3/26/06 8:07 PM

Note: I am presently looking at a particular facet in the evangelizing program for the world, focusing now on the Muslims. I need to come up with what we can expect from reason as we begin our search for the ways of discerning God. The general question is: how can we discern God. Here we look at the determination on the way, the contribution of pure reason itself to any such discernment.

What we discover, upon diligent investigation in pure reason,* is our inability to discern anything at all about God, not so much as even whether there be such a thing, but merely that it would not contradict science to assume God, any more than it would to assume free will, and anymore than it would to assume eternal life.

[* which will then be in an appendum.]

A word is necessary in justification for this assertion. Freedom of will can be thought at the same time that all actions are events. What is an event for science is a free act by one and the same individual. Two different ways of thinking about one and the same individual, that do not impede each other. And so no way of knowing if there is free will or not. You don’t need it for science, that’s for sure. But it is also easy enough to think.

Eternal life is an unacceptable extrapolation from the fact that we do in life have a single consciousness of our own identity in different times, to the assertion that this is independent of the body and so that our identity continues past the grave. And so there is simply no evidence meaningful to this question possible, one way or the other. It is simply an unwarraned extrapolation.

God can be considered as a causal agent, and there it can easily be thought, so long as everything that science attests to is then an effect of God. Thus it is easy enough to think, but that is no warrant that it is true, any more than thinking free will makes it so, or thinking you are made of glass means you are made of glass.

God can also be considered as a pure idea, unique in its perfection, but that is no more evidence than that for eternal life. It is not possible to derive any existence from its idea, as though existence were part of the perfection of the idea. An imperfect thing is not made perfect by appending existence to it.

And so while it is impossible to disprove the existence of eternal life, free will and God, it is equally impossible to prove the existence of those three. And so you are left with a take-it-or-leave-it situation. To each his own. The scientist leaving it, except possibly in his private life.


Now we can leave this arena of using principles to make connections and to draw conclusions as knowledge, a theoretical use of principles. We draw now to the other side of the same river of rationality and look at the application of principles such that events are created in the flow of experience, namely our own rational, principled actions.


[That’s going to be the touchest part, and we will let it be an appendix.]

Now we have seen that it is impossible to prove from pure reason that a God exists or does not exist, but merely that it is unnecessary for science.

In the practical realm we think first in terms of principles that reason devises for its use, and these are of three sorts: efficiences in constructions, counsels of prudence, and laws of morality.

The notion of laws of any kind sounds funny at first hearing, because laws, and especially absolute or moral laws, don’t seem to make any sense, other than making someone worthy of happiness, whatever that might import or not. And yet we are attached to this moral law by our rational human nature, i.e., once we understand the moral law we respect it and see ourselves as subordinate to it, at least as a condition of self respect.

Now because we have this respect for the moral law we are able to accept ourselves as free beings and as responsible for our actions, for we can see that we are bound to the moral law regardless of what everything else may say one way or the other, i.e., independently of the laws of nature and the counsels of prudence. [in the moral conception we act immediately without need for further consideration.]

In order for the moral law to be purposeful it must aim at the attainment of some end. This is a requirement for all rational actions, including construction skills and wisdom in prudence. It must be conceived of as achieving something. The only thing that reason will accept, in its unification of the moral law and the human being, is that morality be the measure of worthiness for happiness and happiness be doled out as deserved. That is the aim of the moral law, or rather of the moral act. The moral act is undertaken for the sake of this Highest Good that reason dreams up from the necessity of practical. The moral act is not undertaken merely because it is a moral act, any more than a car is washed just to wash a car (except I suppose in Dadaism). The moral act aims at the Highest Good and we express the fact of this in our actions. We are part and parcel of the Highest Good where people are moral and where as a result they are happy.


Why is this so hard for us to grasp? Because it makes us want to go back and doubt the solitary and independent authority of the moral law. But that is what we are not to do, for this consideration of the Highest Good is a consequence of the authority of the moral law, and is not its condition.

We are speaking of an establish fact which cannot be denied by any human being, i.e., the unquestionable authority of the moral law. Then ipso facto we must seek out its, rationally speaking, goal, for it is a rational act and hence aims at something. What is the goal and aim of the moral law? It can only be conceived of as the Highest Good, where individual moral perfection is possible and also happiness commensurate to that perfection. There is no other goal which can please an unbiased, rational thinker. A rational thinker could not call for uniform happiness regardless of the moral worth, for as Kant himself says (GMM I): a sorry fellow prospering cannot be pleasing to a rational, impartial bystander. And so this goal is a product of pure practical reason itself.

Finally then in order for the Highest Good to be the practical goal, which has already been established, then it is necessary (as a consequence of the now factual practicality of the Highest Good) for eternal life to be postulated in order that we may progress to the posited feasible moral perfection, and it is necessary to postulate God in order that we may find the happiness we are worthy of.

Hence: we are not required by theoretical reason to admit the existence of God or even the possibility of God, but we are required by practical reason to insist upon the existence of God. Hence further: we cannot say there is a God (unless we just want to), but we must say that there must be a God. The one stems from the theoretical and the other from the practical and even the moral; and that is the reason for their disjunct, for ordinarily to say “there must be a God” would render “then there is a God,” but this assertion is excluded (as a necessity or causation) by theoretical reason.