What is Enlightenment?

I read Kant’s Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment last night. The opening paragraph is a famous manifesto.

Enlightenment is man’s exit from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such minority is self-incurred if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Kant goes on to explain how this manifesto should be applied to religious scholarship and toleration. He states his case for why the state, the sovereign rulers of his time, should not intervene in religious affairs because it stifles the admirable goal of perfecting the intellect. Kant himself had been coerced to stop writing about religion during a period of his career.

You find echoes of Kant in Amendment I to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; of abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

From this amendment arises the idea of separation of church and state. Following from this are the many judicial rulings that religion should not be taught in the public schools.

The most prominent case before the courts about teaching religion in schools is Intelligent Design. Is Intelligent Design a religion?

The Intelligent Designer is a supernatural being. One of the distinguishing characteristics of religious belief is the belief in supernatural beings and their powers to intervene at will in the natural world and change the course of natural events. From that standpoint Intelligent Design qualifies as a religious belief.

I have not met anyone who believes in Intelligent Design, and who upon pain of being branded a liar, did not admit that the Intelligent Designer was the god of their religion. The Christian who believes in an Intelligent Designer who is not god must explain why that does not violate god’s commandment to not worship false idols. I leave it to the imagination as to whose opinions are more deserving of respect: the Christian Creationist or the Christian who espouses agnostic belief in an Intelligent Designer who is not the god of his religion.

Let us turn to the flip side of the Kantian enlightenment coin. We know Kant as one of the supreme philosophical geniuses who tried to reconcile metaphysics with science and its methods. That leads into questions about what science is and what are the methods of science. Regarding the law and trials in courts, science is considered an enterprise whose characteristics are observation of natural phenomena, evidence, testable hypotheses, induction, conformation and refutation, explanation, persuasion, and evaluation. At the boundaries of philosophy of science there are many fascinating issues, but in a court of law these are the criteria that have precedent in deciding when a set of beliefs and methods of inquiry are scientific. ID besides possessing the characteristics of a religion also suffers from its inability to meet these criteria. It takes more than being critical of a scientific theory for a hypothesis to be a scientific theory itself.

Kant was one of the profound thinkers about the human intellect. His philosophy has been the embarkation point for much of the profound philosophy of the past 200 years. Let me propose another idea that I think fits with Kantian ideas about the human intellect.

At some point in human intellectual evolution and development humans became imaginative thinkers. Humans build complex conceptual systems and blend those conceptual systems to create new conceptual systems. This free play of intellect is natural to humans, and occurs as much or more at the unconscious level as it does at the conscious level.

Trying to legislate against this natural inclination and distinguishing characteristic of human intellect will do no good. Laws and culture have coerced and stifled the intellect, but the intellect keeps coming back for more. That is part of the nature of the intellect. How much more evidence must history provide to prove it?

The United States is a country begun during the Enlightenment and partially built upon several good Enlightenment ideas. The recognition that philosophy, science, and religion are different dimensions of knowledge was a long time in coming. As bodies of knowledge they all have their gaps and disputes. The genius of the idea of separation of church and state is that it is based upon the recognition of religion and science as different dimensions of knowledge and methods of inquiry.

It seems as though students in high school should be taught what science is, what religion is, and how they differ in their subject matter and methods of inquiry. They should also be taught why separation of church and state is a good idea whose progress towards fulfillment has created many martyrs along the way. That is not a subject matter for biology class or any other science class.

Who wants to play those eights and aces
Who wants a raise
Who needs a stake
Who wants to take that long shot gamble
And head out to fire lake

Fire Lake, Bob Seger

How many people really have the courage to lay the issues of philosophy before the imagination of the ninth grader? Will Kant and the Constitution of the United States be part of the course? Who wants to move the children from their minority to their majority?