Deconstructing rationally and with sound information a lousy and cheating article by Dinesh D’Souza

 [D’Souza] “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.”

[Fernando]  Just read Edmund Burke’s quote to realize that what comes next is a pamphlet against all who do not think or think like the hyper-conservative and anti-liberal Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza.
Edmund Burke was an ultra-conservative (although he began considering himself an old wig), very religious, who became one of the main authors of the so-called Counter-Enlightenment whose obsession was to attack the French Revolution, especially after the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. ” This earned him the disqualification and rejection of the theorists of the democratic revolution (such as Thomas Payne), whom they accused of being anti-democratic.

It is strange that, knowing the story, D’Souza did not realize that he who says of the atheists of the French Revolution who had become turbulent and seditious, was quite aggressive and hard on his political enemies and was a Presbyterian radical

[D’Souza] Yes, “brights,” as in “I am a bright.” In a recent 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.

[Fernando] The idea of changing the name of atheists to Brights is inspired by the success of the tremendous improvement in the public image of homosexuals by adopting the name of gays. Keep in mind that in the US the social group considered the worst and most despised is that of atheists. There is abundant documentation on this majority opinion in American society.

The idea of changing the name of atheists to Brights is inspired by the success of the tremendous improvement in the public image of homosexuals by adopting the name of gays. Keep in mind that in the US the social group considered the worst and most despised is that of atheists. There is abundant documentation on this majority opinion in American society.
The author then jumps into a vacuum and ensures that Brights are “the” smart people who don’t fall for silly superstitions. But it is cheater. Dennett never says that the Brights (=atheists) are the only ones who do not believe in the list that gives silly superstitions, including among those superstitions the unfounded belief in the supernatural, which should have bothered a staunch believer in the supernatural much like D ‘Souza.

Anyway, it was unsuccessful because it is a somewhat simplistic and not very bright idea.

[D’Souza] 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.

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know, and that limit is reality itself.

[Fernando] There are a few errors in this paragraph.
First, the Fallacy of the Enlightenment is an invention of Mr. D’Souza. No one, except him, has written about this fallacy, since no one else has found it in the texts of the theoreticians of the Enlightenment.
But also, if it is postulated that the fallacy is the “assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know, and that limit is reality itself”, it is a nonsense of an ignorant, because it is an empirically established truth that you can only talk about knowledge within the reality. Of course, Mr. D’Souza should have known that the only valid definition of “knowledge” is:  every assumption, every hypothesis, every opinion, every belief that is true because it corresponds to reality. Reality is the Supreme Court that dictates the truth or not the truth of the assumptions and hypotheses, and therefore, the one that defines what is knowledge and what is fantasy, unprovable speculation and beliefs, such as religious faith.

[D’Souza] In this view, widely held by atheists, agnostics and other self-styled rationalists, human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

[Fernando] This is the typical “straw man” fallacy.
In fact, he states without proof that atheists, agnostics and rationalists claim that “human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. ” Note that in this other paragraph, the author defines the fallacy of the Enlightenment differently as in a previous paragraph.
In addition, and especially today, no one with a certain scientific background, whether atheist, agnostic or not, argues that the methodological naturalism of science can make us aware of the totality of reality. Today we know that this is impossible because we know the scientific and mathematical limitations that do not allow us to have a full knowledge of reality.

 The achievements of 20th century mathematics, each in its own way, did far more to destroy the naive assumption that reason could “unmask the whole of reality” than any of the intricate arguments fashioned by Kant. Just a few examples:

• ­­Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, which demonstrated the incompleteness of nontrivial axiomatic systems.
• Quantum mechanics, which includes in its most basic principles certain stochastic characteristics, of which we can only know the probabilities of their occurrence.
• Computability theory, whith the P versus NP problem, which can lead to certain algorithms that cannot be solved, either calculate or verify, in times that are not so enormous (that grow exponentially) that make it impossible to solve those calculations necessary to know certain questions of reality.
• Game theory, which demonstrated numerous paradoxes of rationality.
• Chaos theory, which show how highly nonlinear differential equations depend greatly on the initial conditions, so that if these conditions are not known with almost infinite precision, the calculations quickly deviate greatly from the results needed to know the phenomena of reality.

[D’Souza] In his “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. The only way that we apprehend reality is through our five senses. But 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 apprehended by our five senses?

[Fernando] What D’Souza says demonstrates a huge ignorance of Kant, which is not terribly important, since his theory of knowledge has long been a ruined building in which only post-modern relativists live.
Kant did try to refute this idea described by D’Souza, more or less, but he was neither the first nor the best and certainly not the most persuasive. I have read Kant in both English and German, and I have personally never been persuaded by his brand of logic; on the contrary, I find Kant’s mode of thought to be abhorant in the extreme. I agree that there are limits to rationality, but I would be approximately the last person to suggest that Kant’s reasoning is any guide at all in this matter.

Kant did try to refute this idea described by D’Souza, more or less, but he was neither the first nor the best and certainly not the most persuasive. I have read Kant in both English and German, and I have personally never been persuaded by his brand of logic; on the contrary, I find Kant’s mode of thought to be abhorant in the extreme. I agree that there are limits to rationality, but I would be approximately the last person to suggest that Kant’s reasoning is any guide at all in this matter.

 [D’Souza] Kant persuasively noted that there is no reason whatsoever for us to believe that we can know everything that exists. Indeed what we do know, Kant said, we know only through the refracted filter of our experience. Kant argued that we cannot even be sure that our experience of a thing is the same as the thing-in-itself. After all, we see in pretty much the same way that a camera does, and yet who would argue that a picture of a boat is the same thing as a boat?

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.

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.

[Fernando] Today we know that what Kant understood by the five senses as the only means to know reality, and in general, all his cognitive theory, something that he postulated to combat the empiricism he almost viscerally rejected, is an obsolete idea. Thanks to rationality and science we have many and better means than the five senses that evolution gave us to know the nature of Nature and the reality that is cognizable. There are limits to what we can know, true, but those limits are not fixed and the field in which science is competent to know reality, is widening more and more, without we can guess what those limits are.
If what Kant had written about knowledge and the five biological senses had been true, that knowledge would have stagnated in the late 18th century and our world would be completely different from what it is.

Kant was a thinker of his time and place. His Weltanschauung was characteristic of transcendetal idealism. He believed in an absolute and essentialist ontology (Noumena, das Ding an sich, objects as they are in themselves). Today no analytical philosopher or scientist defends this belief. Kant was wrong to want to start from the ontology to reach epistemology, when it must be the opposite: epistemology defines the ontology, which is relative (W. V. O. Quine).
The way in which D’Souza uses Kant’s philosophy here is a superb example of the Ad Verecundiam fallacy.

[D’Souza] 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.

[Fernando] In summary: D’Souza, as a good conservative and fundamentalist evangelical, wants to discredit atheism using Daniel Dennett as a “straw man” (typical fallacy of logic textbook).
It also aims to make its readers believe that reality is more than can be perceived and known, and that therefore the philosophical (ontological) naturalism of scientific rationalism is false, since it does not accept the supernatural realm, which forms, according to theists, an essential part of reality.
He also tries to discredit the methodological naturalism, fundamental pillar of science, giving place, without mentioning it, of course, to the arguments that include “God in the gaps”.