in our last session we examined briefly thomas aquinas's view of natural theology and if you recall during that session i indicated that thomas was reacting to the integral aristotelianism of muslim philosophy that taught the double truth theory well saint thomas who is called the doctor angelicus or the angelic doctor of the roman catholic church was a titan in the realm of philosophy and theology in the middle ages and he is most responsible for constructing what is known in the history of theoretical thought as the classical synthesis that is by showing that philosophy as well as theology manifested the truth of the existence of god and so strong was this synthesis that it was rare in those days for intellectuals to challenge the notion of the existence of god and historically the principal arguments for the existence of god were the following first of all there was the famous ontological argument for the existence of god which we'll look at later which had been formulated early on by augustine in his version but made most famous by the version set forth by saint anselm of canterbury and the ontological argument for the existence of god was an argument for god from being as i say i'll take time later to explain more of that for you secondly there was the cosmological argument and the cosmological argument was that argument that reasoned from the world or the cosmos back to the origin of the world to the creator it was the argument based on the law of causality arguing that that that world that we perceive has to have a transcendent cause and so the cosmological argument was part of that historical tradition then there was also what was called the teleological argument that that word teleological may be foreign to some it comes from the greek word telos which is the greek word that means end or purpose or goal the teleological argument was the argument from design that is the presence of design in the universe would indicate a designer and the argument that was teleological said that all around nature we see things operating in a logical way and that they are put together with an amazing symmetry that suggests a an intelligent creator or an intelligent designer and so the argument from the appearance or the from the appearance of purpose and order and harmony in the universe was used to argue for the existence of god and in addition to that there was the moral argument for god which i'll pass over for now but these arguments as they had been articulated by christian philosophers through the centuries represented formidable proofs for the existence of god and made it possible for christianity to dominate in the academic world particularly in western europe where in the university of the middle ages theology was seen as the queen of the sciences and philosophy her handmaiden that is the science of philosophy operated as a servant for the aims and goals of theology because it was seen that there was a unity between theological affirmations and philosophical thinking and evidence so again we want to put to rest the idea that saint thomas aquinas was trying to separate philosophy from theology or nature from grace but was trying to maintain their unity in putting together the classical synthesis that reigned for so many centuries and this synthesis enjoyed dominance in theoretical thought until the massive work of emmanuel kant that took place towards the end of the 18th century in the history of western thought we see the publication of immanuel kant's book the critique of pure reason as a watershed moment in history it was a a book that was revolutionary in scope in fact its timing was almost exactly at the same time as the american revolution and we tend to think of the american revolution as one of the most significant events to take place in modern history and that the american revolution changed the course of world history forever and yet at the same time i would say that the intellectual revolution that was provoked by khan's critique of pure reason was even more far-reaching in terms of its revolutionary impact than anything that was accomplished in the political arena by the american colonies in their revolt against the crown of england in his famous critique of pure reason kant who had been awakened by the skepticism of the british empiricist david hume said he was awakened from his dogmetic slumbers and was afraid that hume's critique of causality which we've already looked at briefly in this class would sow the seeds of destruction for all of science not to mention religion and faith and so part of what was motivating kant in his critique was to rescue science from skepticism and along the way he laid his axe at the root of the tree of the classical synthesis giving a comprehensive critique of the traditional arguments for the existence of god and with that kant was not an atheist and was not trying to be totally destructive of christianity but rather he was trying to attack reason in order to make room for faith because he saw christianity having degenerated into too much of a dependence on human reason and not enough on faith and so he gave this critique of the existence of god now at the heart of this critique i shouldn't say he gave a critique of the existence of god that's incorrect he gave a critique of the arguments for the existence of god he himself affirmed the existence of god but he said that you cannot know the existence of god from natural reason his was an attack against natural theology and he said that there were two realms as it were the realm of what he called the numeral realm or the numeral world and down here the phenomenal realm and in the numeral realm he placed three concepts in the numeral realm is the idea of god the idea of the self and the idea of what kant called the ding on zeke or the thing in itself or if you will essences now just take a deep breath here and we'll take try to get an understanding of what that's about when he talks about things in themselves or essences he's talking about the metaphysical level of reality that is beyond the ability of our senses to perceive you know plato aristotle aristotle and other philosophers were fond of talking about the essence of a thing and yet we never perceive essences we only see outward appearances we never perceive treeness we never perceive humanness we only perceive particular human beings and i don't know the soul of a person or even if he has a soul from observation by analysis i can't go to the doctor and get an examination and say doctor what kind of shape is my soul in what are its vital signs because the soul cannot be perceived by the senses and so all of these metaphysical realities that philosophers postulated beyond the realm of physics that's what metaphysics is that's which is above and beyond the physical realm those things cannot be known directly through sense perception we never see them taste them touch them or smell them or so on those things can't assign to the numeral world the self or the soul or the mind we you know how do we know that there is such a thing as the self and you think that well that's simple i mean we all are aware of ourselves that we have a certain self consciousness but kant would begin to analyze that carefully from a philosophical perspective and say but again how can you measure the self of the person so so he would put the self in the numeral world along with god god the self and essences now he doesn't say that there is no such thing as god and there is no such thing as the self or there's no such thing as essences for kant the question is epistemological that is the question is can we know anything about these realities or if in fact they exist at all through scientific inquiry through rational inquiry and his answer was no that all of our knowledge is restricted to this realm the realm of phenomena the phenomenal world does not mean the terrific world sometimes we say that somebody who's outstanding in sports we say he's phenomenal you know he's fantastic he's terrific now but what this word means is phenomenal means that which can be perceived by the five senses the it is the world of appearances it is the world that can be studied and analyzed and examined scientifically that is the phenomenal world now what kant was saying is that through the use of reason or of scientific investigation we cannot get from here to here that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the world that we see and the unseen world of essences so we can have no real knowledge of what's up here and one of the principal reasons he said that was because he said even though the law of causality works in the sphere in which we live in the phenomenal world we can't know for sure that it can be applied to the metaphysical realm so that we cannot use the reasoning based upon cause and effect to get from the cosmos to god to get from this world to the supernatural world and so uh he as i said was skeptical about the ability to know anything about god now at the same time he said in his critique of practical reason that for practical purposes we must live as if there is a god we must believe that there's a god in order for civilization to be possible because the god hypothesis as we will see a little bit later is necessary for meaningful ethics and if you don't have a meaningful ethic you can't have an enduring civilization without morality or law based upon objective virtue sooner or later societies will degenerate into the law of the jungle and into anarchy where might makes right dostoevsky said it this way if there is no god all things are permissible as law becomes reduced to preferences and there is no such thing as what ought to be done only what is done but in any case with this skepticism the christian church reached a crisis many theologians and apologists after this critique was leveled against the traditional arguments turned away from the classical synthesis and away from natural theology to what we call in theology fidaism of one sort or another fidaism is based upon the word for faith in latin and fidaism simply means that we take the idea of god on faith through some kind of leap of faith and the no the notion of god cannot be known rationally and we certainly cannot prove the existence of god you have to take it by faith or as some kind of first principle upon which you build everything else you can maybe assume the existence of god presuppose the existence of god or grant the existence of god by faith but what you cannot do is prove the existence of god by rational categories and as i say many philosophers and theologians capitulated to kant at this point while others however refuse to play dead at the feet of emmanuel kant and have sought ever since the 18th century to reconstruct natural theology in such a way as to answer the objections that kant leveled against traditional theism and i've been very much concerned about this undertaking in my own teaching career for this simple reason i want to be faithful to scripture and i find a simple conflict between what kant taught and what is taught in the new testament we've already looked at the first chapter of romans wherein the apostle paul declares that the invisible things of god even his eternal power and deity are known through the things that are made and so what paul is saying is you can get here from here he says that there is a general revelation by which god's is not only can be known but is known in and through the created order and that that knowledge is so manifest and so clear as to leave the world without an excuse if there really is a barrier between this world and the world of god if kant is right then ladies and gentlemen the unbeliever has an excuse for not embracing the truth of god he has the excuse of ignorance where he says i couldn't get there from here so i what we have here is an irreconcilable difference between the teaching of the apostle paul and the teaching of immanuel kant and so i look at that as a christian and i say well if paul is right then manifestly emmanuel kant has to be wrong and if kant is correct then paul is wrong again because kant says you can have no knowledge of god through the knowledge of this world where the new testament says we do have a knowledge of god through a knowledge of this world that is that god can be known cosmologically now kant went on in his critique to say that all of these traditional arguments of god are based upon the ontological argument which is the argument of for the existence of god from being and the classic formulation of that was from saint anselm who said that i that god is that being without which no apart from which no greater than can be conceived or we turn that around and say god is the greatest conceivable and he says that the greatest conceivable being must be conceived of as really existing because if you're thinking of the greatest conceivable being as being merely a construct of the mind just an idea with no correspondence in reality you're not thinking of god because what anselm was getting at is that god and god alone is that which no greater than can be conceived who can only properly be conceived as being and as existing that is to say he's thinking of a being who cannot not be now kant challenged that and we're going to re-examine that in much greater care here fairly soon but what kant was saying is that from the perspective of a concept there's no difference between a hypothetical being and a real being because he said existence is not an attribute existence is not an attribute that is there's no difference in reality between the idea of a perfect dollar and the reality of a perfect dollar because the concept of the dollar is the concept of the dollar this is the same argument that was leveled against anselm by gonolone who said spoke about islands he said there's there's a basically just because i have an idea of the most perfect island conceivable doesn't make it true and then some said you missed the point i'm not talking about islands or dollars or anything else i'm only talking in one case of that being which no greater than can be conceived and that must be conceived of being because it is greater to exist than not to exist it's greater to be in reality than to simply be in the imagination and and so the debate continues even to our own day but i just leave you with this now that kant in his critique of the traditional arguments for god said that they all boiled down in the final analysis to some form of the ontological argument because what what you're saying here is that if we're going to be rational reason demands that god exists but just because reason demands that god exists does not mean that god exists all it means is that reason demands it but maybe reality in the final analysis is not rational that's why many people went from kant's critique into a philosophy of irrationalism such as existential philosophy and to relativism which pervades our culture today