The Pillars of Unbelief—Kant by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(26

The Pillars of Unbelief—Kant

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Just as we have pillars of

Christian faith, the saints, so Source: Jan-Feb 1988
National Catholic Register
are there individuals who
have become pillars of
unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers with an
enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the
Christian mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

Few philosophers in history have been so unreadable and dry as

Immanuel Kant. Yet few have had a more devastating impact on
human thought.

Kant's devoted servant, Lampe, is said to have faithfully read each

thing his master published, but when Kant published his most
important work, "The Critique of Pure Reason," Lampe began but
did not finish it because, he said, if he were to finish it, it would
have to be in a mental hospital. Many students since then have
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echoed his sentiments.

Yet this abstract professor, writing in abstract style about abstract

questions, is, I believe, the primary source of the idea that today
imperils faith (and thus souls) more than any other; the idea that
truth is subjective.

The simple citizens of his native Konigsberg, Germany, where he

lived and wrote in the latter half of the 18th century, understood this
better than professional scholars, for they nicknamed Kant "The
Destroyer" and named their dogs after him.

He was a good-tempered, sweet and pious man, so punctual that his

neighbors set their clocks by his daily walk. The basic intention of
his philosophy was noble: to restore human dignity amidst a
skeptical world worshiping science.

This intent becomes clear through a single anecdote. Kant was

attending a lecture by a materialistic astronomer on the topic of
man's place in the universe. The astronomer concluded his lecture
with: "So you see that astronomically speaking, man is utterly
insignificant." Kant replied: "Professor, you forgot the most
important thing, man is the astronomer."

Kant, more than any other thinker, gave impetus to the typically
modern turn from the objective to the subjective. This may sound
fine until we realize that it meant for him the redefinition of truth
itself as subjective. And the consequences of this idea have been
catastrophic.

If we ever engage in conversation about our faith with unbelievers,

we know from experience that the most common obstacle to faith

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today is not any honest intellectual difficulty, like the problem of

evil or the dogma of the trinity, but the assumption that religion
cannot possibly concern facts and objective truth at all; that any
attempt to convince another person that your faith is true—
objectively true, true for everyone—is unthinkable arrogance.

The business of religion, according to this mindset, is practice and

not theory; values, not facts; something subjective and private, not
objective and public. Dogma is an "extra," and a bad extra at that,
for dogma fosters dogmatism. Religion, in short, equals ethics. And
since Christian ethics is very similar to the ethics of most other
major religions, it doesn't matter whether you are a Christian or not;
all that matters is whether you are a "good person." (The people
who believe this also usually believe that just about everyone except
Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson is a "good person.")

Kant is largely responsible for this way of thinking. He helped bury

the medieval synthesis of faith and reason. He described his
philosophy as "clearing away the pretensions of reason to make
room for faith"—as if faith and reason were enemies and not allies.
In Kant, Luther's divorce between faith and reason becomes
finalized.

Kant thought religion could never be a matter of reason, evidence or

argument, or even a matter of knowledge, but a matter of feeling,
motive and attitude. This assumption has deeply influenced the
minds of most religious educators (e.g., catechism writers and
theology departments) today, who have turned their attention away
from the plain "bare bones" of faith, the objective facts narrated in
Scripture and summarized in the Apostles' creed. They have
divorced the faith from reason and married it to pop psychology,
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because they have bought into Kant's philosophy.

"Two things fill me with wonder," Kant confessed: "the starry sky
above and the moral law within." What a man wonders about fills
his heart and directs his thought. Note that Kant wonders about only
two things: not God, not Christ, not Creation, Incarnation,
Resurrection and Judgment, but "the starry sky above and the moral
law within." "The starry sky above" is the physical universe as
known by modern science. Kant relegates everything else to
subjectivity. The moral law is not "without" but "within," not
objective but subjective, not a Natural Law of objective rights and
wrongs that comes from God but a man-made law by which we
decide to bind ourselves. (But if we bind ourselves, are we really
bound?) Morality is a matter of subjective intention only. It has no
content except the Golden Rule (Kant's "categorical imperative").

If the moral law came from God rather than from man, Kant argues,
then man would not be free in the sense of being autonomous. This
is true, Kant then proceeds to argue that man must be autonomous,
therefore the moral law does not come from God but from man. The
Church argues from the same premise that the moral law does in
fact come from God, therefore man is not autonomous. He is free to
choose to obey or disobey the moral law, but he is not free to create
the law itself.

Though Kant thought of himself as a Christian, he explicitly denied

that we could know that there really exists (1) God, (2) free will,
and (3) immorality. He said we must live as if these three ideas were
true because if we believe them we will take morality seriously, and
if we don't we will not. It is this justification of belief by purely
practical reasons that is a terrible mistake. Kant believes in God not
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because it is true but because it is helpful. Why not believe in Santa

Claus then? If I were God, I would favor an honest atheist over a
dishonest theist, and Kant is to my mind a dishonest theist, because
there is only one honest reason for believing anything: because it is
true.

Those who try to sell the Christian faith in the Kantian sense, as a
"value system" rather than as the truth, have been failing for
generations. With so many competing "value systems" on the
market, why should anyone prefer the Christian variation to simpler
ones with less theological baggage, and easier ones with less
inconvenient moral demands?

Kant gave up the battle, in effect, by retreating from the battlefield

of fact. He believed the great myth of the 18th-century
"Enlightenment" (ironic name!): that Newtonian science was here to
stay and that Christianity, to survive, had to find a new place in the
new mental landscape sketched by the new science. The only place
left was subjectivity.

That meant ignoring or interpreting as myth the supernatural and

miraculous claims of traditional Christianity. Kant's strategy was
essentially the same as that of Rudolf Bultmann, the father of
"demythologizing" and the man who may be responsible for more
Catholic college students losing their faith than anyone else. Many
theology professors follow his theories of criticism which reduce
biblical claims of eyewitness description of miracles to mere myth,
"values" and "pious interpretations."

Bultmann said this about the supposed conflict between faith and
science: "The scientific world picture is here to stay and will assert

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its right against any theology, however imposing, that conflicts with
it." Ironically, that very "scientific world picture" of Newtonian
physics Kant and Bultmann accepted as absolute and unchangeable
has today been almost universally rejected by scientists themselves!

Kant's basic question was: How can we know truth? Early in his life
he accepted the answer of Rationalism, that we know truth by the
intellect, not the senses, and that the intellect possesses its own
"innate ideas." Then he read the Empiricist David Hume, who, Kant
said, "woke me from my dogmatic slumber." Like other Empiricists,
Hume believed that we could know truth only through the senses
and that we had no "innate ideas." But Hume's premises led him to
the conclusion of Skepticism, the denial that we can ever know the
truth at all with any certainty. Kant saw both the "dogmatism" of
Rationalism and the skepticism of Empiricism as unacceptable, and
sought a third way.

There was such a third theory available, ever since Aristotle. It was
the common sense philosophy of Realism. According to Realism,
we can know truth through both the intellect and the senses if only
they worked properly and in tandem, like two blades of a scissors.
Instead of returning to traditional Realism, Kant invented a wholly
new theory of knowledge, usually called Idealism. He called it his
"Copernican revolution in philosophy." The simplest term for it is
Subjectivism. It amounts to redefining truth itself as subjective, not
objective.

All previous philosophers had assumed that truth was objective.

That's simply what we common-sensically mean by "truth":
knowing what really is, conforming the mind to objective reality.
Some philosophers (the Rationalists) thought we could attain this
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goal through reason alone. The early Empiricists (like Locke)

thought we could attain it through sensation. The later skeptical
Empiricist Hume thought we could not attain it at all with any
certainty. Kant denied the assumption common to all three
competing philosophies, namely that we should attain it, that truth
means conformity to objective reality. Kant's "Copernican
revolution" redefines truth itself as reality conforming to ideas.
"Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform
to objects...more progress may be made if we assume the contrary
hypothesis that the objects of thought must conform to our
knowledge."

Kant claimed that all our knowledge is subjective. Well, is that

knowledge subjective? If it is, then the knowledge of that fact is also
subjective, et cetera, and we are reduced to an infinite hall of
mirrors. Kant's philosophy is a perfect philosophy for hell. Perhaps
the damned collectively believe they aren't really in hell, it's all just
in their mind. And perhaps it is; perhaps that's what hell is.

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