(October 22, 2013 at 3:15 am)filambee Wrote: From what I understand, Kant thinks that intuitions based on pure speculative reasoning are meaningless. He holds the notion that God cannot be proven rationally or empirically and that any knowledge cannot exist independently. He believes, however, that morality or a moral law is a function within the human mind that tells us how we ought to act and that it “commands and constrains us absolutely, with ultimate authority and without regard to our preferences or empirical features or circumstances”. This is the foundation of his a rational argument for a reason to believe in God’s existence. He then proposes that the purpose and practical reason of living a virtuous life is to arrive at the highest good - “a world of universal, maximal virtue, grounding universal, maximal happiness”. He thinks that belief in the realization of this world is necessary because disbelief in this ideal would lead to the meaninglessness of morality. Seeing this world unattainable by humans alone, he introduces the existence of God, a being that portions out happiness to those who are morally right. He claims that this type of reasoning is practical because if there were no God, there would be no reason to be good because it would never bring happiness. He thinks that we have infinite amount of time to achieve perfect virtuosity so that we can deserve the ultimate happiness. Therefore, he also has a practical reasoning for immortality of the soul.
Does he use any intuitions when he proposes his practical reason for God in his moral argument? What are some of your other thoughts on the soundness of his moral and theistic claims? Also, this is my first semester of philosophy (philosophy of religion) and my first time encountering Kant, so please correct me if I have any errors in my understanding.
While it is great to see a Christian finally moving on from Aquinas' tired old arguments, repeating the moral argument in another form doesn't seem very productive.
Moral argument:
P1. Objective moral values cannot exist without a god.
P2. Objective moral values do exist.
C. Therefore, god exists.
Here, Kant starts by assuming P2. According to him, the existence of moral law is axiomatic. And that is the first point at which he goes wrong. While Kant may regard morality as a function that "absolutely constrains and commands" you on how to act and he regards it as an actual mental feature present in all human being - the rest of us are not so easily convinced. And while this shortcoming would be sufficient to reject his argument, we need not stop there.
Regarding his distinction between pure and practical reasoning, Kant seems to have put himself in a spot. His belief in existence of a moral law and categorical imperatives is a product of pure reasoning - something you know intuitively as true without reference to sensory data. Whereas, other theologians typically start with the god assumption. Practical reasoning, according to him, is of the form "If you want X, do Y". Given that his moral law is not as obviously and absolutely applicable as he'd like, he needed a practical reason for its application as well - thus the existence of god. Compare Voltaire's statement "If there wasn't a god, we needed to invent one". The biggest problem I see with his argument is that he needed the concept of god for his view of morality to have teeth, but if his view of morality was as unconditionally and absolutely applicable as he proposes, then the god-proposition would've been superfluous.
