The Ambiguous Revolution: Kant on the Nature of Faith

Abstract

Kant, it has been said, brought a‘Copernican Revolution’to religion and theology no less so than he did to physics. According to Karl Barth, for example, Kant’s theology diverges radically from tradition.² While rejecting the traditional proofs as a foundation for a knowledge of God (God’s existence, etc.) as wholly inadequate, he nevertheless remained a theist. Unwilling to believe in God in the absence of good reasons for doing so, however, he offered an alternative justification for such belief. Religious belief, he insists, is based on practical considerations rather than on theoretical ones. Kant, therefore, did not consider it as necessarily irrational to hold a thing as true even though it be theoretically insufficient holding it to be true. According to him it is simply that in such a case the belief that ‘something’is true does not constitute knowledge. And it is this displacement of knowledge in the religious sphere by faith that essentially constitutes the revolutionary change in theology.³