God Under the Microscope (The Empiricists Strike Back)

     In the near one hundred-fifty years between René Descartes' Meditations (1641) and Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena (1783), some paradigm shifts occurred in philosophy. The longstanding faith- based constructs from medieval and predominantly Christian thinkers (St. Augustine, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas et al) began to fall under increasing scrutiny. This was a direct reflection of the burgeoning advances in science, with the resultant emphasis on empirical thought, that would usher in the Renaissance, and later the Age of Enlightenment. The God-based cosmology that mankind had taken as literal truth for centuries, never daring to question religious authority, was finally put “under the microscope.” And just as that invention revolutionized biology and medicine, debunking ages of myth and superstition in its wake‒ taking a closer, more meticulous look at religion had a similarly profound impact. The human mind became the nucleus of the philosophical universe.

     Even in the relatively recent mid-17^th century, one had to proceed very carefully when questioning the status quo. Doubting church doctrine could get a person excommunicated or worse (maybe decapitated!) and Descartes, despite his skeptical mindset, still made it a top priority to “prove” the existence of a Creator. Judging from his fervent manner, this reads as a sincere desire on his part, when he affirms, in his 1641 Third Meditation:

     Hence there remains only the idea of God, concerning which we must consider whether it is

something which cannot have proceeded from me myself... these characteristics are such that the

more diligently I attend to them, the less do they appear capable of proceeding from me alone;

hence, from what has been already said, we must conclude that God necessarily exists.

     Having, up to that point, questioned the reality of practically everything (beyond himself as a thinker), it does hint at the possibility that Descartes was intentionally playing it safe; making a concession to the Church to avoid trouble. But more likely, one could postulate that his devout Catholicism prejudiced him‒ putting a bias, conscious or not, into his analytic approach. “I can think about God‒ therefore He exists.” Descartes was headed in an empirical direction, but slowed by the burden of his Christian faith.

     David Hume, in 1739, was considerably more bold in his skepticism of religion. Yes, we can have perceptions, he reasoned, but their sources can't be proven. Leaning more toward mathematics and the natural sciences as the roots of knowledge, he challenged the occurrence of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

Everyone agrees that the authority of the scripture and of tradition rests wholly on the testimony of the

apostles who were eye-witnesses to those miracles of our saviour... our evidence for the truth of the Christian

religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses...It contradicts [the senses] which tell us that the

bread isn’t flesh and the wine isn’t blood...

     Hume is basically asking: Which is more probable‒ that such things actually occurred, or that the reporters of miracles are deceiving us (or themselves)? To paraphrase Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is almost always the best. Lies and deceptions occur with great frequency; dead men coming back to life... considerably less often!

     David Hume’s skepticism helped clear the path for perhaps the most important and influential of the modern philosophers, the final in the trinity of thinkers I've selected. To quote, “It was my recollection of [Hume] that broke into my dogmatic slumber, and pointed my work in speculative philosophy in a completely new direction” (Prologomena, ”Introduction”). Obviously I refer to Immanuel Kant, who endeavored to respond to Hume and Descartes, among others, and construct a sort of philosophical “unified field theory” where science, mathematics, ethics, and religion could all coexist. Kant's epistemology allowed for both rationalism and empiricism, a fusion he designated as “transcendental idealism.” He posited that there are some primordial innate structures in the mind, and that our knowledge results from the interaction of these frameworks with the exterior world. This process helps bridge a gap, but it doesn't eliminate it; there is still a gulf between our human reality and the ultimate, “things as they truly are” pure reality. Kant suggested that the human ideas of “self”, the “world”, and “God” help us make sense of all the sensory phenomena that enter our brains. We cannot know for sure if a creator exists, nor how real our environment is... but for practical purposes, it makes sense to assume, to act “as if” there is truth in these concepts.

     As Kant stated it, we need to be aware of “the errors of trying to explain God in terms of the world, and trying to explain the world in terms of God... trying to describe the nature of God in terms of properties that are only borrowings from human nature—thereby losing ourselves in gross and extravagant notions.” What an eloquent way of summarizing the problems humanity faces in understanding who we are, what we mean, and where we came from. Would that we all could examine the world through such a looking glass.