Chapter 7 - Kant, miracles, and Religion, Parts One and Two

Summary

This chapter focuses on one central philosophical component of Kant's Janus-faced approach, namely, his treatment of miracles at the very end of Parts One and Two of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. The book's advocacy of Vernunftglaube, the faith of a moral religion of reason, combines a commitment to the secular Enlightenment belief in human perfectibility and progress with a resolutely non-secular insistence on a complex revolutionary and theodicical shape to that progress. Kant's language in the Religion attempts to dance around the issue of exactly how to talk about miracles and the non-natural in general without being either offensive to his readers or untrue to his own religious concerns and critical perspective. Kant's theodicy implies not only a very expansive teleological conception of each of the cosmological and moral orders by themselves but also a very strong commitment to their tight linkage.