The idea of the Devil . . . is so unstable that we cannot expect anyone to be convinced of its truth.
—Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, §44
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy occupies an intermediate position between radical empiricism and radical idealism and provided a bridge from the Enlightenment’s “cultured despisers” of religion and nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism to modernism. Kant was a Prussian raised in Lutheran Pietism who was known in his hometown of Königsberg for the regularity of his daily walks: it was said you could set your watch by him as he made his way along the same pathway, deep in contemplation. Early in his career, Kant was sympathetic to Leibniz’s rationalism but believed there were difficulties with it and so explored other positions. He read Hume’s writings and agreed to a great extent with his attack on metaphysics (specifically, cause and effect), although he found Hume’s radical skepticism problematic. He said Hume’s skepticism “first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.”
Kant’s Demythologized Evil
Kant’s theory of knowledge serves as a mediating response to the rationalists, for whom knowledge comes from reason alone, and the empiricists, who claim that sense experience is the only source of knowing. In this reconciling framework, knowledge comes though the synthesis of concepts and experience. Knowledge does come through sense experience, but the mind actively organizes that experience by means of a priori categories or concepts that are taken for granted by experience. Kant based the categories on the fact that we have an immediate awareness that thoughts and perceptions occurring simultaneously to us are our own. My awareness of the ache in my back and the awareness that this ache is mine have a kind of unity. This unity of self-aware experience cannot be extracted from experience alone—the unity that I comprehend in my point of view presupposes experience. The a priori categories are not like Plato’s Ideas, which are the very structures of reality itself. Kant’s categories are only mental structures, like predispositions to filter experience in certain ways. The categories apply only to the phenomenal, experiential world and not to the noumenal, that which is knowable only through thought.
The phenomenal is the world as we experience it, whereas the noumenal is the realm of ultimate or absolute reality. We can know some things about phenomena but can only hypothesize about the noumena. Kant insisted that the concept of noumena serves only to mark the limits of knowledge—we cannot say anything about the noumenal except that it is beyond our capacity to know. “God” is a noumenal aspect of human existence, so metaphysical arguments about God go beyond the limits of human reason and end in contradiction and false claims. It is impossible for the human mind to reach beyond the limits of the phenomenal world, and yet we cannot help but try. He offered a proof for the existence of God on the basis of morality. As rational beings, we are obligated to work for the greatest good. Since “ought” implies “can,” God must exist, and there must be an afterlife within which we can obtain the greatest good.
There are real limits to human knowing—there are some things, in other words, that we just cannot know. The limited nature of knowledge means that some metaphysical questions, like the central moral question regarding the connection between happiness and virtue, should be set aside for ethical reasons. We assume that virtue and happiness ought to be connected in a way that means the virtuous should be rewarded and the wrongdoer punished; in fact, faith in the existence of a Being capable of bringing this connection about is essential to morality. However, in a world where humans know the consequences of every act, the “hope for reward and fear of punishment would take the place of moral motives.” Finding a solution to the problem of evil would be not just immoral but also blasphemous for Kant because doing so would eliminate the need for morality. On these grounds, Kant directly attacked the entire endeavor of theodicy.
Kant’s 1791 essay, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy,” called into question all efforts to explain how and why evil might be compatible with God’s existence. Defense of God is not the best use of one’s time, he said, although it can be tolerated since we should test all principles before accepting them as true. Even so, the whole endeavor is likely just “presumptuous reason failing to recognize its limitations.” Anyone who hopes to vindicate God in the face of evil has to prove one of three things: first, that which we call evil is not actually “counterpurposive” (anything that works against our own happiness, comfort, etc.); second, if there are counterpurposive events, they are unintended consequences due to the nature of the universe; or third, they happen as a result of free choice on the part of humans or “higher spiritual beings.” The theodicist does not need to offer proof of God’s wisdom but cannot dismiss evil by claiming we cannot understand the ways of God.
There are three sorts of counterpurposive events: sin (“evil proper,” which cannot be sought either as means or ends), pain (which can co-exist with a wise will as a means), and the gap between crimes and punishments in life. God’s holiness stands against moral evil or sin; his goodness stands against pain; and his justice stands against the apparent lack of consequences for the crimes of the depraved. After taking each of these points apart, Kant asserts that no theodicy has ever succeeded in vindicating the governor of this world over against the doubts that lived experience causes. No matter the approach, the problem of evil cannot be solved through arguments of reason. He then explores the biblical story of Job’s trials and concludes that “it is sincerity of heart, not distinction of insight” that results in God’s rewarding “the honest man over the religious flatterer.” The crux of the matter is Job’s founding of his faith on morality rather than his morality on faith that leads to “not a religion of supplication, but a religion of good life conduct.” The answer to the problem of evil is a matter of faith, not knowledge.
Kant’s 1794 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason drew a tremendous amount of criticism from his philosophical peers for its insistence on what he called radical evil, a concept that bears striking similarities to the Christian doctrine of original sin. In the preface to Religion, Kant asserted that morality inescapably leads to religion, and through religion leads “to the idea of a mighty moral lawgiver.” He used a metaphor of two concentric circles to illustrate the relationship between philosophy and historical, revealed religion. The “pure religion of reason” makes up the inner, smaller circle with its core moral concepts, and historical religions make up the larger, outer circle. Kant’s goal here, as a philosopher of religion, was to show that Scripture and reason are not merely compatible but united. The reaction to this project was quite negative: Goethe wrote of it that “Kant required a long lifetime to purify his philosophical mantle. . . . And now he has wantonly tainted it with the shameful stain of radical evil, in order that Christians might be attracted to kiss its hem.”
Religion offers the argument that we innately have a predisposition toward either good or evil, and we adopt one or the other through use of free will. There is no propensity to evil in terms of our physical natures (evil is not a biological inheritance)—to be evil is to be aware of moral law and choose to deviate from it. Kant demythologizes the demonic: it is not surprising, he says, that the apostles represented the evil inclination as outside of us, as evil spirits. The demonic seems intended to represent something unfathomable to us. It does not matter whether we find the tempter within ourselves or outside—we are guilty regardless, insofar as we are in agreement with the temptation. Although he does not make this entirely clear, Kant seems to intend the same sort of demythologizing regarding Jesus as God Incarnate. Jesus, he says, is the personification of the Good, “the prototype of a humanity well-pleasing to God (the Son of God).” In following Jesus’s example, humanity can defeat evil through establishment of an ethical community made up of the people of God.
Kant’s Religion garnered criticism from all fronts: it was banned by the government censors, the philosophers accused him of having reverted to the Lutheranism of his youth, and the theologians accused him of having reduced Christianity to one faith among many, each manifesting to some degree the “one (true) religion” of morality. Even so, his trust that human reason could lead to establishment of a human community that manifests the best in human nature shaped theology and philosophy for many decades to come.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw tremendous advances in human knowledge of the physical world, many of which would pose major challenges to theology and faith. The cosmos came alive in a new way with the discoveries of astronomers like Kepler and Galileo. Nature became more understandable through the development of calculus and other mathematical advances that made Newton’s description of gravity and the laws of nature possible. The human body began to reveal its secrets as William Harvey described the circulatory system, Robert Hooke discovered the cell, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. Biologists began to better understand the phenomenon of species development as spontaneous generation was proven to be wrong, and species extinction was shown to be true. Geology came into being as a field of study and an early practitioner, Nicholas Steno, proposed in 1669 that fossils are the remains of ...
