The terrier who got his teeth into God -Times Online
"You do know,” I say to him, “that with this book you’ve done Kant?”
“I know,” he cries, “somebody else told me that! And they told me I must under no circumstances read any Kant.”
Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the modern era, did not believe any of the proofs of the existence of God. But he was a believer and his evidence was the “moral sense within” – conscience. That is exactly what Humphrys concludes.
He tells, for example, the stories of Lisa Potts and Irena Sendler. At the age of 18 Potts defended her infants’ class from a madman with a machete, sustaining appalling injuries. Sendler smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Poland. She was caught by the Gestapo but freed by partisans. At the age of 97 she said: “I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.” Such stories, Humphrys thinks, undermine the materialistic account of the world.
“As for me,” he writes, “it is difficult to understand the existence of conscience without accepting the existence of something beyond ourselves.”
And so no, having been less inclined to belief after the interviews, he finds himself more inclined after the book. He’s still not there, of course, but his determination to speak out against the posturing of the militant atheists has given him back the role with which he feels most comfortable – a praying, failed atheist.
"You do know,” I say to him, “that with this book you’ve done Kant?”
“I know,” he cries, “somebody else told me that! And they told me I must under no circumstances read any Kant.”
Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the modern era, did not believe any of the proofs of the existence of God. But he was a believer and his evidence was the “moral sense within” – conscience. That is exactly what Humphrys concludes.
He tells, for example, the stories of Lisa Potts and Irena Sendler. At the age of 18 Potts defended her infants’ class from a madman with a machete, sustaining appalling injuries. Sendler smuggled 2,500 Jewish children out of Nazi-occupied Poland. She was caught by the Gestapo but freed by partisans. At the age of 97 she said: “I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.” Such stories, Humphrys thinks, undermine the materialistic account of the world.
“As for me,” he writes, “it is difficult to understand the existence of conscience without accepting the existence of something beyond ourselves.”
And so no, having been less inclined to belief after the interviews, he finds himself more inclined after the book. He’s still not there, of course, but his determination to speak out against the posturing of the militant atheists has given him back the role with which he feels most comfortable – a praying, failed atheist.
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