Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture, University of York: The Shadow of God, Michael Rosen

This Royal Institute of Philosophy talk took place at 6.15pm on Thursday 17th November at the University of York (UK), hosted by York's Department of Philosophy. In it, Professor Michael Rosen of Harvard University talks engagingly and for a general audience about his fascinating new book about secularisation, 'The Shadow of God'. Near the beginning of the talk, Michael mentions that the book is in many ways a development of an undergraduate essay he began thinking about several decades ago! Introducing Michael, in the first couple of minutes of the video, is Professor Martin O' Neill, of the Department of Philosophy at York.
More on the content of the book here:
"The Shadow of God is a book about secularization. However, rather than treating secularization as a result of forces from outside religion it looks at it endogenously, from the point of view of the tension between faith and reason within monotheistic religion itself. This leads to the great problem of rational theology: the justification of the goodness of the world in the face of the existence of (apparent) evil.
Kant, Michael will argue, developed a distinctive, “post-Lisbon” theodicy, centred on human agency and responsibility, directed towards an afterlife of reward and punishment by a just God. Guided by this, he presents revisionist (or, as he would prefer to say, corrective) re-readings of some of the great central themes of German Idealist philosophy: Kant’s theory of freedom; the categorical imperative; Hegel’s conception of Geist and history; amongst others.
One consequence of Kant’s relentless demand for justification and its associated requirements of impartiality and transparency is that the gap between God and man is closed, but at the price of making God impersonal. In short, Kant, despite not being a secular thinker, turns out to be a secularizing one. Alongside the orientation to divine judgement and the afterlife, however, we also find in Kant a conception by which human beings see themselves as participating in a shared collective project that extends through history. This idea (“historical immortality”) runs through German Idealism although it is by no means confined to it.
Historical immortality has had very deep consequences. Its presence is everywhere within the revolutionary, conservative, progressive and nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
More on the event here:
www.york.ac.uk...
An open access review of 'The Shadow of God':
ndpr.nd.edu/re...
More on the Royal Institute of Philosophy, which sponsored the event:
www.royalinsti...

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I'm always looking for fresh perspectives on these topics, something I explore regularly in my videos.