The Idea of God in Kantian Philosophy

Abstract

The issue of existence and justification of the Supreme Being is constantly approached by Immanuel Kant in his entire work. For Kant, the ultimate goal of the nature created by God id man as a moral being: the world was created according to man's moral needs. This is why it is said that, after Kant, teleology leads to a moral theology, one that is not about the possibility of proving rationally God's existence but which is about stating that moral life is possible only if God exists. Under these circumstances, though the “idea of God” is presupposed in most Kantian works, we insist, below, particularly on what is debated when appealing to practical reason. In the theoretical philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason, the idea of God as Unconditioned, as a being that is absolutely necessary, is seen as a transcendental ideal determined through an idea as a prototype of perfection necessary to everything that is contingent and determined in our sensible world: what we can do to conciliate sensible experience with the Absolute Being is to presuppose an extra-phenomenal reality designated as transcendental object: we presuppose its existence but we cannot get to know it. Later, in Critique of Practical Reason, God is postulated (together with soul's immortality) as a condition of the supreme value of moral life, the Sovereign Good (union of virtue with happiness). Since in the sensible world moral conduct does not warrant proportional happiness, the virtuous ones has strong reasons to believe in the reparatory intervention of a superior power: God, as moral ideal and warranty of moral order. “Morality leads, inevitably, to religion, through which it (morality) extends over a moral Lawgiver” claims Kant. Under these conditions, religion, understood as the belief in the existence of a supreme Lawgiver, has, for Kant, an exclusively moral substance. In the last part of the present study we insist on the work Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, we attempt at arguing the possibility of discovering some elements of “philosophical Christology” in Kant's practical philosophy: first, because, for the philosopher of Konigsberg, Christian doctrine provides the only concept of Sovereign Good that meets the exigencies of practical reason; and second, because we consider significant Kant's debates on God's Son as impersonated idea of the Good, the Perfect Man well-pleasing to God, Moral Personality, noumenal archetype originating in mankind, etc.