PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE & THOUGHT
Immanuel Kant was greatly inspired by Hume's writings and developed many of his ideas. Kant launched a systematic attack on the traditional proofs for God's existence (he also named them!). He's most famous for his criticism of the Ontological Argument but he also launched some effective criticisms of the Cosmological Argument too.
Kant attacks the idea of God as a Necessary Being - so his criticisms apply most forcefully to Aquinas' 3rd Way, the PSR and perhaps the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA). |
If the Supreme Being forms a link in the chain of empirical conditions, it must be a member of the empirical series, and like the lower members which it precedes, have its origin in some higher member of the series - Immanuel Kant
YES
Kant's point that the Cosmological Argument is really a disguised version of the Ontological Argument helps explain why there are so many different variations of the Cosmological Argument about. By showing that the only thing that matters is God's Logical Necessity, Kant clarifies the murky term 'Necessary' that had confused Hume and is often misused.
Kant wasn't an atheist. He demolished the 'classical' arguments for God's existence in order to propose better ones - and a better view of religion. For Kant, God was all about Morality and so was religion. Kant made a huge contribution to focusing religion on morality, rather than just serving God. He helped develop Religious Humanism, liberal theology and modern theories like Situation Ethics.
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NO
Kant focuses almost entirely on the Necessary Being, which is important for Aquinas' Argument from Contingency and the PSR, but less important for the other Cosmological Arguments. The return of the Kalam Argument in the 20th century shows that Kant failed to demolish the Cosmological Argument, which has a "life of its own" separate from the Ontological Argument.
The idea that we can't draw conclusions about things beyond the 5 senses has been rejected in the 20th century. Einstein introduced theories about the 'curvature' of space; astronomers now study Black Holes and Higgs-Boson Particles and search for Dark Matter. All of these things go beyond the Phenomenon of reality. If that's OK for scientists, why not for philosophers?
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