Man the Astronomer

KANT: Would you please tell me how else you would save religion and science from each other? How else would you meet the threats to both that emerged in my time, especially from Hume?

SOCRATES: Perhaps the threats from which you thought you saved both science and religion were not so serious at all. And perhaps your cure was worse than the disease.

KANT: Oh, no, the threats were very real. The threat of science was not merely the threat against science launched by Hume’s skepticism, but also the threat from science to reduce man and the human element to nothing but a tiny cog in the great cosmic machine. As I once said to an astronomer who argued that “astronomically speaking, man is utterly insignificant”, “Sir, you are forgetting that astronomically speaking, man is the astronomer.”

- from Socrates Meets Kant, by Peter Kreeft (ch 5, “Kant’s Big Idea”)


That two sentence critique of Kant’s philosophy by “Socrates” above pretty much sums up this excellent book. As someone who’s been fascinated with what little I can understand of Kant – his ideas best fit what little I can understand of quantum mechanics – I find this book (I’m little past halfway through it) a page turner.

The last sentence “Kant” speaks above, though, reached out and slapped me in the face, in a good way, if a slap in the face can be in any way called good. Almost raised bumps on my arms, that’s how insightful it is. Don’t know if Kant every actually spoke it, or wrote it, but I plan to immediately appropriate it and use it whenever necessary, always giving credit to the little old German professor.