1781–1788

Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason, the Limits of Knowledge and the Religion of Practical Reason

The Enlightenment made reason, nature and autonomy the court of final appeal; British empiricism found expression in deism, but Hume, by showing that experience yields neither causality nor substance, undermined its arguments. Awakened by Hume, Kant argued in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that the mind orders the data of experience by its own structures – space, time and the categories; phenomena are given to us, while the "thing in itself" is inaccessible. God, immortality and freedom passed beyond theoretical knowledge and were grounded in practical reason (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788). Grenz and Olson write that theology became derivative of morality. González sees three paths after Kant: another basis for religion, a return to revelation, Hegel's idealism.