In my last post, I explained how Dinesh D'Souza's primary attack on Hume failed. In this post, I will backtrack slightly and then go on to show why D'Souza's other attack on Hume is flawed. First, I want to establish why D'Souza was even troubling himself over Hume in the first place. As he explained, "[t]he strongest argument against miracles was advanced by philosopher and skeptic David Hume in his book Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume's argument is widely cited by atheists; [Richard] Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both invoke it to justify their wholesale rejection of miracles" (What's So Great About Christianity, 181). I don't have the Hitchens book on my person, but I can follow the citation for Dawkins. Dawkins did briefly mention Hume on p. 91 of The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), but he only did so to reproduce what I believe is called Hume's Maxim. According to the maxim, "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." In his words, Hume is merely telling us to "always reject the greater miracle." As I explained in Stubborn Credulity, "Hume never taught that miracles were impossible; he, instead, urged us to accept the lesser miracle" (155, emphasis in original). Regardless, D'Souza didn't want people to reject miracles; so he was inspired to discredit Hume. As I explained in my previous post, his first attempt at refuting Hume didn't succeed. His second attempt is arguably worse.
Even if we ignore what I wrote in my last post, D'Souza's argument, which I won't cover in its entirety, started off badly. He argued that Immanuel Kant had refuted Hume's teachings on mathematics. D'Souza (or his ghostwriter, I hope), however, didn't understand Kant. In an earlier chapter, D'Souza wrote, "Kant begins with a simple premise: all human knowledge is based on experience" (What's So Great About Christianity, 170). This is probably wrong. Kant is controversial because he evidently taught the exact opposite. In fairness to D'Souza, he was probably using the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason. In the very beginning of the first edition, Kant wrote, "[Experience] is by no means the sole field to which our understanding is confined. Experience tells us, indeed, what is, but not that it must necessarily be so, and not otherwise." As I tried to argue in "Insuppressible Fallacy-Mongers", C. S. Lewis, in his latter days, went all the way to the opposite extreme and apparently only considered knowledge to be of the non-contingent (and therefore, non-empirical) variety (See pp. 101 - 103; See also Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 1893, 65). Even if someone was using the, I believe, more available later edition, even there on the first page, Kant wrote, "But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience" (Unabridged Edition, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 1929, 41 & 42; Smith, the editor, put the original versions of some paragraphs on the same page as the revisions.) Because the meaning of the sentence may be ambiguous, it is necessary for us to explore a topic that is dear to my heart. I've already discussed synthetic a priori knowledge in "Insuppressible Fallacy-Mongers", my book on C. S. Lewis. I argued that he, at least at times, believed in the synthetic a priori, although he never, to my knowledge, said so explicitly. Kant or, at least, Kantians like Ludwig von Mises also believed in synthetic a priori knowledge. If you didn't learn elsewhere what synthetic a priori means, that may be a good thing. Unless you learned the meaning from a real philosopher, there is a chance that you have been led astray (as we'll see).
It's best if we get one thing out of the way before we go further. In spite of what I may have published in the past, synthetic is not synonymous with empirical. Empirical means "based on data". Another way to say empirical is a posteriori. The word, of course, derives from the same word as "posterior". A posteriori knowledge then is knowledge that you receive at the "end" of your experience. A priori knowledge, on the other hand, is 'independent of experience". Of course, the word "prior" is contained in the term, but we shouldn't get the wrong impression. As Paul Carus explained, "Kant does not (as is often imputed to him) understand the a priori in a temporal sense; his a priori is prior logically or according to reason" (Primer of Philosophy, Open Court, 1893, 64 & 66). Now, ask yourself: If synthetic meant empirical, then what would we make of a term like "synthetic a priori"? If synthetic was just another way to say a posteriori, then there could be no synthetic a priori knowledge. Synthetic a priori would mean a posteriori a priori, a contradiction in terms. Kant, if I'm not mistaken, did believe that synthetic a priori knowledge was possible. The one type of knowledge that wasn't real for Kant (or anybody) was analytic a posteriori (Critique of Pure Reason, 49). I mention that type only because the analytic knowledge that does exist--analytic a priori--will be relevant later.
With that necessary digression out of the way, it's time to investigate into what Kant really taught about mathematics. According to D'Souza,
Contrary to Hume's assertions, mathematical truths are not analytic. Consider the famous mathematical proposition in Euclidean geometry that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line." .... How do we know it is true? We have to check. It is only when we make two points on a piece of paper and then draw a line through them that we can observe that the shortest distance between them is a straight line. Kant showed that many other mathematical propositions are of this sort. (What's So Great About Christianity, 183)
Alright then. They aren't analytic. The quoted passage was supposed to be the preface to a takedown of Hume. Hume, however, gets the last laugh because Kant did not teach what D'Souza said he did. According to Kant, "mathematical propositions, strictly so called, are always judgments a priori, not empirical; because they carry with them necessity, which cannot be derived from experience" (Critique of Pure Reason, 52, underline added). Kant then went on to talk about the "proposition of pure geometry" that D'Souza mentioned:
That the straight line between two points is the shortest, is a synthetic proposition. For my concept of straight contains nothing of quantity, but only of quality. The concept of the shortest is wholly an addition, and cannot be derived, through any process of analysis, from the concept of the straight line. Intuition, therefore, must be called in; only by its aid is the synthesis possible. (Critique of Pure Reason, 53, emphasis added)
According to Kant, we don't check the pure mathematical statement empirically at all. That's why Kant is controversial. Only by intuition can we make the judgment. The judgment in this case is "apodeictic" or certain; so it couldn't be empirical. As Paul Carus explained, "Empirical cognition is neither necessary nor universal; we cannot declare that 'it could not possibly be otherwise,' .... When we confront truths to which we have to attribute necessity and universality, Kant proposes to call them a priori" (Primer of Philosophy, 65). Let's be clear: a priori judgments can't be checked by drawing on some paper. The paper and whatever markings are made on it are data. For Kant, data came from perceptions, and perceptions could only give us empirical intuitions. Such intuitions, contrary to D'Souza, could not give us geometrical propositions: "[G]eometrical propositions are one and all apodeictic, that is, are bound up with the consciousness of their necessity .... Such propositions cannot be empirical or, in other words, judgments of experience, nor can they be derived from any such judgments" (Critique of Pure Reason, 70). Given that D'Souza's "Kant" bares no resemblance to the real thing, it should surprise no one that D'Souza or whoever wrote his book didn't provide any citations to the relevant parts of Critique of Pure Reason.
I mentioned in the last post that D'Souza spent a page or so discussing logical positivism. Logical positivism was important to D'Souza because, as he saw it, "if you examine [the] presuppositions [of atheists] you will see that they are based on logical positivism." For that reason, it's unclear if D'Souza believed that a synthetic statement "can be verified only by checking the facts" (What's So Great About Christianity, 182). He may have just been explaining what the positivists believed. Just based on what we've seen so far, it would be safe to assume that he's not a positivist. What then are we to make of the remainder of D'Souza's case against Hume? On p. 184 of his book, we read, "I mention Kant's correction of Hume not to suggest that these mathematical axioms are wrong. What I am suggesting is that their veracity can be established only synthetically. We can proceed only by looking at the data." I quoted these sentences in full because I don't want to accidentally misrepresent D'Souza. At first, I thought that D'Souza didn't know that synthetic and empirical weren't synonyms. I used to be under the impression that empirical meant synthetic, but I never believed that synthetic meant empirical. I am reluctant to accuse someone of making an error--in a mainstream book nonetheless--that even a complete amateur like my younger self wouldn't make, but I don't know how else to interpret the passage. He actually wrote the words "established ... synthetically." We can establish veracity empirically, but I doubt it even makes sense to say "establish synthetically". A proposition can be synthetic, but I am unaware of a philosopher who would say that we established it synthetically. A logical positivist would say that we must establish the synthetic proposition empirically or a posteriori. A Kantian would say that some synthetic propositions could be established a priori using pure intuition. Perhaps, it would be correct to say that an analytic statement was established analytically. If that is the case, then maybe it's forgivable to say that synthetic statements are established synthetically, but I doubt it. The simplest explanation for the passage is that the author didn't know the meaning of the word synthetic and thought it meant empirical. I am going to be charitable and grant that the offending phrase may just be typo. We all make mistakes. Regardless, at the very least, D'Souza made a mistake while trying to attack Hume.
The rest of D'Souza's argument, on the surface, doesn't make sense. He wrote, "We can verify [scientific laws] only by examining the world around us." In the next paragraph, however, we read: "Scientific laws are not verifiable" (What's So Great About Christianity, 184). Which is it? Can we verify them or not? What he apparently meant was that scientific laws are not apodictic. Understandably, you would would be ill-advised to use words like "apodictic" in a mainstream book. Perhaps, "Scientific laws are contingent" would have worked. I would have gone with Kant's phrase and would have written "necessarily so" instead of "verifiable". As the title of the chapter indicated, D'Souza wanted to prove that miracles were possible. By arguing that scientific laws are not necessarily so, D'Souza did make his case. His nasty comments about Hume, however, were unwarranted. Even D'Souza wouldn't say that Hume concluded that miracles are impossible. He instead wrote that Hume argued that "no one can rationally believe in miracles" (Ibid, 181). Even the much weaker claim is wrong. As Erik J. Wielenberg explained,
The conclusion of [Hume's] argument is not that miracles are impossible. It is not that miracles never in fact occur .... It is not that it is never reasonable for anyone to believe that a miracle has occurred. It is not even that it is never reasonable for anyone to believe that a miracle has occurred solely on the basis of testimony. Hume’s conclusion, rather, is that “no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any system of religion.” (God and the Reach of Reason, Cambridge UP, 2007, 126 & 127)
If some contemporary atheists were misusing Hume, that's one thing. Such activity hardly justifies the hostility against Hume and the demeaning of his work.
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