So I'm writing a paper about hermeneutics, and Schleiermacher is becoming a big part of it. I'm trying to start the paper off, and I'd read something (I think) about how Kant changed the way people thought about the Bible as an unquestionable source of truth. Rather than try to find that source again, I started reading Kant's Wikipedia page. I found more than I bargained for.
Kant provided a justification for believing in God, even though his existence cannot be proven. He basically says if you can't prove or disprove a thing, the question becomes whether it's in your best interest to believe it. What caught my attention is that he says it's no longer a question of whether we are deceiving ourselves or not if we take the position. I'm not trying to understand it completely right now, but what I'm getting is that he saw morality as a system but not happiness. He saw happiness as dependent upon morality. And apparently he saw morality as being intertwined with the presupposition of God, the soul, and freedom. Since God can't be proven or disproven, he's not saying that these beliefs have to be exclusive. God to Europe was the Christian God, but there could be other concepts of God that would be acceptable under this criteria, though not all.
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But that brings me back to the idea that believing in God doesn't necessarily equate to believing in the Christian God or the Bible. You can hold to a belief that the universe was created by a supernatural being and that there are higher moral laws without holding to the Apostles' Creed.
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