Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on Ethics

...we have here a powerful weapon in support of Theism Theism: the belief in the existence of a god or gods, specifically a creator who intervenes in the universe.. When we trace certain beneficial effects to the regular working of the laws of nature, we see that these effects are not produced by chance; rather, these laws can work in no other way. But if the nature of things were independent and necessary, what an astounding accident—or rather, what an impossibility—it would be for them to fit together just as a wise and good choice would have made them fit! As this applies to such reasoning in general, it also applies to our current project. We shall find that matter had certain laws imposed on it, by virtue of which it necessarily produced the most perfect combinations. The fact that there is a God is proved even by this: that nature, even in a state of chaos, could only proceed with regularity and order.

He proceeds to work out in detail the problem of how planets formed out of originally diffused matter, taking into consideration the eccentricities The degree to which an orbit deviates from a perfect circle., inclinations The tilt of a planet's orbit relative to the plane of the solar system., etc., of the planets, as well as the rings of Saturn, the satellites, and the comets. It is worth noting that he does not, like Laplace, regard the rings of Saturn as an illustration of his general theory. Because of their large inclination to the ecliptic The ecliptic is the circular path of the Sun's apparent motion; the "tilt" mentioned here is 28° relative to that plane. (28°), he thought it necessary to assign to them a different origin. His hypothesis was that they were produced by gases or matter released original: "emanations" from the planet itself. He showed further (as Laplace also did later) that the ring must have a movement of rotation, and that because different velocities belong to different distances from the planet, its stability required it to consist of several distinct rings. This conjecture, or rather deduction,