Kant’s Copernican Revolution and the Viability of Christian Realism

Abstract

Kant reduces the range of pure reason to the phenomenal realm. This is a consequence of his Copernican Revolution. If his move is correct, Christianity is forced to either (1) push all of its claims to the phenomenal, or (2) persist in its affirmation that they are noumenal. The former, seems to safeguard its reasonableness but only at the cost of becoming subjective and private. This option entails self-contradictions due to the indispensability of claims like the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ being objectively true, and of Christianity’s imperative to evangalize. This option is consequently unreasonable. On the other hand, the latter avoids the former’s self-contradictions. We ought to assert these truth claims since they correspond to reality in itself, and we ought to evangelize because the truth of the Gospel applies universally to all human beings. However, it is still open to the charge of unreasonableness in its failure to proportion its claims to the range of reason. All attempts to prove Christianity’s correspondence with noumenal reality presuppose propositions that could be nothing but our subjective impositions into reality like the principle of causality. Whatever option it takes, therefore, if Kant is correct, Christianity has to be unreasonable. Arguably, Christianity exhausts the set of possible religions that a reasonable person could take today. Even if it does not, religion still is premised on propositions which themselves could be nothing but our impositions to reality. If Kant is correct, faith and reason are therefore mutually exclusive, contra Aquinas and Wojtyla. This paper shows that if religion is to maintain its claim of being reasonable, it has to direct all of its intellectual powers in refuting Kant’s reduction of reason’s range to the phenomenal. If it neglects such task, Christianity will self-destruct. Intrinsically bound up to Christianity is the primacy of reason (logos), so Christians who live up to their identity would have to abandon Christianity. If it does not neglect such task, but fails in its attempts to refute it, then it will just prove its atheistic critics are right – religion is for the irrational, after all.