An Aha! Moment about Atheism and Photos of my Car

It hit me yesterday that and why atheism is a purely Modern notion. Hume destroys all confidence in epistemology--we can't know anything. Kant comes into the wreckage and salvages a little bit of knowledge--we have categories of knowledge that can be filled with our perceptions of the phenomenal world. Beyond this world--what we can experience, sense, etc.--is the noumenal. This is the world of the spiritual. We cannot know the spiritual...we can just know that it's there. Kant is famous for the moral argument for God's existence because morality is the best sense that we know something exists beyond the world of the phenomenal. Now since the phenomenal can be tested, sensed, experimented with, etc. we have science becomes the standard for knowledge. There is no such thing as revelation and certainly no such thing as knowledge of God.

This is the breeding ground for atheism: I cannot know God (and anyway the god I do know I don't like). If I cannot know God he does not exist--at least in any meaningful sense. Atheism needs Modernity to give it space to make sense.

And now, for those who have endured, are two photos of my car.