Do you thus deal with the LORD,
O foolish and unwise people?
O foolish and unwise people?
Deuteronomy 32:6 NKJV
"Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is commonly regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time.
But his intellectual career began with theology. On the 22 April 1724,
Kant was born in Königsberg to devout Pietistic parents who named him
Emmanuel, “God is with him”. His mother’s prayer for him was:
“May God sustain him in accordance with His Covenant of Grace until his final rest, for the sake of Jesus Christ, Amen.”
Kant’s book was entitled Universal Natural History and Theory of 
The
Heavens, or An Essay on The Constitution and Mechanical Origin of The
Whole Universe, Treated In Accordance With Newtonian Principles (1755).
Knowing that it would be theologically iconoclastic, he was only
content to publish it when he felt that he was “secure in relation to
the duties of religion”. This state of affairs was achieved by Frederick the Great (1712–1786)—a known atheist—taking to the throne, to whom Kant dedicated the volume.
Kant developed the first ‘nebular hypothesis’prototype to explain the origin of the universe “through mechanical laws alone”.
In this book he speculates that the universe may have taken ‘millions
of years’ to evolve from chaos; that the earth may have “existed for a
thousand or more years before it was constituted so as to support
people, animals, and plants”; and that the world continues to evolve
because “Creation is never complete … it will never stop.” But his confidence in mechanical causes stumbles at the origin of life. Kant’s reticence here speaks for itself:
“Are we in a position to say: Give me matter and I willshow you how a caterpillar can be created? Do we not get stuck at the first step due to ignorance about the true inner nature of the object and the complexity of the diversity contained in it? It should therefore not be thought strange if I dare to say that we will understand the formation of all the heavenly bodies, the cause of their motion, in short, the origin of the whole present constitution of the universe sooner than the creation of a single plant or caterpillar becomes clearly and completely known on mechanical grounds.”
It was a problem that Darwin would attempt to solve a
hundred years later. Yet, without Genesis, not only was Kant unable to
explain the origin of life, he could not understand what it meant to be
human:
This anthropological quandary led Kant to categorize humanity into four races. Predictably, this resulted in racism. Kant ranks the native ‘inhabitants of America’ “far below even the Negro, who stands on the lowest of all the other steps that we have named as differences of the races.”“We are not even properly familiar with what a human being actually is, even though consciousness and our senses should inform us about it; how much less will we be able to imagine what he will become in the future!”
Incredibly, Kant believed that melanin is strongly correlated with
intellect. Concerning a ‘Negro carpenter’, he writes, “this fellow was
quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was
stupid.” But for his own ethnicity and nationality, Kant reserves the highest praise:
“Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.”
He says that Germans, being the pinnacle of humanity,
have “a fortunate combination of feeling, both in that of the sublime
and in that of the beautiful”, exhibiting “more moderation and
understanding” than the English or the French.
Without minimizing other influences, it was Kant’s science that strategically shaped both his theology and philosophy. Kant argues that the interpretation of the Bible does not depend on 
the
“meaning of the writer” or whether the text has any basis in real
history.
In fact, Kant actively discourages deriving any historical truths from Scripture because they are not “essential to salvation”. He insists that all historical claims should be settled by the “philosophical faculty”, not the “biblical theologian”.
This is because he believes the clergy to be “incompetent (in
scientific matters)” and therefore ill-equipped to investigate any
historical or scientific claims of Scripture.
Consequently, this makes the “literal interpretation” of any Biblical text an abomination to Kant. In a short book entitled The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence of God (1763),
Kant almost expunges God from the realm of rationality by arguing that
classical proofs for his existence “prove nothing at all”.
Kant realizes that he needs God to make morality meaningful. But he will
not allow God to be God. Instead, God is redefined as a
“thought-object”, a “rational concept”, a “legislative force”, a
“hypothetical being”, but without personality or any existence outside
of Kant’s mind." CMI
