Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered — John Shaqi
Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically ConsideredKohler, Kaufmann
Religion
Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered
Kohler, Kaufmann
Judaism -- Doctrines
9. All these so-called proofs were invalidated by Immanuel Kant, the great
philosopher of Königsberg, whose critical inquiry into the human intellect
showed that the entire sum of our knowledge of objects and also of the
formulation of our ideas is based upon our limited mode of apperception,
while the reality or essence, “the thing in itself,” will ever remain
beyond our ken. If this is true of physical objects, it is all the more
true of God, whom we know through our minds alone and not at all through
our five senses. Accordingly, he shows that all the metaphysical arguments
have no basis, and that we can know God’s existence only through _ethics_,
as a postulate of our moral nature. The inner consciousness of our moral
obligation, or duty, implies a moral order of life, or moral law; and
this, in turn, postulates the existence of God, the Ruler of life, who
assigns to each of us his task and his destiny.(171)
10. It is true that God is felt and worshiped first as the supreme power
in the world, before man perceives Him as the highest ideal of morality.
Therefore man will never cease looking about him for vestiges of divinity
and for proofs of his intuitive knowledge of God. The wondrous order,
harmony, and signs of design in nature, as well as the impulse of the
reason to search for the unity of all things, corroborate this innate
belief in God. Still more do the consciousness of duty in the
individual—conscience—and the progress of history with its repeated
vindication of right and defeat of wrong proclaim to the believer
unmistakably that the God of justice reigns. But no proof, however
convincing, will ever bring back to the skeptic or unbeliever the God he
has lost, unless his pangs of anguish or the void within fill his desolate
world anew with the vivifying thought of a living God.
11. Among all the Jewish religious philosophers the highest rank must be
accorded to Jehudah ha Levi, the author of the _Cuzari_,(172) who makes
the historical fact of the divine revelation the foundation of the Jewish
religion and the chief testimony of the existence of God. As a matter of
fact, reason alone will not lead to God, except where religious intuition
forms, so to speak, the ladder of heaven, leading to the realm of the
unknowable. Philosophy, at best, can only demonstrate the existence of a
final Cause, or of a supreme Intelligence working toward sublime purposes;
possibly also a moral government of the world, in both the physical and
the spiritual life. Religion alone, founded upon divine revelation, can
teach man to find a God, to whom he can appeal in trust in his moments of
trouble or of woe, and whose will he can see in the dictates of conscience
and the destiny of nations. Reason must serve as a _corrective_ for the
contents of revelation, scrutinizing and purifying, deepening and
spiritualizing ever anew the truths received through intuition, but it can
never be the final source of truth.
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