Section 79 of Kant's Kritik der Urtheislkraft (Critique of Judgment) poses the following question: What discipline ought to treat teleology? Should it be part of natural science or theology? After pointing out that it can't belong to both and still be a science (Wissenbchaft), Kant offers the following:
It can't belong to theology. Why? Kant declares:
Denn sie hat Naturerzeugungen und die Ursache derselben zu ihrem Gegenstande, und ob sie gleich auf die letztere, als einen ausser und über die Natur gelegenen Grund (göttlichen Urheber) hinausweiset, so that die dieses doch nicht für die bestimmende, sonder nur (um die Beurteilung der Dinge in der Welt durch eine solche Idee dem menschlichen Verstande angemessen als regulatives Prinzip zu leiten) bloss für die reflectirenede Urteilskraft in der Naturbetrachtung.
What is Kant saying? Since teleological considerations here deal with natural objects and their cause (perhaps a divine cause), no determinative judgment of this divine author is possible. We learned in the First Critique that determinative judgments rightly operate through a "synthesis of the manifold of sensation" in Newtonian ways, that is, in the ways of classical mechanics.
Determinative judgments will take us to mechanism, but a "goettlichen Urheber" can never be the product of the application of the empirical and pure concepts of the understanding to intuitions (perceptions), and cannot thus appear in the mechanistic web. Thus, while one is free to think there is such a Urheber, this is the result of a reflective judgment which operates by allowing a universal to be freely thought, a universal under which the particular can then fall. [Kant explains in Section IV of the Introduction that when the particular is given and judgment must locate the universal under which it falls, then the power of judgment is reflective ("soll ist die Urtheilskraft bloss reflectierend").] Clearly, teleology does not belong to theology.
Lamentably, teleology does not belong to natural science either. (I don't think Dembski ever takes on Kant head on, but I have only read some of what he has written.) Kant explains:
Eben so wenig schient sie aber auch in der Naturwisschenchaft zu gehören, welcher bestimmender und nicht bloss reflektierender Prinzipien bedarf, und von der Naturwirkungen objective Gründe anzugeben. In der That is auch für die Theorie der Natur, oder die mechanische Erklärung der Phänomenon derselben durch ihre wirkende Ursachen dadurch nichts gewonnen, das man sie nach dem Verhältnisse zu Zwecke zu einander betrachtet.
Kant points to the reason why explanations in terms of purpose are dubious in natural science: They disclose nothing about the origination and the inner possibility of the natural forms -- "ueber dass Entstehen und innere Moeglichkeit dieser Formen gar keinen Aufschluss giebt" -- about which theoretical science is concerned. So teleology can not belong to natural science either. Has teleology thus no home?
As it turns out, teleology does not concern doctrine but Kritik. It concerns "zwar eines besonderen Erkenntnissvermoegens, namlich die Urteilskraft." Teleology concerns the a priori, and thus, can accordingly be regulative of our thinking in the sciences, a regulative thinking that is largely negative. After all, we cannot specify final causes as theoretical objects in our mature scientific theory. However, purposefulness must, in a sense, form the context within which the text of mature naturalistic mechanistic scientific theorizing operates.
We must remember for the mature Kant, teleological and mechanistic reasoning is grounded in the same thing: the Supersensible. This quote from Section 78 makes all of this quite clear:
Nun ist aber das gemeinschaftliche Prinzip der mechanischen einerseits und der teleologischen Ableiten andrerseits das Übersinnliche, welches wir der Natur als Phänomen unterlegen müssen.
The Supersensible mediately accessible through the pure and empirical concepts of the understanding in the First Critique, and immediately encountered in the determinations of freedom in the Second Critique, is both "an und fuer sich" through the reflective judgments of the Third Critique. (Or one might so interpret it.)
But were there a principle that dealt not with the simple material denizens of the res extensa nor the simple mental reality of the res cogitans, but with that neutral monistic reality from which both emerge, would it not after all demand a new "Erkenntnisvermoegens," one which drives toward that way that Heidegger would later evoke as a "thinking which is a thanking?"
At the Institute of Lutheran Theology, we try to think about things, and we try to think about our thinking of things. Without reverence in the face of the Supersensible, gods become ultimately engineered by, and thus, possessed by the thinker. But Kant, who loved autonomy, nevertheless understood that thinking responds to what is deeper. It can never possess that Abgrund over which it has been fashioned to think. To think that it does is, of course, the ground of idolatry, superstition and ultimately blasphemy. Kant was, of course, a staunch enemy of all of these.
