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Articles

The Shackles of Superstition

Piers Benn thinks religion would still make sense even if God didn’t exist.

There are those who believe that philosophy of religion was made pointless by Hume and Kant. These two thinkers are widely thought to have driven the final nails into the coffin of rational theology and to have shown not only that all previous attempts to prove the existence of God had failed, but that all future attempts were bound to suffer the same fate. Kant in particular is believed to have shown that all traditional arguments for God’s existence must fall into one of three categories – namely, ontological, cosmological or teleological – and that the demolition of ontological arguments is enough to ensure the failure of all other traditional kinds as well.

Not all contemporary philosophers, of course, accept that Kant and Hume succeeded in refuting such arguments. Some thinkers have no particular regard for the eighteenth century Enlightenment, in any case: Thomism is still alive and well in certain quarters, and quietly confident of the ultimate intellectual bankruptcy of secular, atheistic philosophies.

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