Setting Prometheus free: A lecture by A C Grayling on the role of ethics and religion in Society.

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“God will not be tested”. The application of proof in the non deductive setting is what we must use to prove the existence of God, Grayling claims. The question is whether there is more wisdom in the Biblical words than in Graylings analytic/positivist claim.

Aristotle claims that the issue of God is a metaphysical aporetic question and that there is a divine element equivalent to the potentiality of rationality residing within us.

Kant’s arguments against all the current proofs of his time and his insistence that existence is not a predicate places the idea of God outside of the categories of our understanding yet Kant continues to insist that God is a theoretical idea of reasoning(that emerges from our theoretical and practical reasoning): an idea that we can think without contradiction but not know. The justification for God in Kantian Philosophy is a matter of faith connected to a practical expectation of leading a flourishing life if ones will is sufficiently engaged with ones duties. God is a condensed drop of a cloud of practical reasoning.

My thesis is that agnosticism is partly a consequence of the dominance of empiricism and science and leaves space for Aristotelian and Kantian arguments for the non-phenomenological, non phenomenal meaning of the idea of God