Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, p. 25:
Theology cannot serve to explain the appearances of nature to us.
In general it is not a correct use of reason to posit God as the
ground of everything whose explanation is not evident to us. On the
contrary, we must first gain insight into the laws of nature if we
are to know and explain its operations. In general it is no use of
reason and no explanation to say that something is due to God's
omnipotence. This is lazy reason. . . .
As Kant remarks in a footnote to A 689 = B 717 of the Critique of Pure Reason, ignava ratio was the name given to a "sophistical argument" of the "ancient dialecticians," the so-called Lazy Argument.
Diligent reason attempts to account for all natural phenomena in natural terms. The role of God is accordingly attenuated. He becomes at most a sustaining cause of the existence of nature, but not a cause of anything that occurs within nature. See my earlier discussion of divine concurrence. The squeeze is on, and it is no surprise that Schopenhauer squeezes God right out of the picture by rejecting the very notion of causation of existence, as I explain in Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument.
This is relevant to my series on Plantinga's new book. The crucial question is whether there is any room for divine guidance of the evolutionary process.
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