GOD works But with respect to the existence of God he was an agnostic, not an atheist It was not until the triumph of Darwinism in the next century that an atheist could feel conWdent that he had an eVective antidote to the argument from design Kant’s Theological Dialectic The third chapter of Kant’s transcendental dialectic is entitled ‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’: its principal topic is a critique of rational theology, the attempt to establish by pure reason the existence of a transcendent God Kant begins with the claim that all possible proofs of God’s existence 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 proofs, which argue from the general nature of the empirical world; and there are proofs based on particular natural phenomena, which we may call ‘physico theological proofs’ In every kind of proof, Kant says, reason ‘stretches its wings in vain, to soar beyond the world of sense by the mere might of speculative thought’ (M, 346) The ontological argument, as Kant sets it out, begins with a deWnition of God as an absolutely necessary being Such a being is a thing whose nonexistence is impossible But can we really make sense, he asks, of such a deWnition? Necessity really belongs to propositions, not to things; and we cannot transfer the logical necessity of a proposition such as ‘a triangle has three angles’ and make it a property of a real being Logical necessity is only conditional necessity; nothing is absolutely necessary: To suppose the existence of a triangle and not that of its three angles is selfcontradictory; but to suppose the non-existence of both triangle and angles is perfectly admissible The same holds true of the concept of an absolutely necessary being If you think away its existence, you think away the thing itself with all its predicates, and there is no question of any contradiction (M, 348) If the ontological argument is valid, then ‘God exists’ is an analytic proposition: ‘exist’ is a predicate that is tacitly contained in the subject ‘God’ But Kant insists that all statements of real existence are synthetic: we cannot derive actual reality from pure concepts We might object that we can at least argue from concepts to non-existence: it is because 323