Happiness and Theism
What is happiness?
Immanuel Kant defined happiness as “the condition of a rational being in the world with whom everything goes according to his wish or will.” (The Critique of Practical Reason, p. 133) Suppose we accept this definition of happiness, ignoring for the moment Aristotle’s plausible definition that happiness is eudaimonia. It follows from Kant’s definition that no human being in this life is happy, since no human being has sufficient control over the world to make everything go according to his wish or will; moreover, regardless of the control issue, the world simply does not always go according to our wants and volitions.
Kant nevertheless proceeds to argue that a happiness worth having (i.e., for each person, a happiness proportioned to that person’s virtue) is possible. However, its possibility requires an afterlife and an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God who can proportion a human being’s postmortem happiness with his virtue. Thus, according to Kant, “it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God.” (134)
I agree with Kant here. Whatever one thinks of the various philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God, arguments of pure theoretical reason which seem to fall short of strict philosophical proofs, Kant is right — for this reason and others — that we have a practical moral reason to accept theism.