Editor’s note: For more on the Greek philosopher Plato as an inspiration to modern life science, see the forthcoming book on the thought of ID biologist Richard Sternberg, Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome, by David Klinghoffer.
Over time, socio-political debates readily evolve. What once was liberal is now conservative, and vice versa.
But scientific debates should not be nearly so fluid or changeable. Scientific concepts ought to remain consistent, pending some discovery demanding a whole-scale paradigm shift. Such tectonic shifts are rare. Copernicus altered our celestial framework from geocentric to heliocentric. Newton formalized natural law. Lamarck overthrew belief in the fixity of species. Darwin gave species-change a name and a mechanism. Einstein gave us the space-time continuum. Schrödinger formalized the quantum world. Francis Crick proclaimed the central dogma of molecular biology in his “sequence hypothesis”:
The Central Dogma states… that once “information” has passed into protein, it cannot get out again…. the transfer of information… from protein to nucleic acid, is impossible.
The Final Nail
The last of these seemed to hammer the last nail into the coffin of Abrahamic faith. Crick’s postulate was explicitly cited as the final proof in the hundred-year quest by materialism to dethrone intelligent design. Jaques Monod, Crick’s contemporary and co-founder of modern scientific atheism, wrote in 1971 in Chance & Necessity (p. 21):
But the postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science; it has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries.
The battle lines were drawn. All of Monod and Crick’s contemporaries signed on. That was now hard science. Religious belief had been dismantled, proven to be a fairy tale.
But then, just a few decades after Monod and Crick, the self-proclaimed triumph of scientific atheism, aka scientism, proved to be premature. Even avowed atheist biologist Sahotra Sarkar acknowledged that Monod and Crick were wrong: “The Central Dogma of molecular biology is false if it is construed as a universal biological law.”
A 180-Degree Turnaround
At about the same time came the defection of Antony Flew, one of the most celebrated and prolific philosophical atheists of the later 20th century. When Crick’s Central Dogma was overturned, Flew did a complete 180-degree turnaround. He became convinced that the pronouncements of Crick and Monod were irrevocably misleading. Thus he wrote, in the title of his 2007 book, There Is a God.
But changing paradigms require a funeral of their proponents, as noted by futurist Thomas Kuhn. And lacking funerals, the acolytes of scientism have sought desperately over the past 25 years to find a way to reframe the debate. But the bedrocks of intelligent design theory — irreducible complexity and the design inference based on specified complexity — have remained intact. Thus, for the past few decades there has been a growing acknowledgment that the neo-Darwinian randomness-selection hypothesis might not, in the end, prevail.
Alas, Schrödinger’s plea in 1949 for a “new physics” to explain life had gone unheeded. Was it now too late for that?
A “Radical” Solution
In his 1991 book Life Itself, to preserve naturalism, mathematical biologist Robert Rosen proposed a solution, one that he himself characterized as “radical.” (p. 255) His claim was that the timeless wisdom of Aristotle’s final causality, or teleology, must be invoked in order to provide the necessary metaphysical framework for life.
But there was a catch. Rosen acknowledged that Aristotle’s telos ran counter to the blind non-directedness that was fundamental to the thinking of Darwin, Crick, Monod, and Dawkins: “Randomness caught on the wing, preserved, reproduced by the machinery of invariance and thus converted into order, rule, necessity. A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.” (p. 98)
Rosen observed the undeniable fact that organisms anticipate. They are replete with self-referential patterns of function. He attempted to find a way to reconcile these directed qualities with the prevailing dogma of naturalism, in which such attributes are denied. But Rosen died at age 64, and his attempts at this reconciliation went unrealized. Today, mathematical biologist and intelligent design theorist Richard Sternberg carries on part of his project.
Nevertheless, many biologists now acknowledge that Rosen’s invocation of telos really is the best, if not the only way, to account for the anticipatory, context-dependent behavior that literally defines life itself. If that much is conceded, is there still some way to subsume teleology into a materialist metaphysical framework?
All in for Telos
As Daniel Witt has written recently at Evolution News, one leading Tufts and Harvard biologist, Michael Levin, has gone all in on the notion that telos is quite real, given that organisms are in fact goal-directed, problem-solving entities. In podcasts Levin had intimated that his interest in teleology was largely a means for guiding research. But in a new preprint publication referenced by Witt, Levin more explicitly suggests the possibility that Platonic ideas somehow connect with the material world, thus allowing telos to operate. As Witt points out, this is a huge step by a leading contemporary academic scientist away from pure physicalism.
As I have argued consistently through many EN essays on the science of purpose, acknowledging teleology as a true agency in nature is logically inconsistent with materialism. The problem, though, is that teleology can be defined in different ways. Three hundred years after Newton, to this day no one fully understands the attractive force of gravity’s “spooky action at a distance.” And although Newton attributed his discovery to the will of God, Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace came along a hundred years later and removed God from Newton’s equation. Accordingly, teleology as a natural agency that empowers organisms to anticipate, adapt, and evolve could be (mis)construed. In that case, as with gravity itself, a naturalist might claim that telos is no more immaterial than water flowing downhill. As described in my book Telos, forces of attraction such as telos are only discernible by our witnessing their effects, rather than observing the actual embodied force. Certainly, gravity and magnetism are clear-cut examples of this.
Separating God from Science
But there is a crucial distinction between telos as a forceful agency of life, and the several forces subsumed by naturalism, such as gravity, electromagnetism, etc. The very reason that Crick, Monod, and others were able to get as far as they did in separating God from science was that their scientific domain by definition excluded intentionality. Monod’s whole thesis was that intentionality in life was an illusion, and that order developed purely out of randomness. Outside of panpsychism, most mainstream scientists refuse to attribute intentionality to any of the forces subsumed under naturalism.
What is crucial here is to recognize, as does Levin, that in order to explain life we must invoke transcendent concepts that bridge the gap between the material and the immaterial. To be sure, invoking Platonic ideals and equating them with something as immaterial as the phase spaces of truly immaterial mathematical entities, and observing how they apply so precisely to organisms, in the fashion of Eugene Wigner, speaks volumes about the reality of these concepts. Levin expresses it this way:
I propose that the interface between mathematical truths and physical objects is precisely the interface between non-physical mind and its physical embodiments.
But as I said at the start of this essay, all of these considerations will not completely deter the physicalists from reducing telos to just another force of nature requiring nothing nonphysical in its essence. Surely this will be attempted. Again in the words of Monod (pp. 21-2):
Objectivity obliges us to recognize the teleonomic character of living organisms, to admit that in their structure and performance they realize and pursue a purpose. Here therefore at least in appearance, lies a profound epistemological contradiction. In fact the central problem of biology lies with this very contradiction.
Monod wrote explicitly in his best-selling Chance & Necessity that the pursuit of purpose among organisms was mere appearance, which is why he used the term “teleonomic” instead of “teleologic.” Teleonomy is a term coined in 1958 by Colin Pittendrigh to imply simply a law-like behavior asymmetrically oriented toward a particular target state, but without intention.
A Simple Rejoinder
But the rejoinder to Monod, Pittendrigh, Crick, Mayr, E. O. Wilson, Dawkins, and others is simple.
Telos is not a “force” that primarily governs the inanimate. Its action applies to the living by the unique manifestation of intentionality. In this sense it seems far more appropriate to describe telos not as a force, given that force traditionally has been defined as an undirected action, but truly as an agency, which is best defined as a “directed action.” In two previous EN posts (here, here) I have offered a rational approach to incorporating intentionality in biology.
And how can we speak in logical terms of creating a metaphysical framework that resolves the Cartesian dualism between the material and the immaterial?
The answer is so simple that it escapes many. The immaterial mathematical entities that Levin alludes to are a product of mind. So all you have to do is realize that the mind is not entirely material. Many would say it is not material at all. In contemplating the deepest mysteries, it is always helpful to return to the greatest Christian theologian of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas, who reminds us that the human brain is a composite of form and matter just like every object in existence. Matter by itself does not exist and can only become manifest as a substantial form induced by formal cause. Although Levin never mentions Aristotle in his article, he seems unwittingly to invoke formal causality when he writes:
It is not physical living agents that have a mind partly because they draw on computations in non-physical space, it’s that the patterns themselves are the agent, with the physical body being a scratchpad that allows them to project consciousness into a physical world.
Put simply, within Thomistic metaphysics, it is sheer nonsense to think of thought as purely material. Actually, in fact, nothing is.
The Next Crucial Step
As I have advocated in these posts, I believe that the next crucial step in developing the foundational theory of intelligent design is the acknowledgment of telos as the heretofore unrecognized agency necessary for the explanation of life. The very pillars of ID theory — irreducible specified complexity and the design inference — virtually necessitate the existence of an intentional goal-directed agency that generates life from CHNOPS.
In this way, telos can be the basis for the logical framework that solidifies the reconciliation of science with faith. For it must be realized that telos is both a metaphysical and a naturally observable entity. It is in fact the fundamental metaphysic that transcends the gap between the physical and the spiritual — that is, the false divide between science and faith.
This, the greatest discovery of the Western mind, taught by St. Thomas Aquinas, must be jealously guarded against the inevitable attempts by materialism to diminish it, or appropriate it into naturalism.
LaPlace had his chance. His dismissal of the God hypothesis prevailed for several centuries. But no longer. Let us be on guard against any modern-day Laplace that would wrest from us this greatest conceptual link between spirit and life, mind and matter, body and soul.
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