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God’s Awful Majesty Before Our Eyes: Kant’s Moral Justification for Divine Hiddenness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2017

Tyler Paytas
Tyler Paytas*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis
*
Email: tylerpaytas@outlook.com
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Abstract

The problem of ‘divine hiddenness’ arises from the lack of an explanation for why an all-loving God would choose not to make his existence evident. I argue that Kant provides a compelling solution to this problem in an often overlooked passage located near the end of the second Critique. Kant’s suggestion is that God’s revealing himself would preclude the development of virtue because we would lose the experience of conflict between self-interest and the moral law. I provide a reconstruction and defence of Kant’s argument, and I explain why it is consistent with his overall position in the second Critique.

Keywords

Goddivine hiddennessvirtuefreedomgallows

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Articles
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Kantian Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 133 - 157
Copyright
© Kantian Review 2017 

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