SECTION VI. The Impossibility of the Physico-Theological Proof[1627]

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF THE PHYSICO-THEOLOGICAL PROOF

=Statement.=--The teleological proof starts from our definite knowledge of the order and constitution of the sensible world. The actual world presents such immeasurable order, variety, fitness, and beauty, that we are led to believe that here at least is sufficient proof of the existence of God. Kant’s attitude towards this argument is at once extremely critical and extremely sympathetic. Though he represents it as the oldest, the clearest, and the most convincing, he is none the less prepared to show that it contains every one of the fallacies involved in the other two proofs, as well as some false assumptions peculiar to itself. It possesses overpowering persuasive force, not because of any inherent logical cogency, but because it so successfully appeals to feeling as to silence the intellect. It would, Kant declares, be not only comfortless, but utterly vain to attempt to diminish its influence.

”[The mind is] aroused from the indecision of all melancholy reflection, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature and the majesty of the universe....”

Meantime, however, we are concerned with its merely logical force. We have to decide whether, as theoretical proof, it can claim assent on its own merits, requiring no favour, and no help from any other quarter. On the basis of empirical facts the argument makes the following assertions. (1) There are everywhere in the world clear indications of adaptation to a definite end. (2) As this adaptation cannot be due to the working of blind, mechanical laws, and accordingly cannot be explained as originating in things themselves, it must have been imposed upon them from without; and there must therefore exist, apart from the sensible world, an intelligent Being who has arranged it according to ideas antecedently formed. (3) As there is unity in the reciprocal relations of the parts of the universe as portions of a single edifice, and as the universe is infinite in extent and inexhaustible in variety, its intelligent cause must be single, all-powerful, all-wise, i.e. God.

Now, even granting for the sake of argument the admissibility of these assertions, they enable us to infer only an intelligent author of the purposive form of nature, not of its matter, only an architect who is very much hampered by the inadaptability of the material in which he has to work, not a Creator to whose will everything is due. To prove the contingency of matter itself, we should have to establish the truth of the cosmological proof.

But the assumptions implied even in the demonstration that God exists as a formative power, are by no means beyond dispute. Why may not nature be regarded as giving form to itself by its blindly working forces? Can it really be proved that nature is a work of art that demands an artificer as certainly as does a house, or a ship, or a clock? Kant’s argument is at this point extremely brief, and I shall so far digress from the statement of it, which he here gives, as to supplement it from his other writings. Even so-called dead matter is not merely inert. By its inherent powers of gravity and chemical attraction it spontaneously gives rise to the most wonderful forms. When Clarke and Voltaire, in their first enthusiasm over Newton’s great discovery, asserted that the planetary system must have been divinely created, each planet being launched in the tangent of its orbit by the finger of God, just as a wheel must be fixed into its place by the hand of the mechanician, they under-estimated the organising power of blind inanimate nature. As Kant argued in his early treatise, the planetary system can quite well have arisen, and, as it would seem, actually has come into existence, through the action of blindly working laws. The mechanical principles which account for its present maintenance will also account for its origin and development. But it is when we turn to animate nature, which is the chief source from which arguments for design are derived, that the insufficiency of the teleological argument becomes most manifest. As Kant points out in the Critique of Judgment, the differentia distinguishing the living from the lifeless, is not so much that it is organised as that it is self-organising. When, therefore, we treat an organism as an analogon of art we completely misrepresent its essential nature. In regarding it as put together by an external agent we are ignoring its internal self-developing power. As Hume had previously maintained in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, the facts of the organic world not only agree with the facts of the inorganic world in not supporting the argument of the teleological proof, but are in direct conflict with it.

But to return to Kant’s immediate statement of the argument. Setting the above objection aside, and granting for the present that nature may be regarded as the outcome of an external artificer, we can argue only to a cause adequate to its production, i.e. to an extraordinarily wise and wonderfully powerful Being. Even if we ignore the existence of evil and defect in nature, the step from great power to omnipotence, and from great wisdom to omniscience, is one that can never be justified on empirical grounds. Since the Ideas of Reason, and above all the completely determined, individual Ideal of Reason, transcend experience, experience can never justify us in inferring their reality. The teleological argument can, indeed, only lead us to the point of admiring the greatness, wisdom, and power of the author of the world. In proceeding further it abandons experience altogether, and reasons, not from particular kinds and excellencies of natural design, but from the contingency of all such adaptation to the existence of a necessary Being, exactly in the manner of the cosmological argument. And it ends by assuming, in agreement with the ontological proof, that the only possible necessary Being is the Ideal of Reason. Thus after committing a number of fallacies on its own account, the teleological argument itself endorses all those that are involved in the more a priori proofs. The teleological argument rests on the cosmological, and the cosmological on the ontological, which therefore would be the only proof possible, were the proof of a completely transcendent proposition ever possible at all. The strange fact that the convincing force of the arguments thus varies inversely with their validity shows, Kant maintains, that we are correct in concluding that they do not really depend upon their logical cogency, and merely express, in abstract terms, beliefs deep-rooted in the human spirit.