In my most recent post in this series on the science of purpose, I concluded that the proper means of understanding our world requires that we include both purpose and necessity as fundamental elements of any comprehensive framework. I noted that the flagship phrase of 20th-century scientific atheism, as articulated by Nobel laureate Jaques Monod in his book Chance and Necessity, acknowledged necessity but explicitly and intentionally eliminated purpose from scientific dialogue.
Now some fifty years later we see that Monod’s paradigm has failed. And that the only possible way of understanding life on earth is to replace chance with purpose. Doing so reverses an epistemological trend stretching back almost 150 years. As such, it is incumbent that we fortify and substantiate the basis for what many would see as a revolutionary new paradigm. That is the goal of this essay.
In doing so I must state at the outset that proclaiming Purpose and Necessity as a new guiding paradigm for the study of life on earth is only “revolutionary” in a postmodern context. I will in fact rely primarily on the teachings of old, in particular Thomistic Aristotelianism (TA). So what follows is not really new.
Acknowledging this more properly defines our new guiding paradigm. And I hope it will also bridge the gap between advocates of theistic evolution, on one hand, and intelligent design ontology, on the other.
A Brief Historical Perspective
The history of science begins largely in Western Europe with the overthrow of Thomistic Aristotelianism by René Descartes. Indeed, Étienne Gilson, perhaps the foremost Thomist of the 20th century, pointed out that scholasticism was set aside in part because it failed to lead to any meaningful scientific or technological advances. In medieval times the need was for physical improvements in daily life, whereas, unapologetically, Aquinas believed that the primary pursuit of human activity was meditation and stoicism. Consequently, Descartes, Newton, and Bacon pioneered the advance of the human race into the modern world, unencumbered by trying to discern the deeper mysteries of teleology or vitalism. They believed that those concepts were real, but beyond the purview of the human intellect. To be sure, up until at least the middle of the 19th century, centuries after Descartes, all scientists, most notably the greatest of them all, Isaac Newton, fervently believed in teleology, but were admittedly unable to fit it into their limited scientific framework of physics and chemistry. But purpose itself, aka telos, was never in doubt.
Yet as modernism transitioned into postmodernism, accompanied by the fantastic success of the industrial revolution and the rise of Darwinism, modern science largely decided that it no longer had a need for the God Hypothesis. Thus, the perpetual exclusion of purpose from science, originally in deference to the limitations of 16th-century scientific inquiry, became the explicit dogma of 20th-century science. That was for the straightforward reason that purpose is the motivation for design, with design being antithetical to the concept of any immaterial component of our existence. Hence the rise of 20th-century materialism, aka naturalism or scientism.
The Reemergence of Purpose
As I have said before, the reign of a purposeless and yet understandable biology is quickly drawing to a close. The so-called modern synthesis, the nearly 90-year-old neo-Darwinism, has failed. Utterly incapable of explaining the emergence of specified complex systems, the reductionist hegemony of 20th-century molecular biology has ground to a halt. As brilliantly stated by so many authors in these pages, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can explain the spontaneous emergence of life, or specified irreducible complexity, through the known laws of science.
But we have life. And we have the emergence of specified irreducible complexity. And so, after over 150 years of trying to understand life without purpose, we must at last stand ready to admit the failure of the past — and to simply say the magic word (purpose!).
While it may still seem incredible, the resolution of our confusion is no less simple than for Dorothy to return to Kansas. For as Dorothy found, the answer has been there all along. But we, like Dorothy, had to find out for ourselves that it was true.
Of course, I am referring to Aristotle and Aquinas (or what I have called TA). Their work, writing, and teaching can provide an entire lifetime of intellectual study. But the only thing necessary for all to realize is simply their singular fundamental axiom: all things are ordered to their end, purpose writ large. That is, all things come into existence, and all things go out of existence, according to a plan. For Aristotle that plan was telos. For Aquinas, that plan was De ente et essentia (On Being and Essence). While Aristotle almost certainly believed in at least some greater power in nature that provided this plan, it was Aquinas, as Christianity’s greatest theologian, who codified that the purpose and plan as described by Aristotle comes from the designing intellect of the God of Abraham.
Hiding in Plain Sight
That purpose, hiding in plain sight for more than a century, has now at last returned to focus. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions in this series, without purpose, there is no true science of life any more than you can put a square peg into a round hole. It was never complicated. It was just a matter of blindness. Now, with our sight restored, we can by these lights quite easily clear up some seemingly irreconcilable differences.
For example: the impasse or disagreement between intelligent design advocates and proponents of theistic evolution really boils down to this very issue. The problem with theistic evolution is that it assumes the “laws of nature” as studied by scientists are adequate to explain evolution, although these laws explicitly exclude purpose. Thus theistic evolutionists exclude the teachings of Aristotle and Aquinas. In the words of Mariusz Tabaczek, a prominent contemporary Thomist,
I believe it is clear that from a [Thomistic Aristotelian] point of view the concept of “evolutionary creation” [or theistic evolution] is rather problematic, if not altogether ill conceived.
Theistic evolutionists cling to the 20th-century notion that the “laws of nature” and “natural processes” are enough to create and guide life. We know now that that is not true. Purpose is the design of the created world because purpose is intention based on design. Without it you have no evolution, and no explanation of life.
It does seem, however, that the message is getting through and that our theistic evolutionists will understand, perhaps not long in the future, that with this new realization, our philosophies converge.
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