22 April: The 301st Birthday of Immanuel Kant

So sorry, but I let us miss his 300th birthday last year! How does one celebrate a calendar event like this? Probably not by reading The Critique of Pure Reason--a birthday should be fun!

Well, if nothing else at least we can remember one of the smartest guys ever. He's right, too: Kant is usually right, and his ideas tend to be fairly simple and very sensible. The problem is that the poor fellow never figured out how to explain things in simple words. I've heard several times that Germans prefer to read him in English: His German is so hard that it's better to read him in your second language after the translators have done some of the hard work for you.

Well, if you're nerd enough, here's an intro to a few key concepts borrowed from a draft of my next book:

First, we cannot prove that God exists. Some things are beyond our ability usefully to think about, and we tend to think in contradictions when we try. We end up thinking both sides of the question whether God exists—the denial of the existence of God is just as problematic as the affirmation! Reality itself is quite free of contradictions, of course, but we think in contradictory ways when we try to think beyond our limits. Kant depicts this with his famous Antinomy of Reason, which uses pairs of contrary arguments to illustrate what happens when reason tries to think outside of its proper domain.[i] . . .

But reason as a guide for conduct justifies belief in God! Morality, not science, justifies religious belief.

For, and second, we should believe in a real God, as Kant explains in The Critique of Pure Reason.[ii] In order to satisfy the requirements of moral law we must believe that God will eventually align circumstances with morality—ensuring that morality is rewarded with happiness. We must always follow moral law, but creatures such as we are easily tempted to pursue selfish pleasures. Religious hope gives us the psychological wherewithal to act morally. We must believe that God will eventually make circumstances line up with the requirements of morality—we will be as happy as we are good! In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Miss Prism describes her own writing: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” But in Kant that is what religion means—hopefully not fiction, but definition a worthy goal that enables us to act as well as we can. Believing that God will ultimately bring about complete justice helps us live morally, looking with hope toward that end and doing what’s right no matter what, believing that it will ultimately be worth the effort. . . .

. . .

. . . Both morality and that belief in God which morality requires of us are justified by a synthetic a priori statements.

Fifth and finally, this shows the epistemic parity of belief about the physical world and beliefs about religion and morality. Everything in both spheres depends on foundational beliefs that may be doubted yet are perfectly rational. It’s no good rejecting religion and accepting modern science—nor vice versa. The only responsible thing is to accept both.

[i] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 467-495. A scholarly introduction to these arguments is Sadiq J. Al-Azm, The Origins of Kant’s Arguments in the Antinomies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

[ii] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 679-684.

Also, my YouTube Kant playlist has 42 videos aired or scheduled, and the newer ones are also in the the sister playlist/channel on Rumble. A few samples below. My current Friday series is a lovely stroll through the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals.