Thoughts from Kant

"In order to reach God, freedom, and immortality, speculative reason must use principles that in fact extend merely to objects of possible experience; and when these principles are nonetheless applied to something that cannot be an object of experience, they actually do always transform it into an appearance, and thus they declare all practical expansion of reason to be impossible. I therefore had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith."

Dogmatism in metaphysics: "Encourages them (youth) quite early and strongly to reason with ease about things of which they understand nothing and into which, moreover, neither they nor anyone else in the world will ever have any insight"

Comments

Anonymous said…

I'm not sure I like the dichotomy or wedge Kant drives between "knowledge" and "faith" - wouldn't this lead to the "check your brains at the door" phenomenon? Rather, experience (through creation, for example) in tandem with faith can become a means of experiencing God and appreciating Him more - as when a beautiful sunset, starry night, or overwhelmingly powerful hurricane stops us in our tracks long enough to wonder at His awesomeness.
Keep those blogs coming!

9/22/2005 10:33:00 AM

Keith Dow said…

there's a lot of people that don't like the wedge. most Christians certainly don't. the problem is that just not liking it won't change the fact that his theories are still, to my knowledge, undefeated. perhaps God allowed Kant's reflection for the purpose of driving us back from boasting in our knowledge rather than in Him. whether Kant was entirely correct is another issue. I think what he wrote had a lot of truth, but somehow we must move beyond that at the same time, perhaps knowing Christ in spirit allows us to trust that He did, in fact, pierce the knowledge/faith dichotomy through his man/God nature, allowing us to also move from faith to knowledge.

9/23/2005 10:17:00 AM

smelly things

remember those scratch-and-sniff things? of course they still exist, but i haven't smelled one in a while. now all we have are those horrid cardboard car scents: those leaves of aesthetic tragedy. the one i'm thinking of has a strawberry scent. it might have been strawberry shortcake - that little red-headed girl with strawberries painted all over her ginormous hat, a hat ten times the size of her head. this reminds me of those markers you can buy that smell, too, often like berries of some sort. i can remember the blueberry ones the best. which scents do you remember? when Jodi and i (and sometimes Justin, Dan, Kaia or some other participant) would take empty milk jugs and stealthily place them on Mark Vust's doorstep (our Resident Director), i would sometimes smell the rotting milk. it didn't smell good. i'll give you that. but it was certainly a powerful scent. smelling things reminds me of how much i love life. like when i'm in a forest ...

Bye-bye Bible

Perhaps we should all be Jedi Knights. Their principle of non-attachment, which is strikingly like the Buddha's attempt to rid himself of earthly desires, is very appealing. "We will have to find out the cause of sorrow and the way to escape from it. The desire for sensual enjoyment and clinging to earthly life is the cause of sorrow. If we can eradicate desire, all sorrows and pains will come to an end." This makes a lot of sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense. He is right. It can be scary admitting Buddha is right, because what if he's right about everything? Well, even in this case, perhaps he is only right insofar as what he says is true. Does that mean his route is the best path to take on the proverbial road to enlightenment? Right now it might appear that way. You see, I realized recently that I became very attached to something I owned. It's my Bible. Or, was my Bible. (Give me a moment to regain my composure...) I had my NIV study Bible for at least ...

faith-full eyes

faith is a passionate intuition -william wordsworth as a child i was a master lego-builder. this was back in the day when one could take pride in constructing a lego masterpiece, before all of this "put these three pieces together and you have the entire star wars trilogy." no, sirree, this was manual labour. as the foreman of my building project, i grew very attuned to my materials. i would train my eyes to only see the colour i was looking for, whatever the colour may be. sure, it would still take me a while to find the piece i was looking for, but when it was in my field of vision it would jump out at me because of my expectation of it. to the pure, all things are pure -titus 1.15 . if you truly desire to see God’s beautiful tapestry being woven in your life, then see it. it is there. we’re not talking about believing in aliens here. the reason we are able to have faith is because, consciously or unconsciously, we have encountered the substantiation of God...

random anxieties of existence

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