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RE: Faith has much to do with it...

"But then, it was a man of faith, Kant, who in his attempt to discredit Hume's atheism demonstrated the limits of religion."

A cynic might say that by establishing the impossibility of proving God's existence Kant is merely pointing out the obvious. Be that as it may, this is a jab at reason, not religion. Religion is based on faith, not proof. Faith doesn’t require proof. Religious believers didn’t need Kant to prove that reason is incapable of grasping the infinite—they already knew it.

Much more interesting for philosophers and psychologists is the way in which Kant went about demonstrating reason’s severe limitations (when it comes to perceiving reality). You might say that Kant neutered reason by pointing out what has been termed the Enlightenment Fallacy. So we are far from even.

Dinesh D’Souza describes the Fallacy of the Enlightenment as the arrogant assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know – reality itself.

Kant's argument is that we have no basis to assume that our perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. There are things in themselves -- what Kant called the “noumenon”-- and of them we can know (nothing). What we can know is our *experience* of those things, what Kant called the “phenomenon.”

You have a dog at home and you know what it is like to see, feel, smell and pet it. This is your phenomenal experience of the dog. But what is it like to *be* a dog? We humans will never know. The dog as a “thing in itself” is hermetically concealed from us. Thus from Kant we have the disturbing realization that human knowledge is limited not merely by how much reality there is out there, but also by the *limited* sensory apparatus of perception we bring to that reality.

Kant isn’t arguing against the validity of perception or science or reason. He is simply showing their significant limits. These limits cannot be erased by the passage of time or by further investigation and experimentation. Rather, the limits on reason are intrinsic to the kind of beings that humans are, and to the kind of apparatus that we possess for perceiving reality.

"There is thus no *valid* reason whatsoever for saying that the limits of our scientific or theoretical knowledge are identical with the limits of reality," notes Frederick Copleston, in his great work on Kant.

D’Souza explains this clearly and concisely:

http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=25681

He also provides an expanded explanation:

http://books.google.com/books?id=vVXf2PV8pyQC&pg=PA168&lpg=PA168&dq=but+there+is+one+subject+on+which+the+atheist+requires+no+evidence+d'souza&source=bl&ots=GELDtj-kVy&sig=F3hh8inZNo1Vde-SV6E-J0vBHG0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U9YCUJWjNsmZqAHa8pmzDA&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=but%20there%20is%20one%20subject%20on%20which%20the%20atheist%20requires%20no%20evidence%20d'souza&f=false

“Newton's theories are a limiting case of Relativity. This was one of Einstein's conditions when formulating General Relativity. They are correct in the absence of relative motion and mass or acceleration, which is why they work so well in our slow-moving world.”

I think what you’re trying to say is that Einstein's relativity theories and Newton's theories differ in their predictions only if velocities are comparable to that of light, or gravitational fields are much larger than those encountered on the Earth.

Einstein’s theory demonstrates that Newton's Three Laws of Motion are only approximately correct, breaking down when velocities approach that of light and that Newton's Law of Gravitation was also only approximately correct, breaking down in the presence of very strong gravitational fields.

But this merely reinforces Hume’s point. To wit: because Newtonian physics worked so well in our “slow-moving world,” science was quick to credit it with working *everywhere*. And yet Einstein proved that Newtonian physics is fundamentally flawed at a deeper level and so science was not *justified* in proclaiming this universal application in the first place.


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