It’s generally accepted in the western tradition that the Greek philosopher Thales predicted a solar eclipse on May 28, 585 BC—no need to check your screen, that’s BC, not BCE. This date represents a marker for the genesis of philosophy, and perhaps rudimentary science and mathematics, for many historians.

It’s probably safe to assume Thales was not calculating in a vacuum; his efforts most likely existed alongside other thinkers of his day. Nevertheless, classical philosophy operated from Thales’s day forward, virtually unchanged with respect to its foundational metaphysical assumptions for two millennia, before the advent of Hume and Kant, namely that reason, experience, and natural theology, properly handled, possessed the capability to lead a thinker to a true knowledge of God, the noumenal, and the supernatural.

There’s a sharp distinction in philosophic thought on either side of the Hume/Kant boundary. I do not wish presently to explore this divide in depth. Nonetheless, it’s clear historically that Hume and Kant ushered in thoughts which have blossomed into commonplace objections against theism, and Christianity in particular—objections we encounter routinely on the Internet: evidentiary challenges, questions of epistemic warrant, refutations of standard arguments for the existence of God, and agnostic principles, to name a few. It’s no stretch to claim that these two philosophers shaped modern thought as much as any other, including Charles Darwin.

Though many Christians demonize Kant, he’s actually sympathetic to theism in comparison with many subsequent thinkers who piggybacked upon his work. Here’s a highly surprising passage buried within Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which serves as a preface to his ensuing Critiques:

So I find that the psychological idea (however little it may reveal to me the nature of the human soul, which is elevated above all concepts of experience) shows the insufficiency of these concepts plainly enough and thereby deters me from materialism, a psychological concept which is unfit for any explanation of nature and which in addition confines reason in practical respects. The cosmological ideas, by the obvious insufficiency of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in its legitimate inquiry, serve in the same manner to keep us from naturalism, which asserts nature to be sufficient for itself. Finally, all natural necessity in the sensible world is conditional, as it always presupposes the dependence of things upon others, and unconditional necessity must be sought only in the unity of a cause different from the world of sense. But as the causality of this cause, in its turn, were it merely nature, could never render the existence of the contingent (as is consequent) comprehensible, reason frees itself by means of the theological idea from fatalism (both as blind natural necessity in the coherence of nature itself, without a first principle, and as a blind causality of this principle itself) and leads to the concept of a cause possessing freedom and hence of a Supreme Intelligence. Thus the transcendental ideas serve, if not to instruct us positively, at least to destroy the impudent and restrictive assertions of materialism, of naturalism, and of fatalism, and thus to afford scope for the moral ideas beyond the field of speculation.

Great stuff. So, true enough, Immanuel’s not Immanuel. After all, who is, but the one? But certainly he’s not as far off as some might have you to believe.