Why you should become a Bible-believing anarchist
who also believes the universe was created around 4004 B.C.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, born about the time Newton died) was a pivotal figure in Philosophy.
Google AI:
- Transcendental Idealism: In his Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that our minds structure experience using concepts like space, time, and causality, making knowledge possible but limited to phenomena.
- Ethics & Morality: Developed the categorical imperative, a universal moral law stating we should act only according to rules we could will to become universal laws, emphasizing duty and human dignity.
- Political Philosophy: Proposed ideas for "perpetual peace," advocating for a league of nations and universal hospitality, influencing the UN.
- Epistemology & Metaphysics: Bridged rationalism and empiricism, transforming discussions on how we know the world and the limits of reason.
- Enduring Legacy: His work is foundational for German Idealism (Hegel, Fichte), phenomenology, and ongoing debates in ethics, law, and political theory, making him a cornerstone of modern thought.
In short, you can't study modern philosophy without engaging with Kant; he is a monumental figure whose ideas continue to shape our understanding of ourselves and the world.
Note Kant's contributions to "political philosophy." Kant joins pure philosophy, science, and politics. That's the thesis of this website: non-christian philosophy, science, and politics is a "package deal." Based on Romans 1-2, we would expect some nuggets of truth from every human being, even if the trajectory of their life and thought is in rebellion against God and His Word. But despite getting it right on a few counts, anti-christian philosophy as a system is systematic rebellion, as is evolutionary "science" and evolutionary political science.
Gary North says Kant was "the first modern cosmological evolutionist." Note: the first modern cosmological evolutionist. The first since the fall of Rome and the next thousand years of Christian civilization ("the dark ages"). As North notes,
the theory that the universe sprang from the random impact of atoms in motion was first developed by Epicurus and Democritus; the theoretical presuppositions of the “new cosmology” are very ancient indeed. In the area of speculation concerning ultimate origins, the scientists of today have contributed very little improvement over Greek speculation twenty-three centuries ago. The fact that Kant propounded it in 1755 does not make it automatically modern.
Google AI notes the impact of Kant in cosmology:
- Nebular Hypothesis: In his 1755 work Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Kant theorized the solar system formed from a spinning cloud of gas and dust (nebula).
- Galactic Structure: He correctly deduced the Milky Way was a vast, flattened disk of stars, also formed from a giant spinning nebula, and that rotating motion prevented it from collapsing.
- Island Universes: Kant proposed that some fuzzy patches (nebulae) seen in the sky were actually immense systems of stars, i.e., other galaxies, paving the way for understanding the vast universe we know today.
- Cosmic Evolution: He championed the idea of a self-organizing universe governed by natural forces, a concept now central to modern cosmology, linking philosophical thought with scientific observation.
While his work was initially overlooked due to publishing issues, Kant's "natural philosophy" provided crucial intellectual frameworks that anticipated later discoveries, making him a pivotal figure in the history of cosmic thought.
Bernard de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) became the great popular work announcing the new infinity of creation, as well as its new-found autonomy. In 1755, Immanuel Kant took these speculations and became the first systematic evolutionist. Process theology came into its own. Wrote Toulmin and Goodfield: “The fame of Immanuel Kant’s three Critiques has obscured his striking contributions to cosmology. In fact, his earlier work on the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (1755) was the first systematic attempt to give an evolutionary account of cosmic history. In it, he spoke of the whole Order of Nature, not as something completed at the time of the original Creation, but as something still coming into existence. The transition from Chaos to Order had not taken place all at once.”70 Creation, argued Kant, had taken millions of centuries. Time may somehow be linear and infinite, but the process of creation is cyclical. The world will run down, only to be reformed once again out of the climactic conflagration at the end. As he put it, “Worlds and systems perish and are swallowed up in the abyss of Eternity; but at the same time Creation is always busy constructing new formations in the Heavens, and advantageously making up for the loss.” So, what we have here, in his words, is a “Phoenix of Nature, which burns itself only in order to revive again in restored youth from its ashes, through all infinity of times and spaces. . . .”71 Kant, on whose speculations modern philosophy is built, also set forth the presuppositions in terms of which supposedly neutral “eternal oscillation” astronomers have constructed their footnoted cosmologies. Religious presuppositions govern modern astronomical science and modern geological science.
the theory that the universe sprang from the random impact of atoms in motion was first developed by Epicurus and Democritus; the theoretical presuppositions of the “new cosmology” are very ancient indeed. In the area of speculation concerning ultimate origins, the scientists of today have contributed very little improvement over Greek speculation twenty-three centuries ago. The fact that Kant propounded it in 1755 does not make it automatically modern.
Renaissance science broadened the conception of the universe that had been inherited from Aristotelian science. The physical boundaries of the universe seemed immeasurably gigantic, inconceivably large, and finally infinite. Enlightenment thinkers, most notably Kant, then hypothesized the infinity of time to match the hypothetical infinity of the spatial universe. From the Christian point of view, this constituted the “evolutionary wedge” by which the creation account of the Bible was steadily shoved into the realm of myth and fable. Mechanical laws replaced personal providence, thus seemingly negating the necessity of believing in “creation as sustaining.” Next, the expansion of men’s temporal horizon seemingly negated the necessity of believing in “creation as origin.” Cosmological evolution provided the hypothetical framework for geological evolution; geological evolution was to make possible the hypothesis of biological evolution. But all three required vast quantities of time to make them plausible. Loren Eiseley, perhaps the most successful popularizer of biological evolutionary concepts within America’s intellectual circles, made this point repeatedly: “No theory of evolution can exist without an allotment of time in generous quantities. Yet it is just this factor which was denied to the questioning scientist by the then current Christian cosmology. A change as vast as that existing between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems of the heavens had to be effected in Western thinking upon the subject of time before one could even contemplate the possibility of extensive organic change; the one idea is an absolute prerequisite to the other.”75
- Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1958] 1961), p. 58.
Biological Evolution: Pre-Darwin
The seventeenth century had seen the reappearance of postmillennial eschatology—out of favor ever since the fifth century—which offered Christians new hope. The preaching of the gospel and the establishment of Christian institutions would eventually transform the world ethically, and this ethical transformation would eventually be accompanied by external personal and cultural blessings. This had been the vision of many English Puritans and most of the American colonial Puritans until the pessimism of the 1660s, symbolized by the poetry of Michael Wigglesworth, set in. This vision was to have a revival, unfortunately in more antinomian, “spiritual” forms, through the influence of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century.101
The Idea of Progress
Paralleling this biblical optimism was the secular idea of progress of Enlightenment thinkers, especially Frenchmen. By the 1750s, this perspective was becoming a part of the European climate of opinion. 102 The idea of stages of historical development fascinated the writers of the day. The cosmological evolutionary schemes of Kant and Laplace were discussed as serious contributions, and Maupertuis and Diderot, the French secularists, offered theories of biological development —“transformism.”103 Three important features were present in these new theories; without these theoretical axioms, there would have been no reason to assume the evolutionary perspective. First, change (not stability) is “natural”—one of the key words of the Enlightenment.104 Second, the natural order is regular; nature makes no leaps. This is the doctrine of continuity (uniformitarianism). Finally, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the method of investigation selected by the progressivists was the comparative method. Classification preceded the demonstration of evolutionary change.105
- On the Puritans’ postmillennial impulse, see the articles by James Payton, Aletha Gilsdorf, and Gary North in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, VI (Summer 1979); Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope (London: Banner of Truth, 1971); Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966). One of the representative documents of the colonial American period is Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952). Until quite recently, postmillennial thought was a neglected—indeed, completely misunderstood— factor in American history.
- J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (1920), is a standard account of secular optimism.
- Bentley Glass, “Maupertuis, Pioneer of Genetics and Evolution,” and Lester G. Crocker, “Diderot and Eighteenth Century Transformism,” in Glass (ed.), Forerunners of Darwin.
- On the importance of the word “nature” to the eighteenth century, see Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1932). On the way in which “natural history” was used, see Nisbet, Social Change and History, ch. 4. It meant, essentially, conjectural history, that is, how events would automatically develop “naturally” if there were no “artificial” restraints on them. Developmentalism became biological evolutionism in the nineteenth century.
- Frederick J. Teggart, Theory of History (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1925), pp. 129–32.
Yet if we are compelled to regard secular opponents of the biblical doctrine of the six-day creation as naive, then those Christians who try to amalgamate Genesis 1 and one (or all) of the secular cosmologies are doubly naive. Philosophically, the concept of process undergirds the secular positions. Toulmin and Goodfield recognized this. R. J. Rushdoony, in his study, The Mythology of Science, recognized this. Instead of the fiat word of God—a discontinuous event which created time and the universe—we are expected to believe in the creativity of impersonal process. As Rushdoony argued,
“the moment creativity is transferred or to any degree ascribed to the process of being, to the inner powers of nature, to that extent sovereignty and power are transferred from God to nature. Nature having developed as a result of its creative process has within itself inherently the laws of its being. God is an outsider to Nature, able to give inspiration to men within Nature but unable to govern them because He is not their Creator and hence not their source of law.”197
Is it any wonder, then, that the first modern cosmological evolutionist, Immanuel Kant, was also the premier philosopher of the modern world? Is it any wonder that his theory of the two realms—autonomous external and random “noumena” vs. scientific, mathematically law-governed “phenomena”—is the foundation of modern neo-orthodox theology, which has eroded both Protestantism and Catholicism? Is it any wonder that Kant’s “god” is the lord of the noumenal realm, without power to influence the external realm of science, without even the power to speak to men directly, in terms of a verbal, cognitive, creedal revelation? This is the god of process theology, of evolution, of the modern world. It is the only god that humanists allow to exist. The God of Deuteronomy 8 and 28, who controls famines, plagues, and pestilences in terms of the ethical response of men to His law-word, is not the God of modern, apostate evolutionary science. He is not the god of process theology. The Christian with the Ph.D. in geology who says that he just cannot see what process has to do with the sovereignty of God is telling the truth: he cannot see. Had he been able to see, no “respectable” university would ever have granted him a Ph.D. in geology, at least not in historical geology.198
- Rushdoony, The Mythology of Science (Vallecito, California: Ross House, [1967] 1995), p. 53. (http://bit.ly/rjrmos)
- Davis Young, Westminster Theological Journal (Spring 1973), p. 272.
Catastrophism and the Old Testament, Chapter 1, Donald Wesley Patten
Kant is generally credited as the originator of the Nebular Hypothesis, but he wasn't. The originator of the Nebular Hypothesis was another Emanuel, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). With respect to cosmology, Swedenborg was Kant's mentor. Swedenborg wrote his treatise on cosmology in 1734 in Sweden, in the Latin language. It was entitled Prodromus Philosophiae Retiocinantis de lnfinito et Cause Creationis, In addition to his scientific interests, he engaged in psychic activities and claimed to have psychic powers.
He claimed confirmation of his nebular hypothesis from seances with men on Jupiter, Saturn and places more distant. When Kant republished Swedenborg's planetary theory under his own name, he (Kant) left out the seance materials, and he called the rest science.
But the search for the origin of the nebular hypothesis doesn't begin with Swedenborg in Sweden. Some 20 years earlier, in 1712, when Swedenborg was but 24 years old, he took one of his several trips abroad, to England on this occasion. There, he visited with the famous Edmund Halley at Cambridge.
Halley described to the youthful Swedenborg the various kinds of tails of the medieval comets.