Noteworthy News and Analysis from Around the World



In Defense of God


Mr. D'Souza, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, is the author, most recently, of What's So Great About America (Regnery, 2002 ).

The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 6, 2003

'We have always had atheists among us,' the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, 'but now they have grown turbulent and seditious.' It seems that in our own day some prominent atheists are agitating for greater political and social influence. In this connection, leading atheist thinkers have been writing articles declaring that they should no longer be called 'atheists.' Rather, they want to be called 'brights.'

Yes, 'brights,' as in 'I am a bright.' In a recent [July 12, 2003] article in The New York Times, philosopher Daniel Dennett defined a bright as 'a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view.' Mr. Dennett added that 'we brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter bunny or God.' His implication was clear: Brights are the smart people who don't fall for silly superstitions.

Mr. Dennett, like many atheists, is confident that atheists are simply brighter - more rational - than religious believers. Their assumption is: We nonbelievers employ critical reason while the theists rely on blind faith. But Mr. Dennett and his fellow 'brights,' for all their credentials and learning, have been duped by a fallacy. This may be called the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, and it was first pointed out by the philosopher Immanuel Kant.





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.

If Mr. Dennett and the rest of the so-called brights have produced refutations of Kant that have eluded the philosophical community, they should share them with the rest of us. But until then, they should refrain from the ignorant boast that atheism operates on a higher intellectual plane than theism. Rather, as Kant showed, reason must know its limits in order to be truly reasonable. The atheist foolishly presumes that reason is in principle capable of figuring out all that there is, while the theist at least knows that there is a reality greater than, and beyond, that which our senses and our minds can ever apprehend.