Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)

2012 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: Immanuel Kant and Theology

IMMANUEL KANT AND THEOLOGY

philosophers talk about the insights of reason without first of all defining the possibilities and limits of reason. After Kant both faith and reason enter a crisis: they no longer have clear a priori definitions. Kant did not want to say much as a philosopher about transcendent things (God, the soul), so he spoke in his Kritik der reinen Vernunfi (1781) about a transcendental view. By transcendental he means that the knowing subject does not know the real objects as they are (Dinge an sicli) but things as they appear. Notice the difference in these two words: l)Knowledge is transcendental-. - it reaches across reality and composes its understanding of things.

2) Reason is not transcendent — it does not reach beyond or above our experience. Because we are so dependent upon our own faculties of sensory experience and reason, Kant thought that what we can know is merely ‘phenomenal’, and not reality in itself. There is also a deeper ‘noumenal’ reality, which is known by ‘intuition’. Kant thought that an indication of this noumenal reality is that people cannot reach the highest virtues (harmony with the moral law) during their limited lifetime. Therefore God, eternity and the soul (‘noumenal’ realities) must exist. So there are four kinds of basic categories of reality for Kant:

1) The world of sense experience {phenonmenalreality);

2) The reasonable world of our mind or understanding (discernment of thelaws of science and logical conclusions).

3) The ultimate noumenal reality which transcends our sense experience and is thus unknowable to the human mind.

4) Yet the mind is not satisfied without this ultimate reality. So it then ‘postulates’ (posits, supposes) ideas about God and our soul, in order to complete the unity of perspective (worldview). This is practical reason for Kant.

Thus Kant allows for both knowledge and faith. However, he also categorically separates science and religion, or knowledge and faith, by restricting them to different realms. He does, however, say that theism best explains the world - but such theism is a ‘postulate’, not something ‘provable’. But, we could ask: are our reasonable or scientific statements provable? Indeed, does science not change its paradigms often? And is the knowledge of the noumenal merely subjective?

Kant’s five steps in theology3

His original contributions begin when he was 57 years old and published The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). We shall consider the significance of this for theology and for modern questions about faith, as expressed by Kant’s idea of ‘pure reason’.

(I) The first step Kant took was to abolish the classical proofs for the existence

of God. Indeed, God can neither be proved nor disproved, said Kant. Pure reason cannot reach God; but practical reason needs God. The four proofs for God’s

3 Hendrikus Berkhof, Two Hundred Years of Theology (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans: 1989), ch.l.

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