The Super Best Friends

I couldn’t think of a title, and I just watched South Park, so that’s the best I could do.

In rejecting the possibility of apodictic proofs as well as blind faith providing for God’s existence, Reinhold is enamored with Kant’s faith through practical reason. He holds that Kant manages to combine the best of both worlds, as he uses both doctrines for grounds in his argumentation. More importantly, Reinhold argues that a proper balance is stricken between reason and faith. While both are necessary, they cannot be allowed to encroach upon one another. Practical reason leads to the necessity of faith, not to its elimination.

Despite all this adoration, Reinhold doesn’t actually spend too much time in this letter actually discussing what Kant has proved, so I had to cheat and look at what Kant says. Kant argues that through reason, one can neither prove God’s existence, nor his non-existence. Instead, he classifies God as the faultless ideal, something that can never be proven yet never refuted (B669 589). Due to the transcendental qualities we ascribe to God (infinity, unity, omnipresence, omnipotence, etc.), only a transcendental theology could explain them. And as we are incapable of producing such a theology, we can never empirically prove or disprove God’s existence. Conversely, Kant also ascribes the concept of God to morality. Specifically, the idea of God is necessary when trying to conceptualize the highest idea of good. In this sense, one cannot separate the idea of God from the idea of supreme happiness. Thus, the ideal of the highest good is a necessary part of the moral world, which is seen as a consequence of the sensible world (A811 680). Therefore, God is a necessary idea behind the motivations of the good and morality.

Reinhold seems to encapsulate this when he argues that both wise sages and common men seem to accept the idea that there is some future rewarder or judge that will either approve or condemn one’s actions. Thus, Reinhold argues the best part of Kant’s proof is that it grounds the cognition of God’s existence, while still allowing for faith.

Ultimately, the problem I have with this is the effort Kant goes to explain the abilities and boundaries of pure reason, only to determine that it is unable to provide a definitive answer to God’s existence. And then to say that some idea of God is necessary for morality almost seems contradictory to me. If we cannot prove the existence of God, yet God is linked to the prime motivation of morality, then what’s the real point behind morality? I’m not saying this is a call to start rioting in the streets, just that there’s a bridge of faith in Kant’s reasoning that I’m uncomfortable with. I’m accepting of the symbiotic relationship between faith and reason in determining the idea of God, but not the subsequent inference into the reason for morality.