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The Ambiguous Revolution: Kant on the Nature of Faith1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Don Wiebe
Don Wiebe
Affiliation:
Dept of Religion, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada
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Extract

Kant, it has been said, brought a ‘Copernican Revolution’ to religion and theology no less so than he did to physics. According to Karl Barth, for example, Kant's theology diverges radically from tradition. While rejecting the traditional proofs as foundation for a knowledge of God (his existence, etc.) as wholly inadequate, he, nevertheless, remained a theist. Unwilling to believe in God in the absence of good reasons for doing so, however, he offered an alternative justification for such belief. Religious belief, he insists, is based on practical considerations rather than on theoretical ones. Kant, therefore, did not consider it as necessarily irrational to hold a thing as true even though it be a theoretically insufficient holding to be true. According to him it is simply that in such a case the belief that ‘something’ is true does not constitute knowledge. And it is this displacement of knowledge in the religious sphere by faith that essentially constitutes the revolutionary change in theology.

Contrary to this generally accepted view of Kant's thought, I shall in this paper argue the essentially unrevolutionary character of his understanding of theology. There is, I shall maintain, a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past. The faith of which Kant speaks, I shall attempt to show, is a cognitive faith—a source of beliefs that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge. His theology, therefore, is, like the theology of his predecessors, ultimately an inferential knowledge of the divine.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 33 , Issue 6 , December 1980 , pp. 515 - 532
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1980

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References

page 515 note 2 Barth, Karl, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, Simon and Shuster, 1969; P. 151.Google Scholar

page 515 note 3 This claim appears odd in light of Kant's remarks, in his ‘What is Enlightment’?, with regard to the autonomy of reason and his comment in the Critique of Pure Reason that ‘Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit’. (Kant on History, ed. by Beck, L. W., Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963Google Scholar; p. 3 and Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, Macmillan, 1965Google Scholar; AXIa.) Kant's displacement of theoretical knowledge by faith, however, is not a displacement of the rational by the irrational for, as Barth points out (Barth, op. cit, 1969; p. 156), this move to faith is the result of reason's perception of its own limitations. Religion for Kant, that is, is seen, as Barth puts it (ibid., p. 188), ‘as a necessary phenomenon of reason’.

page 516 note 1 The generally assumed distinction between belief and knowledge in Western philosophy I have argued elsewhere is not tenable. (Cf. my ‘Is Religious Belief Problematic?’, Christian Scholar's Review, VII, 1977.Google Scholar) I shall be assuming throughout the critical sections of this paper, therefore, that ‘knowledge’ and ‘justified belief’ are indistinguishable.

page 516 note 2 Cf. I. Kant, op. cit., 1965; A299, B539, A306, A307.

page 516 note 3 L. W. Beck, 1956; ‘Translator's Introduction’ to Kant's, I.Critique of Practical Reason, p. XIV.Google Scholar

page 517 note 1 I. Kant, op. cit., 1965; A297.

page 517 note 2 L. W. Beck, op. cit., 1956; p. XV. Such claims would not be faith claims but rather the claims of naïve credulity. Such claims made upon insufficient evidence when evidence is potentially obtainable is simply intellectual dishonesty.

page 518 note 1 It is important to note here that the second edition of the first Critique was published about the same time as the second Critique came off the press. We ought therefore to expect a good deal of overlap of the discussion in these two works and some change in the former due to the position taken up in the latter.

page 518 note 2 I. Kant, op. cit., 1965; BXXV.

page 518 note 3 ibid., BXXV.

page 519 note 1 I. Kant, op. cit., 1965; BXXV.

page 519 note 2 ibid., BXXVIa, my emphasis.

page 520 note 1 I. Kant, op. cit., 1965; BXXI.

page 520 note 2 Kant explicitly draws attention to the differences between mere hypotheses or assumptions and postulates in the Critique of Practical Reason (Bobbs-Merrill, 1956)Google Scholar. See especially p. 142 (p. 147).

page 520 note 3 Cf. I. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Hafner, 1951; p. 321.

page 520 note 4 Kant, op. cit., 1965; BXXX.

page 521 note 1 This is the assessment of F. Ferré in his Basic Modem Philosophy of Religion (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967; p. 222), an assessment which I shall criticize later in this essay as slightly naïve.

page 521 note 2 K. Barth, op. cit., 1969; p. 161. H. J. de Vleeschauwer makes a similar claim in The Development of Kantian Thought (Nelson, 1962). He insists that ‘for fifty years Kant dreamed and planned to establish that future of metaphysics, and for him to proclaim its downfall amounted to discrediting it temporarily in order to lay secure foundations for it. His complaints are directed against a particular metaphysics and a particular (philosophical) method…. To discover ultimately the correct philosophical method and by means of it to construct an eternal metaphysics were the aims cherished by Kant.’ (p. 2.)

A recent critique of Kant's argument by Byrne, Peter—‘Kant's Moral Proof of the Existence of God’, Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 32, 4, 1979, pp. 333–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar—I suggest fails to take this intention seriously and places an emphasis upon Kant's ‘Critique of all Theology based upon speculative Principles of Reason’ that is not there in the original. I have more to say of this below.

page 521 note 3 Kant, op. cit., 1951; p. 324.

page 522 note 1 This is seemingly overlooked by Hick, J. in his Faith and Knowledge (Cornell U. Press, 1966)Google Scholar in which he suggests that the reference to faith in Kant is ‘tied’ to the will rather than to reason. (See esp. p. 12.)

page 522 note 2 F. Ferré, op. cit., 1967; p. 223.

page 522 note 3 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B499.

page 523 note 1 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B850.

page 523 note 2 ibid., B850.

page 523 note 3 Kant, op. cit., 1951; p. 325.

page 523 note 4 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B851.

page 523 note 5 ibid., B853.

page 524 note 1 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B855.

page 524 note 2 ibid., B856.

page 524 note 3 ibid., B662.

page 525 note 1 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B857.

page 525 note 2 Ferré, op. cit., 1967; p. 222.

page 525 note 3 Walsh, W. H., Kant's Moral Theology, Oxford University Press, 1963.Google Scholar

page 525 note 4 ibid., p. 284.

page 526 note 1 Walsh, op. cit., 1965; p. 284. Peter Byrne, op. cit., 1979, is similarly critical. Byrne, however, simply argues that Kant's position here is incoherent. The criticisms of Walsh set out here apply to Byrne with equal force.

page 527 note 1 Hick, op. cit., 1966; p. 4. On this point see also Ferré (op. cit.), pp. 86–89.

page 527 note 2 Baillie, John, Our Knowledge of God, Oxford University Press, 1939; p. 161.Google Scholar

page 528 note 1 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B833.

page 528 note 2 Kant, op. cit., 1956; p. 132.

page 528 note 3 ibid., p. 132 (my emphasis).

page 528 note 4 ibid., p. 134 (my emphasis).

page 528 note 5 ibid., p. 133.

page 529 note 1 Kant, op. cit., 1956; p. 135.

page 529 note 2 Kant, op. cit., 1965; B859.

page 529 note 3 Kant, op. cit., 1956; pp. 5, 6 (my emphasis).

page 530 note 1 Kant, op. cit., 1956; p. 121. Space does not afford further discussion of this matter here. It must be pointed out, however, that Walsh's claim that Kant's pure moral theology is identical in essentials to the ‘functional’ view of theology expressed by Braithwaite, in his ‘An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief’ (Cambridge University Press, 1955)Google Scholar is simply wrong, although it might apply, I think, to ‘ecclesiastical’ or ‘doctrinal’ faith as it is expressed in Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. (On this score it seems to me that G. E. Michalson, Jr. (in ‘The Role of History in Kant's Religious Thought’, in Anglican Theological Review, LIX: 1977Google Scholar) attributes too much value, so to speak, to doctrinal faith.) For a position somewhat similar to the one I adopt here see Wood, A. W., Kant's Moral Religion, Cornell University Press, 1970.Google Scholar

page 531 note 1 Baillie, John, Our Knowledge of God, Oxford University Press, 1939; p. 157.Google Scholar

page 531 note 2 ibid., p. 161.

page 531 note 3 Baillie, it is obvious, had a profound sympathy for Kant's position but felt the change from traditional theology was not radical enough. Faith, Baillie wished to argue—particularly in his The Sense of the Presence of God (Oxford University Press, 1962)Google Scholar—is a direct, non-inferential but not non-mediated apprehension or awareness of God involving personal commitment. To see it as less, according to Baillie, would be to sell the ‘revolution’ short.

For a similar understanding, see England, F. E., The Validity of Religious Experience, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1932Google Scholar. I have discussed a similar thesis in my ‘The Religious Experience Argument’, Sophia, Vol. XIV; 1975.Google Scholar

page 531 note 4 Kant's preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason seems to state the matter in precisely this way; see especially BXXI and BXXII.

page 532 note 1 Peter Byrne, op. cit., 1979; p. 334.

page 532 note 2 ibid., p. 335.

page 532 note 3 ibid., p. 335.