spiritual reality constitutes the only permanent reality there is". Röstigraben (talk) 13:35, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Move to a forum? I'd hate to see all this erudition get pibotted into archive #73 next week... ħuman 01:33, 18 July 2010 (UTC)