11.01.08
Antinomies of reason, and ‘science’ on the god concept
Today’s post, Explaining away religion?, didn’t quite address the stance of scientists, trying to explain (away) religion, toward the ‘god concept’. To try and analyze religion with such an obvious atheist agenda doesn’t really work.
Scientists who attempt to study religion should, at a bare minimum, be aware of the Kantian critique of metaphysics, and the ‘dialectic’ of his Critique Of Pure Reason.
There the various ‘antinomies’ arise in the discussion, among them, e.g. ‘there is a beginning in time’, ‘there is no beginning in time’.
Just that one alone is enough to suggest that scientists are poised on one pole of the ‘debate’ that is staged to surround the antinomy.
The equivocation over this antinomy is more than enough to suggest the spontaneous gestation of the ‘god’ concept. Atheists are stuck in the same situation, precisely, and can’t win an inch of ground in response.
To be trotting out the whole apparatus (bogus, anyway) of Darwinism or cognitive psychology to explain why people believe in god is therefore a complete misunderstanding of the simpler reality that human thought processes experience all the limits that Kant described in detail.