Kant understands God as the idea which grounds or gives substance to disjunction, to all possible disjunctive syllogisms or deductive reasonings. As any single disjunct (those individual conditionals which comprise members of the finite set of statements satisfying the conditions of a disjunctive syllogism) rests conditionally upon further disjunctions in terms of their meaning and necessity or actuality with respect to the implicit assumptions or logical presuppositions of the syllogism itself, we can posit out of necessity a “pure” object or unconditional which grounds each finite or exhaustive set of disjuncts corresponding to any given disjunctive syllogism - for Kant this positing of the unconditioned object to which the disjunctive subject ultimately refers was unavoidable, and implicit within the syllogistic system of disjunction itself:
In a disjunctive judgment, as Kant understood it, the subject A of the judgment is joined to an exhaustive list of exclusive predicates. For example, “The world exists either through blind chance, or through internal necessity, or through an external cause” (A74/B99). If we think of each disjunct as a condition, the unconditioned corresponding to the disjunctive judgment would be one in which there is an exhaustive list of predicates which are not separated by disjunction. The idea of such an object is the idea of a “most real being” or God. philosophy.ucdavis.edu/mattey/ph … oglec.html
So was Kant correct that syllogisms of disjunction, which comprise a wide array and scope of our common understandings and references or knowledge of the world at large, necessarily require such reference to God - the conditioned resting only upon an unconditional? Taking it even a step further, does this mean that the conditional disjunctive in fact gives rise to such a notion of God, perhaps even as the source of the God-object itself? At such time as the human mind began operating within disjunctive realms and forming syllogistic statements or using deductive reasoning to form ideas and conclusions about the world, did this necessitate the creation of the God-concept in order to give grounding to and thus generate substance or a gravity of logical coherence to these conclusions and reasonings of ours?
I see atheists easily able to disjunk and set up syllogisms without believing in “God” or god.
God makes sense when you expect causality to run in an order of superior things causing inferior things.
In such logic, every other ripple in the pond is less powerful than the very first ripple.
But that seems logical, so the method of theological thought is similar to the disjunction process that you describe.
I tend to believe in equal proceedings in the nature of causality and reality.
So my theory is that reality causes reality, nothing less and nothing more, but equal forces moving.
Does that make any sense, in your opinion?
In short - no. Kant has some very strong points, of course, but he gets some things arse-backwards in his search to justify the existence of certain things by pure reason.
He effectively claims with this that we start with a knowledge of a whole, of the essential substance, which we then split and subdivide into categories and concepts by reason. Whereas what we start with are specifics, perceptions, which we then build up into conceptual frameworks by seeing similarities and differences. At this stage we start worrying about syllogisms, but we can’t then use the existence of our reasoning tools to back-engineer a proof of existence that we don’t have from experience - concepts are derived from things, not vice versa. To say otherwise is (to my mind) philosophy gone sick.
Disjunction is a tool to classify what we have; the fact I own a saw doesn’t mean that somewhere there is an infinitely long plank
In any case, funny that you post this - I read a criticism of this yesterday by Schopenhauer. He made the point that an all-powerful God is certainly not necessary for reason and syllogism, as the Ancient Greeks were completely devoted to logic and syllogism and their Gods were very finite indeed.
I tend to agree with you, however what I think Kant is (apparently) saying isnt that God must exist (either ontologically or metaphysically), but that the notion of God, in the idea of a “most powerful” or “absolute” is an unstated assumption and implicit (but perhaps not necessarily necessary) result of disjunction and syllogistic reasoning. In this way, language and logic engender belief or assumption in a God-concept (the unconditional) as a result of the combined conditionality and disjunctive format of our deductive reasonings.
Of course Kant’s project to ground reasoning in the “Pure” away from sensation (i.e. in the “nounemal”) is fairly questionable, indeed his whole phenomenological framework seems at the expense of “how things really are” with respect to the human mind’s ability to sense, perceive, contemplate, form abstractions and observe relations – his answer to the “fictions” of belief/perception/thought seems to be the invention of still more fictions. But Kant does have a point here regarding disjunctive syllogisms I think - not that he is right that these do require belief in God or the God-ideal (the Absolute, the Objective, Universal, etc) but that in practice or without realising it this God-ideal is a by-product of the way in which we use disjunctive reasoning itself. I am probably taking this further than Kant here, but his argument that conditionals (syllogistic, disjunctive or otherwise) need a grounding in an unconditional is of course fallacious from a logical (e.g. coherence or intersubjectivity can do away with a need for the unconditional) or ‘real world’ (as in “how things really are” (what appears to be a divergence between the metaphysical and ontological constructs)) perspective, but, I do not see Kant’s criticisms here as an attack upon these ideas themselves, but rather an examination of how these ideas, admittedly fallacious, are nonetheless at work in the human psyche, individually and collectively. . . granted, the “admittedly fallacious” nature of such God-beliefs (the unconditional) may be something that Kant himself never attested to (I am not really sure one way or the other). . .
As I understand it, he was saying just that, a sort of rehashed ontological argument. But I much prefer your interpretation of it, that it’s symptomatic of the thought process! There is a tendency within pure logic and rationalism to talk yourself into Something or Someone that is logically perfect, since logical operations offer such perfection. This was an achievement of the logical positivists/atomists, that they pulled pure reason out of fairyland and grounded it again in what Is.
This is one way of treating the God-concept - as the ultimate consequence of a given system of knowledge. The Kantian God would be the infinitesimal object on the end of the line, which is really negligible in reality.
Of course this renders God meaningless - just a cork on the open end of a system. But seen from outside of Kants perspective, the God that Kant really bowed to was the method he used, his logic.
In this sense alone, God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.
