2. Reformation and Enlightenment Views

2

Reformation and Enlightenment Views

Due to its strong view of sin’s dire consequences, the Protestant Reformation is sometimes assumed to have been on the side of critics of the demonstrability of God’s existence. For different reasons, a similar critique of the demonstrability of God’s existence is also often associated with the Enlightenment. Of course, as the Reformation historian Diarmaid MacCulloch observes, “much of the Enlightenment was not anti-Christian at all: it was able to alter Christianity and open it to ways of reformulating the questions and answers which made up Christian belief.” As MacCulloch remarks, however, during the eighteenth century “Often doubt, scepticism or hatred of the Church . . . moved on to become what we would define as atheism.” Is it correct to say, then, that the major thinkers of the Reformation and Enlightenment periods deny that human reason can demonstrate the existence of God?

While some figures from these periods have no room for the demonstrability of God’s existence, others strongly insist on human reason’s ability to arrive at knowledge of God. Thus, John Calvin argues that our knowledge of God’s existence is innate and indelible, although people still fall into idolatry, because the human mind, obscured by sin, is not able to know exactly who or what God is. For Calvin, even those who reject God and are most deeply mired in sin know that God exists. Calvin does not think that there is any need for complex metaphysical proofs of the kind we found in Aquinas, but he fully affirms the fathers’ proof from the order of the universe.

Similarly, René Descartes, widely acknowledged as the father of Enlightenment philosophy, affirms that he can demonstrate God’s existence with certitude. Beginning with “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes reasons that he can conceive of something more perfect than himself, and he can also recognize that he is not the source of this perfection. He has an idea of the infinite, though he is only finite. On this basis Descartes concludes that God must exist.

The Reformation and Enlightenment periods also include creative exponents of the Aristotelian tradition that we saw in Gregory of Nazianzus, John of Damascus, and Aquinas. For instance, the Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez, while rejecting Aquinas’s argument from motion, disagrees with Ockham regarding the argument from efficient causality. Suárez holds that this argument succeeds in demonstrating an unmoved mover, Pure Act. Like Ockham, Suárez is not thereby persuaded of the unity of God, since he supposes that there might be many distinct universes governed by distinct Pure Acts. To demonstrate the unity of God, Suárez argues that singularity must belong intrinsically to the essence of uncreated being.

Nonetheless, the critique of the demonstrations of God’s existence can correctly be said to have the sixteenth century for its fundamental starting point, even though Ockham anticipates this critique. Deeply learned in the Stoic and Academic (skeptical) traditions of classical antiquity and negatively impressed by the religious turmoil of his day, Michel de Montaigne holds that human reason cannot arrive at certitude even about animals, much less about God. Since we do not know what laws characterize nature or whether there is one universe or many, and since what we know of existence is ephemeral and constantly changing, we have no real basis for constructing proofs about God’s existence. Our ambitions should be chastened by the example of the Stoics, whose proofs from the created order to the Creator never could get beyond pantheism. In Montaigne’s view, the effects we see around us are far too faint and weak to show anything about an infinite cause.

Responding to Montaigne, his fellow Frenchman Blaise Pascal grants that the order of the universe does not suffice to demonstrate God’s existence. Occasionally, Pascal suggests that some demonstrations of God’s existence do indeed work, as for example the demonstration from our finite and contingent existence to an infinite source of existence and from truths to an eternal Truth. But more frequently, Pascal insists that God infinitely exceeds our understanding and that we cannot find God solely through reason. The personal God manifests himself to those who seek to know him in personal ways rather than through impersonal and abstract demonstrations. Pascal also urges us to consider what makes us happy and to notice that nature everywhere shows traces of a fall away from God. In this light, Pascal proposes that since we have to choose to live either as though God exists or as though God does not exist, the former option is the only rational one, given that the potential reward is all on the side of the former option.

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume extends Montaigne’s skeptical arguments. His key move is to separate the cause-effect relation into two separate events and to argue that an absolutely necessary relationship between the two events cannot be demonstrated. This gets rid of the principle of causality that is central to many of the classical demonstrations of God’s existence. Given that effects may not need causes at all, Hume no longer has to worry about how something could cause itself. Hume also argues that even if one assumes normal causal relations, one can only infer a cause that is exactly proportionate to the effect; anything else is conjecture. Thus we can at best infer a finite, imperfect cause. For Hume, we certainly cannot infer a cause unlike anything that we have ever observed, which is what is done by the demonstrations of God’s existence.

The last thinker that I treat in this chapter, Immanuel Kant, considers that God’s existence is a postulate of practical reason. Practical reasoning, rooted in the experienced imperatives of the moral law, moves us toward holiness and happiness, which together comprise our highest good. Such movement would be utterly incoherent if God did not exist, since in our short and sinful lives on earth there is no way for us to achieve the holiness and happiness that we seek. When it comes to speculative demonstrations of God’s existence, however, Kant argues that every attempt at such a demonstration fails. He argues that the principle of causality applies only within the world of sense, and like Hume, he thinks that we can reason only to a strictly proportionate cause: appealing to an utterly incomprehensible cause is no way to account for a series of dependent causes. Within the sphere of our understanding, we know of nothing for which nonbeing is impossible; we cannot even conceive of an “absolutely necessary being.” In Kant’s view, all the proofs of God’s existence depend, like Anselm’s Proslogion, on an a priori concept of a highest being, despite their claim to begin with sense knowledge and to demonstrate God’s existence on that basis.

The modern period, therefore, leaves the classical demonstrations of God’s existence—advocated in different forms by Calvin and Suárez—seemingly in tatters, even though Pascal’s wager (with its appeal to rational pursuit of our highest possible good) and Kant’s practical postulate (with its emphasis on our experience of the moral law and our desire for happiness) offer new approaches. The crucial question is whether Montaigne, Hume, and Kant are correct in their epistemology and in their rejection of the principle of causality as an effective path by which to demonstrate the existence of a transcendent, self-subsistent cause of all things.

John Calvin (1509–64)

John Calvin, born in Noyon, France, became a clerk to his local bishop at age twelve. He studied Latin and philosophy in Paris before moving to the University of Orléans and then to the University of Bourges for law studies. His first book, published in 1532, was a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia. In 1533 he experienced a religious conversion and broke with the Catholic Church. Soon after, due to his association with Nicholas Cop, a Protestant Reformer who was removed from being rector of the Collège Royal in Paris, Calvin went into hiding and eventually fled to Basel. He published the first edition of his massively influential Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536. He became a pastor in Geneva and worked to organize the Reformed Church there, but tension among the reforming parties forced him to return to Basel, and he moved to Strasbourg in 1538. After three years ministering and writing in Strasbourg, he returned to Geneva, where he remained for the rest of his life. He wrote a commentary on almost every book of Scripture and completed the final revision and extensive expansion of the Institutes in 1559.

Calvin argues that all humans have some kind of innate knowledge of God’s existence. For Calvin, our human misery itself directs us toward God: “Every man, being stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness, in this way at least obtains some knowledge of God. Thus, our feeling of ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption, reminds us that in the Lord, and none but He, dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness.” When we come to know our situation, we naturally seek for God—even though in our pride we cannot fully know our miserable state until we have known God. The cure for pride is to “raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to which as a standard, we are bound to be conformed.” Before the fall, says Calvin, we could have known God by natural reason as our benefactor and father, but the fall placed us at odds with God. We retain a knowledge of God that is distinct from salvific knowledge of Jesus Christ, but unless our knowledge of God leads us to love, trust, and obey God in Christ, it is worthless knowledge.

With this proviso in mind, Calvin argues that God has endowed all humans with a real knowledge of God. Even sinners who reject God know him by natural reason. Their conscience continually condemns and torments them because they know the one whom they are rejecting: “a sense of Deity is indelibly engraven on the human heart.” Even idolaters know God to some degree because they still have the instinct to worship. Calvin grants that idolatry obscures this “sense of Deity,” but idolatry cannot uproot it. He remarks in this regard, “At length they bewilder themselves in such a maze of error, that the darkness of ignorance obscures, and ultimately extinguishes, those sparks which were designed to show them the glory of God. Still, however, the conviction that there is some Deity continues to exist, like a plant which can never be completely eradicated.” In part, Calvin is here responding to arguments that religion was invented by a few men in order to subjugate the ignorant masses. The opposite is the case: the mass of humanity struggles powerfully to extinguish the knowledge of God, but cannot do so no matter how many false gods are devised. Humans devise false gods because they fear the true God and his righteousness.

In addition to considering that all humans have an innate knowledge of God, Calvin also argues for the existence of God based on the order of the universe. He states that God has arranged “so to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily place himself in our view, that we cannot open our eyes without being compelled to behold him.” Although God is incomprehensible to our finite minds, his works make manifest his glory. No one who has seen God’s works can be ignorant of God’s glorious existence. The universe reveals “the immense weight of glory,” so that the visible world serves as an “image” of, or mirror to, the invisible God. In making this point, Calvin twice quotes the Psalms because they often rejoice in God’s manifestation of himself through created things. Calvin also quotes and strongly affirms Romans 1:20. The wisdom of God is attested by “proofs which force themselves on the notice of the most illiterate peasant, who cannot open his eyes without beholding them.” The study of astronomy or medicine strengthens our appreciation for God’s wisdom in ordering the cosmos, but anyone who looks at the stars or the human body will be moved to give glory to God. Calvin approves the view that the human being is a wondrous “microcosm,” and he holds (citing Paul’s words in Acts 17:27) that “in order to apprehend God, it is unnecessary to go farther than ourselves.”

Calvin complains that a number of his contemporaries, like the ancient Epicureans, seek to replace God with a personified “nature” (the world-soul) as the Creator of the universe, notwithstanding the extraordinary evidence provided by natural science. As he says, “Let Epicurus tell what concourse of atoms, cooking meat and drink, can form one portion into refuse and another portion into blood, and make all the members separately perform their office as carefully as if they were so many souls acting with common consent in the superintendence of one body.” He then proceeds to a strong defense of the spiritual soul, on the basis of which he concludes that there must be an intelligent Creator because human intelligence cannot simply arise from matter. He also points to the immense power of God as manifested by God’s sustaining the entire universe in being and by God’s governance of the weather and the ocean. He adds that “this method of investigating the divine perfections, by tracing the lineaments of his countenance as shadowed forth in the firmament and on the earth, is common both to those within and to those without the pale of the Church.” After bemoaning the fact that few persons pay attention to the divine glory that is so manifest, he concludes by warning once more against mere speculation about God that does not result in obedient love, and by emphasizing that “there is no need of a long and laborious train of argument” to prove God’s existence, because the proofs are in fact “so immediately within our reach in every quarter, that we can trace them with the eye, or point to them with the finger.” He also cautions against the errors of the pagan philosophers, including pantheism and atheism. Among the pagans, he says, “though all did not give way to gross vice, or rush headlong into open idolatry, there was no pure and authentic religion founded merely on common belief.”

I should add a brief note regarding Calvin’s Commentary on Romans, published in 1539. On Romans 1:19, which in Calvin’s translation reads, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has showed it to them,” Calvin comments that God wishes us to know “all that appertains to the setting forth of the glory of the Lord,” that is to say, “whatever ought to move and excite us to glorify God.” Calvin thinks it significant that Paul says that what can be known about God is manifest in humans. This means, he suggests, that humans intuitively know what can be known about God. God manifests himself in us so clearly that we cannot fail to know his glory. Calvin states that Paul intends “to indicate a manifestation, by which they [humans] might be so closely pressed, that they could not evade.” We cannot avoid possessing sufficient knowledge of God so as to be able to give God glory. For Calvin, this is the same as saying that each person possesses the knowledge of God “engraven on his own heart.”

If this is what Paul means by stating that the knowledge of God has been manifested “in them,” what does Paul mean when he affirms that the knowledge of God “is manifest” in them? How does it become manifest? Calvin argues that it “is manifest” because the world’s beauty clearly reveals its divine author. The manifestation is through external things, but it is also in us because we cannot escape the conclusion that the world has a Creator. In Calvin’s view, “man was created to be a spectator of this formed world,” and “eyes were given him, that he might, by looking on so beautiful a picture, be led up to the Author himself.” Simply by opening our eyes and observing the world’s beauty, we know that it has a glorious Creator.

Calvin’s translation of Romans 1:20 is as follows: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” The first point that Calvin makes is that God is invisible in himself. We cannot see God with our physical eyes, but nonetheless God’s “invisible things” are “clearly seen.” How is this so? Calvin observes that God’s “majesty shines forth in his works and in his creatures everywhere.” There should be no difficulty in discovering the glorious God, since God’s majesty is evident through the works and creatures of God. Citing the Letter to the Hebrews, Calvin remarks that when we look into the world as into a mirror, what we see in the mirror is God. The world shows forth many of God’s attributes, but Paul mentions two, “eternal power and Godhead.” After all, the existence of the world shows that its Creator is powerful and indeed shows that God “must necessarily be without beginning and from himself.” If God had a beginning and a cause, God would be among the things of this world. Thus the world reveals not only a Creator, but a Creator with attributes that differentiate him from any creature. Calvin comments that “when we arrive at this point, the divinity becomes known to us.” From the things of this world, we can arrive at a knowledge of God that is sufficient for the purpose of giving God glory. The world shows that it must have a Creator, and that this powerful Creator must be self-subsistent.

Paul concludes that “they are without excuse.” God has done his part; God has clearly manifested himself so that we cannot use the weakness of the human mind or our dependence on sense-knowledge as an excuse for not glorifying God. Calvin underscores that “the manifestation of God, by which he makes his glory known in his creation, is, with regard to the light itself, sufficiently clear.” Our sinfulness, however, makes us blind. The lack of sufficiency lies in us, not in God’s manifestation. Are we so blind that in fact we do not know that God exists, despite its clarity? Calvin answers no. Our blindness does not hide from us that God exists. Rather, our blindness obscures from us exactly who God is, and so we fall into idolatry. As Calvin puts it, “We conceive that there is a Deity; and then we conclude, that whoever he may be, he ought to be worshipped: but our reason here fails, because it cannot ascertain who or what sort of being God is.” We perversely fail to worship God, or rather we worship gods instead of God. Yet we know that some sort of God exists; otherwise the things of this world would be inexplicable, since they make clear that they have a Creator.

Indeed, given the obscuring of our minds, we need faith in order to recognize fully and worship properly the true God. In this regard Calvin cites Hebrews 11:3: “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” What Paul ascribes to reason in Romans 1:20, Calvin ascribes to faith in Hebrews 11:3. Calvin explains that faith possesses this role without negating reason’s ability to know that God exists: “We are prevented by our blindness, so that we reach not to the end in view; we yet see so far, that we cannot pretend any excuse.” Calvin also draws on Acts 14:16–17, where Barnabas and Paul proclaim to the people of Lystra, “In past generations he [God] allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways; yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons.” Calvin interprets this to mean that God manifested his existence via the good things of this world—God’s “witness”—while at the same time God allowed the nations to practice idolatry. Calvin concludes his commentary on Romans 1:19–20 by strongly differentiating between natural knowledge of God through “the things that are made” and saving knowledge of God through faith in Jesus Christ; the former merely leaves us “without excuse.”

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92)

Michel de Montaigne, born into a noble family near Bordeaux, received a careful education in Latin philosophy and literature, and his essays reflect the influence of Stoic and Academic philosophy. For thirteen years, he worked as a councilor in Bordeaux’s Chambre des Enquêtes. Inheriting his father’s estate at age thirty-five, Montaigne devoted himself largely to writing, publishing the first two books of his Essays in 1580. In 1581 he became mayor of Bordeaux, a position that he held for four years, although he fled the city during a plague that killed almost half of its inhabitants. During the 1570s and 1580s, a period of religious wars and strife throughout Europe, Montaigne undertook diplomatic and political work for Henry of Navarre, later Henry IV. The final edition of his Essays appeared in 1588. On his deathbed, Montaigne requested and received the last rites of the church.

In his essay “Apology for Raimond Sebond”—in length the size of a short book, and among his very first writings—Montaigne critiques Raimond Sebond’s natural theology under the guise of defending it. Sebond was a Spanish theologian who published a book titled Natural Theology, or Book of Things Created in the early fifteenth century. A theologian named Pierre Brunel gave this book to Montaigne’s father, and, at the request of his father (with whom Montaigne was very close), Montaigne translated it into French in 1569. Montaigne notes that at this time, Martin Luther’s views were shaking the faith of many French Catholics. He describes the situation of the “common people” in words that aptly apply to himself: “When once certain articles of their religion have been called in question and placed in the scales, they will soon be ready to throw into a like uncertainty all the other articles of their faith, which had no more authority or foundation in their eyes than those which are already shattered.”

In his “Apology for Raimond Sebond,” Montaigne presents himself as a defender of the faith, fully persuaded by Sebond. But he depicts Sebond as a naïve and deluded rationalist. Montaigne explains, “The author’s aim is bold and courageous; for he undertakes, by human and natural reasons, to establish and prove against the atheists all the articles of the Christian religion.” The implication is that Sebond thereby goes far beyond earlier theologians, who demonstrated God’s existence but not the existence of the Trinity. Tongue in cheek, Montaigne gives this bold undertaking his approval at the outset: “I find him so strong and successful that I do not think it possible to improve on his arguments; and I believe that no man has equalled him.”

After suggesting that Sebond was a follower of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne explains the critique that has been lodged by some thinkers against Sebond’s work. The critique is that many Christian beliefs require faith, in which case Sebond could not prove all Christian beliefs by reason. Despite the supposed praise that he has just bestowed on Sebond, Montaigne agrees with the critique. Christian truth, he says, is so beyond human understanding that God’s help is needed for us to believe it. If human reasoning alone could demonstrate all Christian beliefs, then the pagan philosophers would have demonstrated them. Montaigne claims to approve of the project of strengthening faith by employing reason on faith’s behalf, so long as we recognize that our reason will not “be able to attain to a knowledge so divine and supernatural.” Yet Montaigne adds that Sebond is to be commended because unless reason confirms all Christian beliefs, they will collapse. Faith is too shaky a reed upon which to rely.

Montaigne next argues that if faith were the divine gift that it claims to be, the minds and actions of Christians would be gracious and virtuous rather than profoundly weak and dissolute. He suggests that for most if not all of those who call themselves Christians, faith is not real. Those who call themselves Christians are really self-seeking partisans, perfectly willing to burn their opponents at the stake in the name of truth. This is so despite the apparent fact that if we knew God, “we should love him above all other things, for the infinite goodness and beauty that shine in him.” Our problem, then, is that we do not know God either by faith or by reason. We are Christians simply because we happen to have been born in a traditionally Christian country and wish to be called Christian out of respect for our ancestors or out of self-seeking considerations with regard to life after death. Sudden fear of death makes “Christians” even out of professing atheists.

In supposed agreement with Sebond’s defense of natural theology, Montaigne then professes that the cosmos must have “some marks imprinted on it by the hand of that great architect.” Yet he argues that without faith, Sebond’s arguments for natural theology fall flat. Neither atheists nor Sebond, he suggests, are truly capable of saying anything about God, because human reason is incapable of arriving at certitude about such a matter, or indeed about anything at all.

Ostensibly in defense of Sebond, Montaigne goes on to advance arguments against the central premises of natural theology—namely, that the order and existence of the cosmos require a Creator, and that we can know this to be the case. With a comedic barb, Montaigne asks rhetorically, “What has induced him [man] to believe that the wonderful motion of the heavenly vault, the eternal light of those torches rolling so proudly over his head, the awe-inspiring agitations of that infinite sea, were established, and endure through so many centuries, for his service and convenience?” The cosmos is far too vast for us to know the slightest portion of it, let alone to know its meaning, and it is quite likely that whatever meaning the cosmos has does not involve us. We are merely another kind of animal, and a lesser kind at that. In fact, we would trade all our philosophical wisdom for health and serenity, which the best philosophy is powerless to increase and often depletes. It is therefore fitting, Montaigne remarks sardonically, that Christianity commends ignorance to us, as an antidote to pride and as befits the obedience of faith. For Montaigne, the most one can say in favor of Christianity is that it is the faith of those who embrace their own ignorance: “So unable are we by our own powers to conceive the sublimity of God, that we least understand those works of our creator that best bear his stamp, and are most his. To meet with a thing that is unbelievable is to the Christian an occasion to believe. It is the more according to reason as it is contrary to human reason.”

Not surprisingly, Montaigne proceeds to deny that we can name God from the attributes of creatures. Although we apply to God such feelings as fear, anger, and love, these are feelings whose place in God, if any, we cannot imagine. Likewise, neither wisdom nor intelligence in fact apply to God, because wisdom involves choosing between good and evil (and God could have nothing to do with evil), and intelligence is a discursive search for clarity (and everything must already be clear to God). In the same vein, justice, temperance, and fortitude have to do with human community, bodily pleasures, and earthly dangers, none of which apply to God. Reason thus is unrelated to any knowledge of God that we might have, as is fitting, because such knowledge in Christianity comes solely from faith and obedience to authority. Against the pretensions of reason, we must acknowledge the futility of all the main schools of ancient philosophy. To their credit, the ancient skeptics admit their lack of knowledge, by contrast to the ancient dogmatists—foremost among them Aristotle—who either rely on obscure and unintelligible arguments so as to conceal their ignorance or else focus on posing puzzles without truly seeking to resolve them.

Turning explicitly to religion, Montaigne observes that the discussions of God (or gods) that we find in the various religions impiously and anthropomorphically pretend to know what cannot be known, with sheer confusion as the result. Religions make promises about eternal happiness or suffering in the next life that either inventively extend what we experience in this world or else go far beyond what flesh can bear and thus require that we be transformed into something entirely different. By means of examples, Montaigne shows that religions do not hesitate to make up things in this regard. Furthermore, if God or the gods reward what they make possible in our earthly lives, then we do not really deserve either a reward or punishment for what we could not help but do. There is also the despicable practice of propitiating God or the gods by inflicting suffering on innocent victims or by ascetical self-mutilation. The main point is this: God is not “subservient to the vain and feeble conjectures of our understanding.”

This principle holds especially with respect to the universe. Even supposing it to be God’s creation, we cannot thereby know about God from it, both because God must radically transcend our small capacity to know and because there may be other universes quite unlike ours. We cannot know God on the basis of supposed laws pertaining to nature, since we do not know these laws. This stricture includes notions of “existence” and “motion.” What we call our existence is “but a flash in the infinite course of an eternal night.” Nor can we assume that God “cannot” do or not do particular things, such as die, because we know nothing of God. All our language about God fails utterly and bears witness merely to our absurd pride: “That his goodness, wisdom, power, are one with his essence: our tongue speaks it, but our intelligence does not comprehend it. And yet our overweening conceit would make the Deity pass through our sieve.” We speak of God’s providence, too, as if we knew that God cared about every little thing. When we pretend to be honoring God, we are merely glorifying ourselves—just as other animals, if given the chance to make gods, would make them in their image.

With reference to Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, Montaigne shows how the effort to move logically from the created order to a Creator resulted in absurdly attributing the creation of the cosmos to “Nature,” pantheistically conceived as a cosmic soul or cosmic animal. To this “Nature,” Cicero attributes goodness, love, and justice, because we have these qualities. In Montaigne’s view, Circero’s example shows that effects give us no real knowledge of causes, especially when we are talking about God. The thing to do, therefore, is to have no theory whatsoever about God. Whenever we find such a theory, replete with “arguments and proofs,” we should assume that it amounts to “nonsense and lies,” despite the venerable witnesses who testify to it. Such theories have traction over time because we seek to know the opinion of the supposed experts rather than seeking the truth of the matter. Thus, “The god of scholastic knowledge is Aristotle,” and his authority cannot be questioned, although his metaphysical theories are no more likely to be true than are a multitude of other silly theories. In particular, Montaigne dismisses Aristotle’s theory of matter and form, along with the notion of first principles that can be known absent divine revelation. As he puts it, “To be convinced of certainty is certain evidence of folly and extreme uncertainty.” Montaigne is unpersuaded that we can know anything with certitude, since we cannot even comprehend our own powers of sensation and understanding, and all the philosophers disagree with each other and often make absurd claims. The immortality of the soul here receives an especially withering condemnation as an anxious attempt to claim an afterlife for ourselves.

Toward the end of the essay, Montaigne openly states his opposition to Sebond’s natural theology. The controversies among the philosophers, and the inconstancy of our ideas and the sway of our emotions, prove the inability of reason to attain knowledge. Ideas that seem so certain in one age are found in another to be merely superstition. Thus, in the new world Montaigne finds uncivilized humans worshiping the god of rain under the form of a cross, with the implication being that Christians are no less superstitious than worshipers of the god of rain. Further, philosophers cannot agree on what is the highest good that would make us happy or what the laws of conduct should be. Those who argue in favor of natural law consistently fail to agree on its content or to demonstrate that the allegedly immutable laws are accepted by all nations. Only a divine revelation can settle these matters, and yet humans would inevitably disagree on its meaning if it depended on human interpretation. Intelligent humans can be found to advocate any kind of nonsense and to interpret texts in any direction. Nor are our senses trustworthy or consistent. Ultimately, since we are constantly changing and nothing is stable, “nothing certain can be proved of one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual motion and change.” Human nature cannot rise above itself and attain a divine perspective. Montaigne concludes that only God can raise us—but he has already made clear the problems with any discourse about God.

In sum, for Montaigne, we cannot rise from effects to cause because we have no idea what God might or might not have done. Since even with regard to natural things “we can only half infer the causes from the effects,” we must throw up our hands with regard to God, since surely God’s “condition is too elevated, too remote, too supreme, to suffer itself to be tied and bound by our conclusions.” The attributes of God identified by metaphysicians are merely another example of the tendency of each creature to measure “the qualities of all other things by its own qualities.” All that man can gain from philosophy, then, “is to have learned to acknowledge his own weakness.”

Francisco Suárez (1548–1617)

Francisco Suárez, born into a prominent legal family in Granada, Spain, studied at the University of Granada and the University of Salamanca before entering the Society of Jesus in 1564. Ordained a priest in 1572, he taught philosophy and theology at Segovia, Valladolid, Avila, Rome, Alcala, Salamanca, and Coimbre. Suárez was well versed in the thought of Thomas Aquinas but also often disagreed with him, siding with Scotus and Ockham. His most famous work is his massive Disputationes metaphysicae, published in Salamanca in 1597. Suárez taught theology at a time when metaphysical disputation at the highest level was expected of any leading Catholic theologian. His metaphysical logic strongly influenced Descartes, although Descartes did not follow Suárez on the demonstrations of God’s existence. Suárez played a major role in the De Auxiliis controversy over predestination and premotion, helping to persuade the pope not to take sides in the debate between Jesuit and Dominican theologians.

In Metaphysical Disputation 29, Suárez offers a lengthy investigation of whether we can demonstrate that God—uncreated being—exists. He first asks whether such a demonstration would be the province of Aristotelian philosophy of nature (“physics”), which deals with the form/matter composite in physical beings and their necessary dependence on other moved movers, or of Aristotelian metaphysics. He mentions the contrasting opinions of Averroes and Avicenna, with the former arguing that the demonstration of God’s existence belongs strictly to physics and the latter arguing that it belongs strictly to metaphysics. Taking the position that the demonstration of God’s existence is the province of metaphysics, but with the help of physics, Suárez states that “there are just two physical means which we can use to demonstrate separate substance either in general or in the particular case of a first uncreated being.” He then proceeds to examine whether the two physical means—from the motion of the heavenly bodies (considered by Aristotle to be everlasting) and from the operations of the human soul, respectively—can suffice for a demonstration of God’s existence.

Suárez first denies that “from ‘eternal motion’ an eternal or immaterial mover” can be demonstrated. He does not think that the perpetual motion of the heavenly bodies shows that Pure Act must be the cause of this motion. It could be, he reasons, that something that has no potency to moving, but nonetheless still has potency of some kind, is the cause of the heavenly bodies’ motion. Second, Suárez notes that “in no physical means does it seem that God can be more known than in the contemplation of the rational soul and its operations.” If the soul’s operations can be known through physics (since the soul is the form of matter), then can the existence of God be demonstrated on this basis? In reply, Suárez argues that to demonstrate God’s existence, one would need to proceed not only from the soul’s operations but also from “some principle common to other agents and created effects.” Physics is therefore unable to demonstrate God’s existence.

Given the insufficiency of physics, Suárez holds that the demonstration of God’s existence cannot follow the lines of the argument from “motion” (from potency to act). He states that “in place of that physical principle, ‘Everything which is moved, is moved by another,’ we must take another metaphysical one which is far more evident: ‘Everything which is made, is made by another,’ whether it is made in the sense of being created, being generated, or in any other sense.” A thing cannot make itself. This avoids the problem of self-movers, since even if things can move themselves from potency to act, they certainly cannot make themselves when they do not exist.

Suárez succinctly describes the proof that follows, which depends on the claim that “all beings in the totality cannot be made” (he accepts a version of the univocity of being). If all beings were made, then we would either proceed to infinity in created beings, or reason circularly. Circular reasoning would suppose that a thing can be produced by that which it itself has produced, “either immediately or mediately and after many generations”—thereby supposing that the world is in some way cyclic. Suárez rejects circular reasoning on the grounds that, in fact, one and the same thing cannot produce itself. A thing that already exists cannot be brought into existence by its own effect. Yet, Suárez notes that some have imagined that, for instance, a dead father can be generated by his descendant many generations later. In response to such hypotheses, Suárez explains that here one falls into the error of proceeding to infinity. No matter whether the changes in generations are linear or ultimately circular, there must be “some first ungenerated producer.”

Why so? Suárez observes that “if in those circles and changes of generations we never stop at any first generator,” then we would have to suppose that it is possible “to proceed to infinity in the emanation of one being from another.” He is aware of arguments in favor of such a possibility. For example, in the case of accidentally ordered causes, where not all the causes need to exist together (such as grandfather-father-son), Aristotle thought that proceeding to infinity is possible, since he thought that the world exists from eternity. Likewise, in the case of essentially ordered causes, where all the causes must exist together in order to produce the effect, one might simply suppose that an infinite number of causes can work together. If an infinite number of causes can work together to produce an effect, then “that a simultaneous whole, or a whole multitude of causes existing simultaneously, also simultaneously act and exert influence on the same effect is not against the nature of the infinite.”

In response to such views, Suárez first notes that one might appeal to arguments that deny that an infinite number of things can actually exist; however many things there are, they must be numerable rather than infinite. But instead of depending on such arguments he thinks it better to follow the path of Aristotle’s argument regarding efficient causality, according to which “it is impossible that the whole collection of beings or of efficient causes be dependent in its being and in its operation.” One cannot proceed to infinity in a collection of dependent beings (beings that were made by another) because one would then have an infinite collection of beings that would in fact, as a collection, be dependent on another for existence. Nor could one member of the infinite collection be the one on whom the whole collection depends for being, since in such a case that member would cause itself. A collection of dependent beings therefore requires the causality of an independent, uncaused being—a being that transcends the collection of dependent beings.

When speaking of dependent beings, Suárez has in view things that are made and that depend on each other for their coming to be. His argument, then, applies to essentially ordered causes in which “a lower cause depends upon one that is higher, in such a way that the whole being, the power, and the acting of the first be based upon the second.” One cannot proceed to infinity in efficient causes of this kind. As Aristotle says, the result of proceeding to infinity would be that “all causes, apart from the last which is immediately joined to the effect, would be middle [causes] and no one would be first—which is impossible.” Suárez considers that the same thing holds for action: if all things are dependent in their action (that is to say, cannot cause their own power to act), then the whole collection would itself be likewise dependent and would not be able to act unless there existed Pure Act from which all dependent action has its source.

Returning to the idea of an infinite number of causes working together to produce an effect, Suárez observes that in an essentially ordered series of causes, God does not ordain a particular number of intermediate causes between God and the effect. It is not theoretically impossible that this number of intermediate causes might proceed to infinity. Suárez supposes that God could will an infinite number of intermediate causes—for example, an infinite number of angels. He argues that even as enclosed by the extremes (God and the effect), the number of intermediate causes could be infinite. This is so because even between God and the lowest angel, the number of species of angels could be infinite; for no finite creature can ever draw near, ontologically speaking, to the infinite and uncreated God. Suárez considers it highly unlikely that God has in fact so willed, since an infinite number of intermediate causes is not only unnecessary but also goes against what we can perceive. It has to do with possible things rather than with determinate things. But he shows that even an infinite number of intermediate causes, supposing this could exist, would be dependent and finite in being and would therefore require a cause that transcends the set of intermediate causes.

What about accidentally ordered causes—in other words, causes that do not need to be in act simultaneously in order to produce the effect? Here Suárez notes that each human is dependent on others for his or her existence, and each human has been made. Therefore, the whole human race, as a collection, is dependent and has been made. Even if humans were infinite in number, the species as a whole would require a cause that was not a member of the species. Suárez observes that “proceeding in this way, either from one individual to another or from one species to another that has been made, it will be in the end necessary to stop at a thing that is completely not made.” The being of humans is obviously received, dependent being. To account for it, in an accidentally ordered series of causes, one needs to posit a cause outside the human species, and ultimately an absolutely independent, uncreated being. Again, this is so even if one thinks, as Aristotle did, that the human species has existed forever and therefore comprises an innumerable multitude. For his part, however, Suárez argues that there cannot have been an infinite number of humans, on the grounds that there must have been “some particular and determinate individual” who first received human nature from a cause outside the human species, and with regard to whom all other humans come later in time. This holds even if the world itself has existed eternally.

Suárez reserves other problems about God for Metaphysical Disputation 30, such as whether the uncreated God can have accidents, and whether God is completely immaterial in all possible senses. Thus far in Metaphysical Disputation 29, by means of Aristotle’s argument from efficient causality, Suárez considers that he has demonstrated that uncreated being exists.

He next turns to Ockham’s question about God’s unity. Given that uncreated being exists, can its unity be demonstrated? Until the unity of uncreated beings can be demonstrated, Suárez (like Peter d’Ailly) does not think that he can claim to have demonstrated the existence of God. It might be, for example, that there are “several uncreated beings which would have no causal order among themselves.” In this same section of Disputation 29, Suárez also takes up the possibility that God’s existence cannot be demonstrated because it is self-evident.

Suárez proceeds to demonstrate the unity of uncreated being, the source or cause of all things. God, of course, cannot be defined; we cannot know what God is within the confines of a finite concept. What then does the word “God” signify? Suárez comes up with the following basic signification: “a certain most noble being which both surpasses all the rest and from which as from a first author all the rest depend.” He considers that whatever else “God” means, it must mean that God is necessary being, uncreated, unique, and the source and cause of all other things, which participate in the being of God. To deny that reason can demonstrate the existence of such a being would be to deny what is taught by Paul in Romans 1:19–21, namely, that “knowledge of God can be derived from creatures, in such a way that it makes men inexcusable, if either they do not assent to the existence of God or they neglect to worship him.” As Suárez points out, Wisdom 13 teaches the same. Citing Wisdom 13:5 as particularly instructive, he argues that “the beauty of the whole universe and the wonderful connection and order of all things in it do sufficiently declare that there is one first being, by whom all things are governed and from whom they draw their origin.” God’s existence and unity can be demonstrated from the order of the universe.

In this regard, Suárez first cites various fathers of the church who either demonstrate the existence of God on the basis of the order of the universe or affirm that God’s existence can be so demonstrated: John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, John Chrysostom, Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Lactantius, and (Pseudo–)Justin Martyr (in addition to Thomas Aquinas and to Aristotle in books 1 and 12 of his Metaphysics). He then raises a number of possible objections to proving the existence of one God from the order of the universe. For example, this order might show that there is one governor, but it need not follow that there is one Creator; or the order might show that the governor of the universe is one not by nature but by consensus; or it might be denied that the order of the universe reveals anything about the provenance of spiritual and invisible realities (such as angels); or it might be supposed that there is more than one universe, each of which is created and governed by a distinct uncreated being.

In response, Suárez begins with the objection that the order of the universe manifests a governor but not a Creator. He cites a lengthy passage from Lactantius to show that “the universe can be governed only by him by whose counsel and power it has been created.” He then argues that not only each species but also prime matter, the four elements, spiritual souls, and so forth require a cause of being. In cases of propagation and procreation, we see that a species cannot “emanate from itself” or “exist from itself.” The intricate order of all these things in relation to each other, an order that manifests wisdom and beauty, shows that their Creator is one and the same as their governor. Suárez goes on to demonstrate that the heavenly bodies, too, belong to this wise and beautiful order and have the same Creator as the rest of the universe. God does not merely arrange things into an ordered universe; rather he creates all things as an ordered universe. The key point that Suárez makes in this section of his exposition is that the heavenly bodies cannot be the creators or governors of the sublunar realm.

Regarding the objection that the order of the universe could be produced by a consensus of first causes or “quasi-partial agents,” Suárez explains that this could be possible only if these causes were each too weak to produce the whole universe alone, or if they decided to share in a task that each could have performed alone. If the former, then these causes would be highly imperfect and, in fact, lacking the infinite power that the act of creation requires. Their finite intelligence and will would be weak and changeable, and their providential governance and conservation of the universe would be imperfect and flawed; they would be like pagan gods, always inadequate and in conflict. Likewise, if one were to suppose that these first causes decided to share a task that each could have performed alone, insuperable questions would arise, the foremost being why one would suppose this to be the case. A consensus of first causes could always break down; none could enjoy perfect governance, and the power of each would be limited.

The third objection was that the order of the universe does not tell us about the provenance of spiritual realities such as angels. Could it be that the angels are necessary beings? Suárez notes that simply from the effects that we experience, we cannot demonstrate that angels exist, even though we can conjecture that they do. Instead, reflection on angels’ existence must proceed metaphysically. In following this path (which Suárez treats at length in Metaphysical Disputation 35) it can be shown not only that angels exist but also that “they have received being from the First Being.” Finally, the fourth and last objection was that there might be another universe with a distinct uncreated being as its creator. Suárez grants that “there is no doubt that God could make many worlds.” Since angels and potentially other worlds exist, he thinks that the demonstration of God’s unity from the order of the world becomes difficult because we cannot know precisely in what the world consists or whether there are multiple worlds.

For this reason, Suárez holds that an a priori demonstration is needed at this stage: “after something about God has been demonstrated in an a posteriori way, we can from one attribute demonstrate another a priori.” He has demonstrated, as we have seen, that a necessary and self-sufficient being (God) exists. On this basis, he thinks that he can demonstrate a priori that God is one. He rejects some standard arguments for demonstrating God’s unity, including Aquinas’s contention (in book 1, chapter 42 of the Summa contra gentiles) that if there were two or more uncreated beings, they would have to be distinguished by some added component, which would mean that they are composite and therefore cannot exist necessarily. As Suárez says, if this argument were taken as probative, “it would also prove [against Suárez’s own view] that there is not one concept of being or of substance which would be common to God and to creatures.” He also holds that Aquinas’s argument against the existence of two or more uncreated beings cannot account for the distinction of persons in the Trinity.

The a priori argument that Suárez settles on for demonstrating God’s unity, then, is as follows. He states that “wherever a common character is multipliable in respect to diverse singular natures, granted that it is not necessary that singularity be distinguished in actual reality from the common nature, it is however necessary that it be in some way outside the essence of such a nature.” For uncreated being, however, singularity is clearly not outside its nature, since its nature is its being, and “being belongs only to a singular thing inasmuch as it is singular.” Not only its being but also its singularity belong to the nature of uncreated being. Here Suárez agrees with Aquinas: an uncreated and necessary being, possessing being essentially, cannot be this singular being unless singularity (like necessity) belongs intrinsically to its essence, because “to be in act entails being singular.” Responding to Peter Aureoli’s objection that this proves only that there cannot be two uncreated beings that are distinct in number, not that there cannot be two uncreated beings that are distinct in some other way, Suárez explains that an uncreated being “cannot be constituted in such or such an essential character (ratio) by something added, even according to concept (ratio).” It follows that in no way can an uncreated being be conceived as anything but singular. He goes on to underscore that “a nature which is essentially singular cannot be numerically multiplied”; no diversity of species is possible. He also adds arguments from the perfection of the supreme being and from the causality of the ultimate end.

Recognizing of course that most people do not employ demonstration in order to know God, Suárez goes on to ask from whence comes the widespread—if often confused—knowledge that God exists, given that God’s existence is not, strictly speaking, self-evident to us. He answers that belief in God fits with common sense: “For if a man reflects on himself he knows he does not exist from himself, nor does he suffice for himself for his own perfection, nor do all the creatures which he experiences satisfy him.” In addition to common sense, there is the fact that human tradition and education have handed down through the generations “a general feeling among all nations that God exists.” This tradition, rooted in common sense rather than in demonstrative arguments, is responsible for widespread belief in God, understood as the supreme source of all things.

René Descartes (1596–1650)

Born in the small town of La Haye, France, Réne Descartes spent much of his childhood as a boarding pupil at the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou before earning a degree in law at the University of Poitiers. As a young man, Descartes served in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau and traveled widely. After settling in Holland, Descartes published his most important works, including Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, between 1637 and 1641. In 1647 the king of France offered him a pension, and in 1649 he accepted Queen Christina of Sweden’s invitation to become her personal tutor. In addition to his more famous philosophical works, he wrote treatises on optics, meteorology, geometry, the human body, and the passions. A lifelong Catholic, his goal was to replace the scholastic philosophy that he had learned at La Flèche with a philosophy that fit modern scientific and mathematical discoveries and that allowed for greater certitude than could be found in the competing schools of scholastic philosophy.

In the fourth discourse of his Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, Descartes identifies a clear and certain truth: “I think, therefore I am.” Were one not to exist, one could not think; it follows that one who thinks exists. Descartes thereby apprehends that he possesses a perfection, since it is better to know than to doubt. In the act of thinking, he can think not only of himself but also of perfections that he does not have. He concludes that to be able to think of something more perfect than himself means that he must have received his own limited perfection from another. As he puts it, “If I had been alone and independent of all other, so as to have had from myself this small portion of perfection that I had by participation in the perfection of God, I could have given myself, by the same reason, all the remainder of perfection that I knew myself to lack, and thus to be myself infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, all-powerful.” Since he cannot give himself perfection, it follows that the perfections that he can conceive of, but that are superior to him, must have been taught him by God. God therefore must exist.

Descartes adds that certitude about anything other than the existence of God and the soul requires believing in God, because otherwise we cannot be sure that we are not being deceived by our senses or by our mind (or by a demon). He remarks that “if we did not know that all that is in us which is real and true comes from a perfect and infinite Being, we would have no reason which would assure us that, however clear and distinct our ideas might be, they had the perfection of being true.” The proof of God’s existence is particularly important, then, because it serves to ground Descartes’s knowledge of the world outside his mind.

In his Meditations, Descartes follows a similar path to demonstrating the existence of God. Beginning with himself as “a thinking thing,” he inquires in the third meditation into whether the idea of God could have originated with himself. He argues that everything that is in himself, he can surely know from himself. But he has a clear and distinct idea of infinite substance, whereas he is merely a finite substance. His idea of infinite substance involves not a negation of the finite but rather an idea of something far more real. The idea of the infinite in his mind therefore precedes that of the idea of the finite. Descartes concludes that the idea of God must have come to him from God. Possessing a true idea of the infinite does not mean understanding the nature of the infinite: Descartes does not expect his finite mind to understand the infinite. Could his knowledge, however, grow until it became infinite, so that he could become God? He answers no, on the grounds that his knowledge, despite being potentially infinite, will never become actually infinite.

Similarly, Descartes asks whether he could exist if there were no God. Without God, from where would his finite existence come (both originally and at this moment of his life)? He reasons that if he could have given himself existence, he would have given himself all the perfections of infinite existence. But as it is, he receives existence from outside himself. Since “there must be at least as much reality in the cause as in its effect,” he concludes that a thinking thing like himself must have for its cause another thinking thing, and indeed one that possesses all the perfections that can be conceived. Having received his bodily matter from his parents, then, he has received his being and understanding of all perfections from God. Thus, in his view, “We must necessarily conclude that, from the mere fact that I exist, and that the idea of a sovereignly perfect being, that is to say of God, is in me, the existence of God is very clearly demonstrated.”

In his fifth meditation, Descartes begins by reflecting on how the idea of a triangle comes into his mind. He argues that the senses cannot be the fundamental source, because he can imagine a triangle that he has never seen, and “yet it remains true that there is a certain determined nature or form or essence of this figure, immutable and eternal, which I have not invented, and which does not depend in any way on my mind.” He can imagine other forms as well, indeed an infinity of other forms, none of which he has possibly seen. Since he knows them “clearly and distinctly,” they are true. They do not originate with him, and they are certainly something rather than nothing. On this basis, he formulates an argument for the existence of God. Just as he encounters within himself the idea of a triangle and various truths about triangles, he also finds in himself “the idea of God . . . , that is to say, the idea of a supremely perfect being.” And just as the idea of a triangle is inseparable from certain properties that necessarily pertain to the nature of triangles, the idea of God is inseparable from “an actual and eternal existence.” Descartes concludes that his idea of God, since it is clear and distinct, must be true (as true as his idea of a triangle); therefore, God must have “actual and eternal existence.”

Descartes raises a concern about his conclusion: since existence and essence can be separated in all things, surely they can be separated in God, so that “God may be conceived as not actually existing.” In response, he again emphasizes that just as the nature or essence of a triangle cannot be separated from certain mathematical truths about triangles, so also the essence of God is simply inconceivable without existence, since God is by definition “a supremely perfect being.” If one were to conceive of God’s essence as lacking the perfection of existence, then one would not be conceiving of the supremely perfect being, possessed of all perfections. Yet an idea, however true, may not mean that the content of an idea actually exists in the world, since our thought does not make it necessary that what we conceive actually exists. We can imagine a winged horse, but winged horses do not exist. Is the same the case for God? Descartes thinks not. As he says, “I am not free to conceive a God without existence, that is to say, a supremely perfect being devoid of a supreme perfection, as I am free to imagine a horse with or without wings.” If one tries to think of a supremely perfect being that lacks a perfection, one falls into a nonsensical contradiction. The idea of God imposes by necessity the existence of God. If the idea is true—and it is, because it is clear and distinct—then God exists. Descartes observes in this regard that “only the things I conceive clearly and distinctly have the power to convince me completely.” He notes that far from inventing the idea of God according to the whims of his imagination, the idea of God imposes itself on his mind clearly and distinctly, with certain necessary and unavoidable attributes of its own, just as the idea of a triangle does.

If the idea of God is so clear and distinct, however, is it clear to everyone? Descartes notes that some clear and distinct ideas—such as the idea that the square of a triangle’s base is equal to the square of its two sides—are difficult to perceive though obvious and incontestable once we have perceived them. The idea of God may be difficult for some (including Descartes himself) to perceive due to the mind’s continual bombardment by sense images. But having perceived it, one recognizes that it is the clearest and most manifest of all ideas. Furthermore, the idea of the “supreme and perfect being” is required if one is to have certainty about any other ideas. This is so because if God did not exist, we could suppose that our mind is constituted in such a way as to deceive us. Knowing that God exists, we know that our mind depends on God, who does not deceive. Therefore we can have confidence in the truth of the things that we have perceived “clearly and distinctly” through a process of reasoning, even if we no longer recall the steps of our reasoning.

Although some contemporaries and later scholars have supposed him to be a closet skeptic, Descartes’s letters and recorded conversations indicate the importance that these proofs of God’s existence held for him. Thus, to Jean de Silhon, a government official and author of The Two Verities: God and the Immortality of the Soul, Descartes writes in 1648 that “you will surely admit that you are less certain of the presence of the objects you see than of the truth of the proposition ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist.’” One’s knowledge that one exists comes from a direct intuition, not from discursive reasoning or from the instruction of teachers. It also possesses clarity. On this basis, Descartes goes on to show Silhon that our knowledge of God in this life is not intuitive as it will be in the beatific vision; instead, we must reason about God.

Likewise, in a conversation that same year with the young Dutch scholar Frans Burman, a conversation that Burman reconstructed, Descartes defends his proofs for the existence of God. With regard to the proof offered in the Discourse on Method, Descartes tells Burman that even though we explicitly recognize our imperfection before we recognize God’s perfection—here Descartes gives the example of our finiteness and God’s infiniteness—in fact, “the knowledge of God and his perfection must implicitly always come before the knowledge of ourselves and our imperfections.” This is so because in reality, God’s perfection exists prior to our imperfection; and since imperfection is defective perfection, no imperfection can exist without reference to an existing perfection. Descartes states, “For in reality the infinite perfection of God is prior to our imperfection, since our imperfection is a defect and negation of the perfection of God. And every defect and negation presupposes that of which it falls short and negates.” Here we find resonances with the traditional argument for God’s existence from degrees of perfection.

Descartes adds that we cannot of course imagine what God’s perfection is like. Even so, we can form an “indefinite conception” of a divine perfection (such as infinite knowledge). Although we can conceive of ourselves growing in knowledge until our knowledge is infinite, we cannot really make ourselves infinitely knowledgeable. The fact that we can conceive this perfection without being able to attain it, Descartes thinks, shows that we are not the source of our existence.

To give one more example, in a 1644 letter to his Jesuit friend Denis Mesland, Descartes observes that we can employ any of God’s effects to prove the existence of God. Yet, he argues that all such proofs “are incomplete, if the effects are not evident to us.” On this basis, he defends his decision to use his own existence as the effect through which to prove the existence of God, since his own existence is clear to him, whereas he cannot be “equally certain” of the existence of heaven and earth. Likewise, in his view, the impossibility of an infinite regress in an order of causes can only be known if one first discerns within oneself the idea of a first cause and the idea of God. It is only the idea of God that prevents one from positing an infinite number of causes. In this regard, he points out that “in the division of the parts of matter there really is an endless series,” which shows that a series can go on forever. This fact is contrary, he suggests, to the view of those who deny an infinite regress without appealing to the presence in the mind of the idea of God.

Blaise Pascal (1623–62)

Blaise Pascal, son of a tax commissioner, was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and was educated at home—first in Paris and then in Rouen—under the guidance of his father. In 1640 he published an essay on conic sections, and he went on to invent a calculating machine and to publish significant work on atmospheric pressure, the problem of the vacuum, and mathematics. Beginning in 1646, while experiencing the severe ill health that would afflict him for the rest of his life, he came under the influence of the spirituality of Cornelius Jansenius, whose teachings on grace, predestination, and morality soon became the center of an intense controversy. Five Jansenist propositions were condemned by Pope Innocent X in 1653. On November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced an intense conversion through a personal encounter with God that lasted for about two hours. He wrote down a brief account of this experience that he sewed to the inside of his coat so that it could be kept close to his heart. His Provincial Letters, written when the Jansenist controversy was at its height, excoriates the casuistry and moral laxity of the Jesuit order, the main opponent of the Jansenists. From the mid-1650s until his death he prepared notes for a projected apologetic work, which he arranged in bundles under twenty-eight headings. These were preserved by the executors of his estate and published as the Pensées.

In the Pensées, Pascal invites us to consider what makes us instinctively happy. We are happy when we know that God exists, and we are desolate when we think he does not. As Pascal notes, “Ecclesiastes shows that man without God knows nothing and remains inevitably unhappy. To be unhappy is to want to do something but to be unable to do it.” Unless we know that God exists, we cannot be happy, because we “can neither know nor not want to know”; we live in a state of unfulfilled and seemingly unfulfillable thirst. Since we nonetheless cannot help but want to be happy, we divert our minds and try to stop thinking about God and death by means of generally pointless but effective “noise and activity.” In this regard, gambling serves Pascal as a central example of the effort to divert ourselves. But in addition to gambling, young people are taught that they cannot be happy unless “their health, honour, and wealth, and those of their friends” are assured. This can never be the case, but it provides fodder for diversion, so that they do not need to face the question of “what they are, where they come from, where they are going.” If they have to face this question without God, they will be utterly miserable. Pascal concludes soberly, “How hollow and full of filth man’s heart is.”

Despite human efforts to ignore the central questions, Pascal insists that “all men are in search of happiness. There is no exception to this, whatever different methods are employed.” Drawing on classical philosophy, he urges us to know ourselves, to face our unhappiness. It is only in this way that we have a chance of becoming happy by seeking and finding God. Pascal observes, “All very well to shout out to someone who does not know himself to make his own way to God!” If we truly know ourselves we will catch ourselves trying to make finite things our happiness, even when we profess love of God. We must become aware of our corruption. For example, those who seek reputation above all in fact desire “to be the object of men’s longing for happiness.” As Pascal shows, this desire is a horrible but common distortion. It is rooted, however, in a correct understanding that we cannot be our own source of happiness; we cannot withdraw into ourselves and be autonomously happy (as Montaigne supposes). In this sense, it is good and salutary that “our instinct leads us to believe we must seek our happiness outside ourselves,” even though no finite external object can give us happiness.

Our inability to give ourselves happiness should instruct us, as Pascal makes clear: “Such a lengthy, continual, and universal test ought to convince us of our powerlessness to achieve good through our own efforts.” Nonetheless, as he notes, we generally still do not learn. Yet our very wretchedness—our constant thirsting for something more, something that we cannot give ourselves—is also the sign of our greatness. Humans have greatness because we have a God-shaped void, even if in our wretchedness we seek to fill this void with everything other than God. Pascal asks rhetorically, “What does this greed and helplessness proclaim, except that there was once within us true happiness of which all that now remains is the outline and empty trace?” The key is to seek with all our strength to find the reality that pertains to this “outline and empty trace.” Pascal therefore distinguishes sharply between those who do not believe in God but actively seek God, and those who have given up the search: “I make an absolute distinction between those who strive with all their strength to learn about it, and those who live without bothering or thinking about it.” The latter have not grasped or are diverting themselves from the true human situation on which all our actions in this world depend. As Pascal describes the situation of such careless individuals: “You do not need a greatly elevated soul to realize that in this life there is no true and firm satisfaction, that all our pleasures are simply vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and lastly that death, which threatens us at every moment, must in a few years infallibly present us with the appalling necessity of being either annihilated or wretched for all eternity.”

The key, then, is to seek to avoid such wretchedness and to make every effort now to know God if he is knowable. For a person who does not believe in God, life is “cloaked in impenetrable darkness” and the most that can be said is that “I see nothing but infinities on all sides, enclosing me like an atom, or a shadow which lasts only for a moment and does not return,” since death is a plunge into everlasting nothingness unless God exists. Such a person may decide simply to ignore questions of meaning and to enjoy each moment of life nonetheless, as Montaigne advises. With a great deal of accuracy, Pascal voices the perspective that Montaigne (who is not named here) adopts: “I could perhaps find some enlightenment among my doubts, but I do not want to take the trouble to do so, nor take one step to look for it. And afterwards, sneering at those who are struggling with the task, I will go without forethought or fear to face the great venture, and allow myself to be carried tamely to my death, uncertain as to the eternity of my future state.” In Pascal’s view, such a person cannot be trusted as a friend, because he or she has given up on reason and on life and cannot be trusted in adversity.

What better path does Pascal propose? As we have seen, he argues that our intuitive sense that we have been happy and can be happy is a crucial sign that points toward God. Along these lines, he observes, “Man tries unsuccessfully to fill this void with everything that surrounds him, seeking in absent things the help he cannot find in those that are present, but all are incapable of it. This infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite, immutable object, that is to say, God himself.” Every human attempt to replace God with a lesser good has failed to produce real happiness, despite the vast variety of objects with which humans have tried to replace God. In fact, our idolatrous efforts make us ever more aware that God alone can satisfy us as our true good. Thus Pascal states, “From the time he lost his true good, man can see it everywhere, even in his own destruction, though it is so contrary to God, reason, and nature, all at once.” Pascal likes to reiterate that this “true good” is not “within us” any more than it is an external worldly thing. Those who instruct us to find our good by constructing a region of serenely autonomous selfhood (Montaigne) are leading us far more astray than are those who try to divert us with external things.

How then should we seek God? Pascal emphasizes that “we know the truth not only by means of the reason but also by means of the heart.” Here he has in view the fact that first principles cannot be demonstrated by reason, since if they could, they would not be first. First principles, he argues, are therefore known “through the heart.” This is why skeptics (the “Pyrrhonists” such as Montaigne), for all their efforts, cannot touch the intuitive source of our knowledge of first principles and cannot truly lead anyone to total skepticism. Pascal comments in this regard, “We know that we are not dreaming, however powerless we are to prove it by reason. This powerlessness proves only the weakness of our reason, not the uncertainty of our entire knowledge as they claim.” Pascal later expands on his insistence on the centrality of knowing God through the “heart.” He states with respect to the actual experience of lived Christianity, “It is the heart that feels God, not reason: that is what faith is. God felt by the heart, not by reason.” For Pascal, the “heart” includes the domain of reason, insofar as it has its own reasons for believing: “The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know: we know that through countless things.” As examples, he gives the heart’s natural inclination to love universal being and to love oneself.

As we would expect, therefore, Pascal underscores that many of the ways in which we come to know things do not involve rational demonstration. In fact, experience shows that demonstration is one of the weaker ways of coming to know something. In Pascal’s view, proofs have a limited value no matter how strong they are. He observes that “the way we are persuaded is not simply by demonstration. . . . Proofs only convince the mind; custom provides the strongest and most firmly held proofs: it inclines the automaton [our instinctive sense], which drags the mind unconsciously with it.” Reason alone will not suffice to lead us if custom or our instinctive sense leans in the other direction. Most Christians believe in God by custom or instinctive sense (when combined with the gift of faith) rather than because of any evidence whatsoever given by reason. On these grounds, Pascal urges that we should speak and think frequently about God so as to strengthen our belief or to come to believe. Pascal observes in this regard, “The more we tell ourselves the same thing, the more we bring ourselves to believe it. . . . We must keep silence with ourselves as much as possible, conversing only about God, who we know is the truth. That way we persuade ourselves that he is.”

For Pascal, this influence of custom and our willingness to believe what we often repeat do not negate our ability to know truth. In the debate between skeptical “Pyrrhonists” such as Montaigne and “dogmatists” such as Descartes (both of whom he considers to be wrong), Pascal argues that the dogmatists are at least correct that we cannot doubt natural principles such as that we exist. From the knowledge of this basic truth, we can reflect on our existence and become aware of our radical contingency. Indeed, this path of reflection seems to Pascal to constitute something of a proof. As he remarks in a highly condensed fashion, “I am not a necessary being. I am neither eternal nor infinite. But I can certainly see that in nature there is an essential, eternal, and infinite being.” Similarly, in an Augustinian vein Pascal suggests that since some things are true, there must be Truth itself as the ground of all truths.

Nonetheless, Pascal considers that the debate about God’s existence does not admit of easy resolution. In a memorable passage, he describes the tension that reason experiences when faced with the question of God: “Incomprehensible that God should exist, and incomprehensible that he should not; . . . that the world should be created, that it should not.” Faced with this tension, we should turn toward our heart. Pascal considers that only the heart, not reason, can have any experience or feeling of God. The heart’s experience can and should be trusted: we will truly become believers precisely by acting as though we were. Pascal sympathizes with the Pyrrhonists to the extent of granting how little humans know and how confused we can be if we depend solely on our reason. Thus he remarks, “Pyrrhonism is the truth. For, after all, men before Jesus Christ did not know where they had got to, nor if they were great and small. And those who said one or the other knew nothing about it, and were guessing, irrationally and at random.” By contrast, if we follow the desire and intuition of our heart, we can find our way to God. Adapting Acts 17:23, Pascal states, “The God whom I proclaim is in fact the one whom you already worship without knowing it.”

Pascal’s best-known argument for God’s existence proceeds on the basis of denying that we can know by reason whether God exists. Since God is utterly simple, he is infinitely beyond our understanding, with the result that we can only make a wager on whether God does or does not exist. Against Montaigne, Pascal insists that agnosticism is not possible in this regard: we must wager either for or against. If we try to remain neutral and refuse to wager, then we de facto have chosen to live as though God did not exist. Pascal then argues that the only reasonable course is to wager for God’s existence: “Let us assess the two cases: if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager that he exists then, without hesitating!” Pascal grants that one might try to elude the logic of the wager by claiming “that it is uncertain if you will win, that it is certain you are taking a risk, and that the infinite distance between the CERTAINTY of what you are risking and the UNCERTAINY of whether you win makes the finite good of what you are certainly risking equal to the uncertainty of the infinite.” In other words, why risk something certain (a finite good in this life) for something uncertain (the infinite good of eternal life)?

Pascal responds that the answer will be well known to every gambler. In gambling, we risk a certain finite good for an uncertain finite gain, and this is not unreasonable. Much less is it unreasonable to risk a certain finite good for an uncertain infinite gain. After all, there is a 50 percent chance (so far as the skeptic can know, since the skeptic cannot really have any knowledge about it) that the one who gambles for the infinite gain will win. These odds surely make the gamble for an infinite gain worth the finite risk. Pascal concludes, “So our argument is infinitely strong, when the finite is at stake in a game where there are equal chances of winning and losing, and the infinite is to be won.”

Here, then, our fallen human inclination toward gambling stands us in good stead. Since the only rational wager is to believe, reason itself should compel us to believe in a living God who loves us and wants us to love him and our neighbor. In Pascal’s view, the only way that we can reject this proof is if our passions prevent us from following the most reasonable path. Pascal urges his imagined interlocutor, who is unable to believe even despite the compelling rational power of the wager, to “at least realize that your inability to believe, since reason urges you to do so and yet you cannot, arises from your passions. So concentrate not on convincing yourself by increasing the number of proofs of God but on diminishing your passions.” The best way to be healed of the passions that prevent us from believing in God is to imitate the example of those who have gone before us in faith, by acting and worshiping as Christians. Furthermore, as Pascal points out, there can be no real harm in doing so, since the result will be that the person will lose only the corrupt “pleasures of high living” and instead “will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, doing good, a sincere and true friend.”

Describing the intense experience of God’s presence that he received on November 23, 1654, Pascal suggests that it came to him like “Fire” and filled him with “certainty, joy, certainty, emotion, sight, joy.” He identifies the God whom he experienced as the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of philosophers and scholars.” Along similar lines, he reflects elsewhere on the difference between the impersonal God known to pagan philosophers and the personal, covenantal God known by Jews and Christians. Pascal insists that it is only the personal God who is ultimately worth knowing, since it is only this God who loves, forgives, consoles, and inspires us. He adds that the attempt to find God outside Jesus Christ ends in atheism or deism, both equally deadly. Christians worship the saving God rather than an aloof deist God who is solely “great, powerful, and eternal.”

According to Pascal, efforts to come to know God by reflection on the things of this world ultimately fall short because God has not chosen to manifest himself clearly in this way. He explains, “What can be seen there [in the world] indicates neither the complete absence, nor the obvious presence of divinity, but the presence of a God who hides himself. Everything carries this stamp.” In hiding himself, God nonetheless shows us enough of himself to let us know that we have lost him and that we are alienated from him. We thereby realize our sinfulness and our need for redemption. Pascal reiterates the point that “nature is such that it points everywhere to a God who has been lost, both within man and elsewhere.” If any proofs from created things succeed, then, these proofs will not make everything clear but rather will lead to the hidden God who has been lost due to the consequences of the fall, and whom the heart knows. As Pascal remarks, God wills to be “DEUS ABSCONDITUS [the hidden God (Isa. 45:15)].” To fallen humans, God has given abundant signs of his existence and love, and so if sought, God will be found. Yet God has hidden these signs “in such a way that he will only be perceived by those who seek him whole-heartedly.” If we do not give our hearts to God, our minds will not find him, since he is a personal, covenantal, living God.

David Hume (1711–76)

Born in Edinburgh to a prominent but not wealthy family, David Hume received a classical education and studied at the University of Edinburgh. After a few months as a merchant’s assistant, he spent three years at La Flèche in France working on A Treatise of Human Nature, published in three volumes in 1739–40. While continuing to write steadily, Hume took positions as aide-de-camp and secretary to a British general, as a law librarian in Edinburgh, as secretary and chargé d’affaires to the British embassy in Paris, and as an undersecretary of state in London. In addition to his numerous philosophical works, Hume wrote a six-volume History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688.

Hume claims at the outset of his The Natural History of Religion that “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.” But both in The Natural History of Religion and elsewhere, Hume in fact argues vigorously against this view that we can reason from the “whole frame of nature” to a Creator God.

In A Treatise of Human Nature 1.3.2, Hume inquires into the notion of cause and effect. Since in his view reasoning has to do with determining the relations between objects, he posits that the strength of reasoning depends on the strength of inference about causation. The question here is how to be assured “from the existence or action of one object, that ’twas follow’d or preceded by any other existence or action.” To provide an adequate ground for reasoning, we need to be able to ascertain a necessary relationship between the existence or action of the two objects (cause and effect). For example, if when a ball hits a windowpane, the windowpane is shattered, can we conclude with certainty—beyond a mere supposition based on extrapolating from what we have always seen to take place—that the latter event is caused by the former?

In reply Hume remarks that in causation two things seem always to be present: temporal priority of the cause, and contiguity and succession of the cause and effect. First, he notes that cause and effect cannot be cotemporal, since if any cause and effect were cotemporal then all cause-effect relationships would be so, with the result that there could be no succession of time; everything would be coexistent.

On these grounds Hume separates cause and effect in a manner that replaces a two-sided, cotemporal causal relation with two separate, discrete events. These two separate events cannot be reconnected without reasserting the cotemporal causal relation. Not surprisingly, then, Hume proclaims his inability to unite the two separate events: “Having thus discover’d or suppos’d the two relations of contiguity and succession to be essential to causes and effects, I find I am stopt short, and can proceed no farther in considering any single instance of cause and effect.” The commonplace idea that the motion of one body causes the motion of another amounts simply to this: “the one body approaches the other; and . . . the motion of it precedes that of the other, but without any sensible interval.” Given the terms that Hume has established, we cannot unite the two movements in any more integral manner. This conclusion rids Hume of the kind of causal series that are in view in Aristotelian demonstrations of God’s existence from “motion.”

Second, Hume observes that two events can possess a relation of contiguity and succession without anyone supposing that one causes the other. It follows that a relation of contiguity and succession does not suffice to establish a necessary cause-effect connection. Indeed, where would such a necessary connection be found? If we take the example of a ball and the windowpane, a necessary cause-effect connection exists neither in the ball hitting the windowpane (the first discrete event) nor in the windowpane breaking (the second discrete event). We see the contact of the ball with the windowpane, and we see that the contact is temporally prior to the breaking of the windowpane. But given that contiguity and succession, however impressive they may be to our senses, can be present without there being a necessary cause-effect connection between the two events—the windowpane may have broken for some other reason than being struck by the ball. Any conclusion about the connection of the two events inevitably has the status of conjecture, rooted in what we observe commonly to be the case. This point raises two questions for Hume. First, why do we consider it “necessary” that “everything whose existence has a beginning, shou’d also have a cause?” Second, why do we suppose that particular kinds of causes necessarily have particular kinds of effects?

It may seem indisputable that whatever has a beginning must have been brought into existence by a cause. In challenging this assumption, Hume is aided by his view that certitude in understanding results solely from the discovery of unalterable, necessary relations in the comparison of ideas. These unalterable relations are four in number: resemblance, proportion, degree, and contrariety. There can be no necessity in matters of fact because the motions of bodies could always be otherwise. The only possible place that necessary truth can be found is in unalterable relations of ideas. With regard to whether things that have a beginning must have a cause, therefore, Hume argues that “we can never demonstrate the necessity of a cause to every new existence, or new modification of existence, without shewing at the same time the impossibility there is, that any thing can ever begin to exist without some productive principle.” The latter point, Hume thinks, cannot be proven. It follows that we are justified in conceiving of something that comes into existence (traditionally speaking, an “effect”) without thinking of a “cause.”

Yet, if something lacks a cause, does this mean that before it exists, it causes itself to come into being? Hume responds that this question assumes what must in fact be proven—namely, whether a cause is needed. The point is that to say that something can come into existence without a cause is not to say that it is its own cause. Is Hume then claiming that such a thing would have nothing for its cause? No. Hume accepts that nothing, since it is not something, cannot be a cause. Hume is simply excluding all causes. His point is that we cannot prove that when something comes into existence, it must have a cause. If we could prove this, then we would have to grant that something that lacked a cause would either have to cause itself or be caused by nothing. But since we cannot prove that something that comes into existence must have a cause, we do not need to account for causality.

Hume then turns to another objection, which he labels “frivolous.” Namely, could it be that the very idea of “effect” cannot really be separated from “cause”? In other words, “effect” seems to be a relative term, requiring “cause.” Since he has already separated cause and effect into two events rather than holding them to be coimplicated, Hume does not here take much further trouble over this objection. In his view, the commonplace observation that things have causes has generated the idea that everything requires a cause. In response, he argues that we might as well imagine that because we observe that having a wife requires that a man be a husband, it thereby follows that every man is a husband. The point is that when we see beings that have causes, we cannot logically deduce that every being has a cause.

Hume elaborates on his position in section 11 of his later work An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. He frames his discussion as a report of some remarks made by a “friend” of his “who loves skeptical paradoxes,” intermixed with some of his own comments. This literary frame is enhanced by his opening salute to the grandeur of philosophy when not weighed down by religious dogmatism and blasphemy laws. His friend replies that religious dogmatism in fact emerges from philosophy and distorts it. When prompted, his friend goes on to defend the example of Epicurus, who taught against the existence of God and divine providence. Although such teaching may seem deleterious for society, in fact the claim to know philosophically that God exists is evidence not of wisdom but of rash presumption. Of course, many philosophers “paint, in the most magnificent colours, the order, beauty, and wise arrangement of the universe; and then ask, if such glorious display of intelligence could proceed from the fortuitous concourse of atoms, or if chance could produce what the greatest genius can never sufficiently admire.” Hume’s “friend” states that he does not intend to refute this argument in favor of God’s existence. He merely wishes to show that it is not demonstrative.

The problem with the argument from the order of the cosmos, says Hume’s “friend,” is that it relies on rational deduction from effect to cause. The argument from the order of the cosmos claims that the intelligent order that we see in nonintelligent things reveals the ordering presence of an intelligent cause. Hume’s “friend” responds that when we infer a cause from an effect—assuming such an inference can be justified—we must infer a cause that is proportionate to the effect, a cause that is sufficient (but no more than this) to produce the effect. To infer a greater cause than is necessary to produce the evident effect would be mere conjecture rather than solid reasoning. This is so because the cause can be known only through the effect, and we must not go further than the effect itself leads us. In addition, once we have inferred the productive cause, we cannot then turn back and claim that this cause must have produced effects other than the ones we can perceive.

What, then, is a cause proportionate to the finite effect that is the cosmos? Put another way, can we infer an infinite cause on the basis of our perception of a finite effect? Given the principle that Hume has stated above, the answer is obviously no. If we claim then to have discovered the existence of God (or gods) on the basis of the order of the cosmos, then this divine cause must be exactly proportionate to the effect and therefore must not only be finite but also no more intelligent, powerful, or good than required to produce the effect. Indeed, since the cause and effect must be exactly proportionate, we can say that the effect will reveal the exact amount of intelligence, power, and goodness that the cause has.

The claims of philosophers who imagine that they have demonstrated the existence of an infinite (and infinitely intelligent, powerful, and good) God by reasoning from the finite being and order of the cosmos are therefore wildly exaggerated. For reasons of their own, they have posited a cause infinitely greater than needed in order to achieve the effect. The cosmos, after all, does not show us infinite intelligence and goodness. Rather the cosmos is full of disorder, foolishness, and sheer absence of intelligence—even though the cosmos exhibits order and intelligence too. The point is not that such a great, wonderful God surely does not exist. On the contrary, the sole point is that human reasoning from finite effects can lead only to a proportionate and finite cause. The cause cannot be inflated beyond the bounds of what we see in the effects. We owe such inflation of the divine cause to the inventions of rash philosophers. Even granted that the orderly cosmos must have a cause, we have no reason to ascribe to the divine principle “any perfection or any attribute, but what can be found in the present world.”

Where then does religion stand? Insofar as it posits anything different from what we see around us, it is at best a realm of sheer conjecture. Perhaps the conjectures are true. But as Hume’s “friend” says, “Why take these attributes for granted, or why ascribe to the cause any qualities but what actually appear in the effect? Why torture your brain to justify the course of nature on suppositions, which, for aught you know, may be entirely imaginary, and of which there are to be found no traces in the course of nature?” The hypothesis of God is a hypothesis invented by human minds rather than a result of true philosophical reasoning. Thus there can be no blasphemy on the part of philosophers who, while denying God’s existence or providence, certainly do not deny the existence of the cosmos or human suffering or other such manifest topics to which philosophers may more reasonably devote themselves. To focus attention on the hypothesis of God is to seek solace in an invented heavenly future rather than dealing with the problems of the real world.

Hume’s “friend” goes on to answer an objection that Hume puts to him. It may seem that just as we can infer a craftsman from an imperfect and unfinished building, so too we can infer a divine Creator from an imperfect and unfinished cosmos. Surely such a Creator would possess an intelligence superior to what we can find in the imperfect cosmos that the Creator is in the process of perfecting. Hume’s “friend” answers that with regard to human art, we can reason from effect to cause and back again, since we know what to expect from human beings. Even assuming that God exists, however, we know only his works. We cannot infer anything about God except through his works. He explains, “As the universe shews wisdom and goodness, we infer wisdom and goodness. As it shews a particular degree of these perfections, we infer a particular degree of them, precisely adapted to the effect which we examine.” Human reasoning can go no further than this: given that God does not show himself directly, we can speak of “God” (or of a divine cause) only in exact proportion to the finite, imperfect things that comprise the cosmos. Everything else is mere projection. We have no reason for supposing that God is like us or is more perfect than we are, and indeed we must always keep in mind that God, if he exists, is “remote and incomprehensible” to us and “bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun to a waxen taper.”

In this way Hume, like Montaigne, turns Christian arguments for God’s incomprehensibility against Christian philosophy. The result is skepticism about God on the grounds that no philosophy (or religion) can “carry us beyond the usual course of experience.” In his own voice rather than that of his “friend,” Hume adds a final point that serves as a conclusion: Can a cause really be known when it is known only by its effect? Correspondingly, can we truly know something that is absolutely unique and has no parallel with anything that we have ever observed? Hume explains, “It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other.” The inference of a cause from an effect is tenuous enough already without adding the element that we have never observed this cause in any other way. If the cause is unlike anything we have ever observed, then it is not likely that our inference from the effect will succeed, especially when the effect (the cosmos) is unique and beyond our full apprehension. Hume states that it seems only reasonable that “both the effect and cause must bear a similarity and resemblance to other effects and causes, which we know, and which we have found, in many instances, to be conjoined with each other.” It hardly needs to be said that this is not the case with the cosmos and God.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant, born into a middle-class Pietist Lutheran family in Königsberg, Germany, was a student, then a lecturer, and finally a chaired professor at the University of Königsberg. Between his student years and his return to the university as a lecturer, he served for eight years as a household tutor for various East Prussian gentry. As a young scholar, he published three scientific treatises and then turned his attention to metaphysics, logic, anthropology, and ethics. Most of his major works appeared after his fifty-seventh birthday, including the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Critique of Judgment, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forth as a Science, and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

In the preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant remarks that reading “David Hume was the very thing which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction.” Although Kant seeks to overcome Hume’s general skepticism in certain respects, he agrees with Hume’s rejection of the validity of the demonstrations of God’s existence. After sketching Kant’s epistemology with the help of his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, I will survey Kant’s arguments against the demonstrations of God’s existence in his Critique of Pure Reason. I will also examine the reasoning behind his practical postulate that God exists, as found in his Critique of Practical Reason.

In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant begins with Hume’s question of how, when we have apprehended one concept (such as “effect”), we can “go beyond it and connect it with another which is not contained in it, in such a manner as if the latter necessarily belonged to the former.” For Hume, the connection of distinct ideas is rooted ultimately in experience or custom. Must we then be skeptics in the line of Hume? Kant thinks that before answering yes, it is worth striving to see if we can find some “pure synthetic cognitions a priori.” (A “synthetic” proposition contains its predicate concept in its subject concept, by contrast to an “analytic” proposition.) He begins with mathematics, and the question that first arises is how to conceive of the relation between an object and our mental representation of the object. Can there be a “pure intuition” that provides us with a “synthetic judgment” that is “certain and apodeictic,” prior to any “contingent empirical intuition” of the object?

Kant proposes that the answer can be found in considering our intuition of our own subjectivity (the conditions or “form of sensibility”), which “precedes all the actual impressions through which I am affected by objects.” He points out that every impression that an object makes on our minds comes through this “form of sensibility”: “objects of sense can only be intuited according to this form of sensibility I can know a priori.” What then gives our representations (concepts) of sense objects certitude as knowledge? Kant argues that we have knowledge of things when we know them as they are in our “form of sensibility.”

Contained in our “form of sensibility” are certain “pure intuitions,” notably the intuitions of “space” and “time” that ground mathematics. We know space and time not as inhering in things but as a priori intuitions, immediate and nonconceptual. Our mental representation of sense objects, then, is inseparable from this “form of sensibility.” Although we can recognize that there are objects that truly exist outside us, therefore, “we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i.e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses.” Our certain knowledge is of the appearances of things, which we know through our “form of sensibility.” Kant terms his position “critical idealism.”

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant approaches the same topic from a somewhat different angle. He observes, “Time and space are . . . two sources of cognition, from which different synthetic cognitions can be drawn a priori.” As “the pure forms of all sensible intuition,” our a priori intuitions of time and space ensure the certitude of our knowledge, freeing us from the spectre of skepticism. How so? Kant explains that “these a priori sources of cognition determine their own boundaries by that very fact (that they are merely conditions of sensibility), namely that they apply to objects only so far as they are considered as appearances, but do not present things in themselves.” Thus, since we know things as they appear to us rather than things in themselves, our knowledge has certitude.

Kant goes on to distinguish between the “phenomenal” (things as they appear to our mind) and the “noumenal” (things in themselves). Kant insists that we only know the “noumenal” phenomenally. Although Kant denies that there is any doubt that things in themselves exist, it nonetheless remains a problem for him. For Hume, we assume that effects have causes because this is what our experience accustoms us to infer. For Kant, cause is an a priori concept among other a priori concepts (or forms of thought), such as substance, existence, possibility, and necessity; these pure concepts are coterminous with the a priori intuitions of time and space. By means of these pure concepts, the mind synthetically organizes the sense perceptions that are perceived in space and time. Kant emphasizes that “no objects at all can be represented through pure concepts of the understanding without any conditions of sensibility.” According to Kant, philosophers who try to transcend the limits of these principles of understanding inevitably fall into absurd logical antinomies in which the pro and contra are equally valid.

Kant affirms that we can have an idea of “the sum total of all possibility” and an idea of “an All of reality,” and in this light he explores our conceptual representations of beings and nonbeing. Just as we can have the concept of the All, so we can have the concept of a determinate thing in itself and the concept of a most real being. He terms the latter concept a “transcendental ideal,” and he also calls it “the original being,” “the highest being,” and the “being of all beings.” This transcendental ideal, however, is not something that we posit as really existing; it is simply a concept. It is the basis for our concepts of all other possible things, since “all manifoldness of things is only so many different ways of limiting the concept of the highest reality.” When we “hypostatize” or personalize this transcendental ideal, it becomes the concept of “God”; yet “this use of the transcendental idea would already be overstepping the boundaries of its vocation and its permissibility.” Reason has no grounds for claiming that God exists.

Why then do so many people conclude that nothing would exist unless God existed? Kant replies that in order to think about “objects of sense,” we must posit or presuppose the sum total of all empirical objects. We therefore tend to hypostatize this sum total: “we think up an individual thing containing in itself all empirical reality,” which then serves as the unconditioned, necessary principle for the possibility of all else. We make this leap because of “the inner insufficiency of the contingent,” the sense that changing things, which come into existence and go out of existence, “must have a cause” and that ultimately there must be a supreme cause of all things, a cause that is coterminous with the most perfect, highest being.

This leap is made by common people in a prephilosophical way. What happens, then, when philosophy takes up the matter? Kant finds that there are three ways of trying to demonstrate philosophically that God exists. The “physico-theological” proof consists in moving from sense experience (of order and purposiveness, for example) to a transcendent highest cause. The “cosmological” proof rises from the contingency of some being in the world to a necessary transcendent being. Last, the “ontological” proof infers “the existence of a highest cause entirely a priori from mere concepts.” In Kant’s view, none of the three proofs works.

The ontological proof is exemplified for Kant not by Anselm’s argument from “that than which nothing greater can be thought” but by the reasoning of Descartes (and Leibniz). Kant gladly admits that “the inference from a given existence in general to some absolutely necessary being seems to be both urgent and correct.” But it is questionable whether one can truly frame a concept of an absolutely necessary being. To frame such a concept, one would have to explain why one considers nonbeing to be utterly impossible for something. If nonbeing were in fact impossible for the thing, then the thing would stand “entirely outside the sphere of our understanding.” Furthermore, even assuming that one could frame a concept of an absolutely necessary being, this would hardly mean that such a being existed. Kant observes that it is possible to make a necessary (a priori) judgment that a triangle has three angles, but it is not possible to make a necessary judgment that a triangle exists. The same point holds for whether an absolutely necessary being exists. One would have to claim that one has identified a being that simply cannot not exist. But how could one show this? As Kant says, “I cannot form the least concept of a thing that, if all its predicates were cancelled, would leave behind a contradiction.” It may be true that there is an absolutely necessary being, but the point is that we literally cannot conceive of a being that simply cannot not be.

Proponents of the ontological proof, however, argue that there is indeed one such case, namely, “the concept of a most real being.” Kant therefore delves into what the concept of existence adds to the concept of a thing. He finds that the concept of an existing thing, or even of the most supremely existing thing, does not entail any actual existence of the thing. As he puts it, “Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing.” When we say “God is,” this does not add the predicate of actual existence to God but instead posits a merely possible concept. The concept of God does not change at all when we posit that God “is.”

Kant adds that no matter how complete our concept of the highest being is, we run into the difficulty that our concept of the highest being is not cognizable a posteriori. This is so because the highest being, as we conceive it, is not an object of sense. It follows that we make mistakes about our concept of the highest being that we would not make about sensible beings. Kant states, “If the issue were an object of sense, then I could not confuse the existence of the thing with the mere concept of the thing.” In our concept of an object of sense, “the object would be thought only as in agreement with the universal conditions of a possible empirical cognition in general, but through its existence it would be thought as contained in the context of the entirety of experience.” Our concept of a sensible object contains the possibility of perceiving the object. By contrast, since our concept of the highest being denies that the highest being can be an object of sense, our concept of the highest being contains no possibility of perceiving this object. Therefore we have to ask ourselves what is it that we conceive when we conceive of the highest being—namely, pure existence. Kant determines that if we attempt “to think existence through the pure category alone . . . we cannot assign any mark distinguishing it from mere possibility.” An object of pure thought (as opposed to an object of sense) is cognized entirely a priori, without any reference to sense perception.

This means that although we can have a concept of God (or the highest being), we cannot connect this concept in any way with actual existence. Kant explains that “our consciousness of all existence (whether immediately through perception or through inferences connecting something with perception) belongs entirely and without exception to the unity of experience, and though an existence outside this field cannot be declared impossible, it is a presupposition that we cannot justify through anything.” The a priori concept of God cannot help us determine whether there actually is a God.

The next section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason addresses the cosmological proof. He argues that the cosmological proof always follows the same basic pattern: “If something exists, then an absolutely necessary being also has to exist. Now I myself, at least, exist; therefore, an absolutely necessary being exists.” This proof, Kant suggests, merely pretends to differentiate itself from the ontological proof. It is in fact no more rooted in empirical experience than is the ontological proof. He states that “here one presupposes that the concept of a being of the highest reality completely suffices for the concept of an absolute necessity in existence, i.e., that from the former the latter may be inferred—a proposition the ontological proof asserted, which one thus assumes in the cosmological proof and takes as one’s ground.” Since Kant has already shown the falsity of the ontological proof, it is clear that the cosmological proof is not going to fare any better. It is only in pure concepts, not in any experience of ours, that a necessary being can be found. One’s own existence thus has nothing to do with the proof, but instead the proof again rests on the claim that the concept of the most real being entails the absolute necessity of the existence of the most real being.

Moreover, the cosmological proof makes other important errors. First, it claims to move from a contingent thing to a transcendent cause. For Kant, however, “the principle of causality has no significance at all and no mark of its use except in the world of sense; here, however, it is supposed to serve precisely to get beyond the world of sense.” Second, the cosmological proof relies on the denial of the possibility of an infinite regress in a chain of finite causes. This appeal to the impossibility of an infinite regress in finite causes cannot be justified either with respect to the realm of experience or with respect “to somewhere beyond it (into which the causal chain cannot be extended at all).” The main point is that we cannot try to explain contingency by appeal to a transcendent causality because we cannot move conceptually beyond the realm of our experience. Third, when confronted with a series of conditioned causes, the solution cannot lie in doing away with every condition (and moving to a transcendent, unfathomable cause) because in this case we would also be doing away with the concept of necessity and entering into sheer incomprehensibility rather than a conceptual completion. Fourth, the notion that all reality is united is a logical possibility, but it is not a “transcendental possibility” until the principle of synthesis is located, and this principle can only be found in sensible experience. This point has been shown by the failure of the ontological proof, which can demonstrate the conceptual requirements of the highest reality but cannot show that such a reality exists. Here Kant comments movingly on the inscrutability of the “unconditioned necessity, which we need so indispensably as the ultimate sustainer of all things.” The concept of God, as an a priori ideal of pure reason, is not inscrutable, but an actual highest being certainly is.

Reflecting further on the ontological and the cosmological proofs, Kant asks what produces “the dialectical but natural illusion that connects the concepts of necessity and highest reality and that realizes and hypostatizes that which can be only an idea.” It seems plausible that if something exists, then there must be a necessary being that cannot not be. But one can always conceive of any determinate being as not being. Nothing empirically experienced can be conceived as absolutely necessary; within the world we cannot reach an absolutely necessary being that would serve as the supreme ground of all things. Kant considers and rejects the view held by some ancient philosophers that matter itself is such a necessary principle. He grants that we cannot avoid regarding “all combination in the world as if it arose from an all-sufficient necessary cause,” but this is simply “a regulative principle of reason” rather than “an assertion of an existence that is necessary in itself.” The danger comes when we embrace too readily our natural tendency to hypostatize the concept of a necessary cause. We need the idea of a necessary cause in order to give unity to our concept of nature, but we mistakenly turn this “formal condition of thought” into a concrete, constitutive principle.

Kant’s theory of cognition makes necessary the conclusions that he reaches regarding what he calls the “cosmological” proof. If our reasoning is strictly limited by the “conditions of sensibility,” the categories of mind beyond which one cannot go, it follows that inference from effect to cause “has significance only in the world of sense, but . . . outside it does not even have a sense.” The same point holds for arguments against an infinite regress of finite causes: Kant’s epistemological starting point ensures that one simply cannot think the unthinkability of such an infinite regress. One at best can arrive at sheer incomprehensibility, understood as absolute opaqueness rather than surplus of truth. Kant attacks these elements of the traditional “cosmological” proofs (from contingency and causality), but at the same time he argues that these metaphysical moves are simply a veneer covering over the fact that those who appeal to contingency are merely reprising the “ontological” proof in different outer garments. For Kant, it cannot be taken seriously that the cosmological proofs really start from concrete experience in the world, not least because there is an impassible (cognitive) gulf between finite experience and the infinite cause that the proofs are seeking to demonstrate. So it must be, he thinks, that the cosmological proofs make a show of beginning a posteriori but in fact do not actually do so.

Does what Kant calls the “physico-theological” proof fare any better? He begins by making clear that this proof cannot be other than a failure, not least because “if one searches for the unconditioned among conditioned things, then one will seek forever and always in vain, since no law of any empirical synthesis will ever give an example of such a thing, or even the least guidance in looking for it.” If one tries to think of a “highest being,” it will either be yet another conditioned member of the chain, or else it will be a pure concept that has no relation to the chain. This is so because, as we have seen, “all laws of transition from effects to causes, indeed, all synthesis and extension of our cognition in general, are directed to nothing other than possible experience, and hence merely to objects of the world of sense, and they can have a significance only in regard to them.”

That said, Kant is effusive in his praise of the things that led past thinkers to develop physico-theological proofs. He rejoices in the world as “an immeasurable showplace of manifoldness, order, purposiveness, and beauty.” Before such vast grandeur, our words, measurements, and judgments are reduced to awed silence and wonder. Indeed, he describes the proof in a manner that calls to mind the proofs offered by patristic and medieval thinkers: “Everywhere we see a chain of effects and causes, of ends and means, regularity in coming to be and perishing, and because nothing has entered by itself into the state in which it finds itself, this state always refers further to another thing as its cause,” with the result that “the entire whole would have to sink into the abyss of nothingness if one did not assume something subsisting for itself originally and independently outside this infinite contingency, which supports it and at the same time, as the cause of its existence, secures its continuation.” He praises this proof as deserving “to be named with respect. It is the oldest, clearest and the most appropriate to common human reason.” Kant disavows any intention to undermine this proof, because it is natural to the human mind and “subtle and abstract speculation” will not be able to displace it.

Even so, Kant thinks that this proof requires positing a highest being that possesses “a degree of perfection exceeding everything else that is possible,” and doing so through a finite concept. Thus the physico-theological proof inevitably gives way to the futile a priori ontological proof. The signs of wise, purposive, artful order in the universe—composed as it is of nonrational things—certainly indicate that there is a sublime cause. Proceeding with the analogy of a craftsman and his craft, however, has profound limits. The physico-theological proof can lead us to a sublime cause, perhaps, but not to a transcendent cause of the kind that God must be. Kant holds that “the proof could at most establish a highest architect of the world, who would always be limited by the suitability of the material on which he works, but not a creator of the world, to whose idea everything is subject.” To attempt to say more is to speak about contingency and causality along the lines proposed by the cosmological proof, and Kant has already shown that the cosmological proof only pretends to start from experience rather than from an a priori idea. Thus we are back once more to the ontological proof—and to its failure.

Kant agrees with Hume, then, that the best a physico-theological proof can do is to identify a cause proportionate to the finite effect. The physico-theological proof gives “relative representations, through which the observer (of the world) compares the magnitude of the object with himself and his power to grasp it.” Since this relation escapes our power of observation, given that we cannot quantify it in any determinate fashion, the physico-theological proof provides no real knowledge of God, no “determinate concept of the supreme cause of the world.” When the empirical path ends in indeterminate concepts about the highest being, the physico-theological proof restarts itself on the basis of the world’s contingency. But we have already seen that the “transcendental concepts” used to get from contingency to a determinate concept of “an all-encompassing reality” do not work. In short, when “physico-theologians” find that their path cannot achieve a transcendent concept of God, they undertake a “mighty leap” into the a priori “realm of mere possibilities, where on the wings of ideas they hope to approach that which has eluded all their empirical inquiries.” They claim to find a determinate concept of God through an empirical path when in fact they are exercising pure reason, albeit in an inappropriate way. They have merely turned back to the ontological proof, which in Kant’s view is the only serious proof, albeit an impossible one.

Although Kant does not think that God’s existence can be demonstrated, he does consider God’s existence to be a postulate of pure practical reason. In his Critique of Practical Reason, he holds that God’s existence is a speculative or theoretical proposition “attached inseparably to an a priori unconditionally valid practical law.” The postulates of practical reason are the concepts necessary for practical reason not to be frustrated. Kant’s first postulate of practical reason is the immortality of the soul, on the grounds that the will seeks perfect holiness but cannot achieve it in this life. The will’s object is “endless progress” toward holiness, but such progress toward full conformity with justice would be impossible and unthinkable if human existence ends at death. Only given the immortality of the soul could the will rationally pursue the highest good (holiness or morality); otherwise it would be a mere mirage, impossible to attain.

Kant then observes that the highest good is not simply holiness but also happiness, the state in which all things are in accord with the person’s just will. The practical reason seeks this highest good, but it can only do so rationally if such a happiness is possible. How can the whole of the universe be in accord with a perfectly holy will? The only way is through the existence of an intelligent and good “supreme cause of nature,” who ensures the possibility of the highest good, the world’s configuration to perfect justice. Practical reason cannot go forward without postulating “the possibility of the highest derived good (the best world).” It follows that from the perspective of practical reason, the existence of God is necessary. God’s existence is necessary not as the ground of law, but in order for practical reason truly to be what it is, namely, a rational “striving to produce and promote the highest good in the world.” Kant finds that only the Christian doctrine of the kingdom of God, “in which nature and morals come into a harmony,” provides a concept of the highest good that “satisfies the strictest demand of practical reason.”

But does a postulate of pure practical reason add anything to our knowledge? When we postulate God’s existence in this way, do we then know that God exists? Kant replies that for pure speculative or theoretical reason, the concept of God remains unthinkable. The concept of God is thinkable only as the practical reason’s necessary object. Speculative reason can purify and refine this concept, but only in order to ensure that the concept functions better for practical reason. Kant comments that “for speculative purposes reason has not in the least gained by this.” But how can the wall between practical and speculative reason be so sharp, since it would seem that if we cannot think something by speculative reason, we really have no knowledge of it whatsoever?

In reply, Kant explains that “there is indeed a cognition of God but only with practical reference”; the speculative reason knows only “what is required for the possibility of thinking of a moral law.” A suprasensible object simply cannot be known by speculative reason, since such an object utterly exceeds the capacities of speculative reason. For Kant, to argue for God’s existence “in order to explain the arrangements of nature or their changes” is to go beyond what philosophy can achieve, since thereby “one is forced to assume something of which in itself one otherwise has no concept, in order to be able to frame a concept of the possibility of what one sees before one’s eyes.” Even so, we can know “the concept of the object of a morally determined will (that of the highest good),” and we can know that such an object can be realized only if God exists. In this way, we can know through practical reason, as a postulate without which practical reason could not proceed, that God exists. Kant concludes that “the moral law, by means of the concept of the highest good as the object of a pure practical reason, determines the concept of the original being as the supreme being, something that . . . the whole speculative course of reason could not effect.”

Yet, the cognitive value of such a “postulate” may still seem suspect. Kant notes that in speculative reasoning, a logical need produces nothing more than a hypothesis. This is so because the existence and movement of things do not depend on whether or not our concepts are logically well-grounded. When we see “order and purposiveness in nature,” we may hypothesize the existence of a first cause, but this cannot be more than a hypothesis, because “an inference from an effect to a determined cause, especially to a cause so precise and so completely determined as we have to think in God, is always uncertain and doubtful.” Is a practical postulate, too, a mere hypothesis? The answer is no. Kant states that “a need of pure practical reason is based on a duty, that of making something (the highest good) the object of my will so as to promote it with all my powers; and thus I must suppose its possibility and so too the conditions for this, namely, God, freedom, and immortality.” But why does “duty” require of us anything more than a hypothesis? By “duty,” Kant means the “moral law,” which reveals itself in us to be “apodictically certain.” We discover in ourselves an inner requirement to follow duty or the moral law. We find that we must “promote the practically possible highest good.” But we could not do this unless the highest good were indeed possible. Kant remarks that “it would be practically impossible to strive for the object of a concept that would be, at bottom, empty and without an object.”

Unlike a mere hypothesis, therefore, the postulate arises from obedience to “an inflexible command of reason that has its ground objectively in the character of things as they must be appraised universally by pure reason.” We experience the moral law as an inescapable command. We know that we must obey it. At the same time we know that perfectly obeying the moral law (holiness) and possessing a proportionate happiness are only possible if God exists. Otherwise our quest for holiness and happiness—which together compose the highest good—would be impossible, and following the moral law would not be rational. Thus the practical postulate of God’s existence is not based on a mere wish that God should exist. Rather, it is rooted in the very heart of practical reasoning, and it is rightly termed a “pure practical rational belief.” For practical reasoning, “the promotion of the highest good, and therefore the supposition of its possibility, is objectively necessary.” It follows that God must exist, although this remains indemonstrable from the perspective of speculative reason.

Conclusion

By not treating the arguments for God’s existence in detail, Montaigne suggests that he thinks that his belittling of our power to know anything, let alone to know God, suffices to make his case. He is right to point out that the basic insight that underlies the proofs of God’s existence led the Stoics to posit a Creator “God” who is not transcendent but instead inheres as something like the soul of the cosmos. But this does not mean that a deeper reflection on finite being would not be able to discover that such a world-soul would also be finite in being, and therefore that a world-soul could not account for the existence of finite being per se. For Montaigne, as we have seen, to posit an infinite first cause goes beyond the limits of our minds, which cannot even connect effect to cause in many earthly matters. But even granted the limits of our minds, it remains the case that we are simply holding that the existence of finite, ordered things is unintelligible unless there exists an incomprehensible, infinite first cause. Montaigne prefers to rest in the claim that almost nothing (let alone the existence of God) is truly intelligible, but his lengthy discourse, as a communicative act, relies upon the bedrock of intelligibility that he denies.

Hume’s position is likewise vulnerable to his own extreme skepticism. Responding to critique of God’s existence set forth in Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Keith Ward puts this problem well:

Insofar as the attack depends upon Hume’s metaphysics and theory of knowledge, it will lack force, as it would undermine modern science as much as it undermines belief in God. Insofar as the attack depends upon Hume’s actual common-sense beliefs, it will justify belief in God as much as it justifies any commonly held belief. Insofar as the attack is upon rational speculation about the nature of reality, it will be self-defeating, since Hume himself speculates about the nature of reality when he publishes what he calls his “proudest invention,” the theory that all knowledge must rest solely upon an association of impressions and ideas.

Hume’s notion that we can know only discrete facts but not universal necessities problematizes not only knowledge of God but also knowledge of basic causes and dependencies that we experience all the time. Since Hume eschews inquiry into being, he is only willing to consider how the idea of cause relates to the idea of effect. He is therefore unable to see how the two are coimplicated in one event. Hume also holds that, even if we do allow ourselves to reason from effect to cause, a finite effect can be attributed only to a finite cause. But once one appreciates finite being, one recognizes that no matter how great the finite being—or no matter how many finite beings compose the vast finite being of the universe (or of many universes)—no finite being can account for its existence solely by reference to another finite being. In Hume’s view, of course, we cannot posit anything as a cause that we have not already observed concretely in the world. But Hume’s stipulations leave no room for the unique change that must be involved in the gift of being. Since it is not a finite gradation, the “change” from nothing to something must involve infinite causal power. Act is not self-limiting, and so there is no reason that we cannot conceive analogically of unlimited Act (infinite being) even though our concepts are finite.

The central point is that as with Montaigne, Hume’s critique of the demonstrations of God’s existence obtains its force from the denial that we can truly know the ordinary things around us as substances of various kinds, having real forms of causal interdependency.

Like Hume and Montaigne, Kant is skeptical about our capacity to know natures and causes, but he does think that we are able to construct rational ideas about reality and to act practically with regard to reality in rational ways. For Kant, therefore, God plays a role in theoretical and practical reasoning, but as an idea rather than as a reality that can be known. As we observed, Kant holds that being is not a real predicate but rather is a mere concept. The result of Kant’s view is manifest in his misleading description of the “cosmological proof”: “If something exists, then an absolutely necessary being also has to exist. Now I myself, at least, exist; therefore, an absolutely necessary being exists.” In fact, the classical demonstration of God’s existence from contingency does not begin by positing “if something exists,” let alone (in Cartesian fashion) by grounding the demonstration on the fact that “I myself, at least, exist.” Rather, the classical demonstration begins from the motion/change of things in the world, and affirms a real (rather than solely conceptual) difference between being and nonbeing, act and potency. Like his critique of the “cosmological” proof, Kant’s critique of the “physico-theological” proof also relies upon the view that knowledge never arrives at actual beings but is merely the interplay of concepts derived through the conditions of sensibility.

What about Calvin, Suárez, Descartes, and Pascal? Calvin’s argument that we know intuitively that God exists, so that we do not need complicated metaphysical demonstrations, manages to avoid the difficulties introduced by the late-medieval Aristotelianism that we saw in Ockham. Yet, while human intuitions can be accurate and correct, they can also be erroneous and misleading. If humans have strong intuitions that God must exist, such intuitions deserve to be followed up by rational arguments—whose demonstrative power Calvin certainly affirms.

For his part, Descartes seeks to get around the various late-medieval schools of thought by grounding the demonstrations of God’s existence in the recognition of his own existence and in the idea that he could never have arrived at the notion of absolute perfections had God not given this notion to him, since he himself does not possess absolute perfections. Descartes also reasons that our conception of God requires that God exist, since otherwise we literally could not conceive of a supremely perfect being (and in fact we can conceive of such a being). This approach, which roots the demonstration of God’s existence in our mind’s ideas, unfortunately has the drawbacks of Anselm’s approach without possessing its Augustinian strengths. Descartes’s view of his own ideas is also problematically ahistorical: his notions of divine infinity and perfection are derived in part from his immersion in the previous Christian tradition rather than intuitively coming directly from God.

For his part, Pascal gets around the late scholastics, Montaigne, and Descartes by largely (though not entirely) accepting that the demonstrations are not probative, while at the same time arguing that such demonstrations fail to reach the heart of the matter anyway. Pascal turns Montaigne’s skepticism on its head: the perfect skeptic would have to conclude, as the wager shows, that belief in God is the only rational and reasonable choice. He assumes, however, that the “God” who is the alternative to skepticism is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ.

Does the one broadly Aristotelian position that I treated in this chapter, that of Suárez, offer a more promising path? Not least because of his rejection of the analogy of being, he is unable to appreciate Aristotle’s crucial argument from act/potency and motion (or change). Nonetheless, Suárez astutely puts forward the Aristotelian argument that shows that no matter how many contingent beings one posits in an essentially ordered chain of causes, such beings will not be able to account for their own existence without positing a transcendent first cause who is Pure Act. The fact that we cannot know what Pure Act is does not (pace Montaigne) bear on whether we can know that Pure Act is. Suárez imagines that there could perhaps be many universes each governed by a distinct Pure Act, failing to see that such universes are intrinsically (ontologically) linked together simply by their finitude in being. But Suárez’s deduction that Pure Act, in order to be this singular Pure Act, must be absolutely and essentially singular strikes me as sound, even if not rising to the level attained by John of Damascus and Aquinas.

It should be clear that the movement away from the broadly Aristotelian and Neoplatonic demonstrations of God’s existence during the Reformation and Enlightenment periods did not seriously engage the patristic and medieval arguments for God’s existence. Calvin, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Hume, and Kant generally show very little knowledge of the actual content of these earlier arguments. The Greek and Latin traditions, represented especially by John of Damascus and Aquinas, appear to be rejected largely because they are unknown or known in distorted forms. Positively speaking, however, this forgetfulness provided space for the emergence of some ingenious arguments in favor of God’s existence, most notably in Pascal’s brilliant notion of the wager, and also perhaps in Kant’s practical postulate, defective though it is in its understanding of God.

. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2003), 698.

. Ibid.

. See Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For Calvin on natural knowledge of God’s existence, see especially Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 8: “Natural Theology and the Sensus Divinitas” (esp. 228, 234). See also T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969); John Beversluis, “Reforming the ‘Reformed’ Objection to Natural Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (1995): 189–206. For seventeenth-century Reformed thinkers, see Jeffrey K. Jue, “Theologia Naturalis: A Reformed Tradition,” in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics, ed. K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007), 168–89.

. John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.1, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 38. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth debate the value of such texts from Calvin in their exchange from 1934, published as Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002). Barth considers that had Calvin known Aquinas’s work, Calvin would have had to take a much different approach. For Barth, Calvin’s approach can be justified to the degree that Calvin relies on biblical revelation rather than on any “independent” basis for knowledge of God. Helm observes, “Perhaps there is an element of wishful thinking in Barth’s attitude to Calvin, more a question of what Calvin ought to have believed rather than what he did believe” (Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas, 210). See also Brunner’s Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge, trans. Olive Wyon (Wake Forest, NC: Chanticleer, 1946). Brunner, too, is keen to subordinate reason to revelation. For a response to Barth and Brunner, see G. C. Berkouwer, General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955). Berkouwer sides with “the impossibility of a natural theology,” while granting that a “non-depraved reason” (were such available to fallen humans) could attain “preliminary but true knowledge of God” and while insisting on “the revelational character of God’s working in created reality” (ibid., 73–74, 314). Believers, healed and illumined by faith, can perceive “God’s revelation in his works,” though here “we are not dealing with an independent source of revelation in addition to special revelation, but we are concerned with seeing, recognizing and confessing God in the works of his hands” (ibid., 323).

. Calvin, Institutes 1.1, pp. 38–39.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.3, p. 44.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.4, p. 49. He adds,

Nay, we have still stronger evidence of the proposition for which I now contend—viz. that a sense of Deity is naturally engraven on the human heart, in the fact, that the very reprobate are forced to acknowledge it. When at their ease, they can jest about God, and talk pertly and loquaciously in disparagement of his power; but should despair, from any cause, overtake them, it will stimulate them to seek him, and dictate ejaculatory prayers, proving that they were not entirely ignorant of God, but had perversely suppressed feelings which ought to have been earlier manifested. (ibid.)

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 51.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 51.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 51.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 52.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 53.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 56.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 57.

. Calvin, Institutes 1.5, p. 61.

. John Calvin, Calvin’s Bible Commentaries: Romans, trans. John King (London: Forgotten Books, 2007 [1847]), 47. Calvin’s Latin biblical text for Romans 1:19–20 reads, “Quia quod cognoscitur de Deo manifestum est in ipsis: Deus enim illis manifestavit. Si quidem invisibilia ipsius, ex creatione mundi operibus intellecta, conspiciuntur, aeterna quoque ejus potentia, et divinitas; ut sint inexcusabiles.”

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. Calvin, Romans, 48. Calvin’s reasoning seems broadly similar to Thomas Aquinas’s observation, in response to the claim that God’s existence is self-evident, that “to know that God exists in a general and confused way is implanted in us by nature. . . . This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching” (Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.2.1, ad 1).

. Calvin, Romans, 48.

. See Stuart Hampshire, introduction to Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), xv–xxvi; Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (London: Random House, 2010); Donald M. Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (London: H. Hamilton, 1965). See also Pierre Manent’s Montaigne: La vie sans loi (Paris: Flammarion, 2014).

. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, trans. E. J. Trechmann (New York: Random House, 1946), 369.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 370.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 370.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 371.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 374.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 376.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 379.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 424–25.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 448.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 451.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 453.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 463–64.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 464.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 465.

. See Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 481.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 523.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 456; cf. 448.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 457.

. Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, 426. Montaigne’s admiration for Lucretius, along with Montaigne’s own skepticism, make him the main hero of the concluding chapter of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), which celebrates modernity’s atheistic materialism.

. See Norman J. Wells, introduction to Francis Suárez, On the Essence of Finite Being as Such, On the Existence of That Essence and Their Distinction [Disputation 31 of his Metaphysical Disputations], trans. Norman J. Wells (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1983), 3–43; José Pereira, Suárez: Between Scholasticism and Modernity (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007); Joseph H. Fichter, Man of Spain: Francis Suárez (New York: Macmillan, 1940). John P. Doyle describes the Disputationes metaphysicae as “Suárez’s most important and influential enterprise.” See Doyle, introduction to Francisco Suárez, SJ, The Metaphysical Demonstration of the Existence of God: Metaphysical Disputations 28–29, trans. and ed. John P. Doyle (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004), ix–xxiv, at xi. See also Jorge Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics: The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Roger Ariew, “Descartes and Leibniz as Readers of Suárez: Theory of Distinctions and Principle of Individuation,” in The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez, ed. Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 38–53.

. For discussion, see especially Bernie Cantens, “Suárez’s Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God,” in Interpreting Suárez: Critical Essays, ed. Daniel Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 89–114. See also William L. Craig, The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (London: Macmillan, 1980).

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 56.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 58.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 64.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 65.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 66.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 66.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 67.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 67.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 67–68.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 69.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 69.

. Suárez specifies that “to depend efficiently (efficienter) is to receive from another one’s own being distinct from that which is in the cause” (Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 70). He underscores that this differs from the way in which the whole of a composite depends on its form. A form (in the case of living things, the soul) does not make itself.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 71.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 72.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 75.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 76.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 83.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 85.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 86.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 87.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 89.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 92.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 106.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 112.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 113.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 120. See E. Jennifer Ashworth, “Suárez on the Analogy of Being: Some Historical Background,” Vivarium 33 (1995): 50–75. See also Suárez’s On the Essence of Finite Being as Such.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 122.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 122.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 122.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 123.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 125.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 144.

. Suárez, Metaphysical Demonstration, 144.

. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, “Descartes’ Life and the Development of His Philosophy,” trans. John Cottingham, in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 21–57; John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). See also Roger Ariew, “Descartes and Scholasticism: The Intellectual Background to Descartes’ Thought,” in Cambridge Companion to Descartes, 58–90; as well as Tad M. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin, 1968), 54.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 56.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 59.

. For the split between mind and world in the philosophy of Descartes, see John McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 123.

. On this proof see Thomas M. Lennon, “Theology and the God of the Philosophers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Donald Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 274–98, at 284–85.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 129–30.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 143.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 144.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 144.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 144.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 144.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 145.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 145.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 147.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 147.

. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, 149. For discussion of Descartes’s ontological argument, see Edwin Curley, “Back to the Ontological Argument,” in Early Modern Philosophy: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics, ed. Christina Mercer and Eileen O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46–64; Jean-Luc Marion, “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’s Definition of Divinity,” in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 297–338; Darren Hynes, “Descartes’s Ontological Proof: Cause and Divine Perfection,” Analecta Hermeneutica 2 (2010).

. For the view that Descartes was secretly a skeptic, see Hiram Caton, The Origins of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, The Correspondence, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 331.

. Descartes, Correspondence, 338.

. Descartes, Correspondence, 338.

. Descartes, Correspondence, 339.

. Descartes, Correspondence, 232.

. Descartes, Correspondence, 232.

. Descartes, Correspondence, 232.

. For detailed discussion of Descartes’s proofs of God’s existence, drawing on a wide variety of Descartes’s writings, see Jean-Marie Beyssade, “The Idea of God and the Proofs of His Existence,” in Cambridge Companion to Descartes, 174–99.

. See A. J. Krailsheimer, introduction to Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), ix–xxx; Ben Rogers, “Pascal’s Life and Times,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pascal, ed. Nicholas Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4–19; G. S. Fraser, Pascal: His Life and Works (London: Harvill, 1952).

. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi, ed. Anthony Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), no. 110.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 110.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 168.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 171.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 171.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 171.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 181.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 174.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 175.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 176.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 181.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 181.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 681.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 681.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 681.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 681.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 181.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 181.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 182.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 142.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 142.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 142.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 661.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 132.

. See Pascal, Pensées, no. 164. See Henry Phillips, “Pascal’s Reading and the Inheritance of Montaigne and Descartes,” in Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 20–39; Pierre Force, “Pascal and Philosophical Method,” in Cambridge Companion to Pascal, 216–34, at 231–32; B. Croquette, Pascal et Montaigne. Étude des reminiscences des essays dans l’oeuvre de Pascal (Geneva: Droz, 1974).

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 167.

. See Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 656.

. See Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 570.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 570.

. See Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680. For discussion see Nicholas Rescher, Pascal’s Wager (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 680.

. Pascal, Pensées, (“The Memorial”).

. Pascal, Pensées, (“The Memorial”).

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 690.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 690.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 708.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 681.

. Pascal, Pensées, no. 681.

. For a contemporary Pascalian approach to knowing God, see Rémi Brague, On the God of Christians: And on One or Two Others (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013). For further discussion of Pascal, see Marvin R. O’Connell, Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); David Wetsel, Pascal and Disbelief: Catechesis and Conversion in the Pensées (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994).

. See David Fate Norton, “An Introduction to Hume’s Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton and Jacqueline Taylor, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–39; A. J. Ayer, Hume: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–20; Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). See also David Berman, A History of Atheism in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1988).

. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Hume, Principal Writings on Religion Including Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 134. Hume makes similar comments elsewhere in this work. For example, he states,

It is remarkable, that the principles of religion have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry into theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry. The vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted, being ignorant and uninstructed, never elevate their contemplation to the heavens, or penetrate by their disquisitions into the secret structure of vegetable or animal bodies; so far as to discover a supreme mind or original providence, which bestowed order on every part of nature. (ibid., 159; cf. 160)

In his view, history shows that the superstitious elements of religion always win out and misuse reason in the service of superstition:

A [religious] system becomes more absurd in the end, merely from its being reasonable and philosophical in the beginning. To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bulrush. Will you set up profane reason against sacred mystery? No punishment is great enough for your impiety. (ibid., 166)

. See Hume’s discussion of ancient skepticism and of the origin of religious impulses in Natural History of Religion, 175–77. See also Terence Penelhum, “Hume’s Criticisms of Natural Theology,” in In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment, ed. James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 21–41; J. C. A. Gaskin, “Hume on Religion,” in Cambridge Companion to Hume, 480–513. For Gaskin, “Hume’s critique of religion and religious belief is, as a whole, subtle, profound, and damaging to religion in ways that have no philosophical antecedents and few successors” (ibid., 480; cf. 497). With respect to philosophical antecedents, this is an exaggeration, not least given the work of Montaigne. Likewise, Hume’s arguments are not nearly as “damaging to religion” as Gaskin supposes. See also Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Gaskin notes “Hume’s ‘abundant prudence’ in covering his real opinions with ambiguous irony and even, on occasion, with denials of his own apparent conclusions” (“Hume on Religion,” 480; cf. 487–90). Gaskin points out that Hume was too much a skeptic to be an advocate of atheistic certitude, even though Hume strongly rejects the arguments for God’s existence. For further discussion see Gaskin’s Hume’s Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1988).

. See Martin Bell, “Hume on Causation,” in Cambridge Companion to Hume, 147–76; Helen Beebee, Hume on Causation (London: Routledge, 2006); Abe Roth, “Causation,” in The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise, ed. S. Traiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 95–113.

. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (New York: Penguin, 1969), 121.

. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 124.

. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 124.

. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 126.

. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 127. For the view that Hume is correct here, see Todd M. Furman, “In Praise of Hume: What’s Right about Hume’s Attacks on Natural Theology,” in In Defense of Natural Theology, 42–57. Furman supposes that the question boils down to the claim that “everything that exists must have a cause or explanation” (ibid., 47), but in fact the issue is first one of potency/actuality (and only then of whether Hume’s separation of cause and effect is correct).

. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 129.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, in Hume, Principal Writings on Religion, 11.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, pp. 13–14.

. For discussion of the difficulties that arise here, see Paul A. Macdonald Jr., Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind’s Relationship to God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 7–13.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 16.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, pp. 16–17.

. See Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 18. See Gaskin’s observation that “Hume is . . . at pains to point out in the Dialogues and first Enquiry that we may torture our brains . . . into reconciling the suffering of living things with the presupposition that God is perfectly benevolent, but what we cannot do is justify that presupposition by inference from the given suffering” (“Hume on Religion,” 492). In the present book, I do not address moral rejections of God’s existence (rejections grounded on a moral protest about the existence of evil and suffering). For responses to such moral protests, see David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Brian Davies, OP, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (London: Continuum, 2006); and John F. X. Knasas, Aquinas and the Cry of Rachel: Thomistic Reflections on the Problem of Evil (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013).

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 21.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 22.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 22.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 23.

. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding §11, p. 24.

. For further discussion of Hume’s views, see Paul Russell, The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert J. Fogelin, “Hume’s Skepticism,” in Cambridge Companion to Hume, 209–37.

. See Paul Guyer, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–25; Roger Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–14; Paul Guyer, Kant (London: Routledge, 2006); Steffen Dietzsch, Immanuel Kant: Eine Biographie (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 2003).

. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science, trans. Paul Carus with revisions by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 5. For a succinct discussion, see Frederick C. Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development: 1746–1781,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant, 26–61. The dogmatism to which Kant refers is exemplified in the metaphysics of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and of Wolff’s follower Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62). Baumgarten’s textbook on metaphysics was employed by Kant in his classes throughout his career. Beiser notes the similarities between Hume’s philosophical skepticism and Kant’s 1766 antimetaphysical work Dreams of a Spirit-Seeker: “Kant uses the same example as Hume in criticizing the rationalist interpretation of the principle of causality” (Beiser, “Kant’s Intellectual Development,” 55). But Beiser argues that

Kant’s “dogmatic slumbers” most probably took place from 1770 to 1772, between the Dissertation and his letter to Herz. In using this expression, Kant was probably referring to his confident belief that the Dissertation was his final position. A recollection of Hume would have been most fitting after 1772, for it would have helped Kant to formulate in more powerful and precise terms the problem he stated to Herz. If Hume’s doubts about causality were duly generalized, then they implied that a priori concepts could be neither demonstrated a priori nor verified in experience. In other words, to use the terminology that Kant evolved at this time, these concepts appeared in judgments that were neither analytic a priori nor synthetic a posteriori but synthetic a priori. The influence of Hume is most visible, then, in Kant’s later formulation of the critical problem: “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” (ibid.; cf. 36)

For the young Kant’s relation to Wolff’s metaphysics, with attention to the antimetaphysical work of the Pietist philosopher Christian August Crusius (who anticipates Kant’s positions in significant ways), see ibid., 27–36. Always somewhat critical of Wolff’s metaphysics but nonetheless a defender of metaphysics in his early work, Kant turned fully against metaphysics in the 1760s. See also Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

. Kant’s Prolegomena was published after his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 22.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 22.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 26.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 27.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 27.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 33.

. Kant, Prolegomena, 37.

. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183. See Arthur Melnick, Space, Time, and Thought in Kant (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1989); Lisa Shabel, “The Transcendental Aesthetic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 93–117. See also Anthony Savile, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Orientation to the Central Themes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Eric Watkins, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 183.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 183.

. For a theological extension of Kant’s position, see John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 551. See Desmond Hogan, “Kant’s Copernican Turn and the Rationalist Tradition,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 21–40. For discussion of Kant on causality, see Michael Friedman, “Causal Laws and the Foundations of Natural Science,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant, 161–99. Friedman attempts to strongly distinguish Kant’s position from Hume’s. For a differing view—more common in the secondary literature, and to my mind more persuasive—see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

. For elaboration see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 459–550.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 554–55. See Frederick Rauscher, “The Appendix to the Dialectic and the Canon of Pure Reason: The Positive Role of Reason,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 290–309, at 299–300.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 556–57. For discussion see Michelle Grier, “The Ideal of Pure Reason,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 266–89. See also, along these lines, Gordon D. Kaufman’s In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), which develops his God the Problem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). For an earlier Kantian reduction of speech about God to symbolism pointing to the unknown ultimate, see Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 557.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 558.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 559.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 560.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 563.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 564.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 564.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 565.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 566.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 567. On Kant’s view here (in light of Hume’s very similar view), see Barry Miller, The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm for Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 12–13.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 568.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 568.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 568.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 568.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 570.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 571.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 572.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 572.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 574.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 575.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 577.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 578.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 572.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 578.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 578–79.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 579.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 579.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 579.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 580.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 579.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 581.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 582.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 582.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 582.

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 583. For further discussion of Kant’s critiques of the ontological, cosmological, and physico-theological proofs, see Allen W. Wood, Kant’s Rational Theology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Wood, “Rational Theology, Moral Faith, and Religion,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant, 394–416. See also Karl Ameriks, “The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology,” in Cambridge Companion to Kant, 249–79.

. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139–271, at 238.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 240.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 240–41.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 241. Kant goes on to ask,

But is our cognition really extended in this way by pure practical reason, and is what was transcendent for speculative reason immanent in practical reason? Certainly, but only for practical purposes. For we thereby cognize neither the nature of our souls, nor the intelligible world, nor the supreme being as to what they are in themselves, but have merely unified the concepts of them in the practical concept of the highest good as the object of our will, and have done so altogether a priori through pure reason but only by means of the moral law and, moreover, only in reference to it, with respect to the object it commands. (ibid., 247)

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 243.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 249.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 250.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 251. Kant adds,

It is impossible through metaphysics to proceed by sure inferences from knowledge of this world to the concept of God and to the proof of his existence, for this reason: that in order to say that this world was possible only through a God (as we must think this concept) we would have to cognize this world as the most perfect whole possible and, in order to do so, cognize all possible worlds as well (so as to be able to compare them with this one), and would therefore have to be omniscient. . . . Thus the concept of God always remains, on the path of empirical enquiry (physics), a concept of the perfection of the first being not determined precisely enough to be held adequate to the concept of deity (but with metaphysics in its transcendental part nothing at all is to be accomplished). (ibid., 251–52)

Kant also denies that a priori demonstration of God’s existence is possible:

Finally, however, it is absolutely impossible to cognize the existence of this being from mere concepts, because every existential proposition—that is, every proposition that says, of a being of which I frame a concept, that it exists—is a synthetic proposition, that is, one by which I go beyond that concept and say more about it than was thought in the concept, namely, that to this concept in the understanding there corresponds an object outside the understanding, which it is absolutely impossible to elicit from any inference. (ibid., 251)

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 251.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 252.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 254.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 254.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 254.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 254.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 254–55.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 238.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 255.

. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 257.

. For critical discussion of Kant’s practical postulate, see Gordon E. Michalson Jr., Kant and the Problem of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 20–56, 128–38. Michalson concludes that “the ‘back door’ God of the Critique of Practical Reason—already diminished by virtue of the lean terms of the moral argument and implicated in a new bondage of the [divine] will—is indeed a kind of vanishing point within Kant’s scheme. This is why it is perennially difficult to say much about Kant’s God, as opposed to the God of metaphysics handbooks” (ibid., 56). Michalson includes a helpful discussion of Kierkegaard’s critique of Kant. See also Wood, “Rational Theology, Moral Faith, and Religion,” 401–5; Wood, Kant’s Moral Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). On the basis of more of Kant’s writings than I have surveyed here, Wood holds that “Kant thinks that morality is compatible with a hopeful agnosticism about God’s existence” (“Rational Theology, Moral Faith, and Religion,” 405), a position consistent with Michalson’s thesis. See also Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Is It Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?,” Modern Theology 14 (1998): 1–18. For an attempt to complete Kant’s philosophy (while critiquing it) by reasserting God as the ground of ethics—in a book dedicated to Schubert M. Ogden and with a foreword by David Tracy—see Franklin I. Gamwell, The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990).

. Keith Ward, God and the Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 64. As Ward asks, furthermore, “If Hume was going to be sceptical about the capacities of human reason, why was he not more sceptical about his own dogmatic Empiricism, about the extraordinary opinion that every item of genuine knowledge must be traced back to the occurrence of specific and discrete impressions?” (ibid., 59).

. In this regard, W. Norris Clarke, SJ, points out that Kant overlooks

the key role of action as the self-revelation of being in our human knowing. . . . For, on the one hand, Kant must admit action coming from the real world of things-in-themselves into the human knower, since he insists that he is not an idealist, that we do not create by thought the objects of our knowledge. On the other hand, he will not admit that this action is revelatory of anything objective in real things, anything true of them—not even their real existence, since “being” itself represents only the positing by the mind of its own synthesis of the unordered appearances in the sense-manifold and the innate, a priori forms of sense and intellect. But action that is totally non-revelatory of the nature of the agent-source from which it comes is itself unintelligible, cannot be truly action. . . . The root of the trouble lies, I suspect, in Kant’s implicit rationalist ideal of knowing the real as knowledge by a detached, uninvolved pure knower of a real being as it is in itself independent of any action upon others, including the knower himself. Of course, such a knowledge is impossible save for a purely creative knower, which we are not. (Clarke, “Is a Natural Theology Still Viable Today?,” in Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics: Being—God—Person [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994], 150–82, at 159)

. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 570.

. For a fully developed version of this view, see Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). For a response, see Macdonald, Knowledge and the Transcendent, 62–65.

. For Descartes’s argument to God from the concept of an infinitely perfect being, and for the ways in which later modern philosophers (including Leibniz, Kant, Spinoza, Fichte, and Schelling) wrestle with this Cartesian approach and its legacy, see Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). Unpersuasively in my view, Clayton proposes that the solution lies in a panentheistic “dialectic between the infinity and the finiteness of God” (ibid., 505).

. Thus Norris Clarke observes that Kant’s

refutation of the so-called “Cosmological Argument” for God is flawed by a serious misreading of the traditional argument as presented by realist metaphysicians like St. Thomas. In the last crucial step of the argument, Kant distorts it to become an attempted deduction of the existence of a Necessary Being (I would prefer to call it a Self-Sufficient Being) from the idea of the Ens Realissimum (or infinitely perfect being). St. Thomas would indignantly repudiate such a procedure, all too easily refuted by Kant. The traditional procedure is precisely the opposite. Once the reality of a Self-Sufficient Being has been established from causal arguments, it is then argued that such a being could not be at once self-sufficient and finite, for the latter by nature requires a cause of its being as finite. Therefore the Self-Sufficient Being must be infinite, and so, by an easy step, unique. (Clarke, “Is a Natural Theology Still Viable Today?,” 158–59)

Similarly, though from a somewhat different philosophical vantage point, William Desmond observes,

Think of the transcendental anorexia of Kant’s notion of existence: existence is not redolent with the fullness of being, or the astonishing fact “that it is at all,” or the glorious good of the “to be.” Existence reverts to the power of the self to posit, and posit legitimately in accord with the evidences of experience (itself understood in a determinately restricted sense). . . . Kant was the heir of the Wolffian version of the ontological proof in which the concept of God is that of the ens realissimum. One thinks also of Descartes in the rationalistic context in which the idea of a triangle functions as an analogy to the concept of God. (Desmond, God and the Between [Oxford: Blackwell, 2008], 95)

. See Desmond’s comments on Kant’s practical postulate, in Desmond, God and the Between, 97–102, 146–48.

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