Immanuel Kant was instrumental in demolishing the traditional philosophical arguments for God's existence. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781) ,his first major work, this is exactly what he did. Kant developed his own argument for God's existence a few years later in his second major work The Critique of Practical Reason (1788). He later published the Critique of Judgement (1790) which dealt with the problem concerning the validity and characteristics of aesthetic judgements as well as the general problem of the apparent purposiveness of nature, and the problems arising from a presumed necessity of applying teleological concepts in biology. These three texts are the major works of Kant's critical period. Kant deciphers his ethical questions by examining a person's motivation for performing an act regardless of the consequences. A person who utilizes the Kantian view believes that the only pure good is pure human reason without consequences. This pure human reason works without the influence of human emotions and desires. A truly good act as defined by Kant is performed because of an obligation to

Kant also uses the moral argument ,as we have seen, to prove the existence of God and could not have claimed this if the argument was within the framework of theoretical reason for it would then mean that God is an empirical source of our knowledge, which could not possibly be the case:

In this part of the critique, Kant goes on to say that because of this we must assume a "moral world cause (an author of the world), in order to set before ourselves a final purpose consistently with the moral law, and in so far as the latter is necessary, so far (i.e. in the same degree and on the same ground) the former also must be necessarily assumed, i.e. we must admit that there is a God." (Kant, Critique of Judgement, Hafner Press; 1951).

the categorical imperative. Kant argued that there exists a universal sense of moral obligation. This sense of 'ought' points towards an objective moral law, which basis can only be the supreme being or God. The categorical imperative basically states that an act is moral if, and only if, I should always act in such a way that I am able at the same time to will that the maxim of my action be a universal law of nature. Kant grounded his philosophy in the moral realm and saw God as the core of this morality. Using the moral area he proceeded to show that humans were not only sense-based creatures but also moral. Humans have an innate sense of what they 'ought' to do. This objective morality can only arise, according to Kant, from the supreme being and he uses his moral argument to prove the existence of God in terms of using 'practical reason' that is, reason concerning what we ought to do as opposed to what we know. However, he claims that this argument only holds firm if we use 'practical' reason to demonstrate it and that the moral argument could not possibly hold firm in the realm of theoretical reason and this, Kant states, is were many theories for the existence of God have gon wrong, e.g. the Ontological argument, the Cosmological argument, the Physicoteleological argument etc. In this essay I will be examining Kant's notion that the moral argument only works within the framework of practical reason and not within the framework of theoretical reason. I will first try and point out some important distinctions between theoretical and practical reason that are relative to the question and then go on to discuss exactly why the moral argument, according to Kant, would not work within the framework of theoretical reason by discovering what Kant means by his claim and going on to discover what repercussions of this statement, whether positive or negative, occur.

"Human reason

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Approximate Word count = 1769
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)