Kant's "Critique of Teleological Judgment"

Here's Betsy's post on Kant:

Once again I was assigned a long, confusing article, but I will try and summarize Kant’s points concisely and correctly. The ultimate end of his argument in Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment is to prove that there is a God. This is revealed at the end of the article, so I’ll go through the points that lead up to this conclusion. In the first section, Kant describes natural ends. A natural end is a thing that “exists as a natural end if it is cause and effect of itself”. He gives an example of a tree and how it is its own means to an end or cause and effect. Its species continually regenerates from its own kind; the individual generates or grows from its own material which cannot be provided from an outside source; and even its smallest parts, such as a leaf, depend on the whole and the whole upon the tiny leaf. The tree cannot create energy without its leaves and the leaves cannot exist on their own, so it is a product and an end.

Now that Kant has established what natural ends are, he goes on to explain how they are organized beings. He contrasts key terms in this section, efficient causes and final causes. The first is real causation, or what we think of cause and effect literally. An example would be dominoes hitting each other and creating a chain reaction. The key to this idea is that it only works one way; once the dominoes fall they do not cause the reverse reaction. The second, final causes, is a more ideal, theoretical causation. This connection requires the use of concepts to see how the causation goes in a circle and does not work solely one way. Again he emphasizes that a natural end must produce itself and from its parts that only exist for the sake of the whole.

Next he describes the difference between machine and an organized being. An organized being has capability beyond simple movement, it has “formative power” to organize itself and exist apart from outside causes. At the end of this section Kant seems to undo all he has been arguing by stating that no analogy is appropriate to describe the “inner natural perfection” of organized beings. By saying this, he argues that his own previous analogies are not adequate and cannot explain his argument fully.

Kant’s final point is that we cannot conceive the world or concept without admitting to a being that intentionally started the whole cycle and acted as the “supreme cause”. The last statement seems contradictory because Kant is arguing that we cannot judge if a greater being acts as a catalyst for the world’s processes. In the same sentence he follows with the statement , “we absolutely cannot base the possibility of those natural ends on anything except an intelligent being” (271). My question is what conclusion does Kant ultimately make on this issue? Is he actually trying to prove there is a greater being, namely God, or does he refute this claim by saying it is past our comprehension?