Clearly this is genuine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's great
religious contribution. He was the son of devout German pietists and
saturated in the literature of the Old Testament. It is to Amos, who
may justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moral
absoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading of history
as a moral order. He was following Amos when he took God out of the
physical and put Him into the moral sphere and interpreted Him in
the terms of purpose. But the doctrine of _The Critique of Practical
Reason_ is intended to negate those transcendent elements generally
believed to be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not known
to us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. He is an
idea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjective
necessity. He is a postulate of the moral will. To quote Professor
McGiffert again: "We do not get God from the universe, we give Him
to the universe. We read significance and moral purpose into it. We
assume God, not to account for the world, but for the subjective
need of realizing our highest good.... Religion becomes a creative
act of the moral will just as knowledge is a creative act of the
understanding."[7] Thus there are no ultimate values; at least we can
know nothing of them; we have nothing to look to which is objective
and changeless.
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