ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the cogency of Gordon Kaufman's Immanuel Kantian allusions to a real God, or unfathomable mystery, given his constructivist and anti-metaphysical stance. Kaufman's thought is multi-layered and rich. Although the concept of God is imaginative construct, Kaufman makes important use of the notion that there is some unfathomable divine reality. Kaufman, like John Hick both deny that one can have true beliefs about what is the case independent of human cognition, yet to draw heavily on the concept of such a cognition-independent God. Throughout all of Kaufman's thought the construct God has an important regulative function. Kaufman's one-realm transcendental idealism, when it comes to the real referent of God, is not coherent and cannot survive the neglected-alternative objection. It is clear that Kaufman's real God satisfies none of the criteria given here for being considered transcendentally real. The more reason there is to believe in God, the less God can plausibly be thought of as noumenal.