The Resurrection of Formal and Final Causes

SOURCE: Telic Thoughts

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

Over at Telic Thoughts, g arago commented:

"It would perhaps help to bring in Aristotle's causes again, to the effect that final causes are virtually eliminated from modern science. Postmodernity enables the case for formal causality to re-emerge as a legitimate source of (scientific or non-scientific) knowledge."

It's interesting that this should be proposed, as that is precisely what I will be doing during the very first meeting of my "purpose in nature" seminar at Cornell this summer. It is a sad fact that most undergraduates (and an alarming number of philosophers and scientists) do not know anything about Aristotle's doctrine of causes, nor how they relate to the work they are doing.

Aristotle identified four causes for every phenomenon:

Material Cause: What the object in question is composed of (e.g. a house is composed of boards, bricks, mortar, etc.;

Formal Cause: What formal category the object is an exemplar of (e.g. any particular house is a "house" or dwelling place for people);

Efficient Cause: What immediate processes bring about the existence of the object (e.g. the carpenters, etc. are the efficient cause of the house); and

Final Cause: The purpose of the object (e.g. carpenters et al build houses "in order to" provide dwelling places for people).

In modern science, both formal and final causes are considered to be unnecessary, and are therefore not generally included in scientific explanations of natural objects and processes. However, it is not strictly true that formal causes have been completely eliminated from science. Much of physics, for example, has taken on some of the characteristics of "formal cause" insofar as physical processes are describable and predictable using formal mathematics. This is particularly the case for physicists who believe that actual physical phenomena are "the working out of underlying mathematical relationships."

The same could be said for evolutionary theory insofar as the "modern evolutionary synthesis" initiated R. A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright sought to lay a formal mathematical foundation for biological evolution.

The problem for "intelligent design theory" therefore is to show (if possible) that final causes are necessary (i.e. not just psychologically gratifying or theologically convenient) for evolutionary explanations of natural objects and processes. Final causes (or "purposes") are not entirely missing from evolutionary biology, as shown by the work of Colin Pittendrigh, Francisco Ayala, and Ernst Mayr, all of whom debated the appropriateness of teleological language when referring to adapations. However, no evolutionary biologist has resorted to teleological explanations for the existence or operation of natural selection, speciation, evolutionary development, or other central processes in evolution, at least not recently. The reason for such exclusion has not been an antipathy to theologically based explanations per se, but rather the simple fact that teleological explanations for evolutionary processes have been shown repeatedly to be unnecessary, and therefore irrelevant (notice that I did not say "untrue," as "truth" is also irrelevant in this context).

What W. Dembski and M. Behe and other ID theorists have attempted to do (in my opinion, so far unsuccessfully) is to re-integrate teleology into evolutionary processes. The more recent discussion by some ID theorists of "'front-loaded' intelligent design" is simply a reinvention of Aristotelian formal cause, and as such is indistinguishable from classical deism. Neither of these approaches to "design or purpose in nature" has yet been successful as scientific enterprises because they have not been shown to be indispensible to scientific explanations. Until they are, they will not be integrated into mainstream science. While I personally do not believe they can be, I am willing to be shown otherwise by people who use direct empirical evidence and strong inference to show how teleological explanations are necessary for scientific explanations.

--Allen

The Platonic Roots of Intelligent Design Theory

AUTHOR: Larry Arnhart

SOURCE: Darwinian Conservatism

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill (following the excerpt)

Larry Arnhart has written an incisive commentary on the relationship between Platonic philosophy and "intelligent design theory." Here's the core of his argument:

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In Plato's dialogue, the Athenian character warns against those natural philosophers who teach that the ultimate elements in the universe and the heavenly bodies were brought into being not by divine intelligence or art but by natural necessity and chance. These natural philosophers teach that the gods and the moral laws attributed to the gods are human inventions. This scientific naturalism appeared to subvert the religious order by teaching atheism. It appeared to subvert the moral order by teaching moral relativism. And it appeared to subvert the political order by depriving the laws of their religious and moral sanction. Plato's Athenian character responds to this threat by developing the reasoning for the intelligent design position as based on four kinds of arguments: a scientific argument, a religious argument, a moral argument, and a political argument.

His scientific argument is that the complex, functional order of the cosmos shows an intentional design by an intelligent agent that cannot be explained through the unintelligent causes of random contingency and natural necessity. His religious argument is that this intelligent designer must be a disembodied intelligence, which is God. His moral argument is that this divine designer is a moral lawgiver who supports human morality. His political argument is that to protect the political order against scientific atheism and immorality, lawgivers must promote the teaching of intelligent design as the alternative to scientific naturalism. Two thousand years later, William Jennings Bryan developed these same four arguments for intelligent design as superior to Darwinian naturalism. Recent intelligent design proponents such as Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and Bill Dembski have elaborated these same four arguments.

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COMMENTARY:

I think that Arnhart is right on the money, here. I have already written about the connection between Platonic philosophy and "intelligent design." Here's what I wrote:

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To Plato, the world of nature that we can perceive with our senses is not “reality” at all. Instead, the truest reality can only be found in what Plato called “ideal forms.” These were essentially ideas or concepts that were related to actual, natural objects, but existed in the mind rather than in nature. Who's mind? To Plato, the ideal forms ultimately existed in the mind of a supernatural entity or entities, which he often equated with the Greek gods or with a creator he referred to as the “demiurge”.

Plato's clearest expression of this relationship between natural objects and ideal forms is contained in the Phaedo, which Plato presents as a record of a discussion between Socrates and several of his followers on the day of his execution. In the Phaedo, Socrates (and, by extension, Plato) argues that the natural objects and processes we observe around us are crude reflections of an underlying ideal reality, one that does not exist in the natural world. He argues that most people perceive these ideal forms dimly if at all. However, philosophers should dedicate their lives to identifying these ideal forms or “essences”, and demonstrating their reality to others.

This philosophical worldview has been called essentialism, because it emphasizes the “essences” of things, rather than their differences. Central to this worldview is the idea that such “essences”, including the human soul, are eternal and unchanging. In the Platonic worldview, the most “real” things - the “essences” - cannot be perceived with the senses at all, but only with the mind, imperfect as it might be in any individual person. Whereas, in the worldview of the natural sciences, and especially naturalism, only natural objects and processes that can be either directly sensed or inferred indirectly from sensory observation are assumed to exist - to be “real”.

Notice here, too, the emphasis on the unchanging, eternal quality of the “essences”, as opposed to natural objects and processes. Natural phenomena (i.e. the non-essential) are always changing, but “real” phenomena are not. Here we see the root of the opposition between the evolutionary worldview - one based on continuous change in nature - and the Platonic worldview - one based on unchanging, timeless, and universal “essences”.

The Platonic essentialist worldview largely replaced the earlier Ionian naturalist worldview, partly because of the predominance of Athens and Athenian culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. This replacement had a serious and long-lasting effect on the development of the natural sciences in western culture. This was because Plato didn't restrict his essentialist doctrine to emotional or abstract philosophical ideals as implied in the Phaedo, such as truth, beauty, and the human “soul”. In other dialogues and in his lectures, he applied the concept of “essences” to natural phenomena as well, arguing that all natural phenomena are imperfect representations of “ideal forms” that exist outside of nature. According to Plato, these “ideal forms” are universal and necessarily unchanging and unchangeable.

Plato also argued that the universe formed a complete and harmonious whole, in which any real change could only result in the annihilation of everything. As noted earlier, he also asserted that the ideal forms that participate in this harmony did not arise spontaneously from nature, but rather were originally created by a supernatural entity often translated as the “demiurge”. Plato taught that the demiurge created the universe and the ideal forms with a purpose in mind, and that all things (i.e. all “essences” and their imperfect representations) were therefore the product of a preexisting plan. Finally, Plato argued for the existence of a human soul, which cannot be perceived with the senses at all, but which is the “real essence” of each person.

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This is why I have asserted that Darwin's most "dangerous" idea was his recognition of the reality of the variations that exist between individuals in populations. This variation is produced by various genetic processes, including mutation, recombination, and developmental/phenotypic plasticity, and is the source of all evolutionary innovations (i.e. it is the "creative force" in evolution). Natural selection simply weeds out all of the variations that don't work, and preserves the ones that do (which is why Darwin wanted to call this process "natural preservation", but the term "natural selection" had already gotten stuck to the process).

But to Plato (and his most important student, Aristotle) the variations don't matter; it is the "ideal form" of which those variations are only imperfect representations that really matters. That is, the variations aren't "real," and so for almost three centuries they were ignored. Furthermore, since the "ideal forms" are eternal and unchanging, things like species are as well. Indeed, I believe that the concept of biological species can be traced back directly to Plato's "ideal forms," and that this explains much of the resistance to Darwin's theory. In essence, Darwin argued in the Origin of Species that species aren't fixed entities, but rather can change over time. Furthermore, this change is "real," implying that the variant forms upon which such change depends are "real" as well. Darwin doesn't take his ideas to their logical conclusion, however: that "species" are purely figments of the human imagination (especially as trained in Platonic philosophy, as all of us are).

To believe that "species" don't really exist in nature, and that the only "real" entities in biology are individual organisms is pretty radical stuff. Most taxonomists would bristle at the very suggestion. However, this idea has a long and honorable pedigree as well; it is a variety of nominalism, a philosophical position often said to have been founded by William of Ockham (of "Occam's Razor" fame). Nominalism directly challenges the fundamental basis of Platonic philosophy in the same way that darwinism challenges it in biology. In the long run, I believe that the paradigm shift to the darwinian worldview has been and will continue to be the most important one since the founding of Platonic philosophy (and therefore of the dominant position in western philosophy).

--Allen

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ORIGINAL PUBLICATION REFERENCE:

Location Online: Darwinian Conservatism
URL: http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2006/02/leo-strauss-darwinian-natural-right.html

Original posting/publication date timestamp:
Saturday, February 25, 2006