Modern Period

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also rejected empirical knowledge as a way of knowing God. In fact, he maintained that God cannot be demonstrated at all, yet neither can his existence be disproved. As humans we typically go beyond what we can rightly infer, and our idea that God can be objectively known is an example. Nevertheless, as an idea, God has regulative value for our thinking in that it acts heuristically and gives a sense of unity to our experience. Practically, too, the idea of God grounds important moral beliefs. Specifically, it is fitting that those who do what is right are happy; and since that is not reliably attained in this life, we can rightly posit that there is life in a sphere beyond this one. We can make the practical assumption too that God exists to ensure the connection between virtue and happiness.

God was considered to be an objective issue before Kant. After him there was a greater tendency to consider it a subjective issue, one that is irreducibly a matter of interpretation. It was associated with discussions of ethics and values rather than of science and facts. This accompanied a change from the Enlightenment's emphasis on objective knowledge of God as a transcendent engineer, to Romanticism's emphasis on personal experience of God as a Spirit immanent in everything. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) accordingly emphasized a feeling of dependence on God, while Albrect Ritschl (1822-1889) emphasized God as a source of moral freedom and values.

Whereas Kant and those he affected regard God as elusive to our rationality, for G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) God is the essence of rationality. Furthermore, Spirit reveals itself and its development through the world, being visible for all to see in the very events of history. Thus the categories which Kant regarded as being limited to the human mind Hegel regarded as part of the Absolute Mind. As such, the very structure of that Mind (or Spirit) can be known. Hegel challenged views that had been dominant since Aristotle, that God and truth are unchanging, and that logic deals with dichotomies that are properly kept apart by the principle of non-contradiction (according to which A cannot also be non-A). For Hegel, dichotomies are united in a higher reality. For example, Being and Nothing are transcended in Becoming. That is because Being is a general term and has no qualities, so it passes over into the concept of Nothing. That passing over is Becoming. The original opposition is thereby transcended.

Hegel believed that reality divides into dichotomies and contradictions that are resolved in a dynamic synthesis. Spirit thus moves from homogeneity to differentiation to unity in diversity. He therefore rejected Schelling's idea that the Absolute is undifferentiated. Because for Hegel Spirit is more than matter, he rejected Spinoza's view that the Absolute is substance only. For Hegel it is more than that; it is developing consciousness. In this process God comes to self-awareness through mankind's awareness of him--God thinking of himself through human consciousness.

Kant had claimed that ultimate reality (the thing-in-itself) is unknowable, but Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said it is knowable because it is will. We can know it directly because we can know our own will. Will manifests itself with increasing sophistication in the physical world (through gravity, for example), in plants and animals, and in human nature. But because the will is completely free it is irrational and blind. He rejected Hegel's optimistic belief in the ultimate victory of rationality, and in contrast to Leibniz, he held that this is the worst of all possible worlds.

Hegel's view that Spirit is in process and not a static state was continued in Alfred N. Whitehead (1861-1947). Whitehead held that God is necessary to each act of becoming, and in turn God develops through each act of becoming. God strives to enrich the world as well as himself by nurturing harmony and order while preserving values that enhance truth, beauty, and goodness. He strives to eliminate evil from the world using persuasive (rather than coercive) power. In this sense, "He does not create the world, he saves it." He leads it by means of his vision, rather like a poet.

The so called right wing Hegelians rejected pantheism and interpreted Hegel in a way consistent with theism. Left wing Hegelians associated the Absolute with material reality. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) said that people create the concept of God and project it onto reality. Karl Marx (1818-1883) made religion both a product and a tool of oppression, the "opium of the people." People formulate religion in response to the sufferings caused by society's inequities. Like a narcotic, it insulates them from the pain but it also makes people incapable of dealing with the cause of that pain. Furthermore, religion legitimates the status quo.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1884-1900) rejected belief in God as weak and untenable. He believed his times witnessed the death of God as a cultural force, yet at the same time he feared the outcome. He did not think that God died in the sense that He once existed and at some point ceased to exist, but that modern society regarded God as irrelevant.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) regarded God as a projection of the mind, a product of wishful thinking. The pre-scientific mind, for example, finds it easier to cope with an anthropomorphized universe. It is easier to suppose that a personal being is in control than to face seemingly capricious forces of nature. But when humanity grows into a more scientific understanding of the universe, such beliefs will be discarded.

Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and others thus did not try to rationally defeat belief in God. Rather, they sought to explain its origins and the personal motives of believers.

In the early twentieth century, logical positivism narrowed the scope of meaning in a way that made belief in God subjective by definition. Besides tautologies only empirically verifiable statements were said to be true or false.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was initially sympathetic to linking meaning to verifiability. He held that language is static and pictures reality. This limits what can be meaningfully expressed in language and excludes propositions about such things as ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life. On such topics, "one must be silent." Wittgenstein later came to the view that meaning comes not from a link to the world but from usage. In this way language is more like doing than picturing. Because this necessarily gives language and meaning a social dimension, concepts of God are bound to their use within, for example, a believing community. On this view it is possible to claim that to know "God" is not to know the existence and attributes of a metaphysical being, but the use of a term and its connections to a life style.

Good piece.

Those who created the myths long ago are still selling BS. Here is a response to one of those who ridicules my work - including the reality of War in the 20th Century and now that I am doing a book on right now.

Dear TP

But appease them YOU do and so did those like you in the time of Hitler. Think a little more about what I say. Hitler was a Rothschild bastard (this is part of the Merovingian plan throughout history - as in Charles Martel and Napoleon) and a pawn for those who you support and vote for.

WALL STREET AND
THE RISE OF HITLER




By
Antony C. Sutton

http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/book...reet/index.html