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