Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

XV

Introduction.

proposition allows for a deeper form of the so-called ontological proof The ontological proof is a classic philosophical argument that attempts to prove God’s existence through the very definition of God as the greatest possible being.. The concluding sentence of the treatise, which reminds one of the views of his later "Critical" period, reads: "It is absolutely necessary that one be convinced of God's existence; but it is not just as necessary that one demonstrate it." Despite this, the work was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books original: "Index der verbotenen Bücher," referring to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Catholic Church. in Vienna.

7. The prize essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (1764), which already reveals its standpoint to some extent in its title, brings no essentially new motifs. The primary grounds of natural theology The study of God based on reason and experience rather than on divine revelation. are, Kant still believes here, "capable of the greatest philosophical evidence," even if not mathematical evidence; a number of problems derived from them, however, are capable of only an "approximate," that is, a moral evidence.

8. Skepticism emerges more strongly in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766), a work known for revealing most strongly the influence of French and English empiricism The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience.. At the conclusion of this work, Kant also comes to speak of religious faith. Here, Kant wants to leave all dogmatics of the supernatural ("all noisy systems of instruction regarding such distant objects") "to speculation and the concern of idle heads." To be sure, in his opinion, "hardly an upright soul has ever lived who could have endured the thought that with death everything was at an end, and whose noble disposition had not risen to the hope of the future." But it seems to him nevertheless "to be more in keeping with human nature and the purity of morals to ground the expectation of the future world on the feelings of a well-disposed soul, rather than conversely to ground its good conduct on the hope of the other world." It is the standpoint of the "moral faith" appearing here for the first time, which, without engaging in subtle reasoning, leads humans "without detour to their true purposes." This concept later expands in his work Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason into the proposition: religion is based on morality, not morality on religion. As for the "mysteries of the—"