Kant's Moral Demonstration Of The Existence Of God

Based on the principle of the division between the phenomenal and nomenal world of his critical philosophy, kant criticized the traditional arguments of the existence of God, and considered that the boundaries of speculative reason can only be limited to the phenomenal world, while the grasp of the concept of God which belongs to the nomenal world can only be false. Kant’s purpose of this critique is to delimit the boundaries of knowledge, and to preserve a site for the faith, that is, to build the faith on a new basis of moral theory.Kant believed that faith in God is a moral faith. Moral faith had a close relation to Will. Will on the one hand needs the formal moral faith law as the determining grounds of its maxim, and on the other hand take highest good as the object of desire. Because of human beings’ f initude, man can’t experience the highest good, and even can’t ensure the continuity of virtue, so practical reason is bound to put it into a transcendent intelligible world,and postulate immortality, freedom and God to ensure the possibility of highest good. Thus, in Kant’s critical philosophy, God become a moral faith which was postulated by the practical reason to ensure the possibility of the realization of the highest good.In Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the concept of god diverged from his critical philosophy in a certain degree. The subject of faith which was previously be understood as individual had now been considered to be the members of ethical community. God as the object of faith which was at first be conceived as the postulate of practical reason turned into the ruler of ethical world. Meanwhile, based on his stance of moral faith, Kant reinterpreted the traditional Christianity, which was considered to be a kind of practical system of morality.