On The Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgement

"There is a God; but all that is allowed to us humans is the restricted formula: We cannot conceive of a purposiveness which must be made the basis even of our cognition of the internal possibility of many things in nature and make a comprehensible except by representing them and the world in general as a product of an intelligent cause (a God)" (270). I am constantly frustrated by philosophers who appeal to the existence of God--something intrinsically metaphysical--as an explanation for physical attributes that cannot be explained. However, when the temporal context of these inquiries is taken into account, these thinkers can easily be excused for coming to such a conclusion. After all, Kant is not trying to prove the existence of God, he is simply saying human understanding is limited to the point at which postulating the existence of God is the only way that the seemingly infinite complexity of nature can be explained. I would argue that resignation to not know is more of a testament to the beauty and magnificence of nature than the limits human understanding. He even goes as far as saying that living organisms are not merely machines (woot, woot!): "An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power, and indeed one that it communicates to the matter, which does not have it (it organizes the latter): thus it has a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is, mechanism)" (246). Kant appears to responding to Descartes way of explaining nature in terms of art, or techne: "But inner natural perfection, as is possessed by those things that are possible only as a natural ends and hence as organized beings, is not thinkable and explicable in accordance with any physical...it is not thinkable and explicable even through an exact analogy with human art" (247). Art is merely ( I don't mean to demean art only celebrate nature) an imitation of the natural world. It cannot, therefore, fully grasp the complexities that are characteristic in nature, because the imitator can never equal up to its model. We are then left with still much to ponder over, and little to know for certain about the inter-workings of nature (or how to explain them in relation to causes). When we appeal to God, it is a indicator that all other means of understanding have been exhausted.