GOD Kant’s postulation of God as a condition of moral behaviour is an elaboration of a strategy Wrst laid out by Pascal, namely, that we should believe that God exists not because we have reason to think that ‘God exists’ is true, but because it is a proposition that is good for us to believe The Absolute of Hegel Hegel was fond of using Christian language For instance, he divides the history of Germany into three periods: the period up to Charlemagne, which he calls the Kingdom of the Father; the period from Charlemagne to the Reformation, which he calls the Kingdom of the Son; and Wnally the period from the Reformation to the Prussian monarchy, which is the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost or Spirit From time to time he refers to the absolute as God and his statement that the absolute is the Thought that thinks itself recalls a phrase of Aristotle that was often employed by Christian thinkers as an approach to a deWnition of God But on examination it turns out that the absolute is something very diVerent from the Christian God God as conceived by Christian tradition is an eternal, unchanging, being whose existence is quite independent of the existence of the world and of human beings Before Adam and Abraham existed, God already existed in the fullness of self-awareness Hegel’s absolute, on the other hand, is a spirit who lives only through the lives of human beings, and the selfawareness of the absolute is brought about by the reXection of philosophers in the everyday world Spirit, however, is not simply reducible to the totality of human thinking; the absolute has purposes which are not those of any human thinker and which human activity unconsciously serves But the spirit’s plan of the universe is not something imposed from outside by a transcendent creator; it is an internal evolution programmed by a cosmic equivalent of DNA Hegel saw his system as a rational, scientiWc, presentation of truths conveyed symbolically by religion Philosophy and religion covered the same area as each other: The objects of philosophy are upon the whole the same as those of religion In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the 329