That's what annoys me most about Dawkins etc. They criticize other people's beliefs, but put a magic bubble around their own.
----- Original Message ---- From: Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Cc: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sun, April 4, 2010 6:53:12 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?
On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:48:28 -0400 c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> writes:
> IMO it would be hard for anyone, whether New Atheist or not, to
> improve upon Hume and Kant. The only reason to even bother, is that
> two centuries later, people still insist upon repackaging the same
> old
> arguments as if they were adding something new to them.
>
> Jim Farmelant
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: Good point , Jim.
>
> But don't Hume and Kant fall back into the equivalent of deism in
> their subjective idealism ? The unknowability of the
> unknowable-thing-in-itself gives it a characteristic of God.
Well Kant did with his moral arguments for belief in the existence of God (and of personal immortality and free will), which were presented in such works as his *Critique of Practical Reason* and *Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone*. Hume was rather ambigous over whether or not he believed in the existence of God. In fact a whole academic cottage industry has sprung up with some Hume scholars arguing that he was a kind of deist, while others have argued that he was a pantheist, and still others maintain that he was either an atheist or an agnostic. Since in Britain at that time, open atheism was a violation of the blasphemy laws (and Hume at one point was almost indicted on a blasphemy charge), even if he was an atheist, he would have been careful not to say so in print. It's perhaps not so important to determine whether Hume was really a deist, pantheist, or an atheist, since in any case he clearly rejected the God of classical theism.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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