KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

First positions 27
years later in great detail – his position itself can hardly avoid this
consequence.
Seven years later the situation had changed considerably for
Kant. In his Only Possible Proof of the Existence of God (1762) the
organism is no longer viewed as a detail problem in the cooling processes
of large masses of matter in space, but rather as a problem in
principle for scientific explanation. Now Kant believes that "it would
be absurd to consider the first production of a plant or an animal as
a merely mechanical incidental result of universal laws of nature"
(W 1,680). He maintains that these laws of nature are "insufficient"
to explain the "structure" of plants and animals; a choice must be
made between two available alternatives.
Whether, namely each and every individual of these kinds was constructed
immediately by God and thus is of supernatural origin, and only propagation,
i.e., the transition to development from time to time, is entrusted to a
natural law; or whether some individuals of the plant and animal kingdoms
were of immediately divine origin, but endowed with a, for us incomprehensible,
power to produce, and not merely to unfold, their like according to
a regular law of nature. (W 1,680; Ak 2,114)
The choice is thus between preformation and what, for lack of a better
name, we call epigenesis. Kant clearly takes the side of epigenesis
in this work but does so rather because the first alternative is
untenable then because the second is convincing. He criticizes the
preformation theory because it assumes too much supernatural
action, and he maintains that it is immaterial whether one
assumes that God created all germs directly at once and then stored
them in the first organisms or that he intervenes in the world on the
occasion of every act of generation: the difference lies only in the
point in time. This objection is of course only valid on the condition
that the germs arose after the origin of matter and not simultaneously
with it; only then is the construction of the germs an extraordinary
intervention into the course of nature.
Kant does not take up the question of whether God must
directly create the first individuals of every species on every planet
in which the right physical conditions have arisen. He does not deal
with the geological and cosmogonical conditions for the origins of
life at all. He takes up a rather defensive position in comparison to
his earlier work and tries to minimize the amount of the supernatural
in his explanations: "My present intention is merely to
show that one ought to allow natural objects a greater possibility of
bringing forth their issue according to universal laws than is com-