Kant's Possibility Proof

Abstract

In his 1763 work The Only Possible Ground of Proof [Beweisgrund] for a Demonstration of the Existence of God, Immanuel Kant offered an innovative argument for the existence of God.1 Kant's argument differs from cosmological and teleological arguments in that it does not begin by assuming that anything exists or that what exists has any particular nature or appearance of design. It assumes merely that something is possible.2 He then argues that, if something is possible, there exists a ground of this possibility. Facts about what is possible cannot be brute; they require grounds. He identifies the grounds of possibility with the powers of existing substances; an object or state of affairs is possible in virtue of the power of some substance to produce that object or cause that state of affairs to obtain. He goes on to argue that all possibilities must be grounded in a single necessarily existing substance, God. If God did not exist, nothing would be possible.

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