Q&A: Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Question
Hello Rabbi!
This is Netanel Miller from Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa.
I’d be glad if you could answer a small question for me.
Not long ago I read your book God Plays Dice, and I wanted to know how you relate to Immanuel Kant’s position, which says that we cannot prove anything beyond time/space/etc. because of our limited cognitive perception.
Because if one accepts that view, all the proofs for the existence of a higher power in the book, and in general, lose their force.
If you don’t accept that view, I’d be happy if you could explain why; and if you do, then how does it fit together?
Thank you
Answer
The question is too general. Kant too argued for the existence of the thing-in-itself, which lies beyond our perception (this is a critique of Zeitlin). We have claims, and even proofs, for many things that are beyond our perception (such as the laws of nature and theoretical entities, none of which is directly perceived, only through their consequences; and from those consequences we learn about the thing itself. That is how we learn from the consequences—that is, the world—about God who created it). We cannot see or perceive things except within our conceptual and cognitive framework. But there is nothing preventing us from inferring the existence of other things beyond those frameworks.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t understand. Perhaps you mean another argument I brought from R. S. T. Geffen: that if time is a human category and does not exist in reality, then there is no question of the world’s eternity. And to that I replied and said that even if time was created along with man, now that he wears those glasses he can look through them into the past as well.
Is there perhaps a connection to the objection to the cosmological proof—that one cannot infer anything about things before time was created?