not so "bright"

this blogcritics article looks at an interesting article in today's Wall Street Journal discussing the "growing trend of considering religious people dumber than atheists or agnostics, because they are clearly not being rational".

In short, Philosopher Daniel Dennett implies that "brights" ("People with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view") are smarter/brighter/more rational than religious believers.

"Mr. Dennett and his fellow brights, for all their credentials and learning, have been duped by a fallacy, first pointed out by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. In his 'Critique of Pure Reason,' Kant showed that this premise is false. Why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality? What makes us think that there is no reality that goes beyond, one that simply cannot be appreciated by our five senses?"

"Kant isn't arguing against the validity of perception or science or reason. He is simply showing their significant limits. Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular. It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith. But in showing the limits of reason, Kant's philosophy 'opens the door to faith,' as the philosopher himself noted."

"The atheist foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while the theist at least knows there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend."

To me, Kant was truly a quantum thinker, centuries ahead of the science that now undergirds his revolutionary thesis. The fundamentally random, statistical/Bayesian structure of quantum reality, which, after all, undergirds our daily existence and all of our world, is a testament to the ultimately unknowable.

Besides, don't you have just the tiniest little doubt in your mind that some little fish wiggled out onto the prehistoric mud and was, therefore, your and my oldest earth-bound ancestor? I mean, next time you're in a pet shop, wander over to the aquarium section and have a look at our great-great-etc.-grandparents' other descendants. Cousin, anyone?

Oh, and don't forget the Big Bang: 13 billion or so years ago, nothing exploded, producing our universe. Oh, OK. D'oh!

I could never be an atheist - even before I became what I considered to be Christian (and later a true Born Again Christian) I knew there had to be something else, something with a plan, something in charge of ordering things, something much bigger than we were.

I can't look at a flower, or an elephant, or our planet in it's solar system, or our universe - and believe that we are capable of understanding it all, through logic and our own minds alone.

Smart little Humans we are - liking to think we know everything - when we can't cure the common cold, and time and time again prove what we think we know about our world is wrong (What is Quantum Physics - Particle/Wave Duality).

Links:

• The Bright Stuff (NY times subscription required)
• "BRIGHTS" - An Exchange With Daniel C. Dennett