What Does Kant Say about the Theoretical Recognition of God?

Abstract: According to the traditional interpretation, Kant maintains in his theoretical philosophy, that is, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that we are not able to prove the existence of God. This opinion is not exact. It is true that Kant denies that we have a theoretical knowledge of God because for Kant ”knowledge” always includes more than the mere knowing that something exists. When we have theoretical knowledge of something we can describe it and we can indicate its relations to other objects of our knowledge. But the only means for describing something are our categories and the only net of relations we know theoretically are the domain of physics. Both are limited to empirically accessible objects and therefore cannot give us knowledge of God. But this does not entail that we do not know God's existence. Yet. Kant's doctrine of the transcendental ideal could not distinguish between the world and God without presupposing God's existence. With regard to the transcendental ideas, Kant admits that I am conscious that I exist not only in the sense of a phenomenon, and the existence of the world is never cast in doubt. Therefore, the existence of the transcendental ideas as such is not necessary outside of the reach of our knowledge. Near the end of his critique of the proofs of God's existence Kant explicitly admits that God exists. We know that he exists, but we are not able to say anything about his attributes and his essence. This result is also confirmed by Kant's claims in his Prolegomena.