Reformers, with help from Kindred souls, are able to treat insanity as a disease rather than as an act of God or Satan. Crime and insanity, no longer given theological explanations, could now be dealt with as mundane difficulties capable of empirical solutions. We are under moral obligation to prefect ourselves and to attain a “highest good” (summum bonum) that is manifestly unattainable in a life lived under the conditions we know here and now.  From the time of Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) to the present day, a great many attempts have been made to base arguments for God’s existence not upon the mere fact that there is a World, nor on the general orderliness it manifests, but on a very special feature of the World—human moral experience. The popularity of moral arguments is not hard to understand. We might attempt to take a single real individual, and build from his life and work a man “typical” of the Enlightenment.  

 Even if the argument to God a First, the Universe had a beginning so something must have first caused it to exist, or “necessary being,” which is a being whose non-existence is a logical impossibility, and which therefore exists either timeless or eternally in all possible Worlds, and these were valid, these notions of deity can be more of an embarrassment than a help to the religious imagination. They present us with a divine object or superobject, whereas religion demands that God be primarily known as a person. A moral argument offers hope of overcoming that external and thinglike character: it insures that concepts of God will be, from the outset, personal concepts. We can, at best, make a start to a moral development that requires very different conditions for its completion. However, since that complete development is demanded of us as a duty, it must be attainable. God and immortality are this presupposed in our actual moral experience. 

Enlightened denial of any kind of transcendence of the external World, of personal immortality is incompatible. When the addict’s withdrawals set in, and he is screaming, cursing, and begging, “Just one shot, man!” God’s people are right there talking junkie jargon to him. “Baby, know that money off your back! Kick that habit! Kick the dope off you back!” The addict, writhing in pain, his nose and eyes running, is pouring sweat from head to foot. He is trying to knock his head against the wall, flailing his arms, trying to fight his attendants, he is vomiting, suffering diarrhea. “Do not hold nothing back! Let that fairy dust go, baby! You are going to stand tall, man! I can see you now in the enlightenment of God!” When the awful ordeal is ended, when the grip of the dope is broken, Science was for them. Living, growing evidence that human beings, using their “natural” reasoning powers in a fairly obvious and teachable way, could not only understand what human beings are really like and by combining this knowledge of nature and human nature, learn how to live better and happier lives.