by MICHAEL DAHLEN
A critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s attack on reason
Dinesh D’Souza, a prominent conservative intellectual and a former White House policy analyst during the Reagan administration, has ambitiously defended Christianity in recent years. He wrote a New York Times best-selling book, What’s So Great About Christianity, and he has had articles published in the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also publicly debated prominent atheists including Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennet, and Michael Shermer.
For the most part, D’Souza has attempted to argue on the atheists’ own terms, that is, on the terms of reason, science, and evidence. He has tried to demonstrate that one need not accept Christianity on blind faith; one can accept it based on the facts. This characterization, however, of D’Souza’s position requires one major caveat. For the die-hard proponents of reason who are not convinced that the evidence supports the alleged truths of religion, D’Souza has a secret weapon up his sleeve: he resorts to brazenly attacking reason. Lacking all subtlety, he asserts openly, explicitly, “Human reason can never grasp reality itself.”1
In arguing against the validity of reason, D’Souza relies on the ideas of arguably the most influential philosopher in modern history, none other than Immanuel Kant. “Kant’s accomplishment,” D’Souza boasts, “was to unmask the intellectual pretension of the Enlightenment: that reason and science are the only routes to reality and truth.”2 Basically, Kant argued that the reality we perceive with our senses is not true reality; it is simply the reality “appearing” to us. True reality, the reality beneath the so-called appearances, is allegedly unknowable. “Perhaps the best way,” D’Souza states, “to understand this is to see Kant as positing two kinds of reality: the material reality that we experience and reality itself.”3 The world of appearances (material reality) Kant calls the “phenomenal world” whereas real reality (“reality-in-itself”) Kant calls the “noumenal world.”
According to Kant, we do not perceive reality as it is. Our senses and our minds provide us only with a distorted picture of reality, not reality itself. Echoing Kant, D’Souza argues that humans “see things in a limited and distorted way.”4 “Reality does not come directly to us but is ‘filtered’ through a lens that we ourselves provide.”5 As such, D’Souza continues, “our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion: the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it.”6 Furthermore, when “we presume that our experience corresponds to reality, we are making an unjustified leap. We have absolutely no way to know this.”7
All of our knowledge, therefore, is allegedly just knowledge of “appearances,” that is, of a world the human mind subjectively creates. As Kant himself states, “all objects of any experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which…have no independent existence outside our thoughts.”8 “Kant’s argument,” D’Souza points out, “is that we have no basis to assume that our perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. Our experience of things can never penetrate to things as they really are. That reality remains permanently hidden to us.”9 Consequently, D’Souza concludes, “reason can never grasp reality itself.”10
Despite D’Souza’s blatant attack on reason and on our ability to perceive reality, he still wants to have things both ways. Amazingly, he says that he and Kant are not actually arguing against them.
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. The implication of Kant’s argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human beings. Put another way, there is a great deal that human beings simply will never know.11
If the “implication of Kant’s argument” is that reality is “inaccessible to human beings”—and that certainly is the implication—then he most emphatically is arguing “against the validity of perception or science or reason.”
Sceptic for more