The Ambiguity of Kantian Faith

Extract

In a recent article in this journal, Professor Wiebe has attempted to discard the traditional thesis about the relationship between faith and reason in Kant's critical philosophy and substitute a decidedly novel and superficially attractive interpretation. While traditional readings of Kant's theology have taken his denial of knowledge in order to make room for faith at more or less face value and have thus attributed to him a rather different sort of theology, Professor Wiebe rejects this polarity of knowledge and faith. Kant's faith, according to Wiebe, is a ‘cognitive faith — a source of belief that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge’. This claim in turn rests upon the assertion that the traditional distinction between belief and knowledge is untenable, that ‘… “knowledge” and “justified belief” are indistinguishable’. Wiebe would thus recast Kant's claim of denying knowledge to make room for faith to denying theoretical knowledge to make room for practical knowledge. Kantian faith then, ‘is not outside the realm of reason, but is rather one aspect of reason, as is knowledge’. It is in this sense that there is ‘a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past’