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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant, it is said, never traveled more than
fifty miles from his native city of Konigsberg in
East Prussia. Nevertheless, there are few thinkers
who have had as wide an influence as Kant in the
history of Western thought. His importance for discussions
about science and religion stems from his
reasoned defense of the position that religion and
science should be kept clearly separated from one
another.
Life and writings
Born in 1724, Kant was the son of humble pietistic
parents who wished for him to have an education.
At sixteen he entered the University of Konigsberg,
where he studied Christian Wolff’s interpretation of
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s (1646–1716) philosophy.
Kant’s encounter with Isaac Newton’s
(1642–1727) work during his student years encouraged
in him an independent attitude toward Leibniz’s
thought, with the additional result that he developed
a profound interest in the natural sciences.
When his father died during his university training,
Kant left the university and served as a tutor in private
families near Konigsberg between 1748 and
1754. After returning to the university he completed
a thesis in June of 1755 and, on finishing a second
thesis in September, was granted permission to lecture.
Prior to the age of thirty-six, Kant’s writings
dealt primarily, although not exclusively, with the
natural sciences. His most famous work from this
period, the Universal Natural History and Theory of
the Heavens, was published in 1755 and contained
Kant’s ideas on the how a cosmos subject to Newton’s
laws of motion might have formed.
After Kant received a professorship in logic and
metaphysics at Konigsberg in 1770 it took some
time before his writings reflected the turn his appointment
marked from a pre-critical stance to what
he himself labeled critical philosophy. Once Kant
began publishing, the works came thick and fast.
The first edition of his most famous book, the Critique
of Pure Reason, did not appear until 1781.
When it did so it was largely misunderstood, moving
Kant to restate its main arguments two years
later in his Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics.
He also expanded the Critique in a second
edition in 1787, and in the following year he published
the first of two new critiques, the Critique of
Practical Reason. This second critique picked up
on a concern with moral philosophy Kant had initially
addressed in another work from the 1780s.
The Critique of Judgment, which appeared in 1790,
dealt with reasoning about the realms of the aesthetic
and the purposeful. Earlier in 1786 Kant returned
to his reflections on science and its methods
in a work entitled The Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science. Finally, his Religion Within the
Boundaries of Pure Reason, which appeared in
1793, provoked King Frederick William II to forbid
him from publishing anything more on religion, a
mandate he honored until the king’s death in 1797.
Kant died February 12, 1804.
Impact on science and religion discussion
Kant’s impact on the subject of natural science and
religion is best understood in his relation to the
Scottish thinker David Hume (1711–1776), whom
Kant claimed awakened him from his dogmatic
slumber. Exactly when this was to have occurred is
unclear; however, among other things Hume represented
for Kant the possibility that the use of reason
in fact undermined the essential truths of religion,
morality, and common sense. Kant faced
squarely Hume’s skepticism about causality and
other conclusions of common sense that haunted
the thinkers of the late eighteenth century. The fear
was that if Hume’s reasoning was correct about
these matters, then how was one to retain one’s
belief in God? As Kant’s contemporary Friedrich
Jacobi (1743–1819) put it, “Nothing frightens man
so much, nothing darkens his mind to such a degree
as when God disappears from nature …
when purpose, wisdom, and goodness no longer
seem to reign in nature, but only a blind necessity
of dumb chance.”
In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(1779) Hume exposed the inadequacy where the
relationship of God to nature was concerned of
both classical metaphysical rationalism, in which
one reasoned from principles accepted apart from
or before experience (a priori), and empiricism,
where reasoning was undertaken only after one
experienced the world (a posteriori). In the Critique
of Pure Reason, Kant attempted to forge a
new path between both rationalism and empiricism
by introducing what he called in the preface
to the second edition a “Copernican” viewpoint in
philosophy. The astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus
(1483–1543) had shown that the way to think
about the relationship of the earth and the sun was
to reverse their traditional roles. Kant demanded
that to understand the relationship of the world of
experience and the mind one must also reverse
the way in which roles were traditionally assigned.
It is not that the mind is shaped by experience of
the world (empiricism); rather, the world of experience
is shaped by “categories” associated with
the mind’s operation. But in shaping our experience
of the world the categories themselves prescribe
only the structure for objects of possible experience
(not the content of actual experience, as
in metaphysical rationalism). Human minds dictate
in advance, for example, that experience can only
be apprehended in accordance with causal relationships
between events, but they cannot determine
prior to a person’s experiencing the world
which specific causal relationships actually obtain.
Without content supplied by sense experience, the
mind, even equipped as it is by its categories,
would still be blind. But without the ordering impact
of the categories, experience would be chaos.
This is why Kant said at the beginning of the introduction
to the Critique that “although all our
knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow
that it all arises out of experience.”
This middle way contained important implications
for the understanding of scientific knowledge.
If the mind contributes in a formative way to
the manner in which people experience the world,
then they can no longer claim that the world they
experience is necessarily the world that exists apart
from the mind. Regularities in one’s experience of
the world, even those so repetitious as to earn the
label of scientific laws, cannot be known as regularities
in nature that one discovers; rather, they
bear the touch of one’s mind. People are, as Kant
says in his Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics,
“lawgivers of reason.” Scientific knowledge,
then, refers to the world of experience, the
world of phenomena apprehended with the
senses, not to a reality lying behind human experience.
Gone is the possibility of conceiving truth
as the correspondence of one’s ideas to the way
things are, a common conception of many scientists.
One cannot be sure of the way things are, so
there is no possibility of checking that against
one’s ideas.
If Kant’s critique of reason introduced a radical
limitation of what could be known, he was
adamant that there was a realm that lay beyond
cognition. “I have therefore found it necessary to
deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,”
he wrote in the preface to the second edition of
the Critique. The object of faith, however, could
not by definition be articulated or expressed in
terms of knowledge. Religion for Kant did not and
could not have to do with cognitive propositions
about nature. In his 1793 book, Religion within the
Boundaries of Reason Alone, he made clear that he
accepted Hume’s negative conclusions about the
so-called argument from design, according to
which one reasoned from evidence of design in
the world to the existence of a designer. Religion
did not commence with nor have to do with one’s
knowledge of the world. Religion had to do with
the purity of one’s heart. To be religious is to view
one’s duties as if they are divine commands. It
should be noted that Kant’s religious stance was
purely intellectual. In spite of the fact that his philosophy
made room for the possibility of eternal
life, it was clear to those close to him that he
scoffed at prayer and other religious practices and
that he had no faith in a personal God.
Kant’s position, then, radically separated science
from religion, as if the two subjects contained
no common ground. It took some time for this position
to gain a hearing since in the Romantic period,
which dominated in the first decades of the
nineteenth century, there was great dissatisfaction
with Kant’s severe restriction of reason’s scope to
the realm of phenomena. Even one of the earliest
neo-Kantian thinkers from this era, Jakob Fries
(1773–1843), added Ahndung (aesthetic sense) to
knowledge and faith as a third possible way in
which people may relate to that which exists outside
of them. Fries believed that through aesthetic
sense people could intimate the infinite that was
present in the finite.
It was not until the neo-Kantian revival of the
late nineteenth century that Kant’s radical separation
of science from religion emerged in earnest. In
the works of the Marburg theologian Wilhelm Herrmann
(1846–1922), composed during the heyday
of debates about biological evolution, one recognizes
the attempt to cede to natural science the
freedom to investigate natural phenomena without
restriction while at the same time stressing religion’s
right to address questions of value and right. If religion
must surrender nature to natural science, natural
science, in turn, must along with religion renounce
any claim to have arrived at metaphysical
reality. Religion becomes morality while science becomes
Naturbeherrschung, mastery of the world.
In the twentieth century the separation of natural
science and religion continued to mark much
of German theology, especially the works of well-known
existential theologians who wrote in the
decades following World War I. Most recently
something of a Kantian position on the relationship
between science and religion has been advocated
by the noted American paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2000) who, without ever
naming Kant, introduced the notion of non-overlapping
magisteria (NOMA) as a means of dealing
with the realities of science, which is concerned
with the factual construction of nature, and religion,
which concerns itself with moral issues about
the value and meaning of life. Gould acknowledged
more than classical neo-Kantians, however, that
while magisteria do not overlap, they are everywhere
interlaced in a complex manner that often
makes it extremely challenging to keep the two
separate. Critics of the Kantian position maintain
that in practice it is impossible to retain a rigid separation
of science and religion.
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