ENDS AND MEANS
an intelligent being would have planned. But that is no
reason for supposing that an intelligent being did in fact
plan it. Such a relationship may equally well be the result
of natural selection working blindly to produce a state of
equilibrium between two.originally discordant and mutually
unadapted entities. Moreover, even if the evidence for
design is taken at its face value (as it was taken by Kant),
there is still no reason for supposing that the designer was
a single supreme being. Upon this point the arguments
adduced by Hume and Kant are decisive.
The ontological argument is even less convincing than the
argument from design. Ansehn was decisively refuted by
Aquinas and Descartes by Kant, In recent years, the verbal
foundations of logic have been subjected to the most search-
ing analysis, as the result of which the ontological argument
seems still less satisfactory than it did even in Kant's day.
The cosmological proof of the existence of God is based
upon the argument that if contingent beings exist there
must exist a necessary being; and that if there is an ens
necessarium it must be at the same time an ens realissimum.
In his earlier writings Kant produced a very elaborate
speculative proof of God's existence, based upon the argu-
ment that the possible presupposes the actual. Later, when
he had developed his Critical Philosophy, he rejected this
proof and sought to show that all the arguments for natural
theology, including the cosmological, were unsound. In
the course of his later refutation of the cosmological proof,
Kant has to dispose of the natural theologian's argument
that the existence of causally related events implies the
existence of a First Cause. He does this by arguing that
causality is merely a principle for ordering appearances in
the sensible world, therefore cannot legitimately be used
for transcending the world of sense. This argument has
been revived, in a less pedantic form, by Brunschvicg in his
Progris de la Conscience (ii. 778): En toute evidence, ceux-
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