It is not surprising, and yet remarkable, therefore that the work of the philosopher Kant is too little considered in the dialectical collisions of science and religion, since his system of philosophy addressed wholesale the problematic that pervades not only the philosophies of rationalist theology, but of the empiricist tradition as well. In fact, positivism is a form of collapsed Kantianism and it is a pity that scientific methodology, mostly through reductionist downshifting, has lost his analysis of the boundaries of science. 

In essence the question is simple. The need for a 'science of metaphysics' is the first step to a 'science of history and/or evolution'. And the same issue haunts religion. But it is just this requirement that proves the stumbling block.  In the preface to his famous first critique Kant isolated the three great issues of the metaphysical tradition destined to get into trouble on the way to a 'science of metaphysics': that of divinity, followed by those of soul and free will. To these we should add the question of teleology, and note the way Kant considered teleology within the bounds of methodological naturalism, albeit ambiguously. The questions of divinity, soul, and free will demand proofs of existence, and Kant exposed the way that the road to these three proofs is beset with contradictions. They are metaphysical because they stand beyond the empirical.

The important issue here is that while we can easily agree, for example, that a 'soul' question (there are a multiplicity of such) is metaphysical, we might forget that its antithesis, the negation of the existence of soul, is equally metaphysical. The very term 'existence' is unclear in this case. The possibility that definable 'soul' has a reality but is beyond the possibility of knowledge would prove a severe check to a theory of the organism, and, unfortunately, that is just where Darwinian theory is going wrong. We can easily predict, then, that a theory such as Darwin's will become ambiguous on these three issues, even as it has banished the fourth. There can be no mystery to the Darwin debate. Each of these questions enters into the ambiguity of evolutionary theory. We see Darwinists attempting to claim that free will rises in the context, once again, of natural selection, and adaptation, a very peculiar approach, one with no evidentiary basis. We should demand the strictest evidence of this, and we rapidly discover just how difficult demonstration would prove there. We need a much broader approach. 

We notice immediately that the conflict of science and religion, notably Darwinians and fundamentalists, impinges on the first, soon followed by the second, the third creating a dilemma even in the context of secular culture. The monotheistic religions have shown an obsessive reluctance to yield ground on the issue of divinity in history, hence evolution. The Eastern religions have not yielded an inch on the question of 'soul' (although Buddhism gives the misleading appearance of rejecting the idea of ‘soul’), would grant the problematic shown by Kant, yet demonstrate methods of enquiry into issues of self. And the core concepts of modernity, its definitional liberalisms, are equally problematical in relation to the causal monism of the defining scientism of the modern era. 

The principle of freedom shows ironically the way in which secular thought is entangled in metaphysical ambiguity as much as the religionist, and this idea creates a more subtle version of the drama of theists and atheists. For the will to freedom soon shades into the hopeless quagmire of the 'will of god'.

Intelligent design The current design challenge to Darwinism offers no relief or clarification of the problems with Darwinism. Note that the design argument is perched ambiguously between the question of monotheistic divinity and some obscure polytheistic 'will to design'. The question of supernatural teleology lurks in mix. Kant and Hume produced some classic (attempted) refutations of the design argument, which is a variant of our first metaphysical barrier, the divinity proof. The design argument has the same problem as natural selection: proper verification.