ABSTRACT
The quality of Immanuel Kant's presentation of his own doctrines seems to suffer some deterioration as he approaches this subject. His dismissive analysis of the some "proofs" of God's existence – the only possible three, according to him – has, at least superficially, an admirable crispness and clarity. The "demand of reason for the unconditioned" in the thesis of each of the dynamical antinomies explicitly takes the form of a demand for a freely acting cause or an unconditioned existence which belongs to the sensible world, the world of things in space and time. The doctrine of transcendental idealism is not supposed, as it were, to put Ideas into reason's head. The ideas of reason are supposed to arise naturally, without assistance from the critical philosophy. To follow the further progress of the illusions of reason, Kant invites people to suppose nevertheless that this conclusion to a non-contingent ground of contingent existences is validly drawn.
