Kant's Grounding of Religion

According to James C. Livingston, "In the second Critique Kant sought to show that our relation to the world is not limited to scientific knowledge (fact), for the world is a stage upon which we must act -a realm of moral valuation." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 62) Thus, Kant set out to show that religion is not grounded in pure reason, but in what he called practical reason. Practical reason does not tell us facts about the world, but how to live. We execute, for Kant, practical reason when we try to understand our moral and religious situation; that is how to act.

In the second Critique, Kant postulates that everyone is under moral obligations, and that these moral obligations taken on various forms, thus are different for everyone. However, what is not different is that we all experience a sense of duty to act in a way which can become a universal maxim. Kant then takes morality to be a given, and as an a priori category, it can be used to ground all aspects of human life, even including religion.

Kant holds that morality is not something that is imposed from without, but comes from within. Morality is inherent in humanity. Therefore, morality, for Kant, cannot come from the Church or from Scriptures. Morality is prior to outside instruction for Kant.  Now what does this mean for religion if morality is prior?

 Like Rousseau before him, Kant holds that religion is grounded in morality. For Kant, "the only way to knowledge of God is through the moral conscience; the only genuine theology is moral theology." (pg. 63)  Thus, as for Rousseau, speculative theology is not valid. As shown in the previous post, we cannot understand God and his attributes through Pure Reason. Thus, religion is only being moral.

By holding to this position, Kant is at the same time going counter the Eighteenth Century mentality and keeping it. He is going against the Eighteenth Century mentality by dismissing Reason as having any insight into Religion. He is keeping an Enlightenment view when he holds that morality is religion.

What does Kant's view then mean for the Church? "For Kant worshiping God was synonymous with obeying the moral law, and 'everything which, apart from a moral way of life, man believes himself of doing to please God' was for Kant 'mere religious delusion'". (pg. 64) The extra moral acts, such as all of the sacraments and attending Church for reasons other than moral instruction, are then for Kant worthless. And we see this mentality in the Church today, where the sacraments are either underplayed or non-existent and only morality is seen as true worship.

Hume's Legacy through Kant

With Hume killing off the en vogue way to God, we are left at an impasse. For Hume opens up questions that previously were not addressed. Following his philosophy we learn that everything is open to critique and question in a way that was more radical than Descartes. Hume, in effect, killed philosophy and the theology that was based on the philosophy of the day. How then do we precede? There are two options that come to mind:

1. Based on Hume's critique, we abolish religion. We let religious thought slink back into the shadows and eventually die out. If we cannot know God, if we cannot know Truth, how then do we worship? 
2. We take Hume's critique seriously and attempt to answer it without slipping into a relativistic subjectivism. We establish that thought and knowledge is not just founded upon objective reason nor subjective experience. We need to hold the two methods (reason and experience) in tension to find the truth. 

It is this second approach that the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant undertakes in his philosophical and theological enterprise. After reading Hume, "Kant came to realize that the human mind finds itself in in the peculiar situation of being burdened by certain metaphysical questions which it is unable to ignore but which also appear to transcend the mind's power to answer." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 58) By this, Kant points to the fact that there is humanity a notion of something that is outside of themselves and outside of the Natural realm. Humanity feels the weight of this other realm upon it's shoulders and then through various forms of thought, tried to understand the world. However, as pointed out in the second part of the quote, these issues are beyond the power of the mind to formulate and come up with a satisfying answer.

Instead of giving into Hume's critique, Kant takes it further. Not only did Kant extend and further enumerate Hume's critique, he did so in a positive way that laid a new foundation and ground for theological and philosophical understanding.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant outlines the three ways to prove God's existence and shows how each fails:

1. The Ontological Argument- (Anselm) The argument runs that God is a perfect being who has all qualities of perfections, which includes existence. Therefore, to be perfect, God has to exist. Since God is perfect, God exists. Kant states that this argument is not logically valid due to the fact that existence is not a predicate.In other words, I can convince of something without it existing. An ideas existence is not dependent on it actually existing. Something does not have to physically exist (have Being) to be thought of. Therefore, we can posit God's non-existence without being logically inconsistent. What Kant's critique truly boils down to is that even if God exists as a perfect Being, it has no bearing on us, due to God, in this instance, only being a Theoretical entity. If we hold to Anselm, according to Kant, there is no practical insight gained. 
2. The Cosmological Argument- The argument runs that if something exists, there must be a Cause behind its existence. The problem with this, Kant contends, is that we can only posit the existence of a Cause and nothing about the Cause itself. We cannot, from this proof, posit any attributes to the cause if we with to be logically consistent. Kant continues his critique by stating that the rule of Cause and Effect only operates in the sensible world. Cause and Effect are based in experience (which Kant takes over from Hume) and therefore cannot be used for anything outside of experience.
3. The Physico-Theological Proof- This proof holds that due to the perceived order of the world there has to be a designer behind the order. This designer is then identified as God. Kant, like Hume, holds this to be untenable.  For Kant, the argument from design can only show that there "is an architect of the world who is always very much hampered by the adaptability of the material in which he works, not a creator of the world to whose idea everything is subject." (pg. 61) Thus, the designer is not the creator but is working with already created materials. Again, this proof goes nowhere if we are trying to prove the existence of God and understand God's attributes. 

What Kant is doing in these critiques is continuing Hume's thought and then taking it forward. We must, for Kant, recognize that our logic and rationality will always fail to posit and proof God's existence. However, Kant (against Hume) holds that the opposite is also true. We cannot through logic and reason, prove and posit the non-existence of God. Kant, unlike Hume, will not dismiss the concept of God due to the fact that the proofs do not work. Instead, Kant will instruct us to use the idea of God and his attributes in a regulative way. That is, although we cannot prove God or God's attributes, the ideas offer us guidelines for our thought and life.

According to this basic summary of Kant's first critique, the Church needs to understand that God is not absolutely provable. God is not a scientific theorem or maxim that can be shown to be valid or not. And in a way counter to contemporary Scientism, we need to understand that just because God and His attributes are not logically or experientially provable., we do not need to abandon the notion of God.

Hume's Critique of Religion

The Scottish philosopher David Hume, can be seen as trying to quench some of the enthusiasm that Rousseau had toward experience. Hume held that, in the words of Livingston, "Experience admittedly is not infallible; there are all imaginable degrees of assurance from the highest certainty to the lowest possibilities." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 50) With this in mind, we have to precede with the thought that experience cannot tell us everything. However, for Hume, neither can reason.

Hume holds a radical position in the history of philosophy with this stance. When examining the whole of philosophy, we see, according to Hume, that it has failed. Reason alone cannot leads us to truth. Neither can experience. With these two positions, Hume in effect, killed the philosophical enterprise. The Rationalist, from Plato to Descartes and beyond were wrong. The Empiricists, from Aristotle to Berkeley and beyond were wrong. But instead of enumerating his critique of philosophy, lets focus on his critique of religion.

Beginning with his critique of religion, he takes a shot at the Rationalists. Not only in his view is "reason impotent to convince us of the claims of faith", "The rational man, who proportions his beliefs the evidence, cannot take the way of faith." (pg. 52) Before we celebrate this statement, we must be wary. It can be seen and used as a counter to religion very easily. It can be read in both a positive and negative way. It can be read in a positive sense by saying that religion is super-rational. However, the same statement can be read to say that faith is irrational and an enemy of critical thought. Before we get into the connotations of this statement too much, we must understand why he said it.

For Hume, reason can only tell us a limited amount about nature and nothing about religion. From reason we can posit an external world, and even a world of order. We can examine nature and see how things work. Yet, we cannot take these as analogies for a divine being. Trying to draw religious inferences from our experience and knowledge of nature are uncertain and useless. "Uncertain because we cannot legitimately draw any inferences from nature beyond what we already know; useless because we cannot make any additions to our common experience of nature from which we would derive principles of moral conduct." (pg. 53) In other words, if something is not knowable to us, how can we know anything about it? If we do not have any basis to start our reasoning from, how can we reason? On top of that, how can we draw morals from such knowledge? Morals come from religion, not reason, for Hume. If that is the case, how can reason give us morality?

Reason for Hume can only try to point towards a Deistic, mechanistic creator. If we try to argue by analogy, that is by saying that God is like man, there are many problems. In Hume's The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion at least three problems with reason leading to religion are outlined.

1. If God is like man, only better, we must renounce all claims of infinity when talking about the nature of God. If the cause has to be like the effect, then God (the cause) has to be finite like man (the effect). The two, cause and effect, have to be in proportion and in likeness. If God is like man, then God must be finite as man is.
2. If we argue from analogy, we have to get rid of all ideas of God's perfection. Or as he has Cleanthes state: "At least you must acknowledge that it is impossible for us to tell, from our limited views, whether the system contains any great faults or deserves any considerable praise if compared to other possible and even real systems...Many worlds might have been botched and bugled throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out." (pg. 55) In other words, we as finite beings have a finite understanding and view of the world, the cosmos and history and cannot know if there is perfection or if it just seems that way.
3. If we argue from analogy, we have to abandon the unity of God. Again, Hume has Cleanthes say:"A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in readring a city, in farming a common-wealth (popular starting points for the analogy of God's creative abilities); why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world?" (pg. 55) Again, just because things are created does not necessarily  mean that only one person\deity created them.

At this point, what can the Church learn from Hume? I think that one of the biggest lessons from this part of Hume's critique of religion shows us that we need to be careful with our argumentation. Not only should we make the best and most thorough argument possible, we need to understand the implications of them. Hume really puts his finger on the logical conclusions of some popular methods of trying to prove God. And if we allow Hume to speak to us, we hear  that we have failed to be convincing. 

If reason does not work as a method of theological argumentation and way to God, what does? Hume holds that religious beliefs cannot be proved by reason, as shown above. For Hume, religious beliefs are natural beliefs. They are not facts that can be inferred through thought. Religious beliefs are "instinctive and practical attitudes toward the world." (pg. 57) This means, for the Church, that we cannot know the truth of our doctrines and dogmas. We can only know what we feel, although we need to maintain a hardy skepticism toward them.

Where the Church needs instruction from Hume is in our attitude towards our beliefs. We need to question them and plumb the depths of our religious beliefs and not hold back. For Hume, nothing is sacred; that is free from critique. Hume himself might have been an agnostic, but at least he tried to open an alternative way to God that is not based in Reason.

The Religion of Experience

Rousseau set out to counter the Religion of Reason by replacing Reason as the key to religion and substituting Experience. According to him, the only way to know something was to read it in the book of nature. And what is this book of nature? Why his own natural self, of course. What he meant is that we do not know anything unless we read it in our own nature, through our natural ways. How does one move from oneself into religion? According to Rousseau there are three convictions:

1. If we reflect on ourselves with a position of doubt, reminiscent of Descartes, we will come to the conclusion that there had to be someone outside of the self to cause the self. And if the self is ordered, then the creator is the one who creates order. Thus, he can conclude that "a will moves the universe and animates nature." (Modern Christian Faith, Livingston, pg. 43) This then points to the second conviction.
2. If there is a will, there has to be an intellect. Therefore, there is an intelligent first cause. We can look at the order and not just posit something that created the order, but we can posit that the creator of order has an intelligence which allows order to be created and maintained. This intelligent first cause can then, in the common vernacular, be called God. 
3. From the first two premises, we can conclude and see that there is a separation of the physical and the mental. With this, we can posit that the mental, our intelligence, is free from the physical. With this, he states, "Man is free in his actions and as such is animated by an immaterial substance." (pg. 43)

Now, if this sounds like the starting point of the Religion of Reason, do not be confused. It is. However, Rousseau makes a move from these logical assertions that no Rationalist would make. The key change he makes is summarized by Livingston: "Reason cannot produce assent to religious beliefs until it is in harmony with our affections and conscience." (pg. 43) This leads Rousseau to posit two requisites for the affirmation of faith:

1. "Religious ideas, doctrines or convictions" have to be "related to and a reflection upon our personal experience." (43) It is not enough for doctrines and ideas to be reasonable to warrant our assent. Our intellect can assent to such things, but that is only step one. For the doctrines, ideas and convictions to be valid, they need to pass the text of my personal experience. Do I see these to be true? Do they have bearing on my everyday life? Do I encounter these ideas in the concrete, non-abstract world?
2. The only concerns that are not idle speculation are those that are related to my moral sentiments. If it does not affect my behavior, then it is worthless at worst, and needs to be meet with skepticism at best. 

In Rousseau, you can see a dynamic shift from Reason to Experience. But what is kept is the importance of the self. You will notice that in the second requisite, nothing external judges right or wrong, true or false. It is my moral sentiment, not moral sentiment that validates or invalidates ideas and doctrines.

The positive step that Rousseau takes for the Church is that "he strove for a conception of reason more consonant with human experience than the narrow rationalism of the critical Deists." (pg. 45) Religion is not an abstract system of knowledge for Rousseau, and that is a wonderful insight. Religion needs to have a grounding in actual life. Without this grounded, it has no bearing or weight on us.

The negative is that it is not only a move towards Moralism, but Subjectivism. If it does not speak to me, I will not listen. Doctrines like the Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Election, or the Trinity do not matter if they do not address my feelings. This quickly leads to an anti-intellectualism in the Church. The Church becomes a place of comfort not due to the salvific work of the Cross, but because it confirms my feelings and attitude toward the world.

The end of the Religion of Reason?

The Religion of Reason was going to collapse, but not from the critiques laying siege to it from the outside. No, it's very foundations where crumbling and would eventually cause it to collapse. Even though it collapsed, it was not left in ruins. It would be re-built and look strikingly similar to what it was. However, in the 18th century, there were a few reasons for it's breakdown.

1. The first problem with the Religion of Reason was that it was abstract. The Religion was "devoid....(of an) aesthetic sense which, even though unarticulated, is required of any religious faith that expects a wide appeal." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 40) In short, it had no beauty nor room for it. Everything in the Religion of Reason could be stripped down to logical premises that lead to a conclusion. Reason is stark, and a religion founded upon such starkness appears to be dark and uninspiring. This lack of beauty led to the second problem. 
2.  With this first problem, the Religion of Reason was devoid feeling. Due to the focus on Reason, feelings had to be done away with. For feelings led to biases, errors, and prejudices. In short, feelings are antithetical to Reason. At the same time, feelings are part of a holistic life, and most were not comfortable without such an unfeeling and unmoving religious focus. 
3. The Religion of Reason was a religion of the philosophers. One had to be an intellectual and read the right philosophies to understand it. This made the adherents a small group of educated men that seemed out of touch with the populace. There was no room for non-experts or laity. This then discouraged the masses from latching on.
4. The Religion of Reason lacked unity.  If everything was dependent on the autonomous thinker, then there could be no sense of unity. Livingston states that it "did not contribute to fraternité, to a sense of a common bond of faith and worship." (pg. 40) There was no need to gather together, to fellowship, to feel apart of a brotherhood in the Religion of Reason. Whether correct or not, most people feel that this sense of belonging to a group bigger than yourself is a cornerstone of religion.

According to the Genevan thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Religious faith is sterile and prefunctory unless it is grounded in personal experience." (pg. 41) This is how the Religion of Reason came off to people. The Religion of Reason was grounded in abstract thought, not practical life, thus causing people to distrust it. This leads to a founding of a 'new' religious attitude, that of experience. Experience, not Reason, will be taken to be the key for religious understanding.

This is what we will examine in our next post.

The Essence of the Religion of Reason

Based on our last post, what then is the essence of Religion? What should the Church look like? Livingston outlines four views of what a Religion of Reason should look like. Before we get into the different views, some more ground work must be done. The apostles of religion thought that religion should be a simple matter and should be reduced down to key understandings. Everything that complicated religion should be done away with. With these apostles, "There was a general desire, even among the supernaturalists, to reduce religion and Christianity to a very few doctrines and even fewer practices." (pg. 36) With this premise, "Sacraments and rituals often were regarded as useless, even dangerous distractions" (pg. 36) as they only over-complicated religion and what it required of humanity. The only ritual or sacrament that was worth practicing was morality. In effect there was a view that "religion was solely a matter between the individual and God and therefore a highly individualistic affair." (pg. 36) Due to this, "the Church was thought of as a voluntary association." (Pg. 36)

According to these thinkers that established the Religion of Reason, we did not outside authority or guidance. We only needed ourselves and God and an attitude of 'Jesus and me' developed. My autonomous reason and morality can guide me, so why do I need anything else? This lead to the first of the four views outlined by Livingston.

1. Christianity is a corruption of true religion and needs to be opposed. This view draws on Remairus, Lessing and Voltaire by holding that doctrines are often obscure and unreasonable, thus they get in the way of what religion should be. The perversion of the supernatural distracts us from the natural, so the sickness of Christianity should be gotten rid of in favor of a more natural religious understanding.
2. Christianity is the religion of Nature. This second view plays off the the thought of Toland, Tindal and Kant. "The essence of Christianity is none other than that of the religion of reason, but couched in the more or less imperfect form of an historical tradition." (pg. 36) This view holds that Christian doctrine obscured what nature reveals by adding un-neccesarry and illogical dogma into the mix. Hence it follows that we can get rid of Tradition in all of its forms, as everyone that is reasonable has access to the truth. Tradition then is made superfluous and not needed.
3. Historical Christianity is a supplement to natural religion. According to this view, "Natural religion is excellent and legitimate as far as it goes but...it needs the supplementation of certain supernatural doctrines which are only found in special revelation in Scripture." (pg. 36) These supplements are only valid if they are not contrary to Reason and Experience. Nature can only point us so far, and after we reach the limits of nature, special revelation can take us the rest of the way. (This is reminiscent of the Natural Theology of Emil Brunner) Even though Special Revelation adds to general revelation, it still is subject to general revelation. If Special Revelation does not conform to general revelation, then it is what is specially reveled is not Revelation
4. Christianity is one historic stage in the quest for a perfect religion. This view holds that Christianity is a stepping stone towards true religion and thus is not the true religion. The "Christ or Christianity is not seen as the historic republication of the original religion of nature or as the full and complete revelation of divine truth." (Pg. 36) Christ and Christianity are incomplete, and as history continues to enfold, truth will be added to the truth of Christianity making it complete. Christianity, in Lessing's view, is necessarily incomplete due to the fact that it is historically conditioned. True religion, for Lessing, is found in the 'Eternal Gospel' which "will transcend the inadequate, historically conditioned and obscure truths" (pg. 35) found in Scripture.

Underscoring all four of these views is the understanding that Christianity is no more than a morality brought to  light by Reason. This view, in its various manifestations, although it failed philosophically, is still present in the Church today.

In our next post, we will look at the supposed failure of the religion of Reason. 

The Religion of Reason

As we previous stated, there were criteria for religion in the Enlightenment era. One was that it conforms to our experience and the other that it conforms to reason. It is this second criteria that we will examine now. I will briefly outline the Religion of Reason and then, through Livingstone, point to it's supposed failure.

The Religion of Reason dethroned the traditional Judeo-Christian God and replaced it with Reason. Revelation was not enough to establish knowledge of God and man anymore. Everything that was revealed in the Scriptures and Tradition had to pass the test and fire of Reason. Christian Wolff, a German philosopher, held that there was a particular necessity to belief in a god, yet "Particular revealed doctrines, however, were fair game for dismissal if they were found to be unreasonable." (Modern Christian Thought, Livingston, pg. 29)

These particular doctrines that were rejected included original sin, predestination, vicarious atonement and the eternity of punishment. These doctrines had to be dismissed to get at the "spiritual kernel of the Old and New Testaments." (pg. 29) According to Wolff and the followers of the Religion of Reason, certain doctrines of the Church would not and did not hold up to critical analysis. If it did not seem logically or physically plausible, then it did not and could not have happened. Thus, we cannot base any doctrine on these false stories and events.

H.S. Reimarus took this farther and introduced a tension between the 'Jesus of History' and the 'Christ of Faith'. The implication of this tension is that there was a Jesus that is historically situated, but he is not the Christ of Faith. The Christ of faith is an invention of the disciples, which was "wholly foreign to Jesus' own intentions." (pg. 31) Reimarus stated that "When Jesus calls himself God's Son, he means to imply only that he is the Christ or Messiah particularly loved by God, and thus he does not introduce to the Jews any new doctrine or mystery." (pg 30-31) This means that Jesus was not calling himself God or Divine but just taking on the titles of the Jewish Prophets, and setting himself up as a great moral teacher. However, "the failure of that Messianic mission" to establish a powerful kingdom in Jerusalem, "and Jesus's inglorious death on the Cross shattered the disciples' expectations. Faced with a crisis, the apostles concocted the account of Jesus as the expected Jewish suffering savior who came to redeem humanity from sin and who would be raised on the third day." (pg. 31) What Reimarus is arguing is that the rational understanding of Jesus failed, so the disciples invented an irrational falsehood to save face. Thus, the Church of Jesus was to be only a church of moral reasonableness, instead of a Church of redemptive grace and supernatural salvation.

Remairus' insight backed up the Religion of Morality in this way. Jesus revealed natural and reasonable moral truth and nothing more. The Church, according to the Rational Religionists should have stayed natural and not had anything to do with the supernatural.

G.E Lessing continued this by stating that "The teachings (of Jesus and Scripture) are not authoritative because they are found in a sacred book: the book is sacred because it speaks an inward truth that existed long before the Bible." (pg. 34-35) He backs this up by analogy. "Is the situation such that 'I should hold a geometrical theorem to be true not because it can be demonstrated but because it can be found in Euclid?' No, of course not." (pg. 34) From this we can establish that truth is not truth based on authority or writing, but because they can be demonstrated. Following from this, we can say that truth comes not from the Revelation of the Holy Spirit but from Revelation of the natural order by the Rational mind.

From the thoughts of Remairus and Lessing we can say that the Church should not hold to anything due to special revelation or divine command. Instead, the Church should be based on the observable order of Nature and it's working out in experience.

In our next post, we will discuss then what the followers of the Religion of Reason thought Christianity should be.