Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)
1998 / 1. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Is there a place for God int he inn of Philosophy?
2)/'. CTranfi cS ( awyer essentially morality, and Jesus is for him the great moral teacher. Kant calls prayer a superstitious illusion and challenges the religious views he learned in his youth. He writes from the homeland of Luther that works are a basis for grace! Kant seems to have almost taken a FIFTH STEP. The first half of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone talks about the radical evil which tries to dominate human lives. It is almost as if Kant might abandon his purely rational morality and begin to talk about sin and grace. Then he would have to admit more room for theology. But as a philosopher he thought he could not do that. So he soon goes back again to the sufficiency of reason. Kant’s perspective is deistic. However, in his later writing he mentions ’the God within us’, and seems to be taking a turn toward panenthesism. In fact, in his last writings at the end of his life (Der Streit der Facultäten), he seemed to find his own deism and his sterile God too removed, and wrote "God is not a being outside of me but purely a thought within me. God is the moral-practical, self-legislative reason - hence only a God within me, for me, and over me." The following says much: "The idea that there is a God is a postulate based upon the principle of moral- practical reason because without it human reason cannot be restrained by man." (This point was emphasized by Dostoevski.) Kant’s problem entered when he said that God as a moral proposition has a subjective base, not an objective base. He could say: "God, therefore, is not a substance outside of me but merely a moral relationship within me. ...God is not something existing outside of me but my own idea. It is absurd to ask whether a God exists." Of course, we must be careful not to turn the Opus Postumum into a finished product, for it was only a set of notes. Kant may not have wanted to end by reducing God to a human product and may have rounded this study off somewhat differently, if he had lived longer. He evidently was searching for a more immediate contact between the (moral) consciousness and God. By appearing to abandon his own Deism toward the end of his writings and appearing to reduce God to our subjective thoughts, Kant approaches the crossroad where philosophy after him thought it had to make a choice: either for pantheism or for atheism. It is not hard to see why Kant abandoned a serious deism: his own destruction of the proofs of God eventually persuaded him that a God found by intuition, faith or even as a moral postulate, is merely a product of the 1 Cf. Norman Geiser, Christian Apologetics (Baker, 1976), part two. Berkhof, Two Hundred Years, p.17. 26
