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The Ambiguity of Kantian Faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

J. C. Luik
J. C. Luik
Affiliation:
Dept. of Philosophy, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada
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Extract

In a recent article in this journal, Professor Wiebe has attempted to discard the traditional thesis about the relationship between faith and reason in Kant's critical philosophy and substitute a decidedly novel and superficially attractive interpretation. While traditional readings of Kant's theology have taken his denial of knowledge in order to make room for faith at more or less face value and have thus attributed to him a rather different sort of theology, Professor Wiebe rejects this polarity of knowledge and faith. Kant's faith, according to Wiebe, is a ‘cognitive faith — a source of belief that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge’. This claim in turn rests upon the assertion that the traditional distinction between belief and knowledge is untenable, that ‘… “knowledge” and “justified belief” are indistinguishable’. Wiebe would thus recast Kant's claim of denying knowledge to make room for faith to denying theoretical knowledge to make room for practical knowledge. Kantian faith then, ‘is not outside the realm of reason, but is rather one aspect of reason, as is knowledge’. It is in this sense that there is ‘a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past’

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , August 1983 , pp. 339 - 346
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1983

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References

page 339 note 1 Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 33 (1980), pp. 515–532.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 339 note 2 Wiebe, op. cit., p. 516.

page 339 note 3 ibid.

page 339 note 4 ibid., p. 522.

page 339 note 5 ibid., p. 515.

page 340 note 6 For a comprehensive account of such theology see Hirsch, Emanuel, Geschichte der neuercn evangelischen Theologii im zusammenhang mit din allgemcinen Bewegungen des europaeischen Denkens, Bertelsmann Verlag, Gütersloh, 1951.Google Scholar

page 341 note 7 Wiebe, op. cit., p. 522.

page 341 note 8 Wiebe, op. cit., p. 531.

page 341 note 9 ibid., p. 522.

page 342 note 10 ibid.

page 342 note 11 ibid.

page 342 note 12 ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ in Kant, I., Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Beck, L. W., ed., pp. 296–297.Google Scholar

page 342 note 13 ibid., p. 300. Emphasis my own.

page 342 note 14 Wiebe, op. cit., pp. 515–16.

page 342 note 15 Kant, , ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, p. 300.Google Scholar

page 342 note 16 ibid., p. 300.

page 343 note 17 ibid., pp. 300–1.

page 343 note 18 Wiebe, op. cit., p. 523.

page 343 note 19 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith, trans., B851.

page 343 note 20 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, J. C. Meredith, trans., 454.

page 344 note 21 ibid., 470. Emphasis my own.

page 344 note 22 I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, V, 147 (Beck).

page 344 note 23 ibid., V, 125.

page 344 note 24 ibid.

page 344 note 25 ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’, p. 305.

page 345 note 26 I. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, IV, 393 (Beck)

page 345 note 27 L. W. Beck, op. cit., p. 49.