Chapter 4

Although I could be wrong, of course, I wasn't under the impression that, as Pastor Dan writes, that "Burroughs was also aware, if only intuitively, of a paradox that has plagued human thought since the birth of modern science. It has its roots in the thought of Immanuel Kant, the German moral philosopher whose work formed the basis of the scientific method."

I thought the Scientific method came first...

I know wikipedia isn't that great but, um, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method

At any rate, I don't remember learning that Kant's work was "the basis of the scientific method" at all when I was in a Moral Philosophy class here at Clemson or in any of my science or history classes. Kant was a major philosopher towards the end of the enlightenment, after the scientific method was already in swing.

Nor is belief that:

"Kant, in his search for a more reliable moral authority, assumed that a good God would make the knowledge of what was right available to all people. Furthermore, this moral knowledge would be clear, transparent, unchanging, and subject to verification. We would only have to use the mental gifts we were given to unlock the secrets hidden all around us. So it was that Kant put reason as the highest value of intellectual inquiry, higher even than faith, and located truth in the external world, rather than in the soul."

ingrained in me deeply. I think that morality is full of grey zones and changes and that God is horribly unclear most of the time. But then again I don't like Kant's ideas about, oh, what's it called... the categorical imperative, either. I hate the emphasis on duty that Kant tends to make, which isn't my point, but it was bugging me the whole time I read the article.

As for:
"Saying that God is an illusion doesn’t make an argument about how the universe came to be, or why it came to be, or how it is that we’re to make sense of it all."
I think that the Hindus would disagree for sure and they think that all of the universe is an illusion!

Furthermore, the fact that "we simply don’t know how the hell we came to be here, or what the hell it all means." is not uncomfortable at all. On the contray, I find it very comforting. To me, it means that "I don't know" is a valid answer and that I'm free to let my imagination go skipping about looking at all the possibilities and that I don't have to fret over one being more right or more wrong than another.