KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

90 The Unconditioned and the Infinite Series
such but rather the arguments in these proofs adduced to refute
thesis and antithesis.
As presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, the First
Antinomy reads:
Thesis
The world has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.
Antithesis
The world has no beginning, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards
both time and space. (B454-55)
The refutation of the thesis presented at the end of the antinomies
chapter in the "Solution of the Cosmological Idea" is the
same as that presented in the "proof" of the antithesis: The thesis is
said to imply an empty time before the world (or an empty space outside
it). In an empty time nothing can happen, including an origin
of the world; such an origin cannot be the object of a possible experience.
At the end of the Analytic in the "Amphibolies" chapter Kant
called the notion of an empty time (an empty space) a "nothing," an
"empty intuition without object ens imaginarium" (B348). The
attempt nonetheless to conceive this "nothing" results in an — as a
rule theologically articulated — equivocation with the word "world,"
whereby we imagine a (non-material) "world" before the world, in
which material systems can arise. Kemp Smith, for instance,
writes: 41
If Kant means by it [the term "world"] merely the material world, the
assumption of its non-existence does not leave only empty time and space.
Other kinds of existence may be possible, and in these a sufficient cause of
its first beginnings may be found. The nature of creative activity will remain
mysterious and incomprehensible, but that is no sufficient reason for
denying its possibility.
Kant of course does not deny the possibility of creative activity; on the
contrary, he asserts, "I have therefore found it necessary to deny
knowledge, in order to make room for faith" (Bxxx). He denies only
that such creative activity could be the object of possible empirical
experience; and the antinomies are supposed to arise not out of
propositions of faith but out of purported knowledge.
The refutation of the antithesis, on the other hand, which
posited the infinity of the past, is supplemented in the "solution" section
by a number of remarks on the question of whether the regress
backwards in time can proceed in infinitum or only in indefinitum.
41 Kemp Smith, Commentary, p. 487.