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

"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."

I think you're overestimating what they knew back then. His was an increasingly rational era but it was still an era in which an educated man could believe in miracles, in Adam and Eve and the flood. In which, with a few exceptions, the Bible could be taken as literal truth. Newton's clockwork neither explained neither the creation of the universe, nor of man. Christianity was still a falsifiable scientific hypothesis -- not something that could only be demonstrated by faith alone, but something that could achieve concrete and demonstrable results.

IMO, Kant's was a Pyrrhic victory at best. Science continues, its limitations notwithstanding. But there is no longer a material peg upon which to hang belief.

"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."

Actually, I'm saying much more than that. Newton's theories are quite literally a limiting case of General Relativity, the case in which objects are at rest to one another and spacetime isn't curved (no mass or acceleration). *They aren't a mere approximation,* though they can and do serve as one in our slow-moving, low mass world. This difference, between an pproximation and a special case that wasn't, initially, known to be one, is anything but insignificant. The requirement that Newton's Laws emerge from the new theory was of great importance to Einstein in formulating General Relativity, just as Kepler's Laws were of importance to Newton, Coulomb's Law was of importance to Maxwell, etc.

"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's system was already known, by some, to be flawed in his own lifetime, indeed, he made an egregious error right at the start of the Critique of Pure Reason when he ignored the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry -- a mistake that Gauss, who had developed the geometry of curved surfaces, recognized.

As it happens, I do not think that there is any scientific reason to recognize a distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal worlds. They are one and the same. There is much that we cannot observe -- events outside our light cone, for example, or quantum worlds not our own -- but that doesn't break down on what are essentially Platonic lines.

If there is anything out there that is entirely metaphysical, it can't interact in any way with us, it is of no interest to science, or to any rational being. It is not a falsifiable hypothesis and there is no scientific reason to suppose that it exists: to do so would be to create an unnecessary multiplication of entities, and so violate Occam's Razor.

"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."

Modern science never claims to be finished: all theories are provisional. That is part of its very essence. Individuals may believe that a scientific theory is universally true, but insofar as they do, they are not being philosophically rigorous. They are conflating a high probability of truth with truth. This is something that comes naturally to us, a necessity of life. When a tiger attacks, we can't hesitate to contemplate the possibility that our theory of tigers is wrong, and that they're actually cuddly and nice. Ancestors who did that were rapidly removed from the gene pool. So we tend to believe in one thing or another, even when the evidence is vague.

In any case, while Hume was correct, that limitation doesn't harm science. Which is interesting in and of itself. If the scientific method didn't, overall, get us closer to the truth, science wouldn't work. It has so far, so the scientific evidence is that we're getting closer to the truth. It is only a matter of probability, of course, but the probability that we aren't is vanishingly small.

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