Editing Reductionism (section)

=== Free will ===
{{main|Free will}}
Philosophers of the [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] worked to insulate human [[free will]] from reductionism. [[Descartes]] separated the material world of mechanical necessity from the world of mental free will. German philosophers introduced the concept of the "[[Noumenon|noumenal]]" realm that is not governed by the deterministic laws of "[[Phenomena (philosophy)|phenomenal]]" nature, where every event is completely determined by chains of causality.<ref>{{Citation|last=Guyer|first=Paul|title=18th Century German Aesthetics|date=2020|url=https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/|encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy|editor-last=Zalta|editor-first=Edward N.|access-date=2023-03-16|edition=Fall 2020|publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University}}</ref> The most influential formulation was by [[Immanuel Kant]], who distinguished between the causal deterministic framework the mind imposes on the world—the phenomenal realm—and the world as it exists for itself, the noumenal realm, which, as he believed, included free will. To insulate theology from reductionism, 19th century post-Enlightenment German theologians, especially [[Friedrich Schleiermacher]] and [[Albrecht Ritschl]], used the [[Romanticism|Romantic]] method of basing religion on the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion.<ref>Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, eds. ''The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science'' (2006) p. 161</ref>