The Fifth Way of arguing for the existence of God, according to Thomas Aquinas, is taken from the fact that non-cognizant things act for a purpose. He believes that this shows that an intelligent being is directing things now to a goal. This argument is not an intelligent design argument inasmuch as it does not argue from the present existence of purposive activity in a thing to a previous event in which the thing so acting was engineered to act in that manner. Rather, Aquinas argues that the fact that a thing acts now to attain a goal implies that it is now being directed by an intelligent being toward that goal.
To a contemporary reductionist, this argument must seem quaintly mistaken, for what passes as purposive activity is really a mechanical process. The sunflower's turning toward the sun is the result of the flower's components acting essentially like levers in a machine. The same is true for all other things, both living and non-living.
One procedure thought to demonstrate the truth of this mechanistic view of nature is to recite the story of the origin of life from non-life and the evolution of cognizant living things from non-cognizant. This story seems to the contemporary reductionist to show how everything presently in the living world is derived entirely from the inanimate world studied in physics and therefore can in principle be explained adequately in terms of the laws of physics that govern that inanimate world.
What if our examination of living things, and especially of ourselves, shows that reductionism must be false and even incoherent? What then are we to make of biogenesis and evolution?
Without reductionism, the story of the origin of life and the evolution look very different. Yes, they would still involve chance. But (if anti-reductionism is true, then) the chancy nature of biogenesis and evolution does not contradict the fact that the world of physics is like a seed ready, given the right conditions, to give rise to something greater than itself. Just as a seed will grow only when the right conditions are present, so to will life arise only under the right circumstances. But the readiness to give rise to something more is present in the world before that something more has come to be.
A reductionist might object that just as a seed has its disposition only because it has originated from earlier mechanical processes, so too our universe has the disposition to give rise to life only because of antecedent mechanical processes. But that objection would not work for the universe or multiverse as a whole. If a world governed solely by the laws of physics cannot give rise to something irreducible to itself, then it does not matter to teleology how many universes it took or how long the one multiverse took to give rise to cognizant, affective life: whenever or however it does give rise to that irreducible something more than can be accounted for by physics, it does so only in virtue of an internal disposition to do so.
We might compare the way in which biogenesis and evolution involve an interplay of internal disposition and chance with the way the same two factors are involved in the triggering of an IED, an improvised explosive device. It may take years for a bomb that has been hidden to be triggered into exploding. When that explosion happens is a matter of chance. The precise circumstances under which it happens are a matter of chance. But that it happens is not a matter of chance alone but of a confluence of chance and purpose.
When life forms are understood understood non-reductively, biogenesis and evolution are as much evidence of purpose as any found in nature. In fact, you could construct a new version of the Fifth Way that takes its point of departure from the facts of biogenesis and evolution, while making room also for the role of chance in the origin and development of life.
To a contemporary reductionist, this argument must seem quaintly mistaken, for what passes as purposive activity is really a mechanical process. The sunflower's turning toward the sun is the result of the flower's components acting essentially like levers in a machine. The same is true for all other things, both living and non-living.
One procedure thought to demonstrate the truth of this mechanistic view of nature is to recite the story of the origin of life from non-life and the evolution of cognizant living things from non-cognizant. This story seems to the contemporary reductionist to show how everything presently in the living world is derived entirely from the inanimate world studied in physics and therefore can in principle be explained adequately in terms of the laws of physics that govern that inanimate world.
What if our examination of living things, and especially of ourselves, shows that reductionism must be false and even incoherent? What then are we to make of biogenesis and evolution?
Without reductionism, the story of the origin of life and the evolution look very different. Yes, they would still involve chance. But (if anti-reductionism is true, then) the chancy nature of biogenesis and evolution does not contradict the fact that the world of physics is like a seed ready, given the right conditions, to give rise to something greater than itself. Just as a seed will grow only when the right conditions are present, so to will life arise only under the right circumstances. But the readiness to give rise to something more is present in the world before that something more has come to be.
A reductionist might object that just as a seed has its disposition only because it has originated from earlier mechanical processes, so too our universe has the disposition to give rise to life only because of antecedent mechanical processes. But that objection would not work for the universe or multiverse as a whole. If a world governed solely by the laws of physics cannot give rise to something irreducible to itself, then it does not matter to teleology how many universes it took or how long the one multiverse took to give rise to cognizant, affective life: whenever or however it does give rise to that irreducible something more than can be accounted for by physics, it does so only in virtue of an internal disposition to do so.
We might compare the way in which biogenesis and evolution involve an interplay of internal disposition and chance with the way the same two factors are involved in the triggering of an IED, an improvised explosive device. It may take years for a bomb that has been hidden to be triggered into exploding. When that explosion happens is a matter of chance. The precise circumstances under which it happens are a matter of chance. But that it happens is not a matter of chance alone but of a confluence of chance and purpose.
When life forms are understood understood non-reductively, biogenesis and evolution are as much evidence of purpose as any found in nature. In fact, you could construct a new version of the Fifth Way that takes its point of departure from the facts of biogenesis and evolution, while making room also for the role of chance in the origin and development of life.
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