In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant separates ‘the highest good’ into two elements: one a demand and the other a promise. Kant tells us that ‘the concept of the highest … can mean either the supreme (supremum) or the complete (consummatum)’.Footnote ¹ The ‘supreme principle’ is the bindingness of the moral law as such, the ‘condition which is itself unconditioned … not subordinate to any other (originarium)’.Footnote ² Here we all know where we are with Kant: our duty is to obey categorical imperatives, those universalizable laws of self-legislating practical reason. More tricky is Kant's insistence that this supreme condition is ‘not yet … the whole and complete good … for this, happiness is also required’.Footnote ³ And this happiness cannot be Stoic self-content, merely present in ‘partial eyes’, but must even be present ‘in the judgment of the impartial reason’.Footnote ⁴ Such a belief in completion is a ‘demand’ of practical reason just because ‘to need happiness, to be also worthy of it, and yet not to participate in it cannot be consistent with the perfect volition of a rational being that would at the same time have all power’.Footnote ⁵

So we are led to ask the question: what is the relationship between the bindingness of the supreme condition, the purity of which binds us whatever the consequences, and the ‘subjectively necessary’ hope for completion and happiness? There are certain parameters to any interpretation that are non-negotiable. Kant is clear that the relationship cannot be one about which we enjoy certain knowledge. If we knew that following the moral law would lead to happiness, moral purity would be compromised, as we would never be able to follow the moral law for its own sake alone. So Kant reflects that ‘our faith is not knowledge, and thank heaven it is not!’.Footnote ⁶ ‘All morality would break down’ if ‘we could attain to knowledge of God's existence through our experience or in some other way’, as then ‘in his every action the human being would represent God to himself as a rewarder or avenger’.Footnote ⁷ Our ‘hopes for reward and fear of punishment’ would entirely take over, such that ‘the human being would be virtuous from sensible impulses.’Footnote ⁸

On the other extreme, we cannot faithfully interpret Kant by making the theological hope for completion and happiness irrelevant to the moral law. An attractive interpretative option for some contemporary commentators,Footnote ⁹ who are disturbed both by the threat to moral purity and the metaphysical extravagance involved. But the somehow necessary relationship between the moral law and hope is such a stubborn and pervasive feature of Kant's moral philosophy, that unless we are explicitly reconstructing his thought, it must be treated somehow.

There then remain, I would suggest, four interpretative options. First of all, that the obligatory quality of morality depends upon religious hope. Secondly, that the hope is needed to provide motivation, in that we seek the future happiness that being moral brings. Thirdly, that the hope is necessary to provide motivation, but not in terms of being an incentive. We are not moral because we are seeking future happiness. This would threaten moral purity. Rather, happiness is the consequence that ought to follow from being moral, such that if we did not believe in this happiness, our motivation would be damaged. The fourth approach, which I argue for here, is that the hope for happiness is independently and irreducibly important for Kant, as one joint condition for a fully functioning morality, along with moral obligation and motivation. On this interpretation, the hope for happiness, or its lack, has important implications for our motivation; but the importance of the hope is not derived entirely from a need to provide such rational motivation. I argue that such a position only looks puzzling if one is unfamiliar with the scholastic theological tradition from which the concept of the summum bonum is derived. Only interpretations three and four are at all plausible, if we are looking to cover the full stretch of Kant's mature thought. Nonetheless, it is worth briefly articulating the first two options. In this way, we hope to build up our sense of what the interpretation must be, through our certainty of what it definitely cannot be.

Before launching into these four interpretative options in more detail, it is incumbent upon me to explain how a new discussion of Kant's conception of the highest good can avoid re-inventing one of the wheels-within-wheels of the Silber-Beck controversy. This debate revolves around Silber'sFootnote ¹⁰ thesis that Kant's notion of the highest good adds content to the moral law, such that the maxim to promote happiness in proportion to virtue is itself a categorical imperative. Silber argues that the concept of the highest good does vital work in Kant's system, providing a material end (happiness in proportion to virtue), to what –Silber regards- would otherwise be Kant's empty formalism. Beck,Footnote ¹¹ AuxterFootnote ¹² and MurphyFootnote ¹³ disagree, and so find that the concept of the highest good is unimportant, even pernicious, introducing ‘extra-moral theological purposes’.Footnote ¹⁴ Those who insist on the redundancy of concept of the highest good tend to circle around the following set of reasons: that the highest good is never cited when Kant discusses the categorical imperative; that Kant could not (or should not) countenance a non-moral material end (happiness) when framing the moral law, and that as we cannot know the extent of another's virtue, we are simply unable to promote the highest good (the proportionality of virtue and happiness). What we are unable to do, we cannot be obliged to do.

It is not always necessary to join a debate to make a side-on contribution to it. This is the case here. What we notice about the Silber-Beck controversy is a shared presupposition held by both sides: that the concept of the highest good can only be important inasmuch as it either provides extra content to the moral law, or motivation to obey it. So where it can be shown that the highest good adds no such content or motivation, it cannot be important. Without deciding the Silber-Beck controversy one way or the other, my account suggests that there is a cogent sense -for Kant as for an older theological tradition- in which the concept of the highest good can remain important, even where its function is not that of providing the content or motivational force of the moral law. I will suggest that when reading Kant, who after all receives the concept of the summum bonum from scholastic theology, it is anachronistic only to regard something as important inasmuch as it helps to ground normativity or motivation. We might not like it, but religious hope seems to play an independently important role in Kant's moral thought. Where we excise this from Kant's thought, we should be clear that we are engaged in reconstruction, not interpretation.

The First and Second Interpretations: Hope as Necessary for Obligation and Incentive

The first interpretative option is to claim that the hope for happiness is necessary to grasp the obligatory nature of the moral law. This has no textual warrant in Kant's works, and would severely threaten the moral purity of Kant's system, where we must follow the moral law without heteronomous regard for our interests. Kant dispatches this possibility in his Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion (1783–4). He draws a distinction between ‘moral theology’ and ‘theological morality’, where the latter is the mistaken view that ‘the concept of obligation presupposes the concept of God’.Footnote ¹⁵ Kant is emphatic that ‘morality …  must not be grounded on theology, but must have in itself the principle which is to be the ground of our good conduct’. Once we have the obligation in place, Kant considers that ‘afterward it can be combined with theology’, as ‘then our morality will obtain more incentives and a morally moving power’.Footnote ¹⁶ Which takes us to the second interpretative option.

The second interpretative option is to claim that the hope in completion is necessary for our motivation as an incentive. The idea here would be that we cannot be motivated sufficiently solely by understanding the obligatory quality of the moral law, without the hope of future happiness in proportion to our virtue. Happiness does indeed seem to be fairly crudely understood as an incentive along these lines in the ‘Canon’ of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Kant writes:

This seems emphatic. Our reason ‘is united in the following three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?’.Footnote ¹⁸ And hope ‘concerns happiness … the satisfaction of all our inclinations’.Footnote ¹⁹ Without this hope in God, it would be impossible to do what is necessary, to ‘subordinate’ our ‘entire course of life … to moral maxims’.Footnote ²⁰

We also find this approach articulated in Kant's 1783/4 Lectures on Ethics. Here he separates the ‘principle of appraisal’ from ‘the ‘principle of motive’:

Religion, on this account, provides this principle of motive, for it is ‘impossible’ Kant tells us ‘to follow the Idea of morality without any hope of being happy’.Footnote ²² This leads us to see that ‘there must be one who gives force and reality and moral laws’, a being who ‘must then be holy, benevolent and just’.Footnote ²³ Religion both ‘gives weight to morality’ and ‘it should be the motive thereof’.Footnote ²⁴

Even here, where the relationship between ‘religion’ and morality is most intimately drawn, we have a fairly ‘theology-lite’ version of religion. Kant draws a distinction between religion and theology, where ‘what is universal in religion’ has a very Kantian shape: ‘to please God by inner dispositions, and to practise His holy law, and to hope by His benevolence for a supplement to our frailties’.Footnote ²⁵ We can be faithful to what is universal in religion, whilst being deeply ‘ignorant in theology’.Footnote ²⁶ Kant is clear: in ‘regard to morality’, such ignorance ‘should be considered of no account’.Footnote ²⁷ ‘Historical unbelief’, in the gospels say, when ‘not done from any evil intent, but merely to guard against error’, effects only the ‘understanding’, and not ‘the will’ and ‘of what lies in morality’.Footnote ²⁸ And remarkably the scope of ‘theological ignorance’ can even include ‘denial of God’,Footnote ²⁹ such that the ‘atheist’ Spinoza ‘did what a man of religion should do’: ‘His heart was good, and could easily have been brought to rights, he merely had too much trust in speculative argument’.Footnote ³⁰ This admittedly seems to be an exceptional -and in terms of Kant's wider discussion, slightly anomalous- case; he goes onto say that ‘atheism is a theological error’ that does (generally but not always, given Spinoza?) have ‘an influence on morality and religion, for in such a case the rules of good conduct have no motive power’.Footnote ³¹

The Third Interpretation: Hope Provides Motivation Without Incentive

As Friedrich BeiserFootnote ³² effectively shows, there is a shift in Kant's thinking around the mid 1780s, with the publication of the Groundwork and Kant's crystallization of his moral purity thesis. By 1788, when Kant publishes the second Critique he has come to regard as ‘absolutely impossible’ that ‘the desire for happiness must be the motive to maxims of virtue’, as ‘maxims that put the determining ground of the will in the desire for one's happiness are not moral at all and can be the ground of no virtue’.Footnote ³³ The outline of Kant's mature view about the relationship between morality and happiness is fairly clear, although how precisely to interpret it is less so. The mature view is that hope in happiness supplies the aim and goal of moral action (what ought to happen), but that it is not an incentive for moral action, in that we do not act morally in order to achieve future happiness. We are not moral because of the promise future happiness, but as it ought to be the case that being moral leads to happiness, we should believe in this connection.

The moral law is the ‘sole determining ground of the pure will’,Footnote ³⁴ but the ‘highest good’ is the whole ‘object of pure practical reason’, where ‘the moral law alone’ is the ‘ground for making the highest good and its realization or promotion the object’.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘highest good is the necessary highest end of a morally determined will’ –that is to say, it is what ought to happen- and so it is a ‘true object of that will’.Footnote ³⁶

The difficulty comes when we ask: what if someone does not have such a belief? If we do not have this hope in happiness, does this impact upon our motivation in such a way that it becomes impossible to follow the moral law? And on this point, Kant seems to blow both ways. In the second Critique he writes explicitly that without this hope in happiness, it will be impossible to get the motivation going to follow the moral law:

This provides our third possible interpretation of Kant's account of the relationship between the moral law and happiness: the hope for happiness, as the goal of morality, is necessary to provide motivation for morality, without being an incentive. Allen WoodFootnote ³⁸ has drawn out this aspect of Kant's thought as a key to understanding his ‘moral religion’. Drawing on the Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, Wood unpacks Kant's ad absurdum practicum argument for the existence of God. Kant tells us that ‘our moral faith is a practical postulate, through which anyone who denies it can be brought ad absurdum practicum’:

Wood does about as good a job as can be done to systematize Kant's thought here, by making his reflections on the highest good an aspect of his theory of rational motivation. The general principle that Wood finds at work is that ‘a person who acts in pursuit of an end E presupposes, implies, or commits himself to a belief that E is at least possible of attainment’:

So the person who denies the existence of God and a future life, indeed denies the ‘highest good to be possible of attainment’, such that ‘I presuppose or imply that I will not pursue the highest good, or commit myself not to pursue it’.Footnote ⁴¹ This is tantamount to a commitment not to obey the ‘moral law’: ‘therefore by denying the existence of a God and a future life, I have presupposed or implied that I will not obey the moral law, or have committed myself not to obey it’.Footnote ⁴²

It is undeniable that Kant in some very clear statements does seem to regard religion as necessary to provide an objective to morality, along just these lines. Nonetheless, there are two sorts of problem with making this the interpretative key to the whole of Kant's thought. The first set of problems are more conceptual, the second more textual. Conceptually speaking, the claim that the hope for happiness is necessary for our motivation (albeit as objective not incentive), still seems too strong for the purity of morality: that we should follow the moral law just because it obliges us universally. If it is necessary, then someone without such a religious hope would be unable to follow the moral law, such that we could not even expect them to. Indeed, if someone has no religious hope, and so is unable to follow the moral law, then on the principle that ought implies can, it would seem that we could do little to reprimand such a person. Even the obligatory quality of the moral law, in specific cases, becomes questionable. To keep the notion of ‘obligation’ up and running, it would need to be obligatory in the first place to believe in the highest good. Kant seems to admit that he is giving this impression: ‘it might almost seem as if this rational belief is here announced as itself a command, namely to assume the highest good as possible’.Footnote ⁴³ At the same time, Kant wants not to be saying this, as a ‘belief that is commanded is an absurdity’.Footnote ⁴⁴ But if I cannot be obliged to believe in the highest good, and belief in the highest good is the precondition for morality, then how can I be held accountable for failing in the latter because of my incapacity with regard to the former?

Perhaps Kant goes some way to addressing this when he draws the distinction between (i) belief that it is at least possible that there is a God (i.e. it is not impossible), and (ii) belief that the existence of God is impossible. His claim is that only the latter threatens an absurdum practicum. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant tells us that the ‘minimum of cognition’ which ‘must alone suffice for what can be made the duty of every human being’ is the belief that ‘it is possible that there is a God’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Commentators such as Beiser and WoodFootnote ⁴⁶ who are keen to systematize this third interpretation of Kant are appreciative of this qualification: that perhaps all we need for faith is to acknowledge a lack of flat contradiction with speculative reason. But it is not clear that the problem has really been dealt with. Okay: so less people will be offended by this duty, as the ‘belief is impossible’ group is something of a fringe element at the non-believers convention. But if Kant's thought is unable to account for how a single extreme non-believer can be morally obligated, then his account has still failed badly. Conceptual failure for an approach that claims universality is measured on the absolute, not in terms of how many people will be likely to be bothered about the failure, in such a way that they will indignantly draw our attention to it.

The second sort of problem with making this the key to interpreting Kant in this area, is that he seems in later works emphatically to contradict it. Consider for example a passage from Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), where Kant insists that ‘on its own morality in no way needs religion (whether objectively, as regards willing, or subjectively, as regards capability) but is rather self-sufficient by virtue of pure practical reason’:

Similarly in the Critique of Judgment Kant considers hypothetically whether someone who cannot convince himself of the ‘existence of God’ could ‘judge himself to be free from the obligations’ of the moral law. Kant's response is emphatic:

The possibility of ‘morality’, both its obligatory quality and our ability to be moved by it, are ‘independent of the cooperation of nature’, and so are ‘established a priori’ and are ‘dogmatically certain’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Belief in happiness cannot then be directly necessary for morality (its normativity or our motivation), as ‘the possibility of … happiness, is empirically conditioned, i.e., dependent on the constitution of nature (whether it corresponds with this end or not)’.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is essential for Kant that ‘morality must be so constituted that it can be thought independently of any concept of God, and obtain zealous reverence from us solely on account of its own inner dignity and excellence’.Footnote ⁵¹

It is instructive to see interpreters who gravitate towards option three dealing with these passages. A note of frustration and indignation tends to creep in. Friedman gives Kant a stern ticking off, complaining that in the passage from the third Critique quoted above, Kant's argument is ‘at best inconsistent and at worst ill-conceived and contradictory’.Footnote ⁵² Beiser complains here that in these passages ‘Kant is retreating from the absurdum practicum’ argument, on the basis of a ‘needless’ worry about atheists slipping out of their moral obligations.Footnote ⁵³ Although it is indeed frustrating to have Kant spill out from the interpretative structure one has built for him, it must be said that Kant is not wrong to worry about the diplomatic immunity of the feckless atheist. Albeit at the cost of inconsistency, Kant might be closer to the problem of the problem, than interpreters who would prefer him to only ever have offered the absurdum practicum argument.

The Fourth Interpretation: Hope as Independently and Irreducibly Important

Part of the problem is that we seem to have run out of interpretative options. We are told that the highest good is ‘essential’ to morality. On investigation, it turns out that neither our obligation or motivation depend upon the highest good. Given this, we might well ask: in what sense then is it ‘essential’? This puzzlement may reflect more our contemporary preoccupations than anything else. Much literature on moral philosophy is concerned with two issues: the grounds of normativity and the source of motivation.Footnote ⁵⁴ If religion is to be essential in some way to religion, it would follow that this must be because it is necessary for one or the other. If it is necessary in such a way, it can be derived as a condition of possibility, either for the obligation or for the motivation. We notice that although the third interpretative option does not regard the highest good as an incentive, it does cash out its importance entirely in terms of it providing -or guaranteeing by virtue of not being absent- rational motivation.

But I would suggest that there is a fourth way of conceiving the issue, which is to regard (a) understanding the obligation, (b) having the motivation and (c) nurturing the religious hope for happiness, as three jointly reciprocal demands of moral rationality, such that none directly depend upon one another, except inasmuch as all three must be in place for us to operate as fully moral beings. The crucial point here is that the hope for happiness can be an independently important requirement that impacts upon motivation, without its importance being entirely or at all reducible to the provision of motivation. Only readers not submerged in the scholastic theological tradition could find this a puzzling suggestion. Kant was entirely familiar with this tradition: indeed the summum bonum is derived from it.

In Aquinas’ universe, all created things strive towards their perfection, ‘because in all things whatsoever there is an appetite for completion, the final end to which each move marks its own perfect and fulfilling good’.Footnote ⁵⁵ In striving for their perfection they move towards the highest good, God and the happiness of beatitude:

In a way that would not embarrass Kant, Aquinas is clear that happiness is not the incentive for morality. Neither our ‘soul … as the thing itself’ nor ‘anything which qualifies it [including happiness] could be the final end of our actions’,Footnote ⁵⁷ for any such reality is in potential (lacking a potential state of actuality) and so imperfect to a degree, and so not the ultimate end. For Aquinas, only God is the ultimate end of all our actions, and delight belongs intrinsically to the contemplation of God. Just as ‘we might say fire requires heat’,Footnote ⁵⁸ so beatitude, the contemplation of the highest good, ‘cannot exist without accompanying delight’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although happiness is not the goal of our striving, our completion as rational beings will intrinsically bring about happiness, owing to God's providence over creation.

With Aquinas, contemplating the ultimate end leads intrinsically to happiness. Kant's moral thought has an identical structure: there is an ultimate end, and although that end is not itself happiness, it is accompanied intrinsically with happiness and delight. Kant envisages a logical relationship between happiness and morality not so very different from the one that Aquinas envisages. For both Aquinas and Kant, we only have a fully functioning morality (d), where one has a (a) a grasp of what the virtuous action is, along with (b) an incentive to do it, and (c) the hope that doing this will lead intrinsically and ultimately to happiness. Although a, b and c are jointly necessary for d, they can all exist to some depleted extent independently of one another. For Aquinas, delight accompanies virtue intrinsically as a consequence, but not as an incentive; although, as with Kant, Aquinas is aware that the incentive can suffer where the hope is not present. Aquinas is unlike modern and contemporary thinkers in having (as he sees it) no problem at all in accounting for our motivation towards the good: this is just the structure of creation. Nonetheless, he sanctions Kant's linking of motivation with hope when writing that ‘no one is moved toward an end that he judges impossible to attain’:

Aquinas, like Kant, can discern a link between motivation and hope, without deriving the importance of hope solely from the need to provide this motivation. Only such an interpretation can combine Kant's continued insistence on the value of hope for future happiness, alongside his statement above from the Lectures on the philosophical doctrine of religion that morality can ‘obtain zealous reverence from us’ even independently of ‘any concept of God’.Footnote ⁶¹ Because in this case, the obligation and incentive would have some degree of existence independently of the religious hope, enough to bind us, even if without that hope we would not be fully functioning moral subjects.

It might help to sharpen the distinction between the third and fourth interpretations, by articulating two different ways in which we can envisage a relationship between realities. One way is a dependent hierarchy: without a, there will be no b, and without b no c. Without the sun, there will be no heat, and without heat, no life. Take the sun out, the heat disappears, and there is no life. An alternative way of conceiving dependent relations involves reciprocal and jointly necessary dependence: such that a, b and c must be in place, if d is to be possible; although a, b and c do not depend upon one another for their own existence, or for all aspects of their successful functioning. Which is not to say that they might not depend upon one another for some aspects of their functioning. Very complex patterns of relationship, mutual reinforcement or mutual degradation, are in principle possible. So it entirely fits this analysis that the lack of hope might impact, in some cases and in some respects, on the incentive principle, although not necessarily in all (take Spinoza for instance). Certainly a, b and c depend upon one another, if we are regarding their ability to bring about d. So jointly and reciprocally the musician (a), the violin (b) and the bow (c) are necessary to bring about violin music (d), although a, b and c each exist independently of one another and of d, although independently of one another, their existence might take an impoverished form. Or, if we prefer a more mechanical example, a trap has three component parts (a, b and c), each of which exist and function to a degree independently of one another. But for the trap to succeed in catching the mouse (d), they must all co-operate in a particular way. Misfunction in b can cause misfunction in c, without c deriving its entire functionality from b.

We limit our options if we think that the relationship between the supreme condition of morality and the completion principle must be hierarchical, in such a way that we get some sort of chain. Those allergic to a whiff of formalization need not fear: what is said with arrows and brackets is repeated in English. The logical relationship being suggested is not (a→b→c), where (a) is our understanding of moral obligation, (b) motivation, and (c) the religious hope in future happiness. This corresponds to option two above: a condition of possibility of understanding our obligation is motivation, and a condition of possibility of motivation is religious hope. Neither is it (b ↔(c and a)), which corresponds to option three: where, and only where, there is obligation and religious hope, is there incentive. Rather, the relationship being envisaged is more along the lines of (d ↔ (a and b and c)), where d stands for a fully functioning morality. Where, and only where, there is an understanding of our obligation, a sense of motivation and religious hope, there is a fully functioning morality.

But still we have not captured the full nuance of Kant's account. To do so, we need to attend to the qualification built in above: a ‘fully functioning morality’. Kant is flexible enough to place moral systems that are not ‘fully functioning’ on a spectrum of better or worse: Stoicism, for instance, is better than Epicureanism, as it understands a and b, if not c in its entirety, whereas Epicureanism only has a full grasp of b and c. To capture this possibility of degrees of approximation to the ideal, we need to introduce degrees approximating to d, such as d^−1 … n, which are more or less good approximations to the full reality. These would need to be invoked when similar degrees approximating to a, b and c are also at work, or where some of these components are even absent altogether.

Similarly, more complex levels of relationship between the hope for happiness c and motivation b would need to be traced, when, for instance, there is only a degree of hope, or none at all. So there is a reactive relationship between motivation and hope, which is to say, because (and only because) a person grasps moral obligation and has religious hope, they are fully motivated. As a sub-clause in our analysis, something like (b ↔ (a and c)) turns out after all to be true, although it is no longer the whole truth, as interpretation three would claim. We see this when we consider somebody who does not believe in God, but who does not believe that God's existence is impossible. Perhaps this might lead to a slightly degraded, but not extinct, motivation along the lines of (b ⁻¹↔ (a and c ⁻¹)), which could cash out ultimately as (d ⁻¹ ↔ (a and b ⁻¹ and c ⁻¹)). In such a case the hope suffers a little, which infects the motivation, but only to a degree, as we still have in place a robust sense of obligation; in turn this means that we function morally, but not on all cylinders. A noble atheist such as Spinoza might generate a worse, but nonetheless above average result, such as (b ⁻² ↔ (a and c ⁻²)), saved because of his untouched appreciation of the obligatory quality of the moral law. Where such a grasp of obligation is absent, as Kant thinks it usually is when someone has such little hope, then c⁻² will combine with a⁻² to produce a disastrously degraded b⁻⁴. For this reason, Spinoza himself can be admirable, although the position he adopts is dangerous.Footnote ⁶²

This suggestion, that Kant's thought can be made less brittle if we admit degrees of success, approximations towards virtue and happiness, fits very well into the medieval background being suggested here. Aquinas would expect to see reality in terms of intensity and degree, rather than in terms of fairly blunt necessary and sufficient conditions that either make something ‘necessary’, ‘possible’ or ‘impossible’ without further nuance. Everything in creation approximates more or less towards the perfection that is the highest good, with God as its source. We have a dimmer switch rather than an on/off button. We know when morality is fully shining, and when it is off, but there are degrees in between. Given such an analysis, we can understand how Kant thinks that although atheism impacts upon motivation, it does not always do so fatally: just because these things come in degrees, and theism is not simply derived as a necessary condition of possibility for our motivation.