Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)
1998 / 1. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Is there a place for God int he inn of Philosophy?
S7s t/iei'e a piacé for UocL. ? SOME THOUGHTS FOR THEOLOGY STUDENTS Plato has been called the philosopher of the Greek Orthodox Church; Aristotle of the Roman Catholics, and Kant of the Protestant movement. Yet Kant was more deist than theist, and therefore as Dooyeweerd says, Kant cannot be considered a main representative for the Protestant Reformational understanding of philosophy. Kant’s idea of freedom is not particularly Biblical. Kant was influenced by Puritanism and Pietism, but his philosophy does not drink deeply from the well of the Scriptures. Kant relies too much on a secular humanist ideal of personality in which the knowing subject determines knowledge of reality. Kant’s ’Copernican revolution in epistemology’ ties into the tendency since Descartes to seek the foundation of reality in the knowing subject. ’Cogito, ergo sum’ means that subjective thought now is on its way to becoming sovereign. His epistemological apriori leaves little place for a normative revelation from God. Kant breaks the cosmos into two spheres and creates a dualism between that of mathematical, scientific, rational understanding, and that of moral freedom and personality. Said in short form: Kant first separates and then seeks a coherence between the spheres of ’nature’ and that of ’freedom’. Nature is the area of sensory perception and freedom is the area of moral choice. In the area of ethics, Kant does not follow the biblical idea of evil as contrary to the will of God; evil for Kant is the choice of sensory inclinations, weaker desires, rather than the ’categorical imperative’ (duty to do good). For Kant, belief in God is grounded in our moral consciousness, whereas the moral law does not depend on belief in God: morality does not presuppose religion, for morality is a matter of doing the right thing. This ignores, however, the religious contribution to defining the right thing: for example Jesus’ Discourse on the Mountain in Matthew’s Gospel. While both sides of Kant’s theory have continued to be influential, the teaching about the thing-in-itself has lost ground compared to the indeed ’revolutionary’ idea that the subject (thinking ego) constructs experience. After Kant’s ’Copernicum revolution’, a subjectivistic freedom-ideal become more and more dominant in western philosophy. After Kant, for many philosophers reason and faith cannot be united under the same lifeview. The knowing subject 1 1 Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (Amsterdam, 1953) vol. I, p.326ff. 33
