On this episode of five minutes in church history, we're going to wander a little bit into the history of philosophy.

So we'll go to the great German philosopher Emmanuel Kant.

Manual Kant, among the many books that he published, was a book entitled The Critique of Pure Reason.

He wrote this book in 1781, and the upshot of the book is a critique of theoretical or purely theoretical arguments for metaphysics

or for the existence of God.

He spends a lot of pages attempting to dismantle the

cosmological argument and the teleological argument. Now in a nutshell the

cosmological argument is built around the idea of the

Cosmos, the world, and it's built around the argument of the law of cause and

effect. And the law of cause and effect is essentially that for every effect

there is an equal or greater than cause. And so the world, the Cosmos, is an effect.

It's a given.

We have this world that we live in.

And so there must be a cause behind this effect.

The world itself points beyond itself to a source, to ultimately as we would say,

a creator. Well, Kant said about trying to dismantle that argument by the argument that you can't use what is true

or what we can sort of see an experience, every effect has a cause, and then stretch that beyond the realm of our experience

to the realm of metaphysics or the realm beyond the physical experience.

In other words, you can't stretch that to prove God.

That's what Kant was trying to do in that book.

He also dismantled the teleological argument.

That argument just builds slightly on the cosmological.

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