Technology Rig Some days you wish had never started, then along comes one you hope will never end. Anything can happen in a day.

Steven Pinker isn't so much interested as language as an object in its own right, but as a window to the human mind. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel reminds us that humans accomplish great things because they can exchange information about their knowledge and intentions via the medium of language.  Language, moreover, is not a peculiarity of one culture, but it has been found in every society ever studied by anthropologists. There’s some 6,000 languages spoken on Earth, all of them complex, and no one has ever discovered a human society that lacks complex language.  For this and other reasons, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write.” Language is an intricate talent and it’s not surprising that the science of language should be a complex discipline. It includes the study of how language itself works including:

1. grammar, the assembly of words, phrases and sentences; 
2. phonology, the study of sound; 
3. semantics, the study of meaning; 
4. pragmatics, the study of the use of language in conversation. For example, if I were to say, “If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome.” You understand that as a polite request meaning, give me the guacamole.  You don’t interpret it literally as a rumination about a hypothetical affair, you just assume that the person wanted something and was using that string of words to convey the request politely. Often comedies will use the absence of pragmatics in robots as a source of humor.  As in the old “Get Smart” situation comedy, which had a robot named, Hymie, and a recurring joke in the series would be that Maxwell Smart would say to Hymie, “Hymie, can you give me a hand?”  And then Hymie would go, {sound}, remove his hand and pass it over to Maxwell Smart not understanding that “give me a hand,” in context means, help me rather than literally transfer the hand over to me.  Or take the following example of Pragmatics in action.  Consider the following dialogue, Martha says, “I’m leaving you.”  John says, “Who is he?”  Now, understanding language requires finding the antecedents pronouns, in this case who the “he” refers to, and any competent English speaker knows exactly who the “he” is, presumably John’s romantic rival even though it was never stated explicitly in any part of the dialogue.  This shows how we bring to bear on language understanding a vast store of knowledge about human behavior, human interactions, human relationships.  And we often have to use that background knowledge even to solve mechanical problems like, who does a pronoun like “he” refer to. It’s that knowledge that’s extraordinarily difficult, to say the least to program into a computer.  
5. Scientists interested in language also study how it is processed in real time, a field called psycholinguistics; 
6. How is it acquired by children, the study of language acquisition.  
7. How it is computed in the brain, the discipline called neurolinguistics. 


It’s important to not to confuse language with three other things that are closely related to language.  One of them is written language.  Unlike spoken language, which is found in all human cultures throughout history, writing was invented a very small number of times in human history, about 5,000 years ago.  And alphabetic writing where each mark on the page stands for a vowel or a consonant, appears to have been invented only once in all of human history by the Canaanites about 3,700 years ago. A second thing not to confuse language with is proper grammar.  Linguists distinguish between descriptive grammar - the rules, that characterize how people to speak - and prescriptive grammar - rules that characterize how people ought to speak if they are writing careful written prose. A dirty secret from linguistics is that not only are these not the same kinds of rules, but many of the prescriptive rules of language make no sense whatsoever. A third thing, not to confuse language with is thought.  Many people report that they think in language, but commune of psychologists have shown that there are many kinds of thought that don’t actually take place in the form of sentences.  

1. We know from ingenious experiments that non-linguistic creatures, such as babies before they’ve learned to speak, or other kinds of animals, have sophisticated kinds of cognition, they register cause and effect and objects and the intentions of other people, all without the benefit of speech.   
2. Types of thinking go on without language like visual thinking, When we think in visual images.

Now, this not to deny that language can affect thought and linguistics has long been interested in what has sometimes been called, the linguistic relativity hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. There’s a lot of controversy over the status of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, but no one believes that language is the same thing as thought and that all of our mental life consists of reciting sentences.  
Let’s turn to what language is beginning with the question of how language works. In a nutshell, you can divide language into three topics:

1. Words that are the basic components of sentences that are stored in a part of long-term memory that we can call the mental lexicon or the mental dictionary. The basic principle of a word was identified by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, more than 100 years ago when he called attention to the arbitrariness of the sign.  Take for example the word, “duck.”  The word, “duck” doesn’t look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because all of us at some point in our lives have memorized that brute force association between that sound and that meaning,which means that it has to be stored in memory in some format, in a very simplified form. There is a symbol for the word itself, there is some kind of specification of its sound and there’s some kind of specification of its meaning. You can estimate that a typical high school graduate has a vocabulary of around 60,000 words, which works out to a rate of learning of about one new word every two hours starting from the age of one.  When you think that every one of these words is arbitrary as a telephone number of a date in history, you’re reminded about the remarkable capacity of human long-term memory to store the meanings and sounds of words.
2. Rules or grammer, the recipes or algorithms that we use to assemble bits of language into more complex stretches of language including syntax, the rules that allow us to combine words into phrases and sentences, morphology, the rules that allow us to assemble bits of words, like prefixes and suffixes into complex words and phonology, the rules that allow us to combine vowels and consonants into the smallest words. Chomsky noted that the main puzzle that we have to explain in understanding language is creativity or as linguists often call it productivity, the ability to produce and understand new sentences. It shows that when we know a language, we haven’t just memorized a very long list of sentences, but rather have internalized a grammar or algorithm or recipe for combining elements into brand new assemblies. Rather than a set of word by word associations, sentences are assembled in a hierarchical structure that looks like an upside down tree.  Let me give you an example of how that works in the case of English.  One of the basic rules of English is that a sentence consists of a noun phrase, the subject, followed by a verb phrase, the predicate. A second rule in turn expands the verb phrase.  A very phrase consists of a verb followed by a noun phrase, the object, followed by a sentence, the complement as, “I told him that it was sunny outside.” So the number of different thoughts that we can express through the combinatorial power of grammar is not just humongous, but in a technical sense, it’s infinite. A second insight is that languages have a syntax which can’t be identified with their meaning.  The following sentence from Chomsky, from 1956, “Colorless, green ideas sleep furiously.”  Well, what’s the point of that sentence? The point is that it is meaningless.  On the other hand, any English speaker can instantly recognize that it conforms to the patterns of English syntax. Compare, for example, “furiously sleep ideas dream colorless,” which is also meaningless, but we perceive it as wrong English. Take for example, the following wonderfully ambiguous sentence that appeared in TV Guide.  “On tonight’s program, Conan will discuss sex with Dr. Ruth.”  Now this has a perfectly innocent meaning in which the verb, “discuss” involves two things, namely the topic of discussion, “sex” and the person with who it’s being discussed, in this case, with Dr. Ruth.  But is has a somewhat naughtier meaning if you rearrange the words into phrases according to a different structure in which case “sex with Dr. Ruth” is the topic of conversation, and that’s what’s being discussed.Now, phrase structure not only can account for our ability to produce so many sentences, but it’s also necessary for us to understand what they mean.  The geometry of branches in a phrase structure is essential to figuring out who did what to whom. Another important contribution of Chomsky to the science of language is the focus on language acquisition by children. Now, children can’t memorize sentences because knowledge of language isn’t just one long list of memorized sentences, but somehow they must distill out or abstract out the rules that goes into assembling sentences based on what they hear coming out of their parent’s mouths when they were little.  And the talent of using rules to produce combinations is in evidence from the moment that kids begin to speak. Children create sentences unheard from adults. At the two-word stage, which you typically see in children who are 18 months or a bit older, kids are producing the smallest sentences that deserve to be counted as sentences, namely two words long.  But already it’s clear that they are putting them together using rules in their own mind.  To take an example, a child might say, “more outside,” meaning, take them outside or let them stay outside.  Now, adults don’t say, “more outside.” So it’s not a phrase that the child simply memorized by rote, but it shows that already children are using these rules to put together new combinations. Another example, a child having jam washed from his fingers said to his mother 'all gone sticky'. Again, not a phrase that you could ever have copied from a parent, but one that shows the child producing new combinations. And famously, Chomsky claimed that children solved the problem of language acquisition by having the general design of language already wired into them in the form of a universal grammar. A spec sheet for what the rules of any language have to look like. What is the evidence that children are born with a universal grammar?  Through a more abstract argument called, “The poverty of the input.”  Namely, if you look at what goes into the ears of a child and look at the talent they end up with as adults, there is a big chasm between them that can only be filled in by assuming that the child has a lot of knowledge of the way that language works already built in. Here’s how the argument works.  One of the things that children have to learn when they learn English is how to form a question.  Now, children will get evidence from parent’s speech to how the question rule works, such as sentences like, “The man is here,” and the corresponding question, “Is the man here?”   Now, logically speaking, a child getting that kind of input could posit two different kinds of rules. There’s a simple word by word linear rule.  In this case, find the first “is” in the sentence and move it to the front.  “The man is here,” “Is the man here?” Now there’s a more complex rule that the child could posit called a structure dependent rule, one that looks at the geometry of the phrase structure tree.  In this case, the rule would be:  find the first “is” after the subject noun phrase and move that to the front of the sentence.  A diagram of what that rule would look like is as follows:  you look for the “is” that occurs after the subject noun phrase and that’s what gets moved to the front of the sentence.  Now, what’s the difference between the simple word-by-word rule and the more complex structured dependent rule?  Well, you can see the difference when it comes to performing the question from a slightly more complex sentence like, “The man who is tall is in the room.”   But how is the child supposed to learn that? How did all of us end up with the correct structured dependent of the rule rather than the far simpler word-by-word version of the rule? “Well,” Chomsky argues, “if you were actually to look at the kind of language that all of us hear, it’s actually quite rare to hear a sentence like, “Is the man who is tall in the room?  The kind of input that would logically inform you that the word-by-word rule is wrong and the structure dependent rule is right.  Nonetheless, we all grow up into adults who unconsciously use the structure dependent rule rather than the word-by-word rule.  Moreover, children don’t make errors like, “is the man who tall is in the room,” as soon as they begin to form complex questions, they use the structure dependent rule.  And that,” Chomsky argues, “is evidence that structure dependent rules are part of the definition of universal grammar that children are born with.” Let's talk about phonolgy now, To give you an example, the sequence, bluk, is not an English word, but you get a sense that it could be an English word that someone could coin a new form… that someone could coin a new term of English that we pronounce “bluk.”  But when you hear the sound khhh, you instantly know that not only isn’t it an English word, but it really couldn’t be an English word. The reason that we recognize that it’s not English is because it has sounds like khhh and sequences like khhh, which aren’t part of the formation rules of English phonology.  But together with the rules that define the basic words of a language, there are also phonological rules that make adjustments to the sounds, depending on what the other words the word appears with.  Very few of us realize, for example, in English, that the past tense suffix “ed” is actually pronounced in three different ways.  When we say, “He walked,” we pronounce the “ed” like a “ta,” walked.  When we say “jogged,” we pronounce it as a “d,” jogged.  And when we say “patted,” we stick in a vowel, pat-ted, showing that the same suffix, “ed” can be readjusted in its pronunciation according to the rules of English phonology. Now, when someone acquires English as a foreign language or acquires a foreign language in general, they carry over the rules of phonology of their first language and apply it to their second language.  We have a word for it; we call it an “accent.”  When a language user deliberately manipulates the rules of phonology, that is, when they don’t just speak in order to convey content, they pay attention as to what phonological structures are being used; we call it poetry and rhetoric.
3. Interfaces that allow all of this knowledge of language has to connect to the world and that allow us to understand language coming from others to produce language that others can understand us. Each of us has at the top of our windpipe or trachea, a complex structure called the larynx or voice box; it’s behind your Adam’s Apple.  And the air coming out of your lungs have to go passed two cartilaginous flaps that vibrate and produce a rich, buzzy sound source, full of harmonics. Before that vibrating sound gets out to the world, it has to pass through a gauntlet or chambers of the vocal tract.  The throat behind the tongue, the cavity above the tongue, the cavity formed by the lips, and when you block off airflow through the mouth, it can come out through the nose.   Now, each one of those cavities has a shape that, thanks to the laws of physics, will amplify some of the harmonics in that buzzy sound source and suppress others.  We can change the shape of those cavities when we move our tongue around.  When we move our tongue forward and backward, for example, as in “eh,” “aa,” “eh,” “aa,” we change the shape of the cavity behind the tongue, change the frequencies that are amplified or suppressed and the listener hears them as two different vowels.   Likewise, when we raise or lower the tongue, we change the shape of the resonant cavity above the tongue as in say, “eh,” “ah,”“eh,” “ah.”  Once again, the change in the mixture of harmonics is perceived as a change in the nature of the vowel.   When we stop the flow of air and then release it as in, “t,” “ca,” “ba.”  Then we hear a consonant rather than a vowel or even when we restrict the flow of air as in “f,” “ss” producing a chaotic noisy sound.  Each one of those sounds that gets sculpted by different articulators is perceived by the brain as a qualitatively different vowel or consonant. Now, an interesting peculiarity of the human vocal track is that it obviously co-ops structures that evolved for different purposes for breathing and for swallowing and so on.  And it’s an… And it’s an interesting fact first noted by Darwin that the larynx over the course of evolution has descended in the throat so that every particle of food going from the mouth through the esophagus to the stomach has to pass over the opening into the larynx with some probability of being inhaled leading to the danger of death by choking.  And in fact, until the invention of the Heimlich Maneuver, several thousand people every year died of choking because of this maladaptive of the human vocal tract. Why did we evolve a mouth and throat that leaves us vulnerable to choking?  Well, a plausible hypothesis is that it’s a compromise that was made in the course of evolution to allow us to speak.  By giving range to a variety of possibilities for alternating the resonant cavities, for moving the tongue back and forth and up and down, we expanded the range of speech sounds we could make, improve the efficiency of language, but suffered the compromise of an increased risk of choking showing that language presumably had some survival advantage that compensated for the disadvantage in choking.  What about the flow of information in the other direction, that is from the world into the brain, the process of speech comprehension? The reason that speech recognition is such a difficult problem is because of the absence of segmentation.  Now we have an illusion when we listen to speech that consists of a sequence to sounds corresponding to words. But if you actually were to look at the wave form of a sentence on a oscilloscope, there would not be little silences between the words the way there are little bits of white space in printed words on a page, but rather a continuous ribbon in which the end of one word leads right to the beginning of the next. It’s something that we’re aware of… It’s something that we’re aware of when we listen to speech in a foreign language when we have no idea where one word ends and the other one begins.  In our own language, we detect the word boundaries simply because in our mental lexicon, we have stretches of sound that correspond to one word that tell us where it ends.  But you can’t get that information from the wave form itself. We are generally unaware of how unambiguous language is.  In context, we effortlessly and unconsciously derive the intended meaning of a sentence, but a poor computer not equipped with all of our common sense and human abilities and just going by the words and the rules is often flabbergasted by all the different possibilities.  Take a sentence as simple as “Mary had a little lamb,” you might think that that’s a perfectly simple unambiguous sentence.  But now imagine that it was continued with “with mint sauce.”  You realize that “have” is actually a highly ambiguous word. As a result, the computer translations can often deliver comically incorrect results.  

In The Presumption of Atheism and other atheistic writings, Flew argued that we must take the universe itself and its most fundamental laws as themselves ultimate. Every system of explanation must start somewhere, and this starting point itself cannot be explained by the system. So, inevitably, all such systems include at least some fundamentals that are not themselves explained. This is a consequence following from the essential nature of explanations of why something that is in fact the case, is the case.

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is how did the laws of nature come to be? and the rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world. The second is how did life as a phenomenon of purpose-driven, reproducing beings originate from a non-live matter. The third is the very existence of nature or why does the universe bother to exist?

The First Dimension

The important point is not merely that there are regularities in nature, but that these regularities are mathematically precise, universal, and “tied together.” Einstein spoke of them as “reason incarnate.” The question we should ask is how nature came packaged in this fashion. This is certainly the question that scientists from Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg have asked—and answered. Their answer was the Mind of God. Singular facts as our capacity to know and explicate truths, the correlation between the workings of nature and our abstract descriptions of these workings (what physicist Eugene Wigner called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics), and the role of codes (systems of symbols that act in the physical world) such as the genetic and neuronal codes at the most fundamental levels of life manifest by their very being the foundational and allpervasive nature of rationality. “The world is rational,” noted the great mathematician Kurt Gödel. The relevance of this rationality is that “the order of the world reflects the order of the supreme mind governing it.” The reality of rationality cannot be evaded with any appeal to natural selection. Natural selection presupposes the existence of physical entities that interact according to specific laws and of a code that manages the processes of life. Also another aspect of this rationality lies in the idea of symmetry, According to most accounts of modern physics, symmetry is any kind of transformation that leaves the laws of physics that apply to a system unchanged. The idea was initially applied to the differential equations of classical mechanics and electromagnetism and then applied in new ways to special relativity and the problems of quantum mechanics.

These laws seem to be fine tuned so that life and consciousness may emerge and life would not have been possible if some of these laws and constants had been slightly different (The anthropic principle). Also the contrived nature of physical existence is just too fantastic for me to take on board as simply ‘given.’ It points to a deeper underlying meaning to existence. This fine tuning has been explained in two ways. Some scientists have said the fine tuning is evidence for divine design; many others have speculated that our universe is one of multiple others, a “multiverse”, with different laws and physical constants, and ours happens to have the right conditions for life. But this claim is absurd for two reasons:
1)it is crazy to postulate a trillion (causally unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe because since they are unconnected then we can't validate this claim by a scientific method, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job.
2) To ask how the laws governing the multiverse originated is the same as asking for the origin of the laws of nature in general again. It doesn't answer anything. We have only shifted the problem of cosmic biophilicity up one level.

Richard Dawkins has rejected the argument that God wrote the laws of nature on the grounds that God is too complex a solution for explaining the universe and its laws. This strikes me as a bizarre thing to say about the concept of an omnipotent spiritual Being. What is complex about the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient Spirit, an idea so simple that it is understood by all the adherents of the three great monotheistic religions;Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws ~ Albert Einstein - Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer.

The Second Dimension

The first philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to abiogenesis, he says that the present physicists’ view of the age of the universe gives too little time for these theories of abiogenesis to get the job done.

A second philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to the fact that living matter possesses an inherent goal that is nowhere present in the matter that preceded it. An overriding question is when (and then how) sexual reproduction itself evolved and precisely how the first genetic machinery evolved also persists as an unresolved issue. There is no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities. It is true that protobiologists do have theories of the evolution of the first living matter, but they are dealing with a different category of problem. They are dealing with the interaction of chemicals, whereas our questions have to do with how something can be intrinsically purpose-driven and how matter can be managed by symbol processing.

A third philosophical dimension to the origin of life relates to the origin of the coding and information processing that is central to all life-forms. The genetic message in DNA is duplicated in replication and then copied from DNA to RNA in transcription. Following this there is translation whereby the message from RNA is conveyed to the amino acids, and finally the amino acids are assembled into proteins. A gene is nothing but a set of coded instructions with a precise recipe for manufacturing proteins. Most important, these genetic instructions are not the kind of information you find in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics; rather, they constitute semantic information. In other words, they have a specific meaning. These instructions can be effective only in a molecular environment capable of interpreting the meaning in the genetic code. The origin question rises to the top at this point. The problem of how meaningful or semantic information can emerge spontaneously from a collection of mindless molecules subject to blind and purposeless forces presents a deep conceptual challenge. The very existence of a code is a mystery. The coding rules (the dictionary of codon assignments) are known. Yet they provide no clue as to why the code exists and why the mechanism of translation is what it is.

[Reason tells me of the] extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.~ Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

The Third Dimension

Absolute nothingness cannot produce something given endless time—in fact, there can be no time in absolute nothingness. The emergence of the universe from “nothing” does not violate the principles of physics, because the net energy of the universe is zero? This is an idea first floated by the physicist Edward Tryon, who said he had shown that the net energy of the universe is almost zero and that there is therefore no contradiction in saying that it came to be out of nothing since it is nothing. If you add up the binding (attractive) energy of gravitational attraction, which is negative, and the rest of the whole mass of the universe, which is positive, you get almost zero. No energy, then, would be required to create the universe, and therefore no creator is required. Regarding this and similar claims, the postulation of a universe with zero net energy still doesn’t answer the question of why there should be anything at all. Alvin Plantinga points out that God understood as a necessary Being exists in all possible worlds.

My religiosity consists of a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God  ~ Albert Einstein - Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer.

Certainly, the existence of evil and suffering must be faced. However, philosophically speaking, that is a separate issue from the question of God’s existence. From the existence of nature, we arrive at the ground of its existence. Nature may have its imperfections, but this says nothing as to whether it had an ultimate Source. Thus, the existence of God does not depend on the existence of warranted or unwarranted evil. With regard to explaining the presence of evil, there are two alternate explanations for those who accept the existence of the Divine. The first is that of the Aristotelian God who does not intervene in the world. The second is the free-will defense, the idea that evil is always a possibility if human beings are truly free.

we are accustomed to hearing about arguments and proofs for God’s existence. Such arguments are useful in articulating certain fundamental insights, but cannot be regarded as “proofs” whose formal validity determines whether there is a God. It is very unlikely that something did come from nothing? Atheists say that the explanation for the universe is simply that it is eternally existing, but we cannot explain how this eternally existing state of affairs came to be. It is inexplicable and has to be accepted as such. Theists, however, are adamant in pointing out that God is something that is not ultimately inexplicable: God’s existence is inexplicable to us, but not to God. A universe would exist uncaused, but rather more likely that God would exist uncaused. Hence the argument from the existence of the universe to the existence of God is a good C-inductive argument. Religious conceptions of the universe  use approximations and analogies to help in grasping ultimate things. They are not the whole truth, but this does not stop them being a part of the truth.

But where is God? How can we relate God to the universe? He says that God is outside spaca and time, “There are a lot of different arguments you might give to try and show that God is outside time, One that impresses me somewhat is simply that if you take special relativity very seriously, you believe that everything that is in time is also in space. It’s just a four-dimensional continuum. No theist has ever thought that God was literally there in space. If he’s not in space and whatever is in time is in space, then he is not in time. The question then becomes: What sense can you make out of there being a personlike being outside of time?”. If God is timeless, then everything he does, he does, so to speak, all at once, in a single act. He couldn’t do one thing first and then another later on. The most basic question is: How could there be a causal connection between a spaceless, timeless finding space for god being and the entirety of space-time? Whether you can make sense of that depends very much on what your theory of causation is. If you think that the concept of cause involves an essential temporal reference [i.e., that cause is tied to time]—for example, a cause is an event that precedes another event and has certain other relations to it—then that’s going to be ruled out. But there are analyses of cause that don’t involve that essential temporal reference. I myself am inclined to the view that the concept of cause doesn’t really have an analysis—that it’s just a primitive concept and that causation itself is a primitive relation. It’s part of the real furniture of the world. If the concept of cause doesn’t have an analysis, then there isn’t anything you can pull out of it by way of an analysis that would rule out a primitive causal connection between a nontemporal God and the whole of time.

The question of whether the Divine has revealed itself in human history remains a valid topic of discussion. You cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible. Everything else is open to omnipotence.

Along the same lines of his Critique project, Kant talks about religion and the limits of reason. Kant says that in order to act freely, we must have some power to ratify or reject our desires. Maxims allow us to accept or reject a given desire, and hence allow us to act freely. Because a maxim is good, only duty inspires it, human nature can only be good (in accordance with duty) or evil (in accordance with everyday desires). In order to be morally responsible you must not only have an intention to do something, you must also have a maxim or principle that puts the final stamp of approval on your intentions. The moral law is part of what makes us rational creatures. But we certainly can demote the moral law, and the tendency to do this is what makes us essentially evil. He argues that when we make decisions, we often put our inclinations first, combine them with our sense of duty, or ignore duty altogether. In his eyes, each of these tendencies qualifies human beings as morally evil.

That, through the moral law, man is called to a good course of life; that, through unquenchable respect for this law lying in him, he finds in himself justification for confidence in this good spirit and for hope that, however it may come about, he will be able to satisfy this spirit; finally, that, comparing the last-named expectation with the stern command of the law, he must continually test himself as though summoned to account before a judge – reason, heart, and conscience all teach this and urge its fulfilment.

Here we then have a complete religion which can be proposed to all human beings comprehensibly and convincingly through their own reason

Kant offers an illuminating metaphor of two concentric circles—the inner one representing the core of the one religion of pure moral reason and the outer one representing many revealed historical religions, all of which should include and build on that core. Existing religious traditions are important if they provide the opportunity for moral reflection.

A religion, accordingly, can be natural, and at the same time revealed, when it is so constituted that men could and ought to have discovered it of themselves merely through the use of their reason, although they would not have come upon it so early, or over so wide an area, as is required. Hence a revelation thereof at a given time and in a given place might well be wise and very advantageous to the human race, in that, when once the religion thus introduced is here, and has been made known publicly, everyone can henceforth by himself and with his own reason convince himself of its truth. In this event the religion is objectively a natural religion, though subjectively one that has been revealed.

Kant criticizes certain aspects of organized religion as a whole. He starts by denying the certainty of revelation and the the limitations time, place and language of this revelation.

Pure religious faith alone can found a universal church; for only [such] rational faith can be believed in and shared by everyone, whereas an historical faith, grounded solely on facts, can extend its influence no further than tidings of it can reach, subject to circumstances of time and place and dependent upon the capacity [of men] to judge the credibility of such tidings.

Every faith which, as an historical faith, bases itself upon books, needs for its security a learned public for whom it can be controlled, as it were, by writers who lived in those times, who are not suspected of a special agreement with the first disseminators of the faith, and with whom our present-day scholarship is connected by a continuous tradition. The pure faith of reason, in contrast, stands in need of no such documentary authentication, but proves itself.

People demand divine revelation, and hence also an historical certification of its authority through the tracing back of its origin. Now human skill and wisdom cannot ascend so far as heaven in order itself to inspect the credentials validating the mission of the first Teacher. It must be content with evidence that can be elicited, apart from the content, as to the way in which such a faith has been introduced – that is, with human reports which must be searched out little by little from very ancient times, and from languages now dead, for evaluation as to their historical credibility.

For how are the unlearned, who can read it only in translation, to be certain of its meaning? Hence the expositor, in addition to being familiar with the original tongue, must also be a master of extended historical knowledge and criticism, in order that from the conditions, customs, and opinions (the popular faith) of the times in question he may be able to derive the means wherewith to enlighten the understanding of the ecclesiastical commonwealth.

Now even though the announcement of such an historical event, as well as the faith in rules of conduct based upon it, cannot be said to have been vouchsafed solely or primarily to the learned or the wise of the world, these latter are yet not excluded from it; consequently there arise so many doubts, in part touching its truth, and in part touching the sense in which its exposition is to be taken, that to adopt such a belief as this, subjected as it is to so many controversies (however sincerely intentioned), as the supreme condition of a universal faith alone leading to salvation, is the most absurd course of action that can be conceived of.

He says that much of existing organized religion does not help people improve their moral standing. Professions of faith, and even consistent participation in religious services cannot transform the morally corrupt into the morally upright. Kant Also thinks that like all formally organized religions encourages "religious delusion." Those suffering from religious delusions think that simply believing in a religious doctrine makes them better in God's eyes. Kant thinks it deluded to believe that God is pleased when we profess faith in Jesus, for example. Kant says there are three kinds of religious delusions, all of which we should avoid. We should not believe in miracles, since we do not have direct, empirical evidence of miracles occurring today or in the days of old. Kant also speaks against religious mysteries, since their existence also cannot be proven through reason.He also denounces clericalism as promoting such misguided pseudo-service, which mistake participation in these practices for true moral conduct.

Between a shaman of the Tunguses and the European prelate who rules over both church and state, or (if, instead of the heads and leaders, we only want to look at the faithful and their ways of representation) between the wholly sensuousp Wogulite, who in the morning lays the paw of a bear skin over his head with the short prayer, "Strike me not dead!" and the sublimated Puritan and Independent in Connecticut, there certainly is a tremendous  distance in the style of faith, but not in the principle; for, as regards the latter, they all equally belong to one and the same class, namely of those who place their service of God in something (faith in certain statutory articles, or the observance of certain arbitrary practices) which cannot by itself constitute a better human being. Only those whose intention is to find this service solely in the disposition to good life-conduct distinguish themselves from those others by crossing over into an entirely different principle, one exalted far above the other, namely the principle whereby they profess themselves members of a (invisible) church which encompasses all right-thinking people within itself and alone, in virtue of its essential composition, can be the true church universal.

We should not believe that religious rituals or professions of faith will make us more righteous in God's eyes. Kant claims that as long as we are earnest in trying to become morally upright, as long as we act in true devotion to duty, God will take care of the rest. Religious practices can be either good expressions of devotion, if they bind us together in moral community or bad expressions of mere pseudo-service, if designed to ingratiate us with God. Kant wants to clarify that good religious groups are those that value the moral improvement of their members over the observance of ritual and dogma.

Whatever, over and above good life-conduct, man fancies that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion. 

People are fooling themselves if they think they really understand God. Professing to know what God is and what he wants does absolutely nothing for our own moral improvement.

But, if this very faith (in a divine Trinity) were to be regarded not just as the representation of a practical idea, but as a faith that ought to represent what God is in himself, it would be a mystery surpassing all human concepts, hence unsuited to a revelation humanly comprehensible, and could only be declared in this respect as mystery. Faith in it as an extension of theoretical cognition of the divine nature would only be the profession of a creed of ecclesiastical faith totally unintelligible to human beings or, if they think that they understand it, the profession of an anthropomorphic creed, and not the least would thereby be accomplished for moral improvement.

Kant goes on to explain that all religious faiths involve something holy that people can comprehend, this holy quality is usually embodied in a moral ruler of the world, a deity who has the final word on all moral questions and concerns. Some faiths articulate the relationship between the moral ruler and humanity better than others. For Kant, true religions believe in a God who is as a morally holy lawgiver, a benevolent ruler, and a just judge and administrator of his laws. He speaks against a concept of God a World-Ruler who transforms this duty into a command to us, a figure who demands reverence to him which makes us act as slaves for him because this turns religion from morality through reason to idolatry.

there is something which so exalts the soul, and so leads it to the very Deity, who is worthy of adoration only because of His holiness and as Legislator for virtue, that man, even when he is still far from allowing to this concept the power of influencing his maxims, is yet not unwillingly sustained by it because he feels himself to a certain extent ennobled by this idea already, even while the concept of a World-Ruler who transforms this duty into a command to us, still lies far from him. But to commence with this latter concept would incur the danger of dashing man’s courage (which goes to constitute the essence of virtue) and transforming godliness into a fawning slavish subjection to a despotically commanding might. 

In that which concerns the moral disposition everything depends upon the highest concept under which one subsumes one’s duties. When reverence for God is put first, with virtue therefore subordinated to it, this object [of reverence] becomes an idol, that is, He is thought of as a Being whom we may hope to please not through morally upright conduct on earth but through adoration and ingratiation; and religion is then idolatry. But godliness is not a surrogate for virtue, whereby we may dispense with the latter; rather is it virtue’s consummation, enabling us to be crowned with the hope of the ultimate achievement of all our good ends.

Kant says to escape all those dogmas, interpretation is necessary to make sense of religious scriptures, and that existing religious practices and religious scriptures do not always interpret correctly. Kant says that clever people of considerable moral fortitude should be responsible for interpreting a given religious tradition. Individuals whose primary loyalty is to reason are in the best position to ensure that religious practices improve people's morals. Kant thinks that such interpreters are needed because some aspects of religious doctrine actually run contrary to moral principles. (Read Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling to see the opposing point of view).

Kant reinterprets Christianity, He starts by the role of Jesus Christ, and humanity's proper relationship to Jesus, Jesus is not the Son of God made flesh, who dies for the sins of all of humankind but is simply the idea of a perfect moral being. A morally perfect being must be capable of falling from grace but able to resist the fall. According to Kant, we can wash out evil by modeling ourselves on this perfect moral being. Jesus should be merely an example that can inspire us to engage in moral behavior. Then he moves to the idea of original sin. Kant rejects that because of Adam and Eve, all humans are born sinful. He thinks the biblical story of Adam and Eve should be understood allegorically, not literally. Kant says we fall from grace not because of Adam and Eve, but because of our own bad behavior. We are not guilty for the sins of Adam and Eve, but guilty for using our free will to choose immoral desires and thoughts. Finally he come to the idea of salvation through faith in Jesus, his main complaint is that it isn't enough to absolve human beings of their sins.

There is absolutely no salvation for human beings except in the innermost adoption of genuine moral principles in their disposition 

From our human perspective, religion—both revealed and natural—should be regarded as "the recognition of all duties as divine commands".Kant makes a particularly provocative claim, that, ultimately, there is only one (true) religion, "the religion of morality", while there can be various "historical faiths" promoting it.  From this perspective, Judaism, Islam, and the various denominations of Christianity are all legitimate faiths, to be located in Kant’s metaphorical outer circle, including the true religion of morality, his metaphorical inner circle.  However, some faiths can be relatively more adequate expressions of the religion of moral reason than others.

Hence to start off with this knowledge, and to let the historical faith which harmonizes with it follow, is not only an act of prudence; it is also our duty to make such knowledge the supreme condition under which alone we can hope to become participants in whatever salvation a religious faith may promise. So true is this that only as warranted by the interpretation which pure religious faith gives to the historical can we hold the latter to be universally binding or are we entitled to allow its validity (for it does contain universally valid teaching); meanwhile the moral believer is ever open to historical faith so far as he finds it furthering the vitality of his pure religious disposition. Only thus does historical faith possess a pure moral worth, because here it is free and not coerced through any threat (for then it can never be honest).

Kant likes the fact that Christianity's message can be communicated to human beings. Furthermore, humans can evaluate Christianity's moral teachings without any special training. They do not need scholarly ability, special insight, or divine election to understand Christianity. Christianity is both a natural and a revealed religion, and Kant shows how the gospel of Matthew expresses Kantian ethics, with Jesus as its wise moral teacher. According to Kant, a comparison between Judaism and Christianity shows how revolutionary the Christian faith can be. In his view, Judaism has restricted its membership to an exclusive group of people, thereby thwarting any possibility of developing into a universal church whose laws would apply to all people. Also Judaism's core principles are more akin to public laws than to internal moral principles.

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness. 

For Kant, faith is useless unless individuals devote themselves to their own moral improvement. He believes that the innate good in people will cause them to turn away from ecclesiastical faith and religious practices, and toward moral religion. He does not claim that people will convert to moral religion because it is simpler than traditional religions. In fact, moral religion is more demanding than ecclesiastical faith, for it requires every individual to take full responsibility for becoming a better person. In the end, if we do not discover this truth, we are responsible, for we did not search our own hearts long enough to uncover it.

There exists meanwhile a practical knowledge which, while resting solely upon reason and requiring no historical doctrine, lies as close to every man, even the most simple, as though it were engraved upon his heart–a law, which we need but name to find ourselves at once in agreement with everyone else regarding its authority, and which carries with it in everyone’s consciousness unconditioned binding force, to wit, the law of morality. What is more, this knowledge either leads, alone and of itself, to belief in God, or at least determines the concept of Him as that of a moral Legislator; hence it guides us to a pure religious faith which not only can be comprehended by every man but also is in the highest degree worthy of respect. 

Locke defines the state of nature as:

To properly understand political power and trace its origins, we must consider the state that all people are in naturally. That is a state of perfect freedom of acting and disposing of their own possessions and persons as they think fit within the bounds of the law of nature. People in this state do not have to ask permission to act or depend on the will of others to arrange matters on their behalf. The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal and no one has more than another. It is evident that all human beings – as creatures belonging to the same species and rank and born indiscriminately with all the same natural advantages and faculties – are equal amongst themselves. They have no relationship of subordination or subjection unless God (the lord and master of them all) had clearly set one person above another and conferred on him an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

In contrast to Hobbes, who posited the state of nature as a hypothetical possibility, Locke takes great pains to show that such a state did indeed exist. Actually, it still exists in the area of international relations where there is not and is never likely to be any legitimate overarching government (i.e., one directly chosen by all the people subject to it). Whereas Hobbes stresses the disadvantages of the state of nature, Locke points to its good points. It is free.

The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that... no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.

Lacking any commonly recognised, impartial judge, there is no way to correct these misapplications or to effectively restrain those who violate the law of nature. The law of nature is therefore ill enforced in the state of nature.

If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others: for all being kings as much as he, every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: and it is not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.

It is to avoid the state of war that often occurs in the state of nature, and to protect their private property that men enter into civil or political society, i.e., state of society. By "property" he means "life, liberty, and estate." By saying that political society was established for the better protection of property, he claims that it serves the private (and non-political) interests of its constituent members.

For this account to work, individuals must possess some property outside of society, i.e., in the state of nature: the state cannot be the sole origin of property, declaring what belongs to whom. If the purpose of government is the protection of property, the latter must exist independently of the former. He begins by asserting that each individual, at a minimum, "owns" himself; this is a corollary of each individual's being free and equal in the state of nature. As a result, each must also own his own labour: to deny him his labour would be to make him a slave. Gold does not rot. Neither does silver, or any other precious metal or gem. They are, moreover, useless, their aesthetic value not entering into the equation. One can heap up as much of them as one wishes, or take them in trade for food. By the tacit consent of mankind, they become a form of money (one accepts gold in exchange for apples with the understanding that someone else will accept that gold in exchange for wheat). One can therefore avoid the spoilage limitation by selling all that one has amassed before it rots; the limits on acquisition thus disappear. In this way, Locke argues that a full economic system could, in principle, exist within the state of nature. Property could therefore predate the existence of government, and thus society can be dedicated to the protection of property.

Locke did not demand a republic. Rather, Locke felt that a legitimate contract could easily exist between citizens and a monarchy, an oligarchy or some mixed form. Locke uses the term Common-wealth to mean "not a democracy, or any form of government, but any independent community".

whatever form the Common-wealth is under, the Ruling Power ought to govern by declared and received laws, and not by extemporary dictates and undetermined resolutions."

 Furthermore, governments are charged by the consent of the individual.

the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves, or their representatives chosen by them

Locke declared that under natural law, all people have the right to life, liberty, and estate; under the social contract, the people could instigate a revolution against the government when it acted against the interests of citizens, to replace the government with one that served the interests of citizens. In some cases, Locke deemed revolution an obligation. The right of revolution thus essentially acted as a safeguard against tyranny.

whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume their original Liberty.

In his Meno, Plato raises the epistemological question of how is it that humans have certain ideas which are not conclusively derivable from their environments? Plato argued that, as the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and is thus immortal. He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death, when it would return to the world of Forms. Since the soul does not exist in time and space, as the body does, it can access universal truths.

Descartes 

Descartes and other philosophers of rationalism stressed the primacy of innate ideas placed in the human mind by God at birth. Besides mathematical principles and simple ideas, the main innate idea for Descartes was the idea of God, an idea that could not be derived from experience. Although there is obvious variation among individual human beings due to cultural, linguistic, and era-specific influences, innate ideas are thus said to belong to a more fundamental level of human cognition because they are common to everyone (Universal Assent). Descartes posited relation between mind and body is called Cartesian dualism. He held that mind was distinct from matter, but could influence matter. The mind exerted control over the brain via the pineal gland and that the soul was the place in which all our thoughts are formed.

Locke

British Empiricists, were critical of this theory and denied the existence of any innate ideas, arguing that all human knowledge was founded on experience, rather than a priori reasoning. Locke, who proposed the notion of tabula rasa (Mind as a blank slate) saw no evidence of pre-existing ideas in the mind. Locke further objected that accepting the notion of innate ideas would open the door to dogmatic assertions, as it implied that the mind was born somewhat predetermined to think based on these ideas. Accepting the existence of innate ideas could thus lead to abuse in the search for truth as well as in human affairs. Locke goes on to suggest that in fact there is no universal assent. Even a phrase such as, "What is, is," is not universally assented to; infants and severely handicapped adults do not generally acknowledge this truism. Locke also attacks the notion that an innate idea can be imprinted on the mind without the owner realizing it. Locke would not accept the idea that someone can be aware of what he or she does not know.

Leibniz 

Leibniz acknowledged the need for a middle road between the two extremes, for him, rational ideas were virtually in the mind at birth and needed to be activated by experience, a position that builds upon Aristotle’s ideas. From this perspective, the pre-existence of a mental design is compatible with the essential need for experience. Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding (1695–1705, published in 1765) was a response to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Leibniz suggested that people are born with certain innate ideas. The rich sense of “ self ” structured as containing the fundamental notions (innate ideas) of "being, substance, unity, possibility, change, action, and so on". They are the ingredients of our self (hence “ we are innate to ourselves ” in this sense, too). The most identifiable of these being mathematical truisms. The idea that 1 + 1 = 2 is evident to people without the necessity for empirical evidence. Leibniz argues that empiricism can only show that concepts are true in the present; if one sees one stick and then another, he knows that in that instance, and in that instance only, one and another equals two. If, however, people wish to suggest that one and another will always equal two, they require an innate idea, as they are talking about things they have not yet witnessed (No experinece yet). Leibniz called this innate ideas, "necessary truths." Another example of such may be the phrase, "what is, is," or "it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be." Leibniz argues that such truisms are universally assented to (acknowledged by all to be true) and, this being the case, it must be due to their status as innate ideas. Often there are ideas that are acknowledged as necessarily true, but are not universally assented to. Leibniz would suggest that this is simply because the person in question has not become aware of the innate idea, not because he or she does not possess it. Leibniz argues that empirical evidence can serve to bring to the surface certain principles that are already innately embedded in the mind. This is rather like needing to hear only the first few notes of a song in order to recall the rest of the melody.

Kant 

Kant introduecd two distinctions, the first was Analytic and Synthetic propositions:

1. Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept, we require only analysis of the subject itself to understand this proposition (True by virtue of Meaning and if true then it is self evident) - "All bachelors are unmarried".
2. Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept, we require something outside of the analysis of the subject. (True by how their meaning relates to the world and if true then it tells us something new about the world) - "All bachelors are happy"

Kant contrasts this distinction with another one which is a priori and a posteriori propositions:

1. A priori proposition: a proposition whose justification does not rely upon experience. Therefore, it is logically necessary.
2. A posteriori proposition: a proposition whose justification does rely upon experience. Therefore, it is logically contingent.

Of course, as Kant would grant, experience is required to understand the concepts "bachelor," "unmarried," "7", "+" and so forth. However, the a priori/a posteriori distinction as employed here by Kant refers not to the origins of the concepts but to the justification of the propositions. Once we have the concepts, experience is no longer necessary. The analytic/synthetic distinction and the a priori/a posteriori distinction together yield four types of propositions:

1. Analytic a priori
2. Synthetic a priori
3. Analytic a posteriori
4. Synthetic a posteriori

We can know analytic propositions by consulting our concepts in order to determine that they are true. Analysis of the subjects by our kowledge of concepts through previous experience. Kant says the Analytic a posteriori propositions is self-contradictory, so there are no analytic a posteriori propositions. So all analytic propositions are a priori. We can know Synthetic a posteriori by experience of the world. That leaves only the question of how knowledge of synthetic a priori propositions is possible. How understanding a proposition requires something outside of the analysis of the subject yet its justification doesn't rely upon experience.

This question is exceedingly important, Kant maintains, because all important metaphysical knowledge is of synthetic a priori propositions. If it is impossible to determine which synthetic a priori propositions are true, he argues, then metaphysics as a discipline is impossible. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists and rationalists assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known. Hume's skepticism rested on that basic principles such as causality cannot be derived from sense experience only: experience shows only that one event regularly succeeds another, not that it is caused by it.  Kant's goal was to find some way to derive cause and effect without relying on empirical knowledge. Kant rejects analytical methods for this, arguing that analytic reasoning cannot tell us anything that is not already self-evident. Instead, Kant argued that it would be necessary to use synthetic reasoning. It can't be Synthetic a posteriori because this is the core of Hume scepticsm is that he found out there is no justification for causality in experienece. So it must be Synthetic a priori. However, this posed a new problem — how is it possible to have synthetic knowledge that is not based on empirical observation — that is, how are synthetic a priori truths possible?

Kant uses the classical example of 7 + 5 = 12. No amount of analysis will find 12 in either 7 or 5. The concept "12" is not contained within the concept "5," or the concept "7," or the concept "+." And the concept "straight line" is not contained within the concept "the shortest distance between two points". (So it is a synthetic) but once we have grasped the concepts of addition, subtraction or the functions of basic arithmetic which govern the relation, the same principle applies to other numerals (for example 4+6 = 10) and it tells us something new about the world without having experience with 4, 6 or 10. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. And so Kant proves a proposition can be synthetic and known a priori. But not all synthetic propositions are a priori, for example "All bachelors are happy" has no concepts of rules to govern the relation so it always requires experience.

Kant concluded that the mind operates through a priori categories present independently from experience. However, for him, these categories are not  innate ideas but they are merely the way the human mind necessarily processes information (for example, the concepts of substance, causality, etc.). First they would remain entirely empty unless filled with experience gathered from the senses. They give no information whatsoever to what reality really is (the things-in-themselves), but merely indicate how one understands it with a limited, human understanding. (Condition for understanding).
Thus causality when thought as a synthetic priori, it is a concept governing the events happening in sequence which we can apply at other sequences of events to tell something new about the world each time, yet they are a priori whose justification does not rely upon experience. thus Causality doesn't require experience.

Kant created a revolutionary synthesis between rationalism and empiricism that shed an entirely new light on the question of innate ideas.

1. From rationalism, he draws the idea that pure reason is capable of significant knowledge but argues that pure reason is flawed when it goes beyond its limits and claims to know those things that are necessarily beyond the realm of all possible experience: the existence of God, free will, and the immortality of the human soul. Kant referred to these objects as "The Thing in Itself" and goes on to argue that their status as objects beyond all possible experience by definition means we cannot know them and in the Critique of Pure Reason famously showed how all arguments for the existence of God are flawed, that the received views about the simplicity and immortality of the soul were problematic, and that our freedom could never be cognized. Yet, all is not lost, for Kant believed that the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will must be considered as postulates of morality and not objects of knowledge. It follows that problems which according to Kant are beyond experience cannot even be raised by pure reason.
2. Kant noted the peculiarity of Locke's suggesting that, after deriving all concepts from experience and reflection on experience, he could demonstrate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, matters lying well beyond all experience. So to the empiricist he argued that while it is correct that experience is fundamentally necessary for human knowledge, reason is necessary for processing that experience into coherent thought. He therefore concludes that both reason and experience are necessary for human knowledge. In the same way, Kant also argued that it was wrong to regard thought as mere analysis. In Kant's views, a priori concepts do exist, but if they are to lead to the amplification of knowledge, they must be brought into relation with empirical data, without the concepts, intuitions are nondescript; without the intuitions, concepts are meaningless."

Frege's notion of analyticity included the idea of substitution of synonymous terms. "All bachelors are unmarried" can be expanded out with the formal definition of bachelor as "unmarried man" to form "All unmarried men are unmarried," which is recognizable as tautologous and therefore analytic from its logical form: any statement of the form "All X that are (F and G) are F". This expanded idea of analyticity was able to show that all Kant's examples of arithmetical and geometrical truths are analytical a priori truths and not synthetic a priori truths. Carnap said in his autobiography that:

Since empiricism had always asserted that all knowledge is based on experience, this assertion had to include knowledge in mathematics. On the other hand, we believed that with respect to this problem the rationalists had been right in rejecting the old empiricist view that the truth of "2+2=4" is contingent on the observation of facts, a view that would lead to the unacceptable consequence that an arithmetical statement might possibly be refuted tomorrow by new experiences. Our solution, based upon Wittgenstein's conception, consisted in asserting the thesis of empiricism only for factual truth. By contrast, the truths of logic and mathematics are not in need of confirmation by observations, because they do not state anything about the world of facts, they hold for any possible combination of facts.

Quine

A proposition that is necessarily true is one whose negation is self-contradictory (thus, it is said to be true in every possible world). By contrast, a proposition that is contingently true is one whose negation is not self-contradictory (thus, it is said that it is not true in every possible world). As Jason Baehr states, it seems plausible that all necessary propositions are known a priori - and this position stems from Positivism - because "Sense experience can tell us only about the actual world and hence about what is the case; it can say nothing about what must or must not be the case".

In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", Quine begins by making a distinction between two different classes of analytic statements.

1. The first one is called logically true and has the form: No unmarried man is married A sentence with that form is true independent of the interpretation of "man" and "married", so long as the logical particles "no", "un-" and "is" have their ordinary English meaning.
2. The statements in the second class have the form: No bachelor is married.A statement with this form can be turned into a statement with form (1) by changing synonyms with synonyms, in this case "bachelor" with "unmarried man". The notion of the second form of analyticity leans on the notion of synonymy, which Quine believes is in as much need of clarification as analyticity.

So for the sentence "All and only all bachelors are unmarried men" to be analytic, the terms 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' should be synonymous (analyticity is explained by synonymity). And for two words to be cognitively synonymous, they must be interchangeable in every possible instance of these words, and the referents are necessarily identical. (synonymity is explaind by necessaity)

So, from the above example, it can be seen that in order for us to distinguish between analytic and synthetic we must appeal to synonymy; at the same time, we should also understand synonymy with interchangeability. However, such a condition to understand synonymy is not enough so we not only argue that the terms should be interchangeable, but necessarily so. And to explain this logical necessity we must appeal to analyticity once again, which means we have gotten full circle. Given any one term in the family-analyticity, synonymy, necessity-we could define the others. But since we can't explain any of the terms except by using the others, and since Quine thinks that all are equally in need of explanation, he concludes that the analytic/synthetic distinction, along with the necessary/contingent and the apriori/aposteriori distinctions, must be rejected.

But Quine's argument is effective only against positions that accept two of the positivists' fundamental theses:

Tl . All necessary (and all apriori ) truths are analytic.

T2 . Analyticity is needed to explain and legitimate necessity so a prioricity.

It is only when these two theses are accepted that Quine's argument holds. It is not a problem that the notion of necessity is presupposed by the notion of analyticity if necessity can be explained without analyticity. Both theses were accepted by most philosophers when Quine published Two Dogmas. Today however, both statements are to be antiquated.

1. For T1, although some truths are both necessary and apriori, there are many examples of each that are not examples of the other. As for analyticity, opinions vary; the analytic truths are a subset of the truths that are both necessary and apriori.
2. For T2, necessity and aprioricity are, respectively, metaphysical and epistemological notions that can stand on their own.

Kripke 

Kripke argued identity is not a relation that holds between names. It is a relation that holds between an object and itself. So when someone accurately claims that two names refer to the same object, the claim is necessarily true, even though it may be known a posteriori (can be known only through empirical investigation). For example, the proposition that water is H2O (if it is true). According to Kripke, this statement is necessarily true (since water and H2O are the same thing, they are identical in every possible world, and truths of identity are logically necessary) and a posteriori (since it is known only through empirical investigation). Also it is analytic because analysis of H20 says that it is water. Kripke's controversial analysis of naming as contingent and a priori would best fit into Kant's epistemological framework by calling it "analytic a posteriori".

Another example is the sentence, "the evening star" (Hesperus) is "the morning star" (Phosphorus). Here is an overview of the argument:
(P1) Hesperus is a proper name that refers to the evening star. Phosphorus is also a proper name and it refers to the morning star. They pick out the same thing in all possible worlds in which the thing exists.
(P2) Hesperus is Phosphorus. They are, in reality, two different names that refer to the same thing: Venus. This is necessarily true.
(P3) The fact that Hesperus is Phosphorus was discovered by empirical observation. So it is a posteriori knowledge.
(P4) Therefore, it is possible for knowledge obtained a posteriori to be necessary.
(P5) It is analytic because the predicate concept is contained in its subject concept.

With the example “Hesperus is Phosphorus”, Kripke seems to have provided a successful counter-example to the Kantian claims:
(a) P is a priori iff P is necessary.
(b) P is a posteriori iff P is contingent.

And also he provided a counter example to Quine's claim that the terms analyticity, synonymy, necessity are circularaly definable, so have to be rejected. Because now A prioricity, analyticity, and necessity have since been more clearly separated from each other. Although some truths are both necessary and apriori, there are many examples of each that are not examples of the other. Thus, the relationship between aprioricity, necessity, and analyticity is not easy to discern. the a priori/a posteriori distinction is epistemological, the analytic/synthetic distinction is linguistic, and the necessary/contingent distinction is metaphysical.

Hilary Putnam comments on the significance of Kripke’s counter-examples, ”Since Kant there has been a big split between philosophers who thought that all necessary truths were analytic and philosophers who thought that some necessary truths were synthetic a priori. But none of these philosophers thought that a (metaphysically) necessary truth could fail to be a priori”.

Chomsky

Noam Chomsky has taken this problem as a philosophical framework for the scientific inquiry into innatism. His linguistic theory attempts to explain in cognitive terms how one can develop knowledge of systems which are too rich and complex to be derived from the environment. One such example is human linguistic faculty. Human linguistic systems contain a systemic complexity which could not be empirically derived. The environment is too variable and indeterminate, according to Chomsky, to explain the extraordinary ability to learn complex concepts possessed by very young children. It follows that humans must be born with a universal innate grammar, which is determinate and has a highly organized directive component, and enables the language learner to ascertain and categorize language heard into a system. Noam Chomsky cites as evidence for this theory the apparent invariability of human languages at a fundamental level.

Parallels can then be drawn, on a purely speculative level, between the moral faculties and language, as has been done by sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker The relative consistency of fundamental notions of morality across cultures seems to produce convincing evidence for these theories. In psychology, notions of archetypes such as those developed by Carl Gustav Jung, suggest determinate identity perceptions.