Kenny Anthony. The Rise of Modern Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 3

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variable, and contingent items in the world of experience to provide the

necessary stable grounding for our fragile and X eeting cosmos.

However, Kant has a further criticism of the cosmological argument

which is independent of his claim that it is the ontological argument in

disguise. All forms of the cosmological argument seek to show that a series

of contingent causes, however prolonged, can be completed only by a

necessary cause. But if we ask whether the necessary cause is, or is not, part

of the chain of causes, we are faced with a dilemma. If it is part of the chain ,

then we can ask, in its case as in others, why it exists. But we cannot

imagine a supreme being saying to itself ‘I am from eternity to eternity, and

outside me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am

I?’ (A, 613). On the other hand, if the necessary being is not part of the

chain of causation, how can it account for the links in the chain that end

with the existence of myself ?

The argument for God’s existence that Kant treats most gently is the

physico-theological proof, which he says must always be mentioned with

respect and which he himself states with great eloquence:

This world presents to us such an immeasurable spectacle of variety, order,

purpose and beauty, shown alike in its inWnite extent and in the unlimited

divisibility of its parts, that even with such knowledge as our weak understanding

can acquire we encounter so many marvels immeasurably great that all speech

loses its force, all numbers their power to measure, our thoughts lose all precision,

and our judgement of the whole dissolves into an amazement whose very silence

speaks with eloquence. Everywhere we see a chain of eVects and causes, of

ends and means, regularity in coming into and going out of existence. Nothing

has of itself come into the condition into which we Wnd it, but always points

behind itself to something else as its cause; and this in its turn obliges us to make

the same inquiry. The whole universe would thus sink into the abyss of nothing-

ness unless over and above this inWnite chain of contingencies one assumed

something to support it—something that is original and independently self-

subsistent, and which not only caused the origin of the universe but also secures

its continuance. (A, 622)

The argument thus presented seems to combine several of the traditional

proofs of God’s existence—the argument to a Wrst cause, for instance, as

well as the argument from design. There is no doubt that everywhere in the

world we Wnd signs of order, in accordance with a determinate purpose,

apparently carried out with great wisdom. Since this order is alien to the

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GOD

individual things which constitute the world, we must conclude that it

must have been imposed by one or more sublime wise causes, operating not

blindly as nature does, but freely as humans do. Kant raises various

diYculties about the analogies that the argument draws beteween the

operation of nature and the artiWce of human skill; but his real criticism

of the proof is not to deny its authority but to limit its scope. The most the

argument can prove is the existence of ‘an architect of the world who is

always very much hampered by the adaptability of the material in which he

works, not a creator of the world to whose idea everything is subject’. Many

religious believers would be very content to have established beyond

reasonable doubt the existence of such a grand architect.

However, Kant did not say his last word about God in the Critique of Pure

Reason. In his second critique he sets out a number of postulates of practical

reason; assumptions that must be made if obedience to the moral law is to

be made a rational activity. The postulates turn out to be the same as the

traditional topics of natural metaphysics: God, freedom , and immortality.

We have an obligation to pursue perfect goodness, which includes both

virtue and happiness. We can only have an obligation to pursue something

if it is possible of achievement: ‘Ought’, Kant said memorably, ‘implies can.’

But only an all-powerful, omniscient God could ensure that virtue and

happiness can coincide—and even such a God can do so only if there is a

life after the present one. Hence, it is morally necessary to assume the

existence of God.

Kant insists that there is no inconsistency between this claim and his

denial in the Wrst critique that speculative reason could prove the existence

and attributes of God. The postulation of God’s existence demanded by the

moral life is an act of faith. Already in a preface to the Wrst Critique Kant had

marked out the di Verence between the two approaches to theology, and

claimed that his critical approach to metaphysics was actually a necessary

condition of a morally valuable belief in God’s existence:

I cannot even assume God, freedom and immortality for the sake of the necessary

practical use of my reason unless I simultaneously deprive speculative reason of its

pretension to extravagant insights . . . Thus I have to deny knowledge in order to

make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics—the idea that it is possible to

make progress in the subject without criticizing pure reason—is the true source of

that dogmatic unbelief which is at odds with morality. (B)

327

GOD

The architect of the cosmos, portrayed in William Blake’s The Ancient of Days

328

GOD

Kant’s postul ation of God as a condition of moral behaviour is an elabor-

ation of a strategy Wrst laid out by Pascal, namely, that we should believe

that God exists not because we have reason to think that ‘God exists’ is

true, but because it is a proposition that is good for us to believe.

The Absolute of Hegel

Hegel was fond of using Christian language. For instance, he divides the

history of Germany into three periods: the period up to Charlemagne,

which he calls the Kingdom of the Father; the period from Charlemagne to

the Reformation, which he calls the Kingdom of the Son; and Wnally

the period from the Reformation to the Prussian monarchy, which is the

Kingdom of the Holy Ghost or Spirit. From time to time he refers to

the absolute as God and his statement that the absolute is the Thought

that thinks itself recalls a phrase of Aristotle that was often employed by

Christian thinkers as an approach to a deWnition of God. But on examin-

ation it turns out that the absolute is something very diVerent from the

Christian God.

God as conceived by Christian tradition is an eternal, unchanging, being

whose existence is quite independent of the existence of the world and

of human beings. Before Adam and Abraham existed, God already existed

in the fullness of self-awareness. Hegel’s absolute, on the other hand, is

a spirit who lives only through the lives of human beings, and the self-

awareness of the absolute is brought about by the reXection of philosophers

in the everyday world. Spirit, however, is not simply reducible to the

totality of human thinking; the absolute has purposes which are not

those of any human thinker and which human activity unconsciously

serves. But the spirit’s plan of the universe is not something imposed from

outside by a transcendent creator; it is an internal evolution programmed

by a cosmic equivalent of DNA.

Hegel saw his system as a rational, scienti W c, presentation of truths

conveyed symbolically by religion. Philosophy and religion covered the

same area as each other:

The objects of philosophy are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In

both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the

GOD

329

Truth. Both in like manner go on to treat of the Wnite worlds of Nature and the

human Mind, with their relation to each other and to their truth in God.

In both philosophy and religion mankind aims to make its own the

universal cosmic reason: religion does this by worship; philosophy by rational

reXection.

Initially, religion presents us with myths and images. Thus in classical

Antiquity Homer and Hesiod created the pantheon of Greek gods and

goddesses. The Wrst reaction of philosophy to myth and image is to explode

their pretensions to literal truth: thus Plato denounces the theology of the

poets and the sculptors. This pattern repeats itself in other cultures. The

Jewish and Christian narratives, for instance, are mocked by the philo-

sophers of the Enlightenment. But this antagonism between religion and

anti-religious philosophy is superseded in the true, Hegelian, philosophy

which accepts both faith and reason as diVerent methods of presenting a

single eternal truth.

What philosophy presents in thought, religion presents in images. What

appears in Hegel’s system as the objectiWcation of the concept in Nature

is presented in the great monotheistic religions as the free creation of a

world by a transcendent God. The Hegelian insight that the Wnite spirit is

a moment in the life of inWnite spirit is expressed in Christ ianity by the

doctrine that in Christ God became incarnate in a human being. But

philosophy does not render religion superXuous: ‘The form of Religion is

necessary to Mind as it is in and for itself; it is the form of truth as it is for all

men, and for every mode of consciousness.’ Hegel proudly proclaimed that

he was a Lutheran and intended to remain one (LHP, I.73).

Hegel’s attitude to Christian doctrines, then, was one of sympathetic

condescension. So too was his attitude to traditional proofs of the existence

of God. But if God is the absolute, and the absolute is all being, then God’s

existence hardly needs proof. That is Hegel’s version of the ontological

argument. ‘It would be strange’, he wrote, ‘if the concrete totality we call

God were not rich enough to include so poor a category as being, the very

poorest and most abstract of all’ (Logic 1975, 85). For him, the real proof of

the existence of God is the Hegelian system itself in its entirety.

The early modern period was a testing time for natural theology. It

underwent criticism not only from philosophers who became increasingly

GOD

330

sceptical of elements of religious tradition, but also from theologians who

wished to downgrade the claims of natural religion to make room for faith.

The Enlightenment philosophers sought to downgrade and perhaps elim-

inate the input of theological doctrines into the areas of epistemology,

psychology, biology, ethics, and politics. The French Revolution and its

aftermath led European thinkers to re-evaluate both traditional religion

and the Enlightenment programme. In the nineteenth century, as we will

observe in the next volume, this led to both an intensiWca tion of the

challenge to religion from admirers of the sciences, and a reactive response

from the religious intelligentsia.

GOD

331

CHRONOLOGY

1513 Machiavelli’s Prince

1516 More’s Utopia

1520 Papal condemnation of Luther

1540 Foundation of the Jesuits

1543 Copernicus publishes heliocentrism

1545–63 Council of Trent

1561 Murder of Ramus

1569 Montaigne’s Essays

1588 Molina’s Concordia

1600 Burning of Giordano Bruno

1605 Bacon’s Advancement of Learning

1625 Grotius’ On War and Peace

1638 Galileo’s Two New Sciences

1641 Descartes’ Meditations

1650 Death of Descartes

1651 Hobbes’ Leviathan

1662 Death of Pascal

1677 Publication of Spinoza’s Ethics

1686 Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics

1687 Newton’s Principia Mathematica

1690 Locke’s Essay and Treatises of Civil Government

1713 Berkeley’s Three Dialogues

1714 Leibniz’s Monadology

1739 Hume’s Treatise

1750 Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws

1764 Reid’s Common Sense

1764 Rousseau’s Social Contract

1781 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

1785 Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals

1804 Fichte’s Wissenschaftslerhe

1807 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

1831 Death of Hegel

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AND CONVENTIONS

General

HWP Bertrand Rusell, History of Western Philosophy

PASS Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

ST Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, cited by part, question, and

article

CHSCP The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. D. Garber

and M. Ayers

Luther

E Erasmus-Luther: Discourse on Free Will, ed. E. F. Winter (London:

Constable, 1961), cited by page

WA Weimarer Ausgabe, the standard edition of his works.

Machiavelli

P Il Principe, cited by chapter

Montaigne

ME Essais, cited by page in the Flammarion edition of 1969

U Utopia, cited by page in the edition of E. Surtz (New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964)

Ramus

L Peter Ramus: The Logike 1574 (Menton: Scolar Press, 1970), cited by

page

Suarez

DM Disputationes Metaphysicae ¼ vol. 25 of Opera Omnia (Hildesheim:

Olms, 1965), cited by disputation, section, and article

Bacon

B Oxford Authors Bacon, cited by page

Descartes

AT The standard edition of Adam and Tannery, cited by volume and

page

CSMK The 3-volume standard English translation, cited by volume and

page

Hobbes

L Leviathan, cited by page in the Oxford World Classics edition, ed.

J. C. A. Gaskin

G Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford

World Classics, 1994), cited by page

Locke

E Essay on Human Understanding, cited by page in the Oxford edition by

P. H. Nidditch

T Two Treatises on Government, cited by page in the Yale University

Press edition of 2003

Pascal and Malebranche

EM Essai de la Metaphysique, ibid.

LP Lettres Provinciales, ed. H. F. Stewart (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1919), cited by page

P Pascal’s Pense

es, cited by the number in the Oxford World Classics

edition

R de V De la Recherche de la Verite

in Oeuvres Comple

tes de Malebranches, ed.

Andre

Robinet (Paris: Vrin, 1958–84)

TNG Malebranche’s Treatise on Nature and Grace, cited by page of the

Oxford translation of 1992

Spinoza

CPS The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. D. Garett (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996)

E References are given by page to Curley’s Penguin translation of

the Ethics (1996)

Ep References are to the letters edited by A. Wolf

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

334

Leibniz

A The Leibniz Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1956)

D References to the Discourse on Metaphysics are to the Manchester

edition of 1988

G References are given by volume and page to the Gerhardt edition

of the complete works.

T Theodicy, trs. E. M. Huggard (Lasalle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1985)

Berkeley

BPW References are given by page to Berkeley’s Philosophical Writings, ed.

D. A. Armstrong (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1965)

Hume

T Treatise of Human Nature, ed. S. Bigge and P. H. Nidditch; references

are given by book, part and, section.

E Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by the same editors; refer-

ences are given by page numbers

W Hume on Religion, ed. R. Wollheim (London: Collins, 1963)

Smith and Reid

I Thomas Reid, Inquiry and Essays, ed. R. E. Beanblossom and K.

Lehrer

TMS Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1976), cited by page

The Enlightenment

PD Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, ed T. Besterman (Harmonds-

worth: Penguin, 1971), cited by page

EL Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, ed. G. Truc (Paris: Payot, 1945 )

Rousseau

SC References to the Social Contract are by chapter and paragraph

Kant

A Reference by page number to the first edition of the Critique of Pure

Reason

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

335