Moral Arguments for the Existence of God
From the time of Immanuel Kant to the present day, a great many attempts have been made to base arguments for God's existence not upon the mere fact that there is a world, nor on the general orderliness it manifests, but on a very special feature of that world—human moral experience. The popularity of moral arguments is not hard to understand. David Hume and Kant had produced powerful and apparently disabling criticisms of the traditional arguments of natural theology, criticisms that seemed decisive against any conceivable type of argument to God as the explanation of the world. Hume had no alternative theistic argument to offer and, insofar as theoretical reasoning is concerned, Kant had none either. The structure of Kant's ethical philosophy, however, accorded to "practical reason" privileges not shared by theoretical reason. If God was to retain any place in the Kantian system, the weight of apologetic had to be shifted from the theoretical to the practical, to exploring the implications of our moral situation. Between Kant's day and the middle of the twentieth century, skepticism about the theoretical arguments tended to deepen rather than to lighten; hence, there has been no lack of religious apologists following Kant's new "moral route" to God.
This page contains 201 words.
Moral Arguments for the Existence of God article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 3,907 words
(approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Existence of God Article
