Kant and Theology at the Boundaries of Reason

Chris L. Firestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138259744
• eBook ISBN: 9781317109686
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book examines the transcendental dimension of Kant's philosophy as a positive resource for theology. Firestone shows that Kant's philosophy establishes three distinct grounds for transcendental theology and then evaluates the form and content of theology that emerges when Christian theologians adopt these grounds. To understand Kant's philosophy as a completed process, Firestone argues, theologians must go beyond the strictures of Kant's critical philosophy proper and consider in its fullness the transcendental significance of what Kant calls 'rational religious faith'. This movement takes us into the promising but highly treacherous waters of Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to understand theology at the transcendental bounds of reason.

Chapter One
Can Theology Go Through Kant?

According to the traditional interpretation and reception of Immanuel Kant’s work, the impact of his philosophy on the discipline of theology has been primarily negative.1 The Critique of Pure Reason cuts off all access to knowledge of God, and, in so doing, demolishes not only the foundations for dogmatic metaphysics, but also the foundations for any kind of positive theology whatsoever. Because traditional interpreters understand these theoretical strictures on knowledge of God to be inescapable, Kant’s subsequent philosophical work, when it touches on matters of significance to theology, is thought merely to aim at reducing their stifling effects. Traditional interpreters judge that Kant’s effort to establish a foundation for theology in his moral philosophy is a failure, or at least a failure in ways that might matter to the adherents of most religions. God is nothing more than an idea, a moral postulate. Although traditional interpreters sometimes recognize that Kant tries again later in his career to establish moral grounds for theology in his writings on religion, his efforts there are thought to be inadequate – either hopelessly convoluted or reducible to his moral philosophy in a way that eliminates their positive contribution to Kant’s thought.

Theological programs indebted to the traditional interpretation of Kant have run their course in several different directions. Somewhat predictably, few of them end up being congenial to the discipline of theology. In some cases, Kant’s philosophy has been used to support a kind of anti-theology. This response to Kant has its roots in a particular way of understanding Kant’s groundbreaking theoretical philosophy in the first Critique. If one understands Kant’s phenomenal-noumenal distinction to have strict epistemic and ontological implications, then human beings are decisively and ultimately cut off from both the knowledge of God and any possible experience of God. Henry Allison calls this rendering of Kant’s philosophy the ‘two-world’ interpretation.2 There exists an impassable boundary between the experience of human beings and the ‘reality’ of noumenal beings, a boundary so deep and wide that not even the highest possible being – God – could traverse it. If God did traverse it and in some way attempt to become manifest to us, we could never know or even reasonably believe that it was God. When evidence for evil and imperfection in the world are then introduced and no counterbalance in the form of arguments for God’s existence and interaction with the world is allowed, we are left with atheism as the only rational faith for the transcendental thinker. In the absence of good epistemic or ontological reasons for believing God exists and cares about the world, the only rational option regarding religious faith is disbelief in the existence of God.

Another approach to theology indebted to Kant as traditionally understood is primarily agnostic about God’s existence and essence. Although Kant posits a strict denial of knowledge of God in the first Critique, God still arises in Kant’s transcendental analysis of reason as a problematic idea with moral significance. ‘The negative part of this thesis is important’, suggests P. F. Strawson, ‘… leaving room for certain morally based convictions, not amounting to knowledge’.3 For Kant, reason has an inherent moral need for belief in God, but since the content of this belief must remain empirically empty, only agnosticism in reference to God is warranted. What Kant leaves us with then is a strong epistemic separation from all things noumenal and ignorance (and indecision) about what can properly be thought of as obtaining in the ontologically real world of the supersensible. Matthew Alun Ray’s conclusions are typical of traditional readers who follow this trajectory: ‘Kant’s epistemological agnosticism seemed relatively self-consistent but his associated and quasi-existential moral proof of God turned out not to be successful’.4 The logical entailments of Kant’s philosophy are not moral theism, but, in Ray’s estimation, ‘Konigsbergian Nihilism’.5 For interpreters like Ray and Strawson, theology under the aegis of Kant amounts to nothing more than human speculation about what we take to be traces of the divine in human life. Culture and history reveal faint longings for the religious ultimate, and the world’s imperfections militate against these longings. There are no more substantial reasons on which to gauge our beliefs and nothing beyond these considerations on which to ground the enterprise of theology. Rational religious faith is thus properly termed theological agnosticism.

Taken at face value, Kant’s doctrine of divine unknowability appears to favour theological agnosticism over atheism. One of the goals of Kant’s first Critique was, after all, to silence the metaphysical sceptic rather than fuel the sceptic’s arguments (Bxxx). We don’t know if God exists beyond the boundaries of human reason that define immediate experience. Therefore, rather than being theologically negative, we should remain philosophically neutral on the matter of belief in God. On closer inspection however, theological agnosticism seems to slip into logical incoherence under Kant’s strictures. How can we take Kant seriously regarding the radical unknowability of all things noumenal and still hold out hope for some kind of room for faith in God? If God exists, then God must, in some sense, be knowable. However, the doctrine of unknowability is radical. God is unknowable, full-stop. The idea of God as a noumenal being who, in principle, both can and cannot be known appears unintelligible. In this way, Kantian agnosticism shades off into atheism. As Ray puts it, ‘Kant’s critical philosophy … shifted God out of ontological consideration on wholly epistemological terms which ultimately left the Kantian metaphysic not only agnostic but – despite Kant’s arguments to the contrary – also arguably liable to be read in atheistic terms’.6

One way of construing these atheistic implications of Kant’s philosophy is to understand them as a precursor to twentieth century logical positivism. Only propositions that can be confirmed by the senses are taken by traditional interpreters of Kant to be meaningful for understanding human experience. Strawson posits this position as the positive flipside of Kant’s negative doctrine of ‘noumenal unknowability’. He calls this positive flipside of the doctrine ‘the principle of significance’.7 These positive and negative doctrines, thinks Strawson, are Kant’s only philosophically responsible contributions to discussions on transcendent metaphysics. According to Strawson, all true propositions amounting to support for rational conviction must either admit to empirical verification or be cast off as examples of dogmatic metaphysics. I will be examining Strawson’s interpretation more closely in the next chapter.

It is not hard to see how his line of reasoning ends up having negative, if not devastating, consequences for religion and theology when founded on Kant’s philosophy. Peter Byrne interprets Kant’s philosophy along the lines of Strawson, and applies this interpretation to Kant’s account of religious language in general and Kant’s writings on religion in particular. According to Byrne, ‘Kant’s account of religious language departs from realism as that is understood by many contemporary philosophers’ by not being referentially and causally based.8 The significance of Kant’s religious writings, in this light, is not their theological affirmation (although Byrne does allow for some minimal amount of affirmation), but their meta-ethical implications. The moral law is transformed in these writings, thinks Byrne, into a set of ethical demands that humans strive to achieve in corporate unison. Referring specifically to Book Three of Religion, Byrne writes, ‘Kant’s underlying thought here – surely a plausible one – is that only in and through cooperative human effort can the full human power to combat evil and pursue good be realized and enhanced’.9 In other words, Byrne finds Kant’s solution to the challenge of evil and vice in the collective moral agency of human beings. The true theological importance of Kant’s work is not rational religious faith (where faith in God’s person and work is understood to be rational), but faith in collective human moral striving for justice (or the Highest Good) through present and future socio-political structures.10 For this reason, Byrne believes Kant’s philosophy of religion affirms the church as the appropriate, even if only incidental, means of achieving what Kant calls an ‘Ethical Commonwealth’.

Yirmiahu Yovel interprets Kant’s philosophy of religion under the aegis of these Strawsonian doctrines as well, but arrives at even more theologically divisive conclusions than Byrne. Employing these doctrines like a Kantian version of Ockham’s razor, he characterizes Kant’s philosophy of religion as ‘an uncompromising attack upon existing religions and an attempt to eliminate them from the historical scene’.11 Kant, on this view, is not only unfriendly to organized religion in general and Christian theology in particular, but antagonistic in an eliminative sense – Kant is taken to be intent on removing religion and theology from the academy altogether. What remains is a so-called ‘civil’ society divorced from religious affiliations and institutions or basically a secularised version of Judeo-Christian religious ideals.

Gordon Michalson, a Kant interpreter concerned with the welfare of Christian theology, applies the Strawsonian Kant to the flow of ideas about God in the Western philosophical tradition. He understands the kind of religiously subversive subjectivity found in the interpretations of Byrne and Yovel to be the real legacy of Kant. Michalson’s thesis is ‘that [Kant’s] own efforts to ameliorate the theologically destructive effects of the Critique of Pure Reason implicitly make things worse for traditional theism, not better’.12 Kant, in Michalson’s view, moves from theoretical agnosticism to a vicious form of autonomous or subjective theism, where Christianity emerges from Kant’s philosophy as the means to a thoroughly secular end, rather than as an end in itself. He traces the influence of Kant through a philosophical stream of thought stretching from Descartes to Feuerbach, characterizing Kant’s philosophy as ‘a way station between Luther and Marx’.13 Michalson’s conclusion, echoing Yovel’s sentiments, is that ‘Kant has cut off the head of the traditional religious body, yet the corpse continues for a time to twitch and move, as though life is still in it when it is not’.14

While the atheistic and agnostic theological movements after Kant are undeniable, they are not the only legacy of Kant traditionally understood. Some approaches to theology emerging out of this tradition are just as restrictive in their allowance of rational access to knowledge and experience of God as Byrne’s, Yovel’s and Michalson’s, but nevertheless understand the idea of God to have more significant practical implications than either theological atheism or agnosticism admits. Theologians of this sort take the idea of God to be a uniquely important reference point for human thinking about the world and the place of human beings within it. Theology matters not because God is real per se, but because the idea of God gives meaning to the moral quest where otherwise there would be none. Because we do not know what actually obtains in reality but desire for it all to make sense anyway, we are warranted in constructing our own ideas about God and embracing these ideas in faith. These ideas become for us realms of meaning focused on divine things with no actual or possible corresponding reference in experience. Transcendent metaphysics matters to philosophical inquiry only insofar as our ideas about it are thought to enhance human well-being and flourishing. On this view, human thinking about God is tantamount to theological non-realism. The idea of God is a pragmatic one, but attempting to take theology beyond nonrealism is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Good examples of the non-realist approach to Kant can be found in the interpretations of Keith Ward and Don Cupitt.15 Citing Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, Ward points out how Kant explicitly affirms certain theological premises: ‘though ethics cannot depend upon metaphysical or theological belief, it necessarily gives rise to theological belief and cannot exist without it’.16 Yet, in Ward’s estimation, while clearly positive in theological intent, little of Kant’s pre-critical metaphysics actually survives the Copernican revolution in Kant’s thought. In the development of Kant’s ethics, Ward understands Kant to start from a position of theoretical agnosticism and, rather than gravitate toward atheism, move gradually toward moral non-realism according to the attractive force of human autonomy inherent in Kant’s philosophy. Kant’s rational foundations for theology are severely limited by a distinct lack of support (if not outright antagonism) found in the theoretical philosophy; whatever positive support is maintained corresponds directly to Kant’s moral theory. Ward finds a fundamental tension between Kant’s moral formalism and the religious realism implied in much of Kant’s language that simply cannot be resolved.17 For this reason, the rational grounds for theology in Kant must remain merely a formal aspect of his ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Note on Kant Citations
• 1 Can Theology Go Through Kant?
• 2 Knowledge and Cognition in Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy
• 3 Faith and Cognition in Kant’s Philosophy of Religion
• 4 Kant’s Moral Grounds for Theology
• 5 Kant’s Poetic Grounds for Theology
• 6 Kant’s Ontological Grounds for Theology
• 7 Rational Religious Faith and Kantian Theology
• 8 Concluding Comments
• Appendix A The Category of the ‘Holy’ in Rudolf Otto
• Appendix B Thinkers of TodayRudolf Otto—Philosopher of Religion
• Select Bibliography
• Index