At one point in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant says:
So it is not surprising that an Apostle represents this invisible enemy, who is known only through his operations upon us and who destroys basic principles, as being outside us and, indeed, as an evil spirit: “We wrestle not against flesh and blood (the natural inclinations) but against principalities and powers – against evil spirits.”
Now, as far as the postulates of practical reason go, the postulate of God is introduced as a positive solution to a problem, not as the figuration of an ultimate enemy. Still, I find it peculiar that in the Groundwork, Kant says:
... it [the abstract-perfectionist view] is nevertheless preferable to the theological view, first, because we have no intuition of the divine perfection and can only deduce it from our own conceptions, the most important of which is that of morality, and our explanation would thus be involved in a gross circle; and, in the next place, if we avoid this, the only notion of the Divine will remaining to us is a conception made up of the attributes of desire of glory and dominion, combined with the awful conceptions of might and vengeance, and any system of morals erected on this foundation would be directly opposed to morality. [emphasis added]
He's just about as harsh with respect to one of the empiricist viewpoints, saying something about destroying the sublimity of the moral law and extinguishing the distinction between right and wrong; but he also says (again in the Religion) that the Stoics were amiss to identify their moral enemy in empirical inclinations. So either Kant had an equally harsh opinion of one version of empirical and one version of abstract ethics, or he ultimately portrayed the divine-power concept as the worst possible in terms of the thinking in play (the four families of deficient moral theories, according to Kant's scheme, take principles of understanding, under their fourfold heading, and not reason for their axioms, which understanding is under the influence of passive physical determination too much to represent the standard of autonomy; ergo, the corrupted image of God corresponds to one of the modal postulates of empirical understanding, viz. the question of necessity, and then modulo his talk of the transcendental ideal does this corruption become an image of absolute necessity).
Dystheism has it that God is Itself evil enough to merit the perspective in relation thereto; maltheism seems to be that God is hated irrespective of whether It is evil (one might hate God for whatever reason, or on account of Its evil). I don't think that Kant was actually either a dystheist or a maltheist and, precisely, his concept of God is not of a being that can do wrong even when wrongfulness is defined by a relatively independent standard. Still, there seem to be potential dystheistic or maltheistic moments in Kant's writings. Since his rebuttals of prominent arguments for God's existence are sometimes portrayed in an antitheistic manner, is there any evidence that Kant considered the possibility of an evil deity as anything more than an allegorical reference as in the Religion? Presumably, Kant did not mean to say that the postulate of God was logically necessary, as in denying the postulate would be (self-)contradictory, but it is a synthetic(al) claim; so if, "God is the solution to the problem of the third postulate," can be denied "without contradiction," does that mean that, "God is the anti-solution to that problem," can be accepted without contradiction instead?
EDIT: ambient countargument: according to Kant, intellectual intuition is the meaning of divine intuition. Intellectual intuition of a fact could not be mistaken about that fact, could not be diverted by a wrongheaded confluence of empirical and discursive consciousness. If a truly divine being could not err about any facts, how could it err about moral facts (such as they are)? But so then Kant even says that "ought" means "would," the conditional sense attaching to the image of purely rational beings, including his description of God as "holiness as substance." Transcendental freedom is like intellectual intuition in terms of being spontaneous/proactive, and so in e.g. the Groundwork Kant identifies the freedom of the intellect with a quasi-proof of freedom of the will. It is true, for all that, that in the Religion he says that it is incomprehensible, how even mortal agents fell into sin "outside of time," but how can he countenance talk of evil spirits even as hypothetical allegories, if pure spirits would know things by intellectual intuition and act by a will not subject to the senses-understanding skewpoint that he mentions in his little discourse about how "the senses do not err because they do not judge at all"?
