Kant concluded there exists a conflict between the physical sciences and the world of religious thought or morality. The conflict centered, according to Kant, upon the Newtonian idea of cause and effect. The physical sciences had concluded, based on empirical observation, that all that "is" and "occurs" in the physical world is a result of the relationship between cause and effect.
This posed problems, for Kant in particular and for philosophy in general, in the realm of religion and ethics. In essence, Kant reasoned that if all is a result of cause and effect in the physical realm, and if the law of cause and effect also applies to the religious or moral realm, then how could there be any degree of personal moral responsibility on the part of the individual since moral freedom is not actually a possibility within the confines of cause and effect.
Kant was not the first to deal with this tension, however. Berkeley and Leibniz, for instance, had also acknowledged and taken on the problem but their conclusions had been inadequate according to Kantian thought. They resolved the problem by down grading the pretensions of the physical sciences and had presented them as inferior to metaphysical doctrine and argument.
In a fashion, Berkeley and Leibniz had trivialized the conclusions of the physical sciences.
Kant concluded that their resolution was inadequate and, therefore, he took another approach to the problem. As Kant observed the physical sciences, he saw they functioned smoothly and progressively with participants in the process finding agreement with one another.
This was not the case for philosophy according to Kant. The philosophical scene was extremely disconcerting to Kant. It appeared to be a chaotic battlefield. In addition, he concluded that Hume's argument that questioned the legitimacy of philosophy as an intellectual understanding was also on target.
So Kant sought another solution to the problems of the tension between the physical sciences and philosophy, and the issue of freedom versus determinism in the world of morality, as well as the intellectual legitimacy of the philosophical enterprise.
