Introduction: A Symposium on Michael Rosen's The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History

Abstract

Framed most generally, The Shadow of God is a book about secularization. However, rather than treating secularization as a result of forces from outside religion—social change or the rise of science and technology, for example—it looks at it endogenously, from the point of view of the tension between faith and reason within monotheistic religion itself. This leads to the great problem of rational theology: the justification of the goodness of the world in the face of the existence of (apparent) evil. Immanuel Kant, my book argues, developed a distinctive, “post-Lisbon” theodicy, centred on human agency and responsibility, directed towards an afterlife of reward and punishment by a just God. “It is from the necessity of punishment that the inference to a future life is drawn,” he writes. Divine justice requires that human beings know what is required of them (they must have moral knowledge) and have the ability to perform it (they must be free). Guided by this, my book presents revisionist (or, as I would prefer to say, corrective) rereadings of some of the great central themes of