Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)

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

IMMANUEL KANT AND THEOLOGY

must draw the line somewhere. We would not be wrong if we said that even though Kant wanted to analyze the possibilities of pure reason, philosophy for Kant kept hinting at theology. He challenges the reasonable proofs for God, but then is open toward wonder, an existential awe, as when he says we have the starry heavens above and the moral law within us, as a witness to higher things.7

II) A second step was that he said that he abolished knowledge (of the noumenal or transcendent) in order to make room for faith. God then becomes a ‘necessary’ postulate of ‘practical reason’. Kant means that the knowledge (proofs for God) had to be abandoned, if we are to honour the limits of reason. But we honour ethics by accepting belief in God. What is happening here? Hendrikus Berkof says: “It was Kant’s purpose to save religion as well as the Enligtenment: in this double objective, we think, lay his deepest passion as a thinker.” The question would become whether he made more room for faith, or destroyed the historical foundation of faith.

III) A third step he took was in the area of ethics, when he wrote Critique of Practical Reason (1788 - Kritik der praktischen Vernunft). Here Kant talks about our autonomy, by which he means we are not morally bound to the drives of nature. We have the moral law within us. Nature is bound by the chains of causality, but people have the freedom of moral autonomy to make their own choices. Kant arrives at his ‘categorical imperative’: Act in such a way that your ethical choices could become universally legislated. Kant then also arrives at three conclusions:

i) we are free to choose a better morality (“you can because you should”);

ii) the soul is immortal (since we cannot fulfill the ethical imperative completely, we need infinite progression);

iii) God exists (since we cannot morally conquer this broken and absurd world, therefore we need God and his kingdom).

By now it is becoming clear that Kant places God on the side of morality and freedom, not on the side of nature and causation. Reason (natural theology) cannot reach God, but intuition and morality can ‘know’ (posit) that God is there. He says: If we act as well as possible within our power, what is not within our power will come to our aid from another source. Kant seeks his certainty about God and faith on moral grounds. He assumed that to accept life at all we must posit a final moral ground: God is conceived not so much as the prime physical cause, but as the prime moral cause.

IV) Step four: After spending much time on a kind of ‘prolegomena’ on the relation of reason and metaphysics, Kant finally arrives at speaking about the content (dogma; teaching) of the Christian faith. He does this in 1793 in Religion Within the lJmits of Reason Alone (Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft). He wanted to write about religion as an Enlightenment philosopher. He therefore submits Scripture

“Der bestirnte Himmel über mir, und das moralische Gesetz in mir.” Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968).

2012/2 Sárospataki Füzetek 79