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. But perhaps it was Immanuel Kant in his "Critique of Pure Reason" who had the greatest impact on culture and church when he built his wall between the transcendent (God, the self, and essences) and the world as we perceive it. The Christian community abandoned its traditional rational arguments for God and turned to leaps of faith. Thus the church, like the culture, found itself separated from God, the self, and essences, and the answers to the important questions: What is Good, Beautiful and True? We have all bowed the knee to Father Kant and his disciples, even if we have never heard their names.

Yes, but that is because Kant had no other choice, when given the skeptical premises of the naturalist philosophers. All of what we know comes from experience. This is common sense; Hume, Locke, etc. made it clear and showed with force how this is so. Yet this is the premise that forced Kant - and God - into the box of the metaphysical. For the extent to which anything we can know from experience (and not apriori) requires an ability, even hypothetical to experience and verify. Kant justified faith with reason, or rather justified kinds of "necessary truths" akin to faith as based on reason, yet by using philosophic reason as the axiom; just as Auqinas and the scholastics justified faith with reason, yet the scholastics took faith itself as axiomatic.

Faith is the Will to Believe. The Will to be Wise. We've lost that and only the Will to Power remains. But there are 3 wills: The Will to Power (existence), Will to Knowledge (Faith,Reason) and Will to Virtue. The philosophers havent figured that out yet (I have).

And yet is Kant so wrong? If God works miracles, physical miracles, then he is part of the world, and we can experience him. If he works only through the laws of nature, then we can only experience him through that veil of nature. The modern critique of Kant is not to release God from metaphysics, but to dissolve the metaphysical entirely. "The Remnant" of Christian faith holds on to but a plot of barren land holding out against materialism, and the positivists and existentialists are ready to evict.

The real culprit in history has been the rationalist faith in ideas - pure ideas - as something real and with more meaning than experience. This was the heart of Plato's rationalism, and was carried on by philosophers after Descartes. After him and into the 20th century, the post-Christian rationalists created ideologies immune to empirical inspection yet without the goodness of Christian virtue.

It is a good article and a good retort. And yet the fineness of Christians past and mean-ness and danger of atheistic ideologies is not an argument that addresses the core truth of the matters.

I liked the comment of Blaise Pascal. We feel what is possible but we cannot experience it. Perhaps he saw it before many of us, the denouement of irreligion and its dissolution of hope in the human spirit. But how to recapture that? You can only fight philosophy with philosophy, truth with truth. That means a defense of the proper sort, attending to matters of knowledge, virtue and existence.

WOW. Good answer! Any suggestions of a reading list for those of us not so knowledgable?

After him and into the 20th century, the post-Christian rationalists created ideologies immune to empirical inspection yet without the goodness of Christian virtue.

Modern Secularist Religion.

The part of Kant that seems to trouble most modern philosphers is his point about time as well as space being an illusion. Despite the fact that Einstein clearly demonstrated this point, most still deny it.

The belief that, of all things in the Universe, time is not an illusion is a direct opposition to the concept of eternal life, and perhaps that is why so many secularists choke on it.

And still, so many Christians insist that God will appear as an illusion when he is not.