Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who ruled the old proofs of God out of court, and then put God back as something the moral law obliges a person to hope for. + Almost every argument about God that a reader meets today has Kant somewhere in its family tree. When a skeptic says that reason cannot reach past the world we experience, that is Kant. When a believer answers that conscience points to a moral lawgiver, that is Kant too. He is the hinge on which the modern conversation turns, and he swings both ways. He was born in a Prussian port city to a harness maker, and he stayed there. In seventy-nine years he never traveled more than a hundred miles or so from the place he was born, never married, and lectured for fifteen years for whatever coins his students handed him at the door. He published the book that reorganized European philosophy at the age of fifty-seven. For Christian readers he is among the most consequential critics the faith has had to answer, and one of the hardest to answer cleanly, because he was not a scoffer. He was raised by devout Lutheran parents, spoke of his mother with real tenderness to the end of his life, and thought he was doing religion a service. His own summary of what the first Critique was for is disarming: he had found it necessary, he wrote, to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

(●) 1724 AD: Born to a harness maker in a household where piety was the weather, and schooled in it until he could not bear the sight of it. + Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, the Baltic port that was then the capital of East Prussia and is now Kaliningrad in Russia. His father Johann Georg Kant made harness and saddlery; his mother Anna Regina Reuter kept the house and, by her son’s account, took him walking and taught him to look at the sky and to name what he saw. Nine children were born to them and five reached adulthood. She died when he was thirteen. The family belonged to the Pietists, a renewal movement inside Lutheranism that pressed for heart religion over doctrinal correctness: conversion you could date, prayer you meant, a life visibly changed. Kant never spoke of his parents’ faith with anything but respect. He said he had never heard an unseemly word in that house. From 1732 to 1740 he attended the Collegium Fridericianum, the Pietist school in the city, where the day began before dawn with prayer and devotion and continued through Latin, Greek, and more devotion. It was the drill he could not forgive. His friend Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, who came to him as a student and stayed close for the rest of his life, reported that terror and fear came over Kant whenever he looked back on what he called the slavery of his youth. The pattern held for life: a man who thought Christian morality was the most serious thing in the world, and who avoided church services when he could.

(●) 1740 AD: He entered the university at sixteen, and his father’s death sent him out to teach other people’s children for six years. + He enrolled at the University of Königsberg in September 1740. The teacher who mattered most to him was Martin Knutzen, a young professor of logic who was both a Pietist and an enthusiast for Isaac Newton, and who lent the poor student books. Newton was the shock. Here was a description of the heavens that actually worked, derived from a handful of laws, and it raised the question that would occupy Kant for the rest of his life: how can the human mind know in advance that nature will behave that way? In March 1746 his father died. There was no money, and Kant left the university without taking a degree. From 1748 he spent six years as a Hauslehrer, a live-in private tutor, first with the family of a country pastor at Judtschen and then with the von Hülsen family at Groß Arnsdorf; a third post, with the Keyserlingk family, is usually added to the list and is the least well attested of the three. One of his early biographers reports him saying, with the honesty that runs through everything he wrote, that no one had ever been a worse tutor of children than he was. He kept working. In 1754 he came back to Königsberg with the manuscripts of several years, took his master’s degree in June 1755, qualified as a lecturer that September, and began to teach.

(●) 1755 AD: For fifteen years he lectured for whatever his students paid at the door, and produced a theory of how the galaxies formed. + A Privatdozent held no chair and drew no salary. He announced his courses, students came, and each one paid him a fee. To live, Kant taught: logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, fortification, pyrotechnics, and the course he invented and loved best, physical geography. Anthropology, his name for the study of human beings as they actually are, was the other course he made up for himself, and that one waited until he had the chair. In some terms he lectured more than twenty hours a week, and he did it for fifteen years. The same year he qualified, he published anonymously the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In it he proposed that the solar system and the Milky Way condensed out of a rotating cloud of matter under Newton’s own laws, and that the faint patches astronomers could see in the sky were other galaxies, unimaginably far away. It is the nebular hypothesis, later developed independently by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, and it is broadly the account of how planetary systems form that is still taught. Almost nobody read it. The publisher went bankrupt and the stock was seized before the book could circulate. He was not the recluse of legend during these years. He dined out, dressed with care, told stories well, and was known in the city as a good man to be seated next to. One offer of a professorship in poetry came in 1764 and he turned it down; chairs elsewhere in Germany came and he turned those down too, waiting for the one at home.

(●) 1770 AD: At forty-five he finally got the chair, and then published almost nothing for eleven years. + In March 1770 Kant was appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Königsberg, the chair he had applied for twelve years earlier and lost to a colleague. His inaugural dissertation argued something that would look small and turn out to be enormous: that space and time are not features of things out in the world but the forms in which a human mind must receive anything at all. Then the books stopped. For eleven years, apart from a few short pieces, one of the busiest writers in Prussia published nothing, and his friends worried. What was working on him was a Scottish skeptic he had read in German translation. David Hume had asked how anyone knows that one event causes another, and had answered that nobody does: we see one thing follow another often enough, and the mind forms a habit of expectation. If Hume was right, then Newton’s physics rested on a habit, and metaphysics was finished. Kant put it plainly in 1783: "I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction" (Prolegomena, Introduction, Carus translation, 1902). The waking took a decade. He kept promising the book in letters to friends, and kept missing his own deadlines, and finally wrote it out in something like four or five months.

(●) 1781 AD: The Critique of Pure Reason appeared when he was fifty-seven, and the decade that followed produced nearly everything he is read for. + The first reviewers could not make sense of it. Kant wrote a shorter version, the Prolegomena of 1783, to explain the long one, then rewrote large parts of the Critique itself for a second edition in 1787. By then younger men were teaching it in universities across the German states, and the argument had a name: the critical philosophy. Critical, in his usage, carries none of the modern sense of finding fault. A critique for Kant is an examination of reason carried out by reason, a survey of what the instrument can and cannot do before anyone trusts it with the largest questions there are. What followed is one of the great late runs in the history of thought. The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in 1785, where the categorical imperative, his name for a duty that binds you whatever you happen to want, gets its statement (T3). The Critique of Practical Reason in 1788, on freedom and moral hope. The Critique of the Power of Judgment in 1790, on beauty and on purpose in living things. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason in 1793. Toward Perpetual Peace in 1795, which proposed a federation of republics renouncing war and is quoted in discussions of international law to this day. He was rector of his university twice, and by the end of the decade his name was known across Europe. The routine that made it possible became famous, and then a joke. He rose at five, wrote until late morning, lectured, dined at one with never fewer than three guests nor more than nine, a rule he later put into print, walked the same route in the afternoon, and read until bed. The poet Heinrich Heine wrote a generation later that the citizens of Königsberg set their watches by that walk, which is a good line and probably a legend. His health was poor, his chest narrow, and the schedule was a strategy for staying alive to work.

(●) 1794 AD: The king ordered him to stop writing about religion, and he obeyed in words he had chosen with care. + Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason had trouble from the start. The Prussian censors passed the first of its four parts and refused the second. Kant got round them by taking the whole book to the philosophy faculty at Jena for its imprimatur, the formal permission to print that a university faculty could grant on its own authority, and Nicolovius printed it in Königsberg in 1793. Frederick the Great, who had let almost anything be printed, was dead. His successor Frederick William II had handed religious policy to a minister named Johann Christoph Wöllner, who intended to put orthodoxy back into Prussian pulpits and lecture halls. A rescript dated 1 October 1794 arrived, issued in the king’s name and signed by Wöllner. A rescript was a royal order sent down to one named subject, and it argued nothing: it stated the charge, required an answer, and expected the answer to be obedience. This one accused Kant of misusing his philosophy to distort and disparage central doctrines of Scripture and Christianity, noted that he had been trusted as a teacher of the young, and demanded that he give no further offense, on pain of unpleasant consequences. Kant was seventy and had no appetite for martyrdom. He answered that the charges misread him, defended the book, and gave the promise: as His Majesty’s most loyal subject, he would refrain from all public statements on religion. Now, he chose that opening phrase with great care, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote it. A promise made to a king as that king’s subject binds only while the king is alive. So when Frederick William II died in 1797, the promise died with him, and Kant said so in print, publishing The Conflict of the Faculties the following year with the whole correspondence in the preface and his reasoning laid out.

(●) 1804 AD: He died at seventy-nine, after years of watching his own mind go, and said that it was good. + The last years were hard in the particular way that is hardest for a man whose whole life was his intellect. From about 1799 his memory failed, then his grip on the thread of a sentence. He went on writing, thousands of sheets toward a final work that would have joined his philosophy to physics, and the manuscript that survives as the Opus Postumum breaks down into repetition as it goes. In January 1802 he dismissed Martin Lampe, the old soldier who had served him for four decades, and among his memoranda his friends afterward found a note in his own hand: the name Lampe must now be completely forgotten. He died on 12 February 1804. Ehregott Wasianski, the former student who nursed him at the end and published an account of it that year, records that he swallowed a little wine and water sweetened with honey and said, "Es ist gut." It is good. Königsberg turned out for the funeral at the end of the month and the bells of the city were rung. He is buried beside the cathedral, in the colonnaded mausoleum finished in 1924 for the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, and a bronze plaque on the wall there carries in German the sentence he wrote to close the Critique of Practical Reason, about the starry heavens above and the moral law within. The cathedral was gutted by bombing in 1944 and the city changed its name and its country, and the tomb is still there.

What He Taught

(T1) The mind does not copy the world; it supplies the shape in which anything can be experienced at all. + Imagine a pair of green spectacles fused to your face at birth. Everything you ever see is green, and there is no experiment you can run to find out what color things are without them, because every look is a look through the lenses. You would still learn a great deal about the world, and you would be right about most of it, but there is one thing you could say in advance about anything you will ever see: it will be green. That is Kant’s picture of the human mind, and he was proud enough of it to compare himself to Copernicus. Astronomers made sense of the sky once they allowed that the observer was moving; Kant proposed that we make sense of knowledge once we allow that the knower contributes something. Space and time, he argued, are not containers out there holding the furniture of the universe. They are the forms of intuition, and that phrase needs unpacking, because intuition in Kant has nothing to do with hunches. It is his word for whatever the senses hand you directly: this patch of red, that weight in your palm, the sound of a door down the hall. His claim is that whatever the outer senses hand you arrives laid out beside other things in space, and that everything at all, your own inner life included, arrives strung after other things in time, because those are the only two shapes a human mind has to receive anything in. On top of them sit the categories: a short list of concepts, cause and effect among them, that the understanding brings to whatever it receives. You can see the red patch. You cannot see causation. What you actually watch on a billiard table is the cue ball arriving and the eight ball leaving, two events with nothing visible strung between them, and the connecting of the two is your own contribution, supplied so fast and so unfailingly that it feels like something you found lying in the world. This is why he thought he had answered Hume. We can know for certain that every event has a cause, not because we have inspected every event, but because causation is part of the machinery that turns raw sensation into experience. The price is stiff, and Kant paid it openly. We know the world as it appears to minds like ours, which he called the phenomenal. We do not know things as they are in themselves, apart from all experience, which he called the noumenal. That distinction is the wall the rest of his philosophy runs up against, and it is where God, on his account, is standing. God is not a patch of red or a weight in the palm, not an object anyone meets somewhere in space at some hour of the day, so on Kant’s map God falls on the far side of the wall, in the noumenal, where the instruments of theoretical reason cannot follow. That is what makes the old proofs impossible for him (T2).

(Q) "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." + Source: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75 (Kemp Smith translation). The two halves of knowing, and neither works alone. The senses hand up material with no organization; the understanding supplies organization with nothing in it. Knowledge happens where they meet, which is why, on Kant’s account, thinking about something no sense could ever deliver is thinking that comes back empty-handed (T2).

(T2) The classic proofs of God fail as proofs, because existence is not one more feature a thing can have. + Count out a hundred dollars in your imagination. Every bill is there, the total is right, nothing is missing from the concept. Now count out a hundred dollars on the table. The concept has not gained an item; your finances have. That is Kant’s hundred thalers, and it is the most quoted objection ever made to the ontological argument. The ontological argument, first put by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, reasons from the idea of God to the existence of God: God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and a God who exists is greater than one who does not, so the greatest conceivable being must exist. Kant’s reply is that the argument treats existing as a property, like being wise or being three feet tall, which can be written into a definition. It is not. To say a thing exists is to say that something answers to the concept, and no amount of work on the concept can settle that. He then argued that the other two proofs lean on the first. Take the cosmological argument, which reasons from the fact that anything exists at all to a necessary being. Necessary here is a strong word: not a being that happens to have been around a long time, but one that could not have failed to be there, the way seven could not have failed to be odd. Kant’s complaint is about the last step. Getting to "there is a necessary being" is one thing; getting from there to "and that being is God" requires you to say what a necessary being must be like, which means working out an existence from a concept, and that, he said, is the ontological argument again wearing a disguise. The argument from design he called physico-theological, meaning an argument that climbs from the physical world up to its maker, and he treated it with genuine respect, calling it the oldest and clearest and most in keeping with ordinary human reason. His objection was about reach: an inspection of the world can support a very great architect who shaped the material available, and cannot by itself deliver the infinite Creator of everything from nothing. Two things are worth holding on to. First, Kant was not sniping from outside. He had published his own proof in 1763, and abandoned it. Second, and this is what commentators on both sides keep forgetting, he did not conclude that God does not exist. He concluded that theoretical reason cannot settle it either way, which cuts the atheist’s proofs down at exactly the same height (T4).

(Q) "A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers." + Source: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A599/B627 (Kemp Smith translation). A thaler was the standard silver coin of the German states. Kant’s next sentence draws the moral: the real coins do not enlarge the concept, though they make a considerable difference to his own financial position.

(T3) The moral law commands without conditions, and it forbids treating any person as merely a tool. + A grocer gives honest change to a child who cannot count, and does it because word gets around and dishonest shops lose custom. The change is correct and the action is decent, and Kant says there is no moral worth in it at all, because the man is not doing what is right, he is doing what pays. Change the incentives and you change the grocer. That example is Kant’s own, from the opening pages of the Groundwork, and it shows what he is hunting: an obligation that does not depend on what you happen to want. He called such an obligation a categorical imperative. A hypothetical imperative says: if you want a loan, keep your promises. A categorical imperative says: keep your promises. Full stop, whatever you want. His test for whether a proposed action is one of these is to ask what would happen if the rule behind it were followed by everyone. Suppose you need money and mean to promise repayment you cannot make. Universalize the rule and promising itself falls apart, because nobody would extend credit to a promise. The plan does not fail because it is unkind; it fails because it cannot be willed for everyone without destroying the thing it depends on. The second and more famous form of the test drops the machinery and states a value: treat humanity, in yourself and in everyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means. Not never as a means, since we use one another all day long and pay for the service. Never merely. The dentist is a means to a filled tooth and remains a person while doing it. Kant’s word for what makes this true is Würde, dignity: a worth that has no price and cannot be traded against anything. A person may not be spent. Christian readers should notice both the nearness and the gap. That every human being carries a worth no one may bargain away is Genesis 1:27 in philosophical dress, and Kant’s ethics is unthinkable apart from the Christianity he grew up in. What Kant would not grant is that the law comes from outside. On his account the will that must obey the law is the same will that legislates it, and he calls this autonomy, self-rule. Scripture presents the law as the command of a Person who gives it (Matthew 22:37).

(Q) "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." + Source: Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, Second Section (Abbott translation, 1873; the work is now usually titled the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). A maxim is the personal rule you are actually acting on, stated honestly: not "I am helping myself to the petty cash" but "I take what I need when nobody is counting." Kant’s test is to hold that rule up and ask whether you could will it for everyone, yourself included, on the receiving end.

(T4) God, freedom and immortality come back as postulates: not things reason proves, but things the moral life requires a person to hope. + Everyone has watched the wrong person win. A decent woman spends her health on her parents and dies with nothing; the man who cut every corner dies comfortable and well spoken of at the funeral. Kant felt the force of that as keenly as anyone who ever wrote about it, and he built a piece of philosophy on it. Here is the argument. The moral law commands you to pursue the highest good, which is not merely being virtuous but a world in which virtue and happiness finally match. You cannot rationally aim at something you believe to be impossible. But you cannot bring that match about yourself, since you do not control the weather, the economy, or how long you live. So the moral life presses on you three things you cannot prove and cannot do without. Freedom, because "ought" means nothing to a machine. Immortality, because no one becomes fully good in seventy-nine years. And God, because only a moral Author of nature could finally fit happiness to desert. Kant calls these the postulates of pure practical reason. The word postulate is doing careful work, and it is worth slowing down for. It does not mean guess, and it does not mean proof. It means something you are rationally entitled, and in fact required, to affirm as a condition of taking your own moral obligations seriously. Kant thought this was not a downgrade for faith but a rescue. Proofs can be refuted by better arguments, and a God available only to people who follow metaphysics is a God for professors. Moral obligation presses on everyone. Christians have received this in two minds ever since, and both reactions are fair. It is a real defense of belief in God, made by the man who dismantled the proofs, and it puts conscience at the center where Paul also puts it (Romans 2:15). It is also thin. The God who arrives at the end of it is a guarantor of the moral system, required so that the sums come out. He does not speak, does not act in history, and does not come looking for anyone.

(Q) "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within." + Source: Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Conclusion (Abbott translation). The most quoted sentence he ever wrote, and a bronze plaque beside his tomb in Königsberg carries it in German. What follows it in the text is the part usually left off: the starry heavens make him feel like an animal on a speck of matter, and the moral law reveals a life independent of that whole scale.

(T5) Real religion is moral religion, and the historical faiths are vehicles for it rather than the thing itself. + Two men attend the same church for forty years. One of them treats attendance as a payment, an entry on the credit side of an account with God, and goes home unchanged. The other comes out of it a little more honest with his wife and a little more patient with his employees. Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason of 1793 is a long argument that only the second man has religion, and that a great deal of what passes for piety is what he called counterfeit service: doing something for God that God has no use for, in place of the one thing asked. He is not shallow about sin, and readers who expect the Enlightenment optimist are usually surprised. The book opens by rejecting the idea that people are basically fine. Kant argues for what he names radical evil: a propensity in human nature, universal and freely taken up, to subordinate the moral law to self-love. Not a bad habit, not bad institutions, something at the root. He knew he was restating original sin in his own vocabulary and said as much, while refusing the inherited part, since on his account guilt has to be something you did. What he does with Christian doctrine is to keep the shape and empty the history, and the pattern is easiest to see if the doctrines are taken one at a time. The Son of God becomes the archetype of humanity well-pleasing to God, an ideal that lies ready in reason and would be valid whether or not any actual man ever embodied it. Atonement becomes the moral change by which the new man in a person bears the suffering owed by the old, so that the whole transaction happens inside one life rather than between a sinner and a cross. Church becomes the ethical commonwealth, which is his term for people bound to one another in the pursuit of the good. As for Scripture and creed, they keep a real usefulness in this scheme, but only as the vehicle: they carry moral religion to people who need a story in order to receive it, and they are meant in the end to be outgrown. Kant meant all of this as the highest compliment he could pay Christianity: of all the historical faiths, he judged, this one comes nearest to the religion of reason.

(Q) "In this manner, the moral laws lead through the conception of the summum bonum as the object and final end of pure practical reason to religion, that is, to the recognition of all duties as divine commands." + Source: Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, chapter II, section V (Abbott translation). Summum bonum is Latin for the highest good, virtue together with the happiness that fits it (T4). The sentence runs on to insist that these are not arbitrary ordinances of some foreign will but essential laws of every free will in itself. Note the direction of travel, which is the whole difference between Kant and the church: morality is the road and religion is where it arrives, so duties are recognized as divine commands rather than received as them.

(Q) "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." + Source: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the Second Edition, Bxxx (Kemp Smith translation). Kant is explaining what the whole critical project was for. If theoretical reason could reach past experience, it could establish God and also refute him; by showing that it reaches no such distance, Kant means to take the ground out from under dogmatic atheism as well as dogmatic metaphysics, and to leave the question where he thinks it belongs, with the moral life. Whether the room he cleared is a room faith can live in is the argument that ran through the next two centuries.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Protestant theology moved indoors after him, resting faith on feeling and on conscience where the critique could not reach it. + Within a generation the effect on German theology was visible from a distance. If the proofs could not be run and history could not carry the weight of doctrine, then theology needed different ground, and two men found two answers that shaped the next hundred years. Friedrich Schleiermacher, preaching in Berlin, published his Speeches on Religion in 1799 and argued that religion is neither knowing nor doing but a distinct thing of its own, a sense and taste for the infinite, later formulated as the feeling of absolute dependence. That is a move around Kant rather than through him: it locates faith somewhere the first Critique was not aiming. Albrecht Ritschl, teaching at Göttingen from the 1860s, went the other way and took Kant’s road straight, building a theology of moral value judgments in which the kingdom of God is a moral community and metaphysics is kept out of dogmatics on principle. Dogmatics is simply the work of setting out what the church believes, doctrine by doctrine, and what Ritschl wanted was a dogmatics containing no claims at all about a world beyond experience. Between them the two men set the terms of what came to be called liberal Protestantism, a theology that holds on to Christian ethics and Christian feeling while treating the miracles and the metaphysics as detachable, and much of the theology written in Europe before 1914 is an argument among their students. In Britain the reception was slower and stranger. Samuel Taylor Coleridge read the Germans and brought a version of Kant into English religious thought in his Aids to Reflection of 1825, and it is largely through him that the vocabulary reached British and American readers. What travelled everywhere, in the end, was less any particular doctrine than a reflex: the assumption that religious claims are a different kind of claim from claims about the world, answerable to conscience and experience rather than to evidence. Apologists have been arguing with that reflex ever since.

(†) His moral postulate was turned around and handed back as an argument for God. + Kant said the moral law obliges you to postulate God. Christian philosophers took the same materials and pressed a step further: if there really is a law over you that you did not make, the best explanation of it is a lawgiver. Hastings Rashdall put the case in The Theory of Good and Evil in 1907, arguing that an objective moral law has to exist somewhere, and that a law exists nowhere but in a mind. William Sorley gave the Gifford Lectures on the same theme, published as Moral Values and the Idea of God in 1918. A. E. Taylor followed with The Faith of a Moralist in 1930. And then a Belfast-born Oxford tutor put it in language a bus conductor could follow: C. S. Lewis opens Mere Christianity with two men quarrelling and appealing to a standard neither of them invented, and by the fifth short chapter he has the reader looking at a Somebody behind the standard. The broadcast talks that became that book began going out in 1941 to a country at war, which is a considerable distance from a Königsberg lecture hall, and the line of descent is real. The other inheritance is about persons. Kant’s insistence that a human being has dignity rather than a price, and may never be treated as merely a means, entered Christian ethics and stayed there. It is not that Christians needed telling; the doctrine of the image of God is older than the argument (Genesis 1:27). But Kant gave the claim a form that could be argued in a secular court and written into a charter, and Christian thinkers working on human rights, medical ethics, and the treatment of the poor have used that form ever since.

(†) The twentieth century came back at the critique itself, and several of Kant’s conclusions did not hold. + For a century and a half it was common to say that Kant had ended natural theology, the old attempt to reach God by reasoning from the world itself rather than from Scripture. That is no longer a safe thing to say in a philosophy department, and the change came from several directions at once. Karl Barth attacked from theology’s side, and his target was the whole project of religion built up from below. In the Church Dogmatics of the 1930s he argued that religion is what human beings construct in the place where God’s revelation should stand, and that a faith grounded in morality or in feeling is a faith grounded in ourselves. Whatever one makes of Barth, he broke the spell that Kant’s heirs had cast over German theology. From the philosophers came a straightforward revival, and it is worth taking the moves one at a time. Norman Malcolm in 1960 and Alvin Plantinga in the 1970s rebuilt the ontological argument in what philosophers call modal terms. Modal reasoning is reasoning about what must be so and what merely happens to be so: the moon could have been larger than it is, but seven could not have been an even number. A possible world, in this vocabulary, is nothing spooky. It is one complete way things could have gone, ours being the way they in fact went. The rebuilt argument never treats existence as a predicate, predicate being the logician’s word for a feature you attribute to something when you say that it is wise or is three feet tall. Treating existence as one more feature of that kind was Kant’s whole complaint (T2). It reasons instead about a being whose existence, if it obtains at all, could not have failed to obtain, and therefore holds in every way things could have gone or in none of them. Kant’s objection is sidestepped rather than ignored, and being sidestepped is not the same as being refuted. William Lane Craig revived the argument from a beginning of the universe, and pointed out that Kant’s first antinomy, his demonstration that reason can prove both that the world had a beginning and that it did not, has a defective side. Cosmology in the twentieth century also handed the question a body of evidence Kant did not have, and an argument stands differently when there are measurements underneath it. Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff and others then went after the underlying demand itself. Nobody has ever proved that other people have minds, and nobody can prove that the world did not spring into being five minutes ago complete with memories and half-finished coffee, and yet a person who believes that his neighbours are conscious and that yesterday happened is not being irrational for a moment. Belief in God, they argued, can belong in that same class: rational without having been inferred from anything else. That unsettles the standard the critique was applying, because Kant assumed a belief reaching that far has to be earned, by proof or else by the moral law (T4), and never simply found in place and rational as it stands. None of this is a rout, and honesty requires saying so. Kant’s objection to the ontological argument in its classical form is still widely thought to land; his warning that a designer inferred from the world is not automatically the God of Abraham is one that careful natural theologians now build into their arguments; and every serious apologist writing today argues in a world that reads him. The conversation moved, and he is still in it.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: grace, atonement, and a God who acts. + Kant kept nearly every Christian word and changed what each one carries. The disagreements are not about tone, and they run to the center. - Grace. For Kant, help that comes from outside cannot make you good, because moral worth belongs only to what you do freely yourself; grace can at most be hoped for after a person has done everything in his own power. Scripture reverses the order: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). - Atonement. He held that moral guilt is the most personal thing there is and cannot be handed to anyone else, so a substitute cannot take it. The New Testament says a transfer is exactly what happened: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). - Christ. The archetype of moral perfection lies in reason, Kant argued, and would hold good whether or not any man ever lived it out. Christian faith stakes everything on the opposite claim, that a particular man in a particular province is God among us: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). - Prayer and worship. Petition, churchgoing, and sacrament he treated as at best props for the moral disposition and at worst a bargain offered to God in place of obedience. Scripture treats prayer as a child speaking to a Father who listens and answers, and the Lord’s Supper as something commanded rather than tolerated. - The believer’s freedom. Autonomy, self-rule, is the ground of Kant’s ethics, and it is the point on which he is furthest from the New Testament, where freedom is not writing your own law but being set free from sin to serve God. One more entry belongs in the ledger, from his own hand. In the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime of 1764, in the essay "Of the Different Races of Human Beings" of 1775, and in his physical geography lectures, Kant ranked the races of mankind and made contemptuous judgments about Africans and Native Americans that his own principle, that every person is an end and never merely a means, forbids outright. He wrote the sentence about dignity and he wrote these too. In the 1790s his published work turns hard against colonial conquest, in Toward Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals, and scholars disagree about how much of his earlier view he abandoned. The failure is worth naming plainly, and it is a demonstration of his own doctrine of radical evil in the one case he could examine from the inside.