THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIALECTIC: THE CRITIQUE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY - KANT

In the fourth antinomy Kant considers arguments for and against the existence of a necessary being. He there leaves open the question whether a necessary being is to be found in the world itself, or outside the world as its cause. It is in the chapter on the Ideal of Pure Reason that he turns to consider the concept of God, the object of transcendental theology.    According to Kant all arguments to establish the existence of God must fall into one of three classes. There are ontological arguments, which take their start from the a priori concept of a supreme being; there are cosmological arguments, which derive from the nature of the empirical world in general; and there are physico-theological proofs, which start from particular natural phenomena.  In Kant's rational theology a very special role is assigned to the ontological argument. He claims that the cosmological argument is only the ontological argument in disguise, and he argues that the physico-theological argument by itself will lead us only to a designer, not to a genuine creator of the universe. Hence the importance of his influential critique of the ontological argument.