Thinking of God
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thinking is that it substitutes a necessity of thinking (we must think an unmoved mover) for the necessity of experience in knowing.of experience. Knowledge is the synthesis of an experienced element (the According to Kant’s critique, knowledge cannot dispense with the element
concretely given “intuition,” or perceived particular within time and space) with an intellectual element (the abstractly conceived thought or “con-cept”).when our intuitions of them are subsumed under the correct concepts. It is (^31) Human minds can and do have knowledge of empirical objects,
even possible to have knowledge of the pure (understanding, such as substance and causality, because they in turn refer to forms of intuitions of time and space, which fall under them. The idea of God, however, is neither an empirical concept nor a pure category of the a priori) categories of the
understanding; it is a regulative (the “sum-total of all possibility” and the “supreme and complete material condition of the possibility of all that exists”) is a necessary thought – the ultimate condition of the possibility of knowledge. “God” supplies reason ideal of pure reason. God as supreme being
with an indispensable standard of perfection, intrinsic to thinking itself, thereby enabling reason to measure both quality and defect. Its necessary, regulative use is to direct the understanding towards the goal of the system-atic unity and completeness of knowledge. “This unity is the criterion of the
truthnot is quite impossible for human beings. “Its objective reality cannot indeed be proved, but also cannot be disproved.”lack of any possible experienced element in connection with the idea of of its (reason’s) rules.”^32 However, knowledge of whether God exists or (^33) Metaphysics tries to dodge the
God through its appeal to logical necessity.in the new garb of absolute idealism. To do so, Hegel reconceived the infinite as the negation of the fundamental opposition within finitude, the opposi-G. W. F. Hegel attempted to revise metaphysics beyond the Kantian critique
distinguishing herself of being, a finite self relates herself to Hegel, the absolute is the negation of this negation, or the absolute ground tion between finite subject and finite object.from it. The subject is defined as to something in the finite world, while^34 In knowing or experiencing not an object. According
or ultimate identity of the identity and difference between subject and object. Cultural and religious history could be explained on the basis of the dialectical logic of the absolute’s self-actualization in time. And “God’s” self-embodiment in history is also the elevation of human consciousness to
“absolute knowledge.” However, Hegel’s project of modern theology did not quiet the critical question. It had problems of its own.conditioned in a thorough-going way. Thinking has no position from which Ernst Troeltsch pinpointed one problem. Human thinking is historically