bite on; we never get a satisfactory answer because reason is not locked on.”
“I know exactly how that feels, thank you very much.”
“In such weighty questions as to the nature of reality, Kant showed that
there will always be two contrasting viewpoints that are equally likely or
unlikely, depending on what our reason tells us.”
“Examples, please.”
“It is just as meaningful to say that the world must have had a beginning
in time as to say that it had no such beginning. Reason cannot decide
between them. We can allege that the world has always existed, but con
anything always have existed if there was never any beginning? So now we
are forced to adopt the opposite view.
“We say that the world must have begun sometime— and it must have
begun from nothing, unless we want to talk about a change from one state to
another. But can something come from nothing, Sophie?”
“No, both possibilities are equally problematic. Yet it seems one of them
must be right and the other wrong.”
“You probably remember that Democritus and the materialists said that
nature must consist of minimal parts that everything is made up of. Others,
like Descartes, believed that it must always be possible to divide extended
reality into ever smaller parts. But which of them was right?”
“Both. Neither.”
“Further, many philosophers named freedom as one of man’s most
important values. At the same time we saw philosophers like the Stoics, for
example, and Spinoza, who said that everything happens through the
necessity of natural law. This was another case of human reason being
unable to make a certain judgment, according to Kant.”
“Both views are equally reasonable and unreasonable.”
“Finally, we are bound to fail if we attempt to prove the existence of God
with the aid of reason. Here the rationalists, like Descartes, had tried to prove
that there must be a God simply because we have the idea of a ‘supreme
being.’ Others, like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, decided that there must be
a God because everything must have a first cause.”
“What did Kant think?”
“He rejected both these proofs of the existence of God. Neither reason
nor experience is any certain basis for claiming the existence of God. As far
as reason goes, it is just as likely as it is unlikely that God exists.”
“But you started by saying that Kant wanted to preserve the basis for
Christian faith.”
“Yes, he opened up a religious dimension. There, where both reason
and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.”
“That’s how he saved Christianity?”
“If you will. Now, it might be worth noting that Kant was a Protestant.
Since the days of the Reformation, Protestantism has been characterized by
its emphasis on faith. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has since the
early Middle Ages believed more in reason as a pillar of faith.
“But Kant went further than simply to establish that these weighty
questions should be left to the faith of the individual. He believed that it is
essential for morality to presuppose that man has an immortal soul, that God
exists, and that man has a free will.”
“So he does the same as Descartes. First he is very critical of everything