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Updated: May 2, 2025
But neither the empirical nor the transcendent nor the intermediate line of thought leads to the goal. The most impressive and popular of the proofs is the physico-theological argument.
It contains no reference to any peculiar property of sensuous objects, by which this world of sense might be distinguished from other possible worlds; and in this respect it differs from the physico-theological proof, which is based upon the consideration of the peculiar constitution of our sensuous world.
Physico-theology is therefore incapable of presenting a determinate conception of a supreme cause of the world, and is therefore insufficient as a principle of theology a theology which is itself to be the basis of religion. The attainment of absolute totality is completely impossible on the path of empiricism. And yet this is the path pursued in the physico-theological argument.
This argument we shall term the physico-theological argument. If it is shown to be insufficient, speculative reason cannot present us with any satisfactory proof of the existence of a being corresponding to our transcendental idea. It is evident from the remarks that have been made in the preceding sections, that an answer to this question will be far from being difficult or unconvincing.
Thus the physico-theological, failing in its undertaking, recurs in its embarrassment to the cosmological argument; and, as this is merely the ontological argument in disguise, it executes its design solely by the aid of pure reason, although it at first professed to have no connection with this faculty and to base its entire procedure upon experience alone.
Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German statistic, and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground, namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional nutriment only in arithmetical ratio and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise.
In this case, I find it impossible to represent this necessity in or by any conception, and it exists merely in my own mind, as the formal condition of thought, but not as a material and hypostatic condition of existence. SECTION VI. Of the Impossibility of a Physico-Theological Proof.
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