I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (10 page)

While reasonable people have no problem with the Law of Noncontradiction, some very influential philosophers have denied it implicitly in their teachings. Perhaps the two most influential of these are David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Many people have never heard of Hume and Kant, but their teachings have affected the modern mind greatly. That’s why it’s important that we take a brief look at each one of them. We’ll start with Hume.

HUME’S SKEPTICISM: SHOULD WE BE SKEPTICAL
ABOUT IT?

Perhaps more than any other person, David Hume is responsible for the skepticism prevalent today. As an empiricist, Hume believed that all meaningful ideas were either true by definition or must be based on sense experience. Since, according to Hume, there are no sense experiences for concepts beyond the physical, any metaphysical claims (those about concepts beyond the physical, including God) should not be believed—because they are meaningless. In fact, Hume asserted that propositions can be meaningful only if they meet one of the following two conditions:

the truth claim is abstract reasoning such as a mathematical equation or a definition (e.g., “2+2=4” or “all triangles have three sides”); or

the truth claim can be verified empirically through one or more of the five senses.

While he claimed to be a skeptic, Hume certainly wasn’t skeptical about these two conditions—he was absolutely convinced he had the truth. In fact, he concludes his
Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding
with this emphatic assertion: “If we take in our hand any volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?’ No. ‘Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?’ No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
³

Do you see the implications of Hume’s two conditions? If he’s correct, then any book talking about God is meaningless. You might as well use all religious writings for kindling!

Nearly two hundred years later, Hume’s two conditions were converted into the “principle of empirical verifiability” by twentieth-century philosopher A. J. Ayer. The principle of empirical verifiability claims that a proposition can be meaningful only if it’s true by definition or if it’s empirically verifiable.

By the mid-1960s this view had become the rage in university philosophy departments across the country, including the University of Detroit where I (Norm) was a student. In fact, I took an entire class on Logical Positivism, which was another name for the brand of philosophy espoused by Ayer. The professor of that class, a Logical Positivist, was a strange breed. Though he claimed to be a Catholic, he refused to believe it was meaningful to speak about the existence of reality beyond the physical (i.e., metaphysics, God). In other words, he was an admitted atheist who told us that he wanted to convert the entire class to his brand of semantical atheism. (I once asked him, “How can you be both a Catholic and an atheist?” Ignoring two millennia of official Catholic teaching, he replied, “You don’t have to believe in God to be a Catholic—you just have to keep the rules!”)

On the first day of that class, this professor gave the class the task of giving presentations based on chapters in Ayer’s book
Logic, Truth,
and Language.
I volunteered to do the chapter titled “The Principle of Empirical Verifiability.” Now keep in mind, this principle was the very foundation of Logical Positivism and thus of the entire course.

At the beginning of the next class, the professor said, “Mr. Geisler, we’ll hear from you first. Keep it to no more than twenty minutes so we can have ample time for discussion.”

Well, since I was using the lightning-fast Road Runner tactic, I had absolutely no trouble with the time constraints. I stood up and simply said, “The principle of empirical verifiability states that there are only two kinds of meaningful propositions: 1) those that are true by definition and 2) those that are empirically verifiable. Since the principle of empirical verifiability itself is neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable, it cannot be meaningful.”

That was it, and I sat down.

There was a stunned silence in the room. Most of the students could see the Coyote dangling in midair. They recognized that the principle of empirical verifiability could not be meaningful based on its own standard. It self-destructed in midair! In just the second class period, the foundation of that entire class had been destroyed! What was the professor going to talk about for the next fourteen weeks?

I’ll tell you what he was going to talk about. Instead of admitting that his class and his entire philosophical outlook was self-defeating and thus false, the professor suppressed that truth, hemmed and hawed, and then went on to suspect that I was behind everything that went wrong for him the rest of the semester. His allegiance to the principle of empirical verifiability—despite its obvious fatal flaw—was clearly a matter of the will, not of the mind.

There’s a lot more to Hume, particularly his anti-miracle arguments, which we’ll address when we get to chapter 8. But for now the point is this: Hume’s hard empiricism, and that of his devotee A. J. Ayer, is self-defeating. The claim that “something can only be meaningful if it’s empirically verifiable or true by definition” excludes itself because that statement is neither empirically verifiable nor true by definition. In other words, Hume and Ayer try to prove too much because their method of discovering meaningful propositions excludes too much. Certainly claims that are empirically verifiable or true by definition are meaningful. However, such claims don’t comprise
all
meaningful statements as Hume and Ayer contend. So instead of committing all books about God “to the flames” as Hume suggests, you may want to consider using Hume’s books to get your fire going.

KANT’S AGNOSTICISM: SHOULD WE BE AGNOSTIC
ABOUT IT?

Immanuel Kant’s impact has been even more devastating to the Christian worldview than David Hume’s. For if Kant’s philosophy is right, then there is no way to know
anything
about the real world, even empirically verifiable things! Why? Because according to Kant the structure of your senses and your mind forms all sense data, so you never really know the thing
in itself.
You only know the thing
to you
after your mind and senses form it.

To get a handle on this, look for a second out the window at a tree. Kant is saying that the tree you think you are looking at appears the way it does because your mind is forming the sense data you’re getting from the tree. You really don’t know the tree in itself; you only know the phenomena your mind categorizes about the tree. In short, you “kant” know the real tree in itself, only the tree as it appears to you.

Whew! Why is it that the average person on the street doesn’t doubt what he sees with his own two eyes, but supposedly brilliant philosophers do? The more we study philosophy, the more we are convinced of this: if you want to make the obvious seem obscure, just let a philosopher get ahold of it!

Nevertheless, we can’t avoid studying philosophy because, as C. S. Lewis said, “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”
⁴
Kant’s philosophy is bad philosophy, yet it has convinced many people that there is an unbridgeable gulf between them and the real world; that there’s no way you can get any reliable knowledge about what the world is really like, much less what God is really like. According to Kant, we are locked in complete agnosticism about the real world.

Thankfully, there’s a simple answer to all of this—the Road Runner tactic. Kant commits the same error as Hume—he violates the Law of Noncontradiction. He contradicts his own premise by saying that
no one
can know
the real world while
he claims to know
something about it, namely that the real world is unknowable! In effect, Kant says the
truth
about the real world is that there are
no truths
about the real world.

Since these self-defeating statements can stump even the sharpest minds, let’s look at Kant’s error another way. Kant is also making a logical fallacy called the “nothing-but” fallacy. This is a fallacy because “nothing-but” statements imply “more than” knowledge. Kant says he knows the data that gets to his brain is
nothing but
phenomena. But in order to know this, he would have to be able to see
more than
just the phenomena. In other words, in order to differentiate one thing from another thing, you have to be able to perceive where one ends and the other begins. For example, if you put a white piece of paper on a black desk, the only way you can tell where the paper ends is by seeing some of the desk that borders it. The contrast between the paper and the desk allows you to see the boundaries of the paper. Likewise, in order for Kant to differentiate the thing in the real world from that which his mind perceives, he would have to be able to see both. But this is exactly what he says can’t be done! He says only the
phenomena
of the mind can be known, not the
noumena
(his term for the real world).

If there’s no way to distinguish between the phenomena and noumena, then you can’t see how they might differ. And if you can’t see how they might differ, then it makes much more sense to assume that they are the same—in other words, that the idea in your mind accurately represents the thing in the real world.

What we are saying is that you really
do
know the thing in itself. You really
do know
the tree you are seeing because it is being impressed on your mind through your senses. In other words, Kant was wrong: your mind doesn’t mold the tree,
the tree molds your mind.
(Just think about a wax seal: it’s not the wax that impresses the seal; it’s the seal that impresses the wax.) There’s no gulf between your mind and the real world. In fact, your senses are your windows to the world. And senses, like windows, are that
through which
we look at the outside world. They are not that
at which
we are looking.

In a philosophy class I (Norm) was teaching, I pointed out the flaws in Kant’s philosophy this way. I said, “First, if Kant claims that he can’t know anything about the real world (the thing in itself) then how does he know the real world is there? And second, his view is self-defeating because he claims that you
can’t know
anything about the real world while asserting that he
knows
that the real world is unknowable!”
⁵

One student blurted out, “No! It can’t be that easy, Dr. Geisler. You can’t destroy the central tenet of the last hundred-plus years of philosophical thought in just a couple of simple sentences!”

Quoting my favorite source—
The Reader’s Digest
—I responded, “‘That’s what happens when a beautiful theory meets a brutal gang of facts.’ Besides, whoever said that a refutation has to be complex? If someone makes a simple mistake, it only takes a simple correction to point it out.” There’s nothing complex about the Road Runner; he’s simply fast and effective.

H
UME AND
K
ANT
A
RE
W
RONG
. S
O
W
HAT
?

Since Hume and Kant violate the Law of Noncontradiction, their attempts to destroy all “religious” truths fail. However, just because Hume and Kant are wrong, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have positive evidence for, say, the existence of God. The Road Runner tactic can only reveal that a proposition is false. It does not provide positive evidence that any particular claim is true.

So is it true that a theistic God exists? Is there any knowable evidence that will give us reasonable certainty one way or the other? Is there such a thing as knowable evidence for an unseen God? To answer those questions, we need to investigate how truth itself can be known.

H
OW
I
S
T
RUTH
K
NOWN
?