Debate

Debate #2

December 5, 2003
Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois

Kant and Theology: Friend or Foe?

Friend: Steven Palmquist: Hong Kong Baptist University
Foe: Keith Yandell, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Moderator: Chris Firestone, Trinity College

Chris Firestone: This is a debate entitled "Kant and Theology: Friend or Foe" It's sponsored by the Philosophy Department of Trinity College and the Honors Program. We are delighted to have these kinds of opportunities—it's a unique event here, a chance where we can have two well-known scholars in their respective fields come in and talk to us about a topic that is vitally important to how we understand both contemporary theology and contemporary philosophy. So I'm looking forward to the debate.
Let me briefly introduce the speakers to you. Then I'm going to read a very short paper to "till the soil" with regard to the whole topic: Why is this a debate? Why is it important? I'm going to read about a page and a half to try to set the stage, and then I'm going to let them take over. We're going to have a back and forth movement of one person giving about an eight-minute talk, the other person responding with an eight-minute talk, a series of progressively shorter rounds, and then at the end we should have ten minutes left for questions.
Most of you are probably familiar with Dr. Keith Yandell, who comes to Trinity to teach courses on a regular basis. He's a graduate of OhioStateUniversity and teaches now at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His works are on philosophy of religion, theology, and a variety of other areas in contemporary philosophy. So, we are glad to have him here with us today. He is going to be arguing the foe side of this debate—Kant is exceptionally antagonistic to the enterprise of theology.
On this side we have Stephen Palmquist from Hong KongBaptistUniversity. (It just so happens that I attended HKBU for a year about eight years ago, and that is how I first got to know Steve.) He's a Kant scholar who is concerned with defending the friend side of this debate—that Kant and theology can find some common ground and are essentially compatible in one sense or another. He is a graduate of OxfordUniversity, and so we have an American-Continental divide, both in their takes on Kant and in their debating style
Let me go right to my little paper as a way of prefacing this debate and then I will turn it over to them. Maybe I should do this first—does anyone have a coin on them? We'll flip to see who goes first. It's been our tradition to do that. We'll save this for the key moment right when they begin. Okay.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways of understanding the impact of Kant on theology. One is decisively positive, veering off in the direction of constructive applications of Kant's philosophy for the ongoing work of systematic theology. According to this view, we can trust Kant when he says that he had to "deny knowledge to make room for faith"—all we have to do to substantiate this position is to look to his later writings and their moral, poetic, and religious grounds for theological belief. We might think of theologians such as Schleiermacher, Otto, Tillich, and Dooyeward under this theologically affirmative rubric. The other way of understanding Kant's impact on theology is decisively negative. Because of his strict emphasis on human autonomy and the so-called liberation of humanity from its "self-incurred tutelage" to the church, Kant's philosophy is implicated in movements like non-realism and the death of God. The trajectory of Kant's thought on this reading moves toward such thinkers as Feuerbach, Neitzsche, Marx, and Freud. The great divide between these two receptions of Kant's philosophical program provides the overarching context in which this debate is set.
It is not the historic impact of Kant on theology that we are here to talk about, however; instead we are here to debate a prior question regarding the rightful relationship of Kant to theology. We are asking the question "What do Kant's writings actually entail with regards to the enterprise of theology?" instead of the question "What have his writings been made to entail?" For those of us who are interested in the field of Kant studies proper, it is this prior question that is of particular significance.
Perhaps Nicholas Wolterstorff best frames the issue for the theologically negative side of Kant interpretation in his article entitled, "Is it Possible or Desireable for Theologians to Recover From Kant?" Wolterstorff identifies the heart of Kant's philosophical program under two motifs—the metaphor of a boundary and the reduction of religion to morality. As for the metaphor of a boundary, it goes something like this: some things, freedom, God, the soul, the ding an sich, are noumenal, and some things, chairs and stairs apple pie and hippopotami, are phenomenal. With the possible exception of freedom, the noumenal realm is made up of things that can't be known and the phenomenal realm is made up of things that can be known. There is a strict separation or boundary between these realms. Our knowledge about the world is bound by the categories of the mind, making possible only the knowledge of phenomena (appearances). There are, on this reading of Kant, no coherent and acceptable ways of thinking of or speaking about God.
Along with the metaphor of a boundary, the theologically negative interpretation of Kant is also characterized by an exclusively moral explanation of religion. If the Kantian paradigm provides any rational justification for religion and theology, if it allows for anything intelligible to be thought or said about God, such affirmations can only be made on the basis of Kant's practical philosophy. This limitation of the grounds for religion and theology to Kant's practical philosophy is said to permeate his entire corpus. It has a reciprocal relationship with the interpretation of Kant's writings on religion. Theologically negative interpreters of Kant commonly hold that Kant's writings on religion are either insignificant elaborations of his overall philosophical outlook, or incomplete extensions of his moral philosophy. These writings are interpreted as being philosophically important only when they cohere with or elaborate upon Kant's practical philosophy.
Theologically affirmative interpretations of Kant, contrary to their negative counterparts, typically hold that there is a rationale for God-talk, God-thought, and even God-knowledge in Kant's philosophy. The case cannot be made with reference only to the first Critique, however; it requires arguments drawing on sources written after the first Critique. These arguments usually make it a point to capture a sense of the whole of Kant's philosophical enterprise, something they believe is often lost in our fixation on the first Critique (which is the place that the boundary line motif is developed). Among these theologically affirmative interpretations of the whole of Kant's philosophy, the way the arguments are articulated and defended varies greatly.
In my own work, I have cited Ronald Green, Adina Daviodovich, and Stephen Palmquist as scholars who argue for three very different theologically affirmative interpretations of Kant. Green's interpretation focuses on the internal logic of practical reason as articulated in the arguments of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. He argues that theology is grounded in the internal logic of moral reasoning. Adina Davidovich looks to Kant's Critique of Judgment, making the case that reflection and the imagination constitute, for Kant, reason's most important faculty. This faculty of judgment allows us to think about God and seek his face with ever increasing proximity. Stephen Palmquist's interpretation of Kant goes one step further than both of these interpreters, arguing that there is a distinctly religious or mystical component to Kant's thinking that is friendly to theology. I will refrain from saying much more about his interpretation of Kant; suffice it to say that he believes that there is religious dimension in Kant's philosophy that provides the truest ground for theology.
Unfortunately that's all I can do, given the time, to prepare you for what's to follow, but I'm sure the speakers will have plenty to say on their own. We're going to go ahead and flip the coin to start. Since you traveled farthest, Steve, why don't you go ahead and call it.
Steve Palmquist: Tails.
Chris Firestone: Tails. Tails it is! So you can choose to go first or second.
Steve Palmquist: Okay, well then, I guess I'll go second.
Chris Firestone: He'll go second. Ah, well, there you have it.
Keith Yandell: The opposite strategy to an NFL game.
Kant's greatest work, at least in terms of its influence, is probably Critique of Pure Reason. When we ask if Kant's friendly to theology, I assume we're asking whether theology is consistent with the doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason. Let me start out by saying how I understand theology.
Theology I take to be a set of claims regarding God, God's existence, God's properties, God's activities. I don't for a moment, surely in the context of a seminary, intend that to be an adequate account of theology, but it will be adequate for my purposes. Theological claims are claims about God's existence, God's nature, God's actions. The first Critique is famous for being an expression of Kant's, as he calls it, "Copernican Revolution." In the past, we have tried to get our concepts to conform to objects. We have, Kant thinks, failed utterly, abysmally, across the board, and thus it's time, Kant says, to try the reverse—to get objects to conform to our concepts.
If you look at the very structure of the Critique, you get the sense of Kant's overall argument. Kant is a transcendentalist. Transcendentalism is the following doctrine: First, a category is a basic concept, a concept without which we cannot think coherently, a concept that has got to apply to all of our sensory and introspective experiences. There are, according to Kant, twelve of these. I'm concerned here about only three: substance or thing, strictly substance with properties, and secondly causality, or cause and effect, and third, event. A thing is something that has qualities, can change qualities, can endure over time. An event is a change in a substance, a substance coming to have a property that it didn't have, or coming to lose a property that it did have. A cause is just some state of affairs that could bring about a change in a substance.
Transcendentalism is the doctrine that no application of the categories beyond the range of possible objects of sensory experience can possibly yield any knowledge. No application of the categories beyond the range of sensory experience, that is, sensory and introspective experience, can possibly yield any knowledge. God, I need not tell you, is not an object of sensory experience. God is not "so-many" feet tall, God does not weigh "so-many" pounds, God does not have skin with a particular tone, God is not a possible object of sensory experience. No one has seen God at any time. Therefore, claims about God involve the application of the concepts of substance or thing; claims about God's properties involve the application of the concepts of substance or thing; claims about God's activities involve both those concepts, plus the category of cause and effect, plus the category of event beyond the range of possible objects of sensory experience. Therefore, they cannot be known. Therefore, in Kant's view, there can be no theological knowledge.
If in Kant's view there can be no theological knowledge, then Kant is not friendly to theology. Hence, Kant is not friendly to theology. Now in saying this, I'm not denying that you can mine Kant for various very interesting things in philosophical theology. You can take the leaps and bounds of Egyptand put them in a basket. But if you take Kant's epistemology as you find it in the Critique, theology is a hopeless endeavor. It is an enterprise that can yield no knowledge whatever. And by the way, knowledge here is not being used in some fancy sense. If you want to put Kant's point this way, it's easily understood and perfectly fair: There is no theological belief such that you can have on behalf of that belief any truth-preferring reason. If I tell you that I want you to believe that I own a minivan and if you don't believe it I'm going to call you bad names, then I offer you a non-truth-preferring reason for believing that I own a minivan. If I take you for a ride in my minivan and I have you read my title to it, I'm giving you truth-preferring reasons to believe that I have a minivan. In Kant's view there are no truth-preferring reasons for accepting any theological claim. If that's friendliness to theology, theology need no enemies.
Chris Firestone: Okay, thank you.
Steve Palmquist: Thank you, Professor Yandell.
I'd like to begin by asking a question about today's topic, "Kant and Theology: Friend or Foe?" If we're going to understand this topic correctly, then we need to understand what a friend is. So, I'd like you to think about the question: What are the qualities of your best friend? Think about some person whom you regard as a good friend, because today the topic is really about friendship and about whether or not a certain person, who happened to be a philosopher, could be called a friend of a certain way of thinking or a certain activity that we call theology.
Aristotle said a friend is a person with whom you are capable of engaging in a mutual quest for virtue. I think that's quite a good foundation for understanding the nature of friendship. It requires mutuality and a search for virtue. Another common statement about friendship that I really like says "opposition is true friendship." If we understand friendship as a quest for virtue that is engaged on a mutual level, and if we understand opposition as not something that indicates that you are not a friend but rather something that confirms your very friendship, then these clues inform the debate today in an important way.
A second, related question, would be: What is a foe? And I would suggest to you that not all foes appear to be foes. So your conclusion, the conclusion that you take away from this afternoon's debate, I think, should be based on whether you think the elements in Kant that Professor Yandell will want you to regard as indicating that Kant is a foe of theology are genuine foe characteristics or whether they are actually characteristics of healthy opposition that a friend gives to another friend. Did the best friend that you just thought of ever tell you something about yourself that you thought was hard to take, something that was in opposition to the way you thought? If so, then maybe it's not the case that just because Kant says some negative things about theology he is an enemy of theology.
Now I would like to suggest that if we see Kant whole—if we see the entirety of Kant's philosophy, not just the first Critique, which Professor Yandell did a good job of introducing just now—if we see Kant whole, then we see a whole lot more than what we've just heard with regard to this question. I want to mention a few things briefly about Kant's own life, some of which are on the handout that Professor Firestone gave you. One is that he was raised as a Pietist Christian. His mother was a very sincere believer, a believer in the Bible and a believer that God can be known only through the heart. Kant learned theology on his mother's knee. And he said as an old man that the religion of his mother was something that he always respected and never gave up. However, as a Pietist, he learned very early on to distrust the church as an organization as well as the hierarchy that stands behind it and anything that supports that hierarchy. As he grew into adulthood, he went to university and majored in theology. Now that is relevant to this afternoon's debate. He studied theology. He eventually transformed his doctoral thesis into something philosophical and wrote quite a lot of his early writings on theological themes or themes relating to God. His last book before the first Critique was, in fact, a book about mysticism, or about mystical experience, which I'm not going to try to get into.
What I would like to suggest, though, is that to understand Kant whole, we need more than anything else to remember that there are three Critiques. Each Critique has a different standpoint, which I call the Theoretical, the Practical, and the Judicial.

Figure 1: The Standpoints of the Three Critiques

Figure 2: Theology, Morality, and Religion

Out of these three standpoints comes Kant's view of the relation between philosophy, theology, and religion. This is something we must understand if we're going to understand Kant's friendship with theology properly. Friendship is true opposition, and opposition is true friendship. Morality and the natural religion, according to Kant, constitute the philosopher's proper standpoint with respect to all things religious. Theology is an opposing standpoint which is theoretical in its orientation and which depends on divine revelation. Kant believed that the philosopher has no business saying anything about divine revelation as such, but he did not believe nor did he claim that theologians should not affirm the belief that they have had divine revelation. Kant believed that the true approach to what he called "empirical religion" requires the combination of theology and morality—revealed religion and rational thinking about religion.
Now, it's true that from the point of view of the first Critique, Kant puts severe limitations on what a philosopher can say about revealed religion and theology. The question is: Why did he do that? He did it for a simple reason. He was convinced that, while theologians are not the enemy of religion, metaphysicians are. Metaphysical philosophy is a wolf in sheep's clothing. He believed firmly that if you try to approach your religion through metaphysics, you will reach a religion that is vacuous, a religion that will not help you to see the Heart of God. What is the Heart of God? The Heart of God, according to Kant, is love—the same love that he saw on his mother's knee as a child, which he never gave up as long as he lived. He believed that love is reason in its practical form. Therefore if we want to do theology properly, we must do theology practically. We must do it through an understanding of love and through an understanding of practical reason.
The problem is that in Kant's mind, as he looked back over the past thousand or so years of Christian theology, which was his own tradition, he saw a tradition that destroyed the Heart of his religion. It destroyed that religion with what he called the "Battleground of Metaphysics." On the first page of the first preface of the Critique of Pure Reason, he says that the Battleground of Metaphysics is unending and his purpose is to make peace, to be a peacemaker on that battleground. To make peace he had to draw limits, he had to take the weapons of the metaphysicians and "beat them into plowshares," to take their "spears" and "shape them into pruning hooks" ( Is. 2:4). That's the reason he did what he did in the first Critique. If we understand that, if we see his peacemaking effort for what it was—namely, to take away metaphysicians' unhealthy, harmful tools for religion that lead us only to a sophisticated belief that we know things that we cannot know—and if we see him as attempting to protect the religious believer and to give this religious believer tools with which we can understand our religion more carefully, then we can see his true friendship with theology.
Keith Yandell: Presumably, Professor Palmquist and I have read the same Kantian texts, though that's hard to believe given the sanitized account of Kant I've just heard. First, the analogy with friendship won't really do. We're asking about how Kant deals with theology. Theology is not a person. You can't sit down and have coffee with it. The analogy, it seems to me, is very misleading. Second, in fact Kant says in the preface to the Critique that he wants to make a restriction, or a constraint, on reason in order to make room for faith. Ah, that sounds an awful lot like various people who were Christians and found out that I was going into philosophy, and they said, "Philosophy? You've given up Christianity?", which is a misunderstanding that I have argued against now for more years than I want right now to count. You've got to ask what Kant means!
What he means is that he wants to restrict metaphysical reflection so that it doesn't get in the way of his moral philosophy. What he means by religion is what he talks about in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. What he talks about there is Kantian morality. In his book Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, look, for example, at the discussion of the atonement. You want to say Kant's a friendly opponent to theology?! What does he do with the atonement? Religious doctrines, in Kant's framework, can't make historical claims nor can they make claims about God's actions. The incarnation and the atonement become metaphors—divorced from history, divorced from theology—metaphors that are used then to express the content of Kant's moral philosophy. If that's theology-friendly, there's nothing that's not theology-friendly.
Now granted, there are three Critiques. That cuts both ways. The three Critiques are supposed to be part of a unified project on Kant's whole philosophy. The second and third Critiques are supposed to be logically consistent with the first Critique. And to a very large extent, they are. The picture of "Kant the Happy Pietist," defending pietistic religion is, if I may gently say so in the context of the debate, preposterous! It would require that you thought that God existed, that God did indeed love us, propositions which are not within range of what we could possibly know or have any reason whatever to believe, given the transcendental charge of the first Critique. Kantian morality becomes the substitute for religion, not faith in Christ, not even faith in God. Kant does say that we should postulate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Why? For precisely the metaphysical kinds of reasons that Professor Palmquist says that Kant never appeals to. But Kant's appeal to them is fascinating. He doesn't think that those postulations give us any reason to believe that what we postulate is true. To believe that would be subject to what Kant calls a "Transcendental Illusion." It is very useful, maybe even practically necessary, to think in terms of God as the source of morality and of the immortality of the soul in the light of the problem of evil. These beliefs have utility. They have utility. If you're seven feet tall and carrying a big bat and you tell me that I've got to pretend I'm a Laker fan, I will satisfy utility by pretending I'm a Laker fan. But there's no truth to it. I'm a Celly fan. I hate the Lakers. Kant doesn't allow any truth-preferring reason for claims like "God loves us."If this is friendliness to theology, then again I really don't understand what opposition to theology would be.
Steve Palmquist: I think it's simply not the case that Kant is the sort of person whom you just heard him to be and anyone who's read the whole first Critique would know that. For example, at B857 of the first Critique Kant says this: "my conviction [the conviction to be a religious believer in the way Kantian theology provides] is not logical, but moral certainty; and since it depends on subjective grounds (of moral disposition), I must not say, 'It is morally certain that there is a God,' but rather, 'I am morally certain [that there is a God].' That is, the belief in God and in another world is so interwoven with my moral disposition that I am in as little danger of ever surrendering the former as I am worried that the latter will be torn away from me."
To say that Kant has no truth-preferring reasons for belief in God is simply incorrect. It is entirely incorrect and there is no proper reading of the text that can possibly hold that seriously, if the whole text is taken into consideration. What there isn't in Kant is knowledge-preferring reasons. But for Kant, the term "knowledge" (when he denies knowledge in order to make room for faith)—what we must understand is Kant did not mean by the word knowledge "justified, true belief." Whereas I suspect that's probably the meaning of knowledge that Professor Yandell thinks Kant is referring to, by "knowledge" Kant was referring to a very specific type of thing that we would probably best describe as scientific proof yielding scientific knowledge. He was referring to a sensible intuition, something you receive through your senses, combined with a concept and formed by these categories, which Professor Yandell mentioned, and synthesized into a judgment that can be verified through empirical observation. That's what he meant by knowledge and that's what he denied that theology can give us. Why? He denied that theology can give us that kind of knowledge because that kind of knowledge cannot convey the heart of love. And the heart of love is what Kantian theology is all about.
Now, I just ask you to think about that good friend of yours, particularly if that good friend is of the opposite sex. If you wanted to convey your love to that friend of yours, and if you went to that person and gave that person a logical proof that described beyond doubt your love—and let's say you gave that person a rose and said, "This rose is part of my logical proof to you, and the rose is some kind of empirical evidence based on my logic (especially if your fancy logical argument referred to the rose somehow), and because I'm giving you this rose it proves that I love you," I suggest that if that is what your friend did to you to confirm his or her love, you would be suspicious.
Erasmus says in his book, In Praise of Folly, that when you have a friend and you are not sure whether your friend is a wise man or a fool, listen to your friend's language. If your friend flatters you, then you probably do not have a true friend. Flattery is the attempt to defend what you think the other person wants to hear in order to improve a relationship that is inherently unstable. That it what the speculative metaphysician does to theology. And that's why Kant in the first Critique says that sophistication in religion and in theology must be done away with. It is actually harmful to the religious cause and the theological cause. Instead of giving a theological or a metaphysical proof of your love, I suggest that if your friend came to you and said, "I'm giving you this rose and this rose is a symbol of my love for you," and if your friend perhaps read a poem or even better, if your friend did something—if it's an opposite sex friend and if it's an appropriate expression, maybe if your friend kissed you when he or she gave you the rose—then this rose would be much more meaningful. Here, the issue for Kant is: How do you explain the role of that rose in your theological understanding? Because theology, if you're a Christian as Kant was, is about love. It's about the conveyance of love from a person to another person. And if you want to convey that love, you don't do it with proof, you do it with symbolic expression. That's what Kant believed moral action was. I'd be happy to demonstrate that in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone he gives accounts of the atonement, of Jesus' divinity, and of biblical inspiration that are perfectly compatible with any Christian view that love is the core of Christianity, not knowledge
Keith Yandell: I have read Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, and I do offer as a serious reading of it what I've said. I'm not a Kant scholar; so be it. I'd rather be right than be a scholar. The faith that Kant refers to is moral faith. I begin to worry, I must confess, when I'm told that the core of Christianity is love and not knowledge as if these are somehow incompatible, as if the Apostle Paul did not make a habit in his epistles of using cognitive verbs. Jesus Christ has come to give us an understanding so that we can know God. And that kind of knowledge includes cognitive knowledge. I suppose I will be told that Kant held a high view of revelation. I suggest there is no good reason to think that whatever. Quite the contrary, Kant's view of pietistic religious experience, insofar as it was a source of knowledge, was that it was enthusiasm to be dismissed.
I don't mean anything fancy by knowledge. I'm perfectly willing to take knowledge, for the purpose of the debate, in a weak sense. Knowledge in any sense has a truth preferring reason for it. Substitute reasonable belief, substitute evidentially supported belief for knowledge if you like. Fine with me. Kant denied that we have anything like that relative to claims about God. Kant's treatment of Christian theology in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is an extraordinarily classical Greek treatment of that. Historical claims can bear no ultimate religious significance for Kant. In that sense, Kant is classically Greek.
The idea that there can be a properly Christian understanding of the doctrine of the atonement or the doctrine of the incarnation, which makes no essential reference, which makes what Professor Palmquist quite rightly and quite revealingly calls a symbolic reference only, no historical consequences, no historical reference—such an account of the incarnation or the atonement cannot possibly be compatible with orthodox Christian doctrine. Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. The third day he rose from the dead. For a Kantian religion, a Kantian morality, that is a symbolic claim translated out of any kind of historical context, minus any historical consequences. As someone once said about the liberal account of the resurrection: they interpret the resurrection so that it never occurred. Kant interprets the atonement and the incarnation so that they never occurred. Now, I think it's fairly evident that it's likely Professor Palmquist and I are not likely to persuade ourselves, each other, in the scope of an hour, or perhaps in the scope of 4,000 years. It's equally clear that one of us is misreading Kant. And each of us has a very strong opinion about which that might be and that's likely to remain unchanged by the time we close. But, I want to put as clearly as I can, at least, Kant as I see him, not in terms of his biography. He was indeed raised a pietistic Christian, something that in my view he abandoned utterly and thoroughly. Yes, he respected it. I respect certain kinds of atheism. But that doesn't mean I'm going to run out and embrace it. I guess I probably ran out of time, so I'll stop.
Steve Palmquist: I'd like to show you one more diagram here that goes along with these two.

Figure 3: God's Three Moral Attributes

It involves the same structure as these two and it is a starting point for understanding what kind of approach Kant wants theologians to take. These are the three attributes of God, which Kant believes are true of God and which he believes anyone who says they believe in God ought to affirm. These are truths of God that have justifiable status in Kant's mind. God is a good governor. This is the theoretical standpoint, from the point of view of God's approach to our natural lives or the world of nature. God is holy law-giver. This relates to the moral law, of which Kant believed that God is the giver. And God is a just judge. These also correspond in Kant's mind to the Trinity, of course: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They are indeed, in Kant's mind, symbols, they are indeed not properly describable as theoretical knowledge, but as I mentioned previously they are not describable as theoretical knowledge because Kant believed that true religion and therefore also true theology is not something that should be associated, not something that would properly be associated, with theoretical knowledge. Why? Because that association will kill the very heart of religion.
I think the Bible follows this in many ways. My reading of the Bible preceded my reading of Kant and when I read Kant I had the advantage of having read him with extremely minimal introduction from scholarly interpreters to what he was supposed to be saying. I saw the Bible throughout the Critique of Pure Reason. Psalm 14:1 says, "The fool says in his heart 'There is no God.'" What most people forget is that the next part of that same verse, the second half, says, "They are all corrupt, they do abominable deeds. There is none who does good." A few verses later the same chapter refers to their lack of knowledge, but the lack of knowledge is clearly in context a lack of moral knowledge. In other words, the fool in this Psalm, according to the Psalmist's intention, is not the one who denies theoretical knowledge of God; the fool is the one whose practice does not fit.
What about Matthew 25:31-46, the last parable that appears in Matthew's account of Jesus' parables? That, of course, is the well-known parable of the sheep and the goats. In that parable we find that the righteous people, the people who lived their lives in ignorance of the fact that they were in fact doing the will of the father, are surprised and quite shocked when God invites them into heaven. This seems to indicate something about the Christian, that is, the biblical view of the importance of our theoretical understanding with respect to the nature of true theology or true faith. Faith and belief is a matter of the heart; it's not a matter of the mind. That's the Bible's view, I believe, and that is exactly Kant's view. He believes, as I've said, that the reason metaphysicians and metaphysics needs to be severely curtailed is precisely that in the history of theology, theologians have used those tools improperly. They have used the tools that God gave us—
Let me interrupt myself and say that God gave us reason, according to Kant, for practical use. Reason in Kant's mind, in Kant's clear repeated statements, is primarily practical. We take reason and use it in a subordinate, tangential way to its true purpose in human life when we use it theoretically. Science is an epiphenomenon of reason. Science is not the primary realm or standpoint that reason is given to us for; rather, religion is. Theology is understood as a practice of the heart. "When Jesus rose from the dead"— which again I would affirm Kant is capable of dealing with and accepting—"When Jesus rose from the dead," according to John 20, Thomas, in talking with the disciples, expressed doubts. After he expressed the doubts, Jesus suddenly appeared in their midst and Jesus said to the disciples and Thomas, "Peace be with you." And then, after he asked Thomas to put his hands in his, to touch the holes in his hands and to put his fist into Jesus' side, Jesus said, "Have you believed because you have seen me?" In other words, he is saying "Do you require phenomenal proof?" That's Kant's view; that's Kant's word for knowledge. Thomas required knowledge. He required proof. He required evidential statements that went beyond the heart. Then Jesus says, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
Don't let anyone tell you that Kant is against belief in religion. "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." Faith and belief are the core of Kant's entire philosophical project.
Chris Firestone: I'm sure Professor Yandell is chomping at the bit to get back at Professor Palmquist. We'll take a five-minute break and allow you to ask questions, and I'm going to try to get them both to give a final word, a 2 ½ minute final word. Person in the back.
Question: I have two questions for Palmquist. One is based on how you were articulating Kant's philosophy. I was wondering if you're arguing that Kant rejects the sort of Enlightenment assumption about what true knowledge is, or whether you're arguing that he was saying that religion is not able to meet those expectations or that the quest for knowledge isn't able to meet it, so therefore we shouldn't even attempt to be involved in the discussion. That was my first question. My second one is, What would Kant say to someone who's a fervent believer in some big, pink elf that's somewhere out there? If you had faith in the pink elf, then what's the difference between that and Christians who believe in God?
Steve Palmquist: For the first question I am definitely of the persuasion that Kant was the primary reason for the end of the 18^th Century Enlightenment. He is often regarded as—and he was indeed—a child of the Enlightenment. He's often regarded by people as just another figure in that tradition, but I believe that he was the capstone and also the transition figure to the next development. Although Kant wrote an essay on the Enlightenment praising it, if you read that carefully, you see—and certainly if you read the first Critique, you see—the meditations on metaphysics that Kant was giving in the first Critique were also limitations on the Enlightenment and perhaps even most importantly they were that. I think they were that as opposed to the other option you gave about the insufficiency of religion.
And what was the—oh yes, the pink elephant. I think Kant would have a very clear answer to that. He would say, "Your belief in the pink elephant does not have the kind of moral impact on your life as a belief in God does." Or if it did, and if you came from a society where this belief in a pink elephant did for you everything that Christian society can do for us (Christian beliefs and history, which is important for Kant)—. Kant is often viewed as a person who threw history out the window, but in fact, almost all of the essays he wrote in the last ten years of his life were about history. Within that tradition, if you had a tradition of pink elephantism, there might be a parallel. The fact is, there isn't such a tradition and that's what makes that example quite irrelevant.
Question: This is for Dr. Palmquist. Based on your articulation of Kant, what then is the task of theology? Is it simply for regulating activity in the moral realm and practices? Or what would you say in terms of reflection and propositional discussions in normal theology?
Steve Palmquist: Kant gave a series of lectures on philosophical theology several different times. Right around the time he was writing the first Critique, in fact, he was also lecturing on philosophical theology. In those lectures he says, Theology is "the system of our knowledge of the Highest Being." It "does not refer to the sum total of all possible knowledge of God, but only to what human reason meets in God." When he fleshes out what that means for him, he states—obviously, as I think both of us up here would agree—that what is the sum total of what would be possible would be God's knowledge from God's point of view, and we don't have that. That's what he calls, "Theologia Archetypa." He says we cannot have that and we shouldn't try. Rather we have what he calls "Theologia Echtypa," which means we can know certain things about God through our moral nature; and that's what he means by symbolism. He doesn't mean that moral knowledge is non-cognitive. For Kant moral knowledge is cognitive; it's just not scientific. So the role of theology, to answer your question, is to create a system of cognition, a system of understanding of our beliefs in God that does not require grounding in scientific fact.
Chris Firestone: Okay, we're out of time for questions. You can come up afterwards with any further questions. I think the professors wouldn't mind sticking around for a few minutes. I'm going to give about two and a half, three minutes, for each person to make their final comments. [To Keith Yandell:] My original thinking was that since you had the first word, it would be appropriate to have Steve Palmquist have the last word, so I'll stick by that unless you have good reasons.
Keith Yandell: If I offer any reasons we will lose the time we have. First, theoretical knowledge does not include historical knowledge. I return to the fact that historical claims are a part of the essence of Christian thought. Kant cannot, on his own terms, grant ultimate significance to historical phenomena, like the incarnation and like the crucifixion. They are treated symbolically, not historically, and that is deeply antithetical to Christian thought.
Second, I read my Bible before I read Kant too. And I didn't, as I went through those pages, think about biblical passages. But given Professor Palmquist's comments, I hadn't expected to get into the question of how we interpret various biblical texts. If I had known that was going to be the case, then I would have thought about that in advance. It seems to me the following is true: First, there are various biblical passages that emphasize morality as at the core of religion, what I call "cup of cold water" passages. There are also a group of passages that emphasize theological knowledge that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. How you put those passages and their emphases together is an interesting question. But one thing that seems to be clear is that neither set of passages can properly be ignored. Neither the "cup of cold water" passages nor the "Jesus is the Son of God" passages. However we understand them, they're integrally related to one another and any view of theology in which you get rid of one or you make the one purely symbolic and not historical is not Christianity. Kant's religion is Kant's morality. The postulates are offered not as things we have good reason to believe, but as things we have good reason to posit and to treat as if they're true¾very different than believing them. Trinitarian belief is a transcendental illusion for Kant.
I begin to worry a lot when I hear that the heart is at the core of Christianity and not the mind. The biblical "heart" is the mind. The Biblical "heart" is the organ of thought and will and feeling. It is out of the heart that one's beliefs come as well as one's conduct. It is utterly unbiblical to think of the heart as simply a thing to be sharply contrasted to the mind. And what worries me in the sense of Palmquist's presentation much more than any interpretation of Kant, about which it's obvious we disagree across the board, is the suggestion that the heart and the mind are within Christian thought to be contrasted to one another. It's hard for me to think of a less biblical notion. And unfortunately the debate is not about that. I'd be happy to come back sometime and debate that one and we'll go through Paul's epistles and other parts of the New Testament and note the use of cognitive verbs there¾that we're to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, MIND, itself. And I take it there's a certain redundancy in that phrase.
I worry too about love being at the center—a kind of love that's apparently divorced from mind. Remember Augustine's comment, "Love God and do what you want." Why? Because if your love of God is a genuine love it includes a knowledge of God. Kant's love is really respect for persons defined in terms of the propositions that are central to Kant's morality—central among them that rational nature is an end in itself. It's got nothing to do with God or love of God. That would be a transcendental illusion. But anyway, my concerns shifted quickly, I confess, from interpretation of Kant to interpretation of Christianity, and it may be that in fact a good deal of why I did this was precisely that.
Chris Firestone: Okay, I'll give the next two or three minutes to Steve and then we'll adjourn.
Steve Palmquist: I'd like to say first of all that symbolic knowledge is not non-historical knowledge. Symbolic knowledge, in fact, must be founded in history. It must be; otherwise it's not symbolic! If you gave a rose to your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever and gave that as a symbol of your love, then your action was spoken; it was empirical. That's the whole point. The whole point of saying that knowledge of God is symbolic is to ground our religion and our theology in history. The statement that this debate is not about—well, the criticism of my view of—the contrast between heart and mind, I accept in part. But I accept it only because those were the terms in which the debate's main focus was cast by Professor Yandell's introduction, focusing on the first Critique. Because if the problem which Professor Yandell has raised is a first Critique problem, as he has said it is, then the problem is a solely mind-oriented problem. That came from Professor Yandell, not from me. Because in the first Critique, the limitations are limitations on our scientific knowledge—that's mind—it's not biblical heart/mind; I completely agree. But in the Bible, there isn't that distinction and that is exactly why Kant is a friend of theology, because in Kant there is no such distinction. Kant begins his philosophy by limiting scientific knowledge and saying "stay out of there, theology," because he wants to preserve the biblical heart/mind! The biblical heart/mind is where actions and beliefs go together, just as Professor Yandell said. And when actions and beliefs go together we've got religion and we've got the potential for a friend of theology. If they don't, if you divorce them and if you try to argue as a metaphysician that you must have the theoretical proofs on their own terms metaphysically and purely logically, then and only then you are attempting to approach theology in an unbiblical way.
I would like to paraphrase that Psalm 14:1 verse: "The fool has said in his heart, 'I know God.'" This is Kant's paraphrase, or how I think he might paraphrase, Psalm 14:1: "The fool has said in his heart, 'I know God and I know God in the same manner I know about the physical constitution of the universe.'" No. Instead, the wise man should say, "I know God in the same manner that I know the rose that I give to my girlfriend or my wife."

Copyright © 2005 by Chris Firestone, Keith Yandell, and Steven Palmquist
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