Kant’s writings address religion and God in two main modes. The first, and less common, deals with religious content and function, or God as an object of worship. This includes Kant’s concept of an inner moral consciousness or conscientiousness being fundamental to religion, the result of his Lutheran Pietist upbringing – which is likely the source for his disdain for external ritual & devotional practice as well. The second, better known and more frequently and deeply considered mode is Kant’s lifelong project of locating God within a system of philosophical principles which account for the order of the world. The latter must necessarily exist, and the locus of God within such a system is the project. The main conflict for Kant here is between the standard rationalist account (God is the supreme constitutive element ordering the world as the ultimate causal ground of the universe) and a concept of God as a regulative or limiting principle in the causal spatio-temporal ordering of the universe.
It should be obvious that no one work fully encapsulates Kant on religion; unfortunately what might be the best source, his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), is often overlooked or cherry picked only on the topic of evil. Kant’s 1763 “One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God” introduces his well-known objection to the ontological argument (existence is not a predicate) which is more fully explored in the Critique of Pure Reason. In “One Possible Basis”, Kant deals with the ontological argument in one category; and groups the cosmological and physico-theological (his term for the argument proceeding from the order and harmony of the world necessarily indicating a wise creator of same) arguments, deeming them invalid.
It is that kind of negative content (denials of premises and dismissals of arguments, etc.) that are traditionally used characterize Kant on religion. In fact, much of his works that deal primarily with religion have a great deal of positive content – such as “Theodicy” (1791), Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), “The End of All Things” (1794), “Conflict of the Faculties” (1798) and even the three Critiques. Much of the perceived negativity results from Kant’s denial of the existence of “religious knowledge”. Given how much Kant addresses types of knowledge and their workings, it is crucial to recognize that his dismissal of religious knowledge is necessary to protect the separate concept of faith. For Kant, faith is the only proper mode of religious assent and necessarily distinct from knowledge. Kant is merely establishing the limits of knowledge so that he may “make room for faith” as he says in the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason.
It is this contrast of knowledge and faith, and which one can be used in speaking of religion and religious concepts, that I want to discuss; I will therefore skip the discussions of the arguments for God’s existence and Kant’s objections thereto (since I’ve already delved into that a few times before!).
From the most ‘real’ to the least, Kant’s hierarchy of categories of mental activity looks something like this: knowledge -> cognition -> thought. Faith is on a separate plane. There is no knowledge outside of experience and the spatio-temporal-causal order. There is no cognition of objects which are outside of experience or the spatio-temporal-causal order. Without possible experience, anything supersensible cannot be known; likewise, if cognition is a semantic concept, denying the cognition of the supersensible is denying the intelligibility of religious concepts. But Kant is not saying this – cognition is thinking of an object or proposition in relation to spatio-temporal-causal order. It is not semantic, but epistemic – a mode of thinking, directed at objects whose reality can be determined (whether or not already done). The only thing required for thinking is that the object or proposition being thought about is not self-contradictory. Cognition on the other hand engenders thought with Real Possibility and is therefore not possible once the object/proposition goes beyond the bounds of possible experience. Therefore, there cannot be cognition of God because there is no viable experience of his existence. This does not carry on down the chain, though, to mean that there can be no thought of God. On the contrary, Kant believes that religious concepts and doctrine, and indeed God, are thinkable – but their truth or falsehood cannot be determined. This is where faith comes in.
For Kant, faith is another method of “holding to be true” (Furwahrhalten) alongside knowledge and opinion/persuasion. Like these, faith is a mode of justified assent – not based on experience or argument, but in practical reason and the demands of the practical life. Unlike knowledge, faith is tied to the will – making it “free assent” to the truth or falsehood, rather than one which relies on proof. In this way, Kant assigns boundaries to knowledge and cognition, preserving faith from the attacks and requirements of those modes of thought. Faith is grounded in the objective, like knowledge, rather than the subjective or theoretical like persuasion. Faith is therefore a legitimate mode of conviction. The basis for faith, the ‘needs of practical reason’, may not be as easily understood as the basis for knowledge (experience), but Kant attributes those needs to an objective determining ground of the will – that is, an a priorinecessary object of the will. The distinction between the practical assent of faith and the theoretical assent of persuasion is free will; knowledge is a movement of the intellect grounded in experience, persuasion is a theoretical assent based on subjectives, but the free assent of faith is a determinate act of will. Faith is a first-person act, rather than one initiated by a third-party - an apt compassion might be to Descartes’ cogito. Kant might have rephrased that famous principle as credo ergo sum – for Descartes means to capture that willed act of thought Kant terms faith rather than the Kantian concept of knowledge or shallow thinking alone.
For Kant then it is not that the supersensible cannot be thought of or accessed, instead he delegates those matters to faith. Religious matters, including the concept of God, can be discussed as rationally and fully as any others – it is simply an issue of faith, of free willed assent to concepts, their attributes, and their truth or falsehood, rather than of knowledge (which depends upon objective experiential bases). I have discussed here the concept of faith in terms of Kant’s hierarchy of brain activity – the faith he terms ‘pure rational faith’ or in later works ‘moral faith’; it is important to note that he also uses faith in the more traditional sense of Glaube (belief or faith) in his corpus – for instance, when he speaks of specific religions’ traditions and rituals, he uses the term historical faith. In works dealing more in depth with religion(s), the terms “saving faith”, “servile faith” and “ecclesiastical faith” appear as well. These are species and relatives of the rational faith we have explored above. The historical faiths, or established religions with doctrines and rituals, act as vehicles by which we reach a pure rational system of religion (which has principles derived from reason alone, e.g. the Highest Good). For Kant, the path to God and/or immortality is obtained through morality being prioritized over self-interest – the various dogmas or observances one uses to achieve such an inner order can vary in outward appearance (that is, can be Hindu or Christian or none of the above). For Kant, it is possible to remain agnostic about the rituals and miracles and claims of specific religions while still following a path toward rational faith; he admits that the a priori path is harder for the average person and that much of humanity benefits greatly from the ‘arbitrary’ and ‘contingent’ external features of religion – he would hope we can someday eliminate the need for such trappings. This again has been overwrought as negative and agnostic or atheistic, when in fact Kant simply a very logical Lutheran. The excesses of worship and the decoration of ritual do not comport with his Pietist upbringing, and they play no role in the essential quest for God, which can be conducted entirely with reason and the will. Kant is, in fact, quite a theologian and to dismiss his valid philosophy of religion simply because of some slightly heretical or dismissive views is unfair and improper. Kant’s conception of faith is highly useful, and grows even more ecumenically useful as the years pass – if all religious persons could agree that faith is grounded in the will and in pure reason, discussions about the differences in the outward manifestations of it could be reduced to ways of improving the faith at the center of all these.
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