Look, everyone trying to debate God's existence with science or some galaxy-brain logical proof is an idiot who's already lost the plot. The entire point isn't about what you can know or prove in a lab, Kant figured this out ages ago. The real reason to believe is that without God the entire concept of morality is a sick joke. Deep down every one of us feels that being a truly good person should ultimately be rewarded with happiness, but just look at the world, that's obviously not how it works here. Scumbags win and good people suffer all the time. The only way for our innate sense of right and wrong to not be a completely meaningless cosmic prank is to believe there's a higher power who will eventually balance the scales and make virtue lead to happiness. You don't believe in God because of evidence, you believe because it's the only way for morality to have any coherent purpose at all. Otherwise being good is just a handicap and we all know that can't be the final answer.
Yeah but the rigid practical/theoretical division in Kant is kind of wack desu.
You're trying to reconcile morality with the individual when it's fundamentally transcendent. The most moral behavior is self-sacrifice for the community, as when a soldier throws himself on a grenade to save his platoon. Anybody whose consciousness has grown to reflect not just himself but the self that constitutes a greater entity will be immediately endowed with some kind of morality.
>>24717437You're confusing the expression of morality with its fundamental logic.The soldier jumping on a grenade is a perfect example but you're not asking the right question. You see "self-sacrifice for the group" as the foundation. I'm asking: why is that sacrifice considered moral in the first place? Just because it benefits the collective? So if a soldier in an evil army sacrifices himself to help his platoon murder civilians, is that a moral act? Of course not.The group can't be the source of morality because groups can be wrong. The soldier's act is moral because he's upholding a higher universal duty to protect life, to honor his commitment, that any rational person would recognize as good independent of the group.And this brings it right back to my original point. That soldier performs the ultimate act of virtue and is immediately annihilated. The world doesn't reward him, it erases him. If there's nothing beyond this life then his sacrifice is a net loss and the universe is indifferent to the highest moral action. The whole system of right and wrong only makes rational sense if you believe that such an ultimate act of virtue isn't just for nothing. You have to believe in a God who ensures that in the end the moral order holds and the highest good (virtue being united with happiness) is possible. Your soldier example doesn't refute the argument, it's the ultimate case for why it's necessary.
“The identity (of practical and theoretical, ought/is, God) insofar as it synthesizes the opposites, is itself just a quantum, and the difference is qualitative, in the fashion of the categories, where the first, for example reality, is posited in the third, and so is the second, but only quantitatively. On the other hand, if the opposition is real, it is merely quantitative. The principle is simultaneously ideal and real, it is the only quality; and the absolute which reconstructs itself out of the quantitative difference is not a quantum but totality.”Kantians on suicide watch.
