Understanding Kant's Religion | w/Dr. Chris Firestone - PPP ep. 16

well welcome back to another episode of parker's pencils this is a podcast where we explore thoughts in philosophy theology nature and life i love thinking about cool stuff so come think with me on today's episode we have with us dr chris firestone dr firestone is a professor and the chair of the philosophy department at trinity international university he did his phd work in kant studies at the university of edinburgh particularly focusing on cons religious views his larger responsible for what some have called a new wave in kantian studies which will be the subject of our conversation today i'm stoked to have him on the podcast dr firestone thanks for being here it's great to be here thanks for inviting me parker yeah so just jumping

in on kant um what why is kant significant why why should our listeners care about kant you know there's a lot of ways into uh philosophy you know anybody who's taken a philosophy class knows you can go into philosophy from the greeks from the germans from the brits from the chinese from from any number of places kant is like a one philosopher calls them like a mountain you know you can get once you get on top of khan you see around the the uh intellectual landscape it really is a pretty high mountain he's a wall you know he's oftentimes called the watershed of the enlightenment in other words he understands empiricism rationalism he understands realism and idealism and he's a massive sort of a watershed

moment in the history of ideas and if you understand khan everything else looks so much clearer from that vantage point of course he's a turning point to contemporary modern and postmodern philosophy as well and so from that mountaintop you can see an awful lot of stuff that's what intrigued me to get into con in the first place was you know there's only so much time in life whose feet do you want to sit at and learn from and begin to see the rest of the intellectual landscape and kant was a you know a viable candidate from from the get-go for me wow yeah that's great that's great i've found that it seems almost as if that the analytic and continental divide in philosophy today it

seems like it can be traced back to kant is that a fair assessment you think or you know what you know khan's one of those handful of philosophers who you can almost trace anything back to but yes i i do believe depending on how you interpret kant you land in an analytical continental stream you know if you focus in on his revolutionary copernican insight for example and zero in on the language involved uh in in in explaining nature and so forth you tend to land in an analytic stream if you look at the more transcendental side of kant and the various perspectives that unfold in khan's philosophy you tend to land more in the uh in the continental stream so you can look at those

german idealists right after khan you know ficta shelling and hegel for example and you'll see they focus on the second third critiques in his uh in his in his religious writings uh you know and and and look at the first critique as a problem to be overcome yeah where the analytics say no there's something fundamental in the early kant we may not necessarily like how he handles it at the end of the day but uh the analytic crowd is tends to be more traceable if you will to the first critique wow yeah that's a great insight and then we'll get into some specifics of your project in a second but it seems like you want to say we need to read the whole corpus of

kant uh to understand his his more mature thought to understand his trajectory yes yeah there's uh you know as soon as you get into the world of kant you you quickly realize that there's kind of two types of kantians and one of them is kant was a genius in his 50s when he wrote the first critique and he decided degrades as he goes and then the other side says no he's maturing like fine wine in his later writings you know i tend to gravitate more in that direction i i think he gets he his philosophy unfolds he's got a plan in mind and not always clearly in mind until he starts putting pen to paper but it unfolds and it really makes some insightful uh

you know points in philosophy and really points the way for philosophy in the 19th 20th centuries yeah so uh before we jump in and get all into the weeds which i'm looking forward to do you have a favorite translation series for for kant's works are they all pretty much uh comparable that's a good question it's complex question uh you know there's these blue books you'll find in most libraries uh the cambridge editions of translations of khan what's really neat about them is everybody's using them yeah and they've got all the pagination numbers in the original german and the translations are really quite good overall but they're not uniformly good right there's some that are a little better than others and when you really get into

the weeds um of a translation let's say of his famous book uh which hopefully we get a chance to talk a little bit about religion within the limits of reason alone realize that some translations are in fact interpretations and uh you know i noticed that early on when i started reading kant and realized hold on a second this translation couldn't possibly be right if i'm understanding contrite and then i go to a different translation i look at the german and i go yikes that isn't a good translation so um but by and large the cambridge edition i think is is is reliable handy and uh usually quite good okay so um another kind of uh definitional point um so kant's whole copernican revolution which i

i found out he uh attributed to himself he he said that this was like wow that's that's pretty a powerful claim there kant but it it may have he may have been able to back it up can you explain can you explain uh rationalism and empiricism uh and analytic synthetic kind of divide to kind of situate the listeners into consequent revolution yeah well i can give it a give it a shot uh it's a big well hopefully yeah your listeners have at least some background in these terms um and i'll assume a little bit of that yep you know ever from from bacon and descartes right on through to say you know christian wolf and and david hume you have two streams of epistemology at

work uh one of them is you know the empiricism where all knowledge begins with the senses and even things like mathematics uh and logic are eventually traceable to the senses and then you have the rationalists who say no those types of truths have a character that's rooted within reason uh you know logic is you really don't even have a perception unless you have some kind of organization you might say and that's where logic and uh you know mathematics come in and so they're not you know in all practical uh for all practical purposes they're not that far apart from each other you know david hume still has relations of ideas and logic at work he just thinks that at the end of the day they're

really traceable to sense perceptions and how the mind deals with them whereas the rationalist says no there's two things at work here as we know descartes was very clear on this there's mental and there's uh extended mental or physical substances as well and so that kind of separates these two streams now when descartes and bacon and those folks turned away from metaphysics's first philosophy to epistemology his first philosophy they were trying to get rid of the the arguments and the disagreements right yeah but they ended up with these two streams you might say and they work their way through uh europe and through britain you know it's kind of two streams of philosophy and kant of course comes along and he's just not satisfied so

you've got to figure out what's going wrong here why is it that we still have two two different parties at work here um and the encounter zeroed in on problems that were still emerging in both of these two systems so you you the two things he points out at the beginning of the first critique are substance and causation david hume will awaken him from his slumbers you may have you know that's a common jargon in the field because he pointed out that causation strictly speaking is never experienced well how is it as an empiricist that you have causation if it's not traceable to the senses yeah um it's a habit of the mind david hume called it right and so that's one problem kind of

scratching his head over he's like david hume just awakened me the fact that piercism can't be right yeah or at least it doesn't have a sufficient enough reason to think that it grounds scientific inquiry and so forth and then the substance side i think comes to him more from the rationalist side where you've got you know primary and secondary qualities adhering to a thing they call substance but no one can describe substance without talking about the qualities that are adhering to it so then his substance that's some kind of other assumption that seems to be in play so right at the beginning he realizes there's two kind of philosophical streams neither one of which has completely resolved the issues that it was you know that

they were hoping to and so kant uh comes along and says hold on a second perhaps like copernicus maybe we thought the earth was in the center of the solar system maybe if we just thought about the fact that maybe the mind is in motion and not just at the center kind of inert stuck there but is actually contributing something to our knowledge and what if causation and substance are two of the things that the mind is contributing that would actually answer what they are they're necessary conditions of the mind active conditions of the mind that make experience possible in the first place they are those things that are required to have any experience at all and they're not all the mysterious assumptions they're actually

rooted in the very nature of reason itself and so that's and of course he's borrowing there if i can go back yeah we were talking off camera about plato and aristotle this is he's borrowing these categories from aristotle right i mean uh causation and substance are not unknown to them plato and aristotle in particular thought that they were inherent in things even though we couldn't see them as such conscious puts them in the mind as it makes them active properties of the mind that make experience possible yeah that's so great and and for for the listeners who are like well you know causation and substance what's the deal this is we we need these things every day for life because we have i'm sitting on

a chair uh i'm sitting at a desk i'm using a computer these are all like substances they're all things so they have substance uh depending on how you interpret that and there's causation going on because we're in time and space and i'm you know am i causing my words to come to you am i the cause of lifting this book you know so these are things that we immediately deal with so even though it may sound kind of uh kind of up there this is the the the everyday life this is what's going on when we're all doing it and so we need to be able to make sense of it and so kant puts that in our in our mental framework right so the

causation is is part of how we view the world is that does that yeah well it's it's um it's part of the superstructure of reason that makes the appearance of the world a thing you see without it con i think basically holds that experience would be we've been be bombarded by all these sense data and qualities right and be like an abstract painting coming in the mind but the mind has 12 categories two of which we've already mentioned um which take that sensed atom and organizes it into a discernible experience yeah and so you want to know why you can't see causation you know it's like two cars hitting each other on the street you see car a and car b and you say a

cause b to get knocked off the road well you didn't see cause you saw two events in simultaneous relationship where then is cause cause is that peace that organizes the experience into a discernible form that the mind contributes to it yeah um and so it's kind of a radical suggestion right that this stuff isn't inherent in the world as such well hold it it may be inherent in the world as such we just can't know that it is but we know the mind is utilizing it to make the world orderly and discernible to us is an appearance that we call nature yeah i at first i thought this was crazy because i was learning about kant from a lot of christians and a lot of

christians kind of jump to this is a this makes uh this is subjectivism just raw just pure subjectivism you can never know the ding on zeke you never know the thing in itself out there you're stuck with the phenomenal realm and there's there's this numeral realm that you can't know but i after learning a little bit more after thinking through after uh reading some jordan peterson and looking at like artificial intelligence and this is this is kind of true you know we look out in the world we don't see infrared light we we don't see uh magnetic fields that ducks see when they migrate we see the world and i would say as a christian the way god wants us to see it and i

think i see it the same way you do because we're both made in his image and and we have this this structure of reason that he's given us but i think khan was totally right and i think maybe not totally but he was right because a christian can agree with that because we don't see angels for instance we don't see the heavenly realm we don't see i don't see your spirit i can see your physical face but i don't see the the physic the spiritual because it's not part of the mental framework that he's given me the the human reason is that is that fair to say you think yeah you know the way the way that's a great point the way i would put

it is the contributions of subjectivity are bittersweet and this is what i mean they're they're bitter because they cut us off from the ability to see god directly i think that kind of you know jives with what scripture is teaching us as well by the way yeah you see god directly you die you know it's basically what they we've found in the old testament it can't see our souls uh directly we have to like listen to people we have to self self-introspect in these sorts of things um it can't see freedom directly you know these kinds of things kind of sort of cuts us off from the ability to fully grasp or take in some things we take to be fundamental about the world that's

the bitter side the sweet side of it is we can experience the world at all we you know if we had unlimited abilities we'd be god yeah or we would not be able to experience something we have to have it we have to have a kind of finitude we have to have the kind of uh a situatedness that allows us to see it from a perspective this is the point if you were omni perspective or could see it like god where you'd be god but you're not so the bittersweet reality is we're cut off from certain direct experiences um through the senses but we are able to experience a wonderful world that god's created and so this is the kind of lesson you might get

from the first critique that basically says well there's good news and they're bad news you know the good news is you can experience the world and do an awful lot of fun stuff the bad news is um you'll never see god in a sense face to face and live you know because that is not something that your senses are capable of handling um and and putting into a form um how do you put the infinite eternal omnipresent into a form that you can experience um that that's going to be a challenge yeah that's great this just uh another peripheral point here i work with wrestlers discipleship mentor relationships and they ask me all sorts of crazy stuff because we we all listen to joe rogan

and they talk about psychedelics and i think they're i don't know a ton about psychedelics i don't have any personal experience with them but it seems like and i should probably study this before i talk about it but i'm gonna anyways that psychedelics might be breaking down that those categories in your mind and so you're mixing and matching if there is some a lot of people think there's a spiritual component i don't recommend you go and do this and practice your faith but if there is a spiritual component it would seem like perhaps that is doing exactly what you said we we don't want is you're letting in all this unmitigated data into your realm in into your experience and so you're seeing all sorts

of crazy stuff because you've broken down the natural god-given barriers for experience that kant talks about in in the 12 categories and other things like that but absolutely i mean really it's all about taking chaos and making order out of it and that's really a fundamental thing that makes us human is bringing order to the chaos and one of the first things we do is is order our experiences it's not just raw sense that i'm coming from all directions right right anybody's tried to multitask knows the difficulties of trying to have too many inputs at one time in your life to the extent that you can manage those and bring order to them you bring understanding yeah that's kind of what the mind is doing

already naturally for us it's taking this mass amount of data from reality as such whatever that is yeah and constructing it in an orderly experience that we can now manage and and and really live fruitful you know flourishing lives within yeah i love that it's encouraging to think about because when you think about the world as as just uh unmediated it's kind of terrifying to think all this stuff coming at you but i can look over and i can see books because i have this concept that's been developed whether that was original to my framework whether that was developed through a causal process of my parents teaching me what books are i can look and see a book and i don't have to see orange

first and then letters and colors exactly and i see the book and it's it i can go on with my day and i can talk you know it i don't have to reinterpret everything as it comes absolutely i mean this is one of the points i think is made very early on in the western tradition in plato is the education itself is about bringing order to the chaos right you don't have to reinvent the wheel you can read books you can educate yourself and that's liberating in itself you want step one in liberation it's not chaos it's bringing order to the chaos through education and that's a freedom um and so you know i'm all for contemporary movements to increase educational opportunities for all for

everybody yeah because there really is liberation there it's when you when you turn your back on it you your world gets smaller right and it gets really smaller and then suddenly everything looks like chaos to you uh when you're when you're uneducated yeah and so um you know you know so that i think that carrick carries that right on through he you know he's the first uh real established philosopher in the academy by the way right yeah were uh were people of affairs but kant believes in the university you know he he's in it uh he he was trying his whole life to get the university post so he could finally have the freedom in a contemporary civil society to stake the claims that he

does yeah and so uh so that whole trajectory of education fits the same motif that the mind is attempting to bring order to the chaos and it does so in a rather magical and you know and enchanted sort of way doesn't it yeah goodness yeah definitely so so i think we did a little bit of spade work here showing that kant is not not just the unmitigated boogeyman that that everyone makes him out to be not not that we should just totally uh take him wholeheartedly but i wanted to to jump off from that point into kant's religion and and some of your own work here uh i have you have uh at least this one you got defense of khan's religion and that's uh

one you co-edited with nathan jacobs yeah co-written that's uh that's written sorry yeah yeah that's that was a book we worked on for at least seven years um to try to write the ship if you will in the field of con studies because there was a real sense in my early study of kant that the field was not really doing kant justice and so went to work on that invited a former student of mine actually has now become a phd in his own right um to to work on this project with me and uh we were able to i think really put uh put a flag in the field of con studies and and help help the academy see content in an entirely new light

so you're speaking about nathan jacobs he was a he was a former student of yours yeah he was a former believe it or not undergraduate student in mind wow and then went on for master's degree and then when he's pursuing his phd we were we you know we had all this life experience together we started working on some of these problems together and he was he was very helpful to me and my intellectual growth i mean it just goes to show you the power of the young mind i would not be where i am today without this young student uh pressing me asking questions uh offering me some directions forward that i didn't see for myself uh was just a great relationship and one day

i'd love to write a book on mentor protege relations with with stories like that one because this really is a a powerful story yeah that's awesome so um some of you might know that name nathan jacobs he he works with the bible answer man is that right that's right hank hannahgrath yeah and so he's been kind of uh in in popular light lately he's got some some he's that guy's crazy he does a lot of stuff he's active isn't he yeah he's uh yeah well he he was the kind of theological side to my philosophical side because one of the things i noticed in kant was that kant was really a gifted theologian as well and i didn't know enough theology at the time when

i first started digging into con and so i said hey nathan come over here for a second read this i remember we were sitting in mcdonald's together and i said read this page here this this very large paragraph in religion and nathan did he goes and he just unpacks the theology if i go whoa he goes yeah he goes that's orthodox christology right there so he he started getting interested in reading comment with me yeah so so i have a couple others um you wrote a chapter in transcending boundaries in philosophy and theology and that's kind of where i first got introduced to your work i saw kevin van hooser's name on the book so i bought it and then uh who was a professor

of yours as well right that's right when when i uh when i went on into the phd program i uh went to the university of edinburgh where he was a professor there at the time and uh i knew he had read his con because i took a con class with him years earlier when he was at uh when he was at trinity and uh and so i sought him out and he took on this project with me which in the british system you gotta have to have a supervisor for your for your advanced studies and he was uh gracious enough to take me on as a student and so i studied with him a number of years while he was in edinburgh before he came

back to trinity and uh he invited me years later to write that essay that you're talking about yeah that's so fantastic talk about the mentor mentee relationship he's uh he's helping me with my master's thesis and so now we have a couple generations here of of of students of his isn't it i love it he's a great guy and then um another another way i was introduced to your work was through the uh philosophy of christie volume 2007 uh number one and they did a whole symposium on your your view on kant's religion yeah i think i think uh that entire what we're calling the new wave of con studies that nathan and i were among the four or five people that were really on

the front edge of that uh the people that phil christie got wind of this and they said okay we've been doing philosophy in the analytic tradition primarily but here comes these christian philosophers dealing with a new reading of kant that we have to take rather seriously because it's getting a lot of noise out there and so they invited us to do a symposium of essays for that volume that was really a fruitful exercise um so yeah yeah that was a that was an interesting coming together of two worlds because you know there was a division of those worlds in the past yeah the continental christian philosophy divide i think it was uh planning uh in mayor westfall for example years in the 80s who kind

of went their separate ways on that and what this book was promising and i think it's still promising is that that that relationship is probably much closer than we realize yeah and so that this new wave of con studies uh was was starting to show that maybe these two worlds of of theologically affirmative philosophy could come together again yeah and i i think that is uh made evident by the fact that nicholas waltersdorf wrote the forward for this book and it's that's amazing you know he's an analytic guy and he's praising your work yeah um he's another one of these mentors who uh we knew early on that he that he was familiar with kant in fact he wrote a book with the exact opposite

title right now something like reason within the bounds of mere religion something like that yep yep opposite of kant's title so we knew he knew his kant he wrote a well-known essay called uh something like the conundrums encounter something in another volume that was influential back in the day and so nathan and i immediately realized that if we can't convince a lucid and astute mind like nicholas waltersdorf that we're on to something then we don't really want to write this book yeah you know we said look we need to set the bar high and if we can't convince this kind of intellectual who really who has every reason to hope that we're right but is probably a skeptic and probably against us in some fundamental

ways we identified him very early on as somebody we wanted a bar we wanted to be able to cross yeah and so we started sending him some our chapters and meeting him at conferences and saying uh nick please read this would you because we want to know if we're on to some we think we are yeah but we need to know if we're just in a bubble here or if there's really merit to these things and uh fast forward that over a number of years trying to send him stuff seeing him at conferences took him out to dinner twice he he did finally read the whole manuscript from beginning to end and i remember you know when we went over to grand rapids we drove

there specifically to talk to him with scholars of that stature it's kind of stuff you need to do for those young people out there who are listening kind of like what you're doing parker looking up firestone and figuring out how do i get them on my show well it's the exact sort of thing you need to do with some of these you know even senior scholars like myself need to look to more senior scholars for their mentorship and uh we were able to convince him that we were on to something and uh i remember when we took him out to dinner and he said so what do you want me to do again i said we would like to write the preface for this book

he said done wow look for that it was wasn't a couple weeks later that it showed up in our inbox wow that's going to feel great yeah well so we've we've talked a lot about it and i know this is like years and years and years of your work your life's work um so it's going to be probably hard to do this but can you give us a sketch of of what you're thinking with with kant's uh religion it's hard you know what i love the question it's immensely hard and it's immensely hard not because the concepts are too hard i think we can get there yeah but it's hard because it all wants to spill out of me at once i know it yeah

um let's let's just quickly talk about the problems and the solutions that kant offered in the first critique and see if we can get to the profundity the religion stuff as we've already talked about he resolves a number of problems causation and substance being two of the chief ones by making them aspects of the mind that make experience possible right they're they're a priori because they come before experience that's right but they're synthetic because they're not true by definition they're synthetic because yes they're not true by definition but they add something to the concept of a thing so the fact that parker causes this um podcast to be possible that causation is something that is added to the concept of parker it's not in your

definition right um it's it's actually added to the concept of a thing and so that's got to be accounted for in some way and khan says you account for it by synthetic operatory truths in the human mind these are not inert ones like logic a logic is just stagnant it sort of sits there and just demarcates truth from falsity you might say sure sure synthetic a priori is stuff that's embedded in the mind that actively adds something to the concept of a thing yeah and that's what this causation and substance do now here's the the bittersweet thing that all the german idealist after kant realized he had solved a myriad of problems from the enlightenment causation and substance being two of the lead ones but

he caused one massive problem yeah and that is he cut us off from ultimate reality this is boundary line motif what's who's god what is freedom what is immortality those things we don't have direct access to there's a boundary line and that boundary line is basically the synthetic a priori it helps us to see the world of nature but not super nature or the supernatural and what do we do as theologians as religious people who have this sense that there's more to this world than meets the eye and yet kant's cut us off from it and so that's the problem that sort of lays there at the end of the first critique but kant has a plan for its resolution and this is the part

that some people get upset with kant because they like the atheism agnosticism deism that establishes yeah in the first critique but they don't like that second half of the first critique where it lays out a plan for the solution of these things because kant is aware that a life worth living is a life that flourishes that's theistic that's free and that has a soul he understands that these are sort of basic to human flourishing if without them you don't have hope a reason to continue on in life right kind of self-destruct and reason goes retrograde he understands the atheistic and agnostic projects are bankrupt at the end of the day that they end up shooting yourself you know they just don't sort of work but

because the boundary line motif he's got to come up with a way of handling them perspectively you might say in the next two critiques the second critique and the third critique handle freedom and handle immortality respectively that is in the second critique you know freedom true freedom whenever you're obedient to the moral law yeah this is khan's basic claim in the second critique and this is the critique of practical reason right that's right critique of practical reason or his other book called crown work of the metaphysics of morals it's called the popular version of the critique is that called prolagomina to any future benefit is that different books that's actually the popular version of the first critique okay okay so he's trying to when he

writes the prologue that one is written for teachers in order to disseminate his first critique to their students okay so it's a simplified version of the first critique so if you're you're teaching kant out there and you don't want them to read this 700 or 800 page book get them the prolagomina because it's a shortened version of the first critique okay and it's supposed to be written in an easier style although some people wonder whether or not he achieved his goal yeah but when we try and make a transition to the second critique kant is looking at what are the opera synthetic opera conditions that make an experience of goodness possible first of all you've got to be free it says kind if you're not

free you're not acting good you're kind of just acting like a robot right but freedom by itself is not a it's a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for acting morally yeah if you're going to act morally you're going to have to act freely on the basis of universal moral law this is why guys like ravi zacharias and c.s lewis love kant's second critique yeah because kant discovers something that's vital to the to a meaningful universe and that is the moral law yeah the moral law within and then he later talks about the starry sky right that's really the first and second critiques right the starry heavens above are our experiences nature the moral law within is the inner world the disposition the cartesian

side of kant you might say that says there's more of the world than just the starry heavens above there's the moral law within that's your character dude get that right you know yeah um and so the second critique is kind of a liberating thing for the theologically and religiously minded because we now have something in the numeral realm something that's beyond the boundary of the first critique that we can know and how do we know it it's not through the senses we know it every time we act according to moral law that's freedom indeed so this is going to separate him from guys like nietzsche who follow him nathan says freedom alone is sufficient for freedom yes be free yeah be human and act the

way you want but kant says that's kind of what lions tigers and bears do yeah they act freely on their own inclinations um you want to be free like a human being you don't go the way of nietzsche you go the way of the moral law that's reason that separates us and that resonates all the way back with plato and aristotle what singles out the human being from all other species is we're rational agents yeah and capitalizes on that and says the moral law is supremely rational so so for for the listeners uh just to summarize freedom is is necessary for for goodness because uh if you're if you're not free you can't be good but it's not sufficient uh because there's free people who

are bad people right so just being free doesn't mean anything right and other and other animals are free in that sense yeah but other animals don't have this this rational law within and some of us might be hearing rational law practical reason and thinking well that immorality is something different but the people before the modern times they called it practical reason it was reasoning about morality and that's something i learned from cs lewis where he's saying like this is a part of reasoning it's it's the moral part of reasoning it's practical because we're dealing with everyday life kind of stuff yeah and and another way to you know another analogy you might use is um like a ruler or a tape measure not the standard

of the moral law you yes you can act kind of morally and act as a moral or immoral agent and so forth but you have nothing by which to adjudicate or judge it right buried within reason is the standard of our moral activity now nobody kant is not naive enough to think anybody actually does that yeah right but he thinks to have moral progress to have you know to to think of a world that has good and evil you had better have a standard somewhere and i think that's you know i think he this is why c.s lewis and robbie zechariah and i think bill craig and others have recognized this is the this is kind of at its best because he realizes these things

which we know to be true like there's a difference between good and evil that we teach our kids to get morally better yeah presuppose is the existence of a moral law and where would that be as well it's not a tape measure laying around on the ground it's rooted in reason yeah um so it sounds dry to people like all our moral activities has to be rational activity that ain't cool you know yeah but really no it's not all that and we know it's not all that and nobody obeys strictly speaking according to moral law if you did you'd be jesus maybe you know but that there is a moral law kant is absolutely confident of and without it you can't be free yeah um

freedom has to be tethered to the moral law to be free indeed otherwise you're acting according to some other inclination and that makes you like every other beast of the field yeah that's great reason kind of turns in on itself it's like a ingrown hair um i i yeah the the so you mentioned a couple apologies i i follow cornelius van till and the presuppositional apologetics and they actually jump on this as well uh when you when you act when someone says well i don't believe christianity because it's immoral and you go well immoral according to what standard right and that's kind of become like a trope that people say but when we talk about moral progress of societies right this society is more moral

than that one well according to according to what you know our society is getting better where it's getting more moral immoral according to what like you got to have some kind of stand and you are presupposing a standard in even making that claim yeah and so this is something that that we have to do that we presuppose in all of our our moral reasonings absolutely you know any anytime you you hear a thoughtful non-christian uh which happens occasionally to be honest um i'll hear our your thoughtful ones say things like um you know i'm i'm a scientific naturalist in terms of my scientific inclinations but i'm a christian in terms of my morals it's usually not a point of dispute that christianity has buried within

it a profound moral theory that resonates with our deepest inclinations now you may not believe jesus is who he said he was yeah but even the thoughtful christian realized thoughtful non-christian realizes that he's minimally a profound moral teacher in fact i want to adopt his ethics yeah i want to adopt the other stuff right i've heard that from a number of uh friends and and others in the academy and there's usually a tipping of the cap says dog gone it yeah he's probably the best moral thinker we've ever seen as a human being on this planet yeah i'll adopt his ethical system i just won't adopt the rest of it and of course as you know c.s lewis won't doesn't think this is a move

you can make right you can't just he's got to be a liar he's got to be a lunatic but he can't be like just a great moral teacher yeah um so anyway that's where that conversation stands yeah okay so is there any more kind of spade work we need to do in the in the uh first critique to or the second critique to no no no this is where we get kind of the interesting turn to religion because by the time we get to the third critique kant is saying basically the following i know what the facts are i can do science because of the synthetic ah priori elements of reason that make nature a stable and orderly enterprise and so i can do science

and i know freedom in the moral law as my guiding features for how to progress both as an individual and as a society okay and by the way that becomes very influential in the founding documents of the united nations and various other places the kantian sort of deontological ethics is sort of dominant in those documents anyway that's a side note yeah but here's the problem he notices in the third critique and this of course is going to lead right into the religion question when you do science kind of like just by observation and you do morality in its pure form all's good the problem is when you try to do them together yeah it's one system and so let me give you give you a

an example of this you know i'm a dad you know i occasionally like to take my kids to the beach i'm trying to be a good dad i'm trying to be a moral dad but here comes a scantily-clad woman by um suddenly nature is warring against my moral enterprise you know the moral law which was in the forefront of my mind is now being challenged by other inclinations right yeah um and it's threatening to throw me retrograde okay and so nature and freedom don't always coincide with each other they don't work together real well yeah nature sometimes kills innocent people morally good people and it sometimes makes morally corrupt people thrive you know david talks about this in the psalms all the time why do

my enemies thrive and i'm here basically can't survive even trying to kill me and you know lord i'm the good one in this in this account david recognizes just like kant recognizes that freedom and nature don't always coincide with each other but we know something deep in our soul tells us they should coincide with each other yeah that that evil should be punished and that goodness should be rewarded proportionately that's what the ancients called the pseudobonum or justice should have nature and freedom working together yeah but they don't work together so in the third critique he raises the question if i pursue the moral law despite whatever nature presents me with what can i hope will justice ever find me um i'm pursuing the moral

law but my enemies who are not pursuing the moral law seem to be thriving lord what hope do i have here kant says and kant uh uh turns to the uh turns to the experience of beauty to solve this problem and this is the the critique of judgment right that's right the third critique the critique of judgment how do i go about uh making judgments as it were yeah khan says anytime you experience something beautiful you experience a sense of harmony between nature and freedom that for a moment when you hear that beautiful song or see that beautiful portrait or see a sunset your soul believes that nature and freedom are in harmony with each other wow i like that this is a rather spectacular

insight i think in the nature of aesthetics yeah when you put that earbud on you're listening to your favorite music it's actually doing something to your souls knitting together the injustices of this world wow things can't you experience a sense of harmony now here's here's the rub though and this is again we'd have to have a probably more time you're willing to take here today part of it here's the rub we feel a sense of harmony but when we try to understand it like socrates did in book one of the republic remarks around trying to ask everybody what is justice i can't fully understand it i can't put words to it i feel a sense of harmony when i when i listen to music or

listen or see a beautiful sunset but when i try to unpack what real justice or the pseudobonum or the highest good actually is i can't it's always imperfect it's always got a human component to it it always has a kind of negative subjectivity to it yeah um that's exactly why he gives the definition the poet or the artist as being one who is a master of air that is their ability to manipulate air to help us feel a sense of justice yeah what is what the great musician is in fact doing so this brings us to the question of religion because in the middle of this problematic of trying to figure out who am i what is my place in the world and what is

really justice kant turns to religion because he thinks that the only way that you're ever going to know who you are and what real justice is is if god tells you that's the only way you know this resonates with socrates remember socrates he says the oracle said that i'm the wisest one in athens how could that be i don't know anything he says god alone is wise this is exactly god's point yeah we need god to answer the question if you will or to give us the resources for answering the question of what justice actually is and every human being knows this right i mean you know when you're on your deathbed who are you making amends with yeah not your brother your sister your

mother your father it's with god so it's god because you're going to beat your maker yeah uh and kant i think uh anticipates this he's already talked about freedom and immortality to ascent now in the religion text he says who am i what is my place in the world and how can i be well pleasing to god at the end of the day that's the question he's raising when he goes to his fourth book here religion within the limits of reason alone what does reason say about god in my relationship to god yeah that's the sort of groundwork question that we find in the religion text what i found before doing my own reading of the religion text was that everybody in the academy was

telling me that what kant's doing there is just putting religious clothing on his ethical enterprise you know that's really on all religion is is putting clothing on the ethical side of the human being and at the end of the day you can get rid of the clothing that that the clothing was just to bolster uh people and to add an element of authority to it because these were religious folks and they needed it at the time yeah and essentially religion and there there is a tinge of this in kant and all in all in all fairness yeah this is khan khan is looking at the religions of his time in prussia right and he's basically saying um these guys are dogmatic they think they have

all the answers they think they know what true religion is but hey what we know is they all disagree with each other first of all so they can't all be right and secondly they haven't really taken stock of reason's contribution to this discussion yes they have revelation but the revelations being variously interpreted and it's hard to determine which of the interpretations is right yeah and so how can reason help us to navigate the turbulent waters of the religious realm because we his his instinct tells us we we all become religious eventually um you know if it's not today it's tomorrow um but which of these voices is trustworthy and how do we make religious decisions and so forth and this is a question that really

interests kant in his in his later years well and he's writing and what is enlightenment and he's he's kind of critiquing people who hold to uh creeds and confessions um not by not because of reason but by religious affiliation and saying this is what i believe because this is what other people say and i'm committed to this even if reason tells me not to be yeah well for kant the educated person is the one who looks at the creeds and confessions now it's not just christian it could be any religion right who doesn't take these things for granted yeah this is what he's talking about the enlightenment is we haven't we haven't arrived at an enlightened age but this is an age of enlightenment he

tells us when we begin to become adults and say let me think this through for myself now this this is scary to a lot of people because you know as a parent having your kid go off to school or whatever you might be concerned that they become free thinkers they're going to lead the creeds of confessions of the faith and there is some risk involved yeah no doubt about that but at the same time if you just spoon feed and get spoon-fed everything you've ever learned and don't kind of look it up for yourself you know and kind of research it for yourself and own it for yourself then how can we expect the muslim or how can we expect the buddhist or how can

we expect the atheist to do any different right right um and so khan's is is is living in a predominantly christian culture he thinks there's all sorts of truths there but finding it hard as it were to ascend to us to them without doing the hard work of understanding reason's contribution to this whole discussion yeah and i i really like that and i i like um this might be like a evangelicalizing of kant but it it seems like i think that he's saying in his first critique to go back to that when he's he's he's critiquing of various arguments for the existence of god and i think he's saying don't put don't put your weight all your weight in these arguments because then if someone

disproves them then what your idea of god goes away to because you've built up on this on this uh just rationalization and so he's saying yes we need to use reason to think for ourselves and in what is enlightenment but then he puts these limits on reason so that we can't just think any old thing we can't just make up god through pure reason alone and make him look like us no no that's an excellent point and the speed at which we've been moving in our discussion parker made me miss one that many of your listeners have heard i'm almost sure and that is i had to deny knowledge to make room for faith right and so this has been a kind of holy grail

in in khan studies we know he denies knowledge where does he make room for faith you know this is this is kind of i call it the holy grail and con studies and that answering that question became a quest for me yeah where is this room for faith and i tell you i found it i think uh in some of our in some of the work in the religion text kant is basically saying that the room for faith is not what we'd call strong feedism a blind leap of faith into the unknown that's not the kind of faith he's making room for um nor is he you know saying to just have any kind of dogmatic assumption about the truth obviously that what is enlightenment

the essay that you talked about is saying no don't just be a dogmatist for dogmatism sake then you can't adjudicate religious truths of various religions for example yeah rather the room for faith is found in the synthetic a priori what are the necessary conditions for the possibility of becoming well pleasing to god this is the question he raises in the religion text what are the necessary conditions for the possibility becoming well pleasing to god this is a question we don't usually ask in such a philosophically astute way but we almost always ask it right especially if you have those moments before you die what are the necessary conditions for me to be well pleasing god it usually has to do with repentance you know so

so this is a question he raises and he in the religion text if i'm reading it correctly he identifies three necessary conditions for the possibility of becoming well pleasing to god and these are really simple and they kind of resonate with what we christians seem to think to be the case now we won't put them in kant's words per se but we recognize them when we see them so the first one is that human beings are evil by nature if you don't recognize your own inability to be obedient to the moral law or to you you're prone to occasionally deviate from the moral law as your highest incentive then you're probably not in the human species things khan you know uh nature is warring against

your freedom and truth be told human beings tend to usurp the authority of the moral law and so de facto after book one in the religion text khan says you're not well pleasing to god let's be honest if the only way you could be well pleasing to god is if the moral law was your highest incentive and you didn't have any sins any debts to pay yeah but everybody's got debts to pay in fact the entire species has a debt to pay it has inscrutably chosen a principle that wars against the moral laws its highest incentive so that's step number one if you're going to be well pleasing to god you have to recognize that you're not well pleasing to god okay step number two

is in book two of the religion text and that is if you're gonna have hope you need to have a new disposition the old one ain't gonna be well pleasing god there's no way to prop it up and make it well pleasing to god god has to provide you with a disposition killing off the old one and taking on this new one yeah this is what kant calls the prototype of perfect humanity god must have a divine human disposition that we can latch hold of in faith without such a thing we can't account for our finite and infinite debts that we have to pay for because we're evil by nature so in book two of religion khan says first of all you we've noticed that

you have to know that you're evil by nature not by necessity but evil by nature and secondly if you're going to have moral hope god has to provide you with a disposition that is not just a human disposition because it doesn't have a surplus of righteousness to cover your past sins yeah it has to be a divine human disposition he tells us in book two and he calls that the good principle he calls it the archetype of perfect humanity sometimes called the prototype of perfect humanity if you're gonna have moral hope to be well pleasing to god god has to give you a disposition that's human so you can latch hold of it and that's divine so it can cover for your finite and infinite

sins which is so amazing because that is in theo theological terms the the hypostatic union of christ the two natures yeah kant believes now he's not talking about jesus here and he's i think he's pretty clear about that yeah he's just doing a rational analysis what does a reasonable person has to think about and believe in if they're going to have hope to be found well pleasing to god yeah and they have to think a that they're evil by nature and b that god would give them a disposition they can latch hold up to he calls this conversion conversion to the good principle he calls it um it looks very familiar to christians and and but kant is reasoning not from christianity he's reasoning from

plato and aristotle you see plato has this notion of an original human right yeah uh that we're the original form yeah that gives rise to all these copies and stuff this is what god's talking about you got to believe that god has a perfect human divine disposition that you can latch hold of in faith unless you don't have moral hope yeah so that's stage two and then stage three is you have to band together with other converts to the good principle in order to create a context in your communities so you can strive to get better in goodness you have to as he says form a church um you have to get together with other people who have been converted to the good principle and

create communities what he calls an ethical commonwealth or ethical communities without such ethical communities you're always threatened to go back to your old disposition because you run into humans all the time who are not converted to the good principle yeah and you're going to go retrograde you're going to go back to your old self in that kind of context you need to create communities where people of like mind and like heart get together on a regular basis and form communities are that are ethical and that's what he calls you know ethical commonwealth ethical communities and he says the most visible example of that that we see in the world is the church the church is where you find such ethical communities go there says kant

because you're going to find people of like mind and like heart who can help you to grow and become progressively more well pleasing to god um and so those are the three things that every religious person has to have at the core of their very belief system less they don't have true religion they've got some lesser rational form of religion and so that remarkably parallels of course the christian story yeah and when you get to book four rather remarkably kant says let's take these three criteria that we developed and let's look at one example of an empirical religion um and um from from that empirical religion example sorry no problem maybe that's kant calling uh from that so which religion does he choose he could

have chose islam he could have chose buddhism he could have chose any number of things he chose christianity he says let's test christianity to see whether or not it matches up to these three things and the test in book four shows that the teacher of the gospel he calls he never uses the word jesus because he doesn't think it's in the philosopher's uh purview to actually um uh uh uh make those kind of empirical claims okay he says in the teacher of the gospel we see the coming of true religion and that it contains three components the recognition that human beings are evil by nature but not by necessity that they have to latch whole love of a disposition that is divine and human so

that they can have moral hope and they have to band together in the form of a church and that we see instantiated by the teacher of the gospel and this is what does in the fourth book wow that yeah as a evangelical you know it's it's like wow that that's that sounds right that sounds amazing and i've never heard that before you're reading your work i haven't heard that because you know uh kant is always the arch enemy of christianity and the yeah like non-non-christian philosophers uh and and just non-christians in general want to grab that and they pick and choose different parts of kant and you know we have uh his his categorical imperative so we don't need uh any teachings from jesus because

we just use that so immediately a lot of people will be asking um well one is this over evangelicalizing kant um two uh was kant himself then a christian and then maybe three uh what place does kant have for revelation no these are these are re now you're getting you know we moved out of kant 101 201 and 301 we're now in con 401 um because this is where it gets um you know you can do a whole phd in these areas right um let me let me just say that um oh boy where do we where do we get in here yeah i don't want to ask you to do a whole phd on each one of those yeah no no you raise us

a number of good points give me one again that i can go with uh well so uh was kant himself uh okay christian yeah that's a great question it's a great starting point kant saw himself as a philosopher and by philosopher he defines philosophy in his final publication called conflict of the faculties a state of mind or a disposition of soul whatever you want to call it where reason and freedom are the perspective by which you analyze the world and so when he gets to uh his vocation as a philosopher he is going to use reason and freedom to understand the nature of the human being and of the world and so forth and of god for that matter and so he is unable and

unwilling to state what his position is because to do so would be to take away your right to see what reason offers yeah he leads you to the church door but he won't take you inside that's a choice you have to make um and so conrad there's two ways to lo there's a famous story about kant he used to go in processionals so forth you know for uh uh graduation or commencement events and he'd go to the church door but you never go inside and say oh must not be a christian well what we can say that's the negative way of putting it the positive way of putting is that he's a philosopher if philosophers don't make those empirical judgments public he has private thing

he says this in his letters to his friends i'll never have the courage to say publicly what i truly truly truly believe he took seriously his role as a pure philosopher yeah not a christian philosopher not any other kind of philosopher but a philosopher is going to follow the breadcrumbs of reason as far as they'll take him and they take him awfully close as you just heard from me yeah to uh christianity in its central or defining features and he even identifies new testament christianity as the place where um true religion finds humanity for the first time this is not disputable evidence this is something everybody sort of agrees on okay the problem in const studies and this you know this is again another area

that we could go into yeah there's two ways of reading the religion text broadly speaking one way is kant has an established ethical theory and he takes tropes and thoughts from christianity and tacks them onto his ethical theory and that's why we have prototype church all this stuff going on the religion essentially he comes to the realization that it doesn't work and he reverts back to his ethical theory and so all religion really is ethics at its core yeah that's what i was taught in kant early on and i'm reading the religion text and i go yeah i can see how you could make that claim you know these he's basically taking lampa's god his manservant or the church his mother's uh pietistic upbringing and

he's translating christianity into ethical terms that's this what i would call the sort of traditional standard way of reading kant the revolution in khan studies took place when we came to the realization that maybe that's not what khan's doing here maybe what he's actually doing is what he says he's doing how's that for a novel idea what he says he's doing is he's being awakened and hastened to rational insights into the nature of reason that's what he says he's doing that religion when he when he hears theologians he's being awakened and hastened to the realization that there must be more to rational faith than i thought there was yeah and then when you read the religion text in this light human depravity the prototype the

ethical commonwealth these things are natural outflowings of reasons self-understanding not things from christianity that are being imported into it but percolating out of the very nature of reason itself that's a radically different thing by the way and by the way it's a lot more religiously friendly yeah it's not ethics versus religion yeah it's actually religion percolating out of reason and that makes a very big difference in how we understand what concept to and i you know one more point bar because you can tell i'm passionate about this topic i haven't had a chance to teach a course on content a while yeah uh but i'd love to do so um what the the big payday in all this or how do how do i know

that i'm right how do i know that the translation reading that all religion really isn't ethics how do i know that i'm onto something and that other reading isn't onto something and it's very simple actually in the religion text nicholas waltersdorf the fellow we talked about earlier notices a whole mess of conundrums like intellectual conflicts within the religion text a gordon michelson wrote a whole book called fallen freedom in which he identifies at least seven different conundrums in the text so two things to do with a conundrum if you're a philosopher one is to say the guy was illogical and probably off his game that's the standard reading of kant the other way to deal with a conundrum is to solve it that is to

figure out why it's not a conundrum yeah our book the defense of kant's religion solves the conundrums that is the reading that we offer that's basically a a a a plato an aristotelian mix an emergence of religion from the recesses of reason rather than a translation of christianity into rational language solves a myriad of conundrums in the text and makes the text coherent and a classic in the uh canon of philosophical literature yeah the standard reading of the religion text casts it to the flames because it's incoherent it contradicts itself which reading do you think is more charitable more understanding of kant yeah we are arguing that in defense of khan's religion is by far more charitable more enlightening and more theologically friendly than its

counterparts and it isn't even close at the end of the day i mean this isn't rocket science when you see the two alternatives one's a failed experiment by kant the other is a very insightful understanding of what human beings must believe to have hope of being found well pleasing to god yeah which one do you think is right oh well you know you can read the book for yourself and make up your own mind yeah well so what's interesting about this is in case someone uh a christian listening is upset by this and thinks well it can't just be relegated to to reason this this would fit well with calvin's census divinitatis it's just including more in the census than just knowledge of god but

it's also knowledge of salvation and it would be knowledge of the church that that's implanted in reason and and intuitively maybe apprehended and then that's why christianity is so appealing or yeah it can be found by an analysis of your your reason as kant is doing in the book well this is the beautiful thing about the christian gospel right and i think this is the beautiful thing about what khan's up to if i'm right about kant and that is jesus comes on the scene he has this amazing message that can change lives and it is either such a foreign thing that you're either a humanist or you're a christian you know and and to make that leap there's an infinite gap there you know you

either got to be one or the other but if kant's right what is actually happening in in in saying the sharing the gospel in a changed life is that you your reason is being awakened to further truths that it that it was struggling to utter itself but it couldn't put into words jesus had to actually come in the flesh to put it into words you know yeah the word became flesh yes and it quickened within our very essence as rational beings a kind of uh anthropology within reason that strikes us as right yeah we are fallen we do need redemption we do need a new a replacement of our old self with a new one get rid of the old man make the new man

and then we knew we do need to band together with other people lest we won't be able to keep our house in order yeah and we won't be able to change the world yeah you know and that's a big deal that's a very big deal and so if we're right this view of kant is a very optimistic indeed now admittedly it doesn't get us to orthodox christianity that will always be a choice kind of a guardian choice you and i will have to make for ourselves yeah he'll lead us with reason to the church door you got to decide if you're going inside yeah uh you know then that's kind of the way i see what counts up to here yeah well you've given us

so much your time i wonder could we can we talk one more thing yeah no you know what i love this kind of stuff so yeah you know i have my coffee right here so here we go what do you got there parker yeah i got some coffee so um so my my question then is well you've told me this before and i really appreciate this and you say look if i'm wrong about kant you know then we let go of kant or if you know it's it's always christ over kant of course for any listeners hearing that but so this is this brings me back to the necessity of revelation and it seemed like we were in our conversation of justice it really made

sense that that there would be this place for the transcendent coming down for god coming down what by what standard we're talking about that well god has to give us a standard because we are depraved not necessarily but we happen to be in in this in this uh human uh context we are depraved so we need a transcendent form coming down giving us goodness so what role does revelation play for kant is he an enemy of revelation or what what do we think because you know we're evangelicals we love revelation so yeah where does what place does can't have for it well god you know like all of us had had to eventually die um and so he couldn't really flesh out you know where

this is all going and where how he saw the broader picture of the empirical realities if you will of god breaking into our world through revelation either through his son or through his inspired words or anything like that so he he doesn't actually do the work of theology for us but he does set the agenda for us you know in his final publication conflict of the faculty he sets up the university with the queen of the sciences theology being present at the apex of the university he thinks this is right and appropriate i believe and he calls philosophy that what he calls the lower faculty the one that chastens these other faculties of medicine law and theology yeah uh and the significance of that is

important right he never comes to how do i put this he never writes takes philosophy and makes it rise to the level of being empirically true he's just doing an analysis of reason all right he's trying to say what's reason's contribution to this ongoing experience that human beings have and he gives us a whole myriad of answers to these questions but then he sort of leaves it at that point and says let the let the doctors lawyers and uh and theologians work it out from here um you know as to what this all means um so that's that's you know that's one point i'd say uh the other point is it's very clear that philosophy can't do this job alone it needs revelation in order

to awaken and hasten within reason anything that it that it needs to flourish and so his view of theology is if the theologian were to stop doing theology i'd have to start doing theology says khan because reason is restless and needs to understand more and his work in the religion text only gives us a core of religious convictions or the basis for how you determine true religion from false religion um but it doesn't necessarily stop there and so in some of my more recent work you may have noticed in some other things i argue that kant's philosophy requires not just a soul but it requires a body and the reason is is that i mean the basic logic is this this kant expects that in

the life to come the soul will continue to grow continue to grow in in in goodness to be more holy as it were but that whole notion of growing without a body seems you don't have a playing field or you how do you grow when you have no challenges you have no um you have no body that the soul isn't it's associated with yeah so i think you know my my my gut tells me that he's going to need a physical and not just a a spiritual resurrection if uh he's going to get all the elements of the pseudonym bonum that he actually needs so i've written on this in the past that i think you can extend quite fruitfully in theology by saying no

it's not just a spiritual resurrection or a dispositional one we're talking about he needs us to be embodied as well so there's one piece to that puzzle i think the trinity is another potential place where khan has something to say because the trinity of course is all about community it's about loving relationships you know between father son and holy spirit that seems like a pretty good uh standard if you will for understanding what the ethical commonwealth might look like about the loving relationships among social agents so again there's lots of additional pieces once you understand how philosophical theology can be done allah const methodology you can see progressively more interesting ways of importing revelation and christian thought into what con's up to and that's kind

of what i've been uh doing more recently in some of my work is trying to show where this trajectory is taking us theologically um and so you know those are at least a few of the yeah puzzle that's really helpful that's that's great um well so we we've we've covered a ton we went from 101 to all the way up to 104 and i'd love to have you back on again to talk uh some some more your more recent work uh talk jordan peterson stuff i know you've you've listened to quite a bit of his stuff and read his stuff so for the for the listeners um this may have been shocking to you to hear kant from from this perspective but i bet you

haven't read uh more than the critique of pure reason if you've read that so do the hard work and read it and if you come to different conclusions that's great um but read this book kant's in defense of kant's religion by dr firestone and nathan jacobs grab that um that's where his perspective can be more flesh or is fleshed out more fruitfully or more fully i should say and then um grab the symposium from philosophy or christie you can just go to uh eps.com i think evangelical philosophical society and you can see other evangelicals critiquing the position and them going back and forth to to help you get a better take on that um dr freyrstone thanks for so much for coming on man this

has been fantastic hey parker thank you so much for having me as you scratch the niche i've had in the academy here for a while to get back into con a little bit so thank you so much for the great questions yeah well so uh we could talk about this more and lord willing someday we will but that's going to have to do it as always this has been parker's pencils and all glory