The Human Question

A thing can be looked at as part of a machine only in virtue of its inner teleology, to which human purposes are superimposed. Mechanism is not the denial of teleology: it's the denial that higher level teleologies are more than the sum of their parts.  It's an attempt to demythologize wholes, but it's based upon the myth that knowledge of nature starts with abstract knowledge akin to geometry rather than familiarity with human agency.

It just occurred to me that we come up with the concept of a line (as found in geometry: i.e., perfectly straight, with zero deviation, no matter how precisely you consider it) by thinking teleologically, that is by intending to produce straightness when engaging in craftsmanship. Interesting because the math consideration of nature is supposed to prescind from the consideration of purposes in nature... even though the purely mathematical objects being applied to nature may themselves be constituted through goal-directed activities (is there any other kind of activity?).

Every mechanistic account presupposes something that drives the mechanism AND which itself is not driven by the mechanism. This is not an argument for God (at least not immediately) but for entelecheia. Consider the Newtonian explanation of planetary motion.  It presupposes gravity, which is itself NOT explained mechanistically.  Rather, gravity is a tendency toward a state that is not yet acheived. Nothing "pushes" gravity: rather, it's an unpushed pusher or an unpulled puller or something like that. Consider a regular hand-driven device.  Say, an old-fashioned coffee-grinder.  The hand that is driving the grinder in that system is like gravity in Newton's explanation of planetary motion, i.e., a force that is not forced by another.  Such forces are.... teleological: that is, they can be described in terms of aiming toward something but CANNOT be explained mechanically--at least not in terms of the wholes and parts that make up the system in question (whe...

Suppose you encounter a machine whose purpose you cannot fathom.  You can analyze how each part pushes and pulls the other and even the various ways in which the combined parts may act.  You can describe those movements in terms of laws.  And these laws are laws open to the possibility of having one purpose or another.  That is, you can know HOW the parts behave without determining whether they even have a purpose. Suppose, however, that the evidence is overwhelming that it is indeed a human built machine:  in such a case you can can know THAT the whole has a purpose without knowing WHAT the purpose is.  In a sense, the purpose is not the sum of the parts, but rather the same sum in relation to a specific purported purpose had by the one who designed it. BTW: I don't know what the purpose of this analysis is...

Dembski seems to be using a quantitive approach to demonstrate that novel biostructures could not have arisen as a result of either chance (or rather, that the improbability is such that it is as good as impossilbe [he multiples the number of quarks in the cosmos by the number of plank moments or something like that to get the denominator for the inverse of his threshold of so-improbable-that-it-is-as-good-as-impossible) or necessity.  He concludes that these forms have arisen as a result of specified complexity.  But the specified in this term is another name for something that a rational being, especially an engineer, would think of.  So it's kind of a way of talking about teleology via quantification.

One can apply it to the mathematized, mechanistic universe... showing it needs a pusher of sorts. But such an argument may be embarrassed by momentum (as I am by my spellllling), etc. Secondly one can apply it to entelecheia-rich universe:  here the first mover is a final cause.  But there is also the need for the first moving mover, which is not pushed but acts for the sake of a final cause.  And that final cause is an unmoved mover.  The latter is a more adequate consideration of motion.

Intelligent design is not the only alternative to random variation. The other alternative is a genus, non-random. ID is a species of non-random explanations, one that can be further divided into first-cell ID, creationist ID (start off with more than one life form), and stages ID (that is, a series of miracles guide evolution). The other species within the genus of non-random evolution is teleological evolution that does not admit of mechanistic explanation (ID is essentially a theory about biochemical mechanics). The other major species can be divided in to different species (all of which may be dubious, but that's another question). Those species include the already discredit Lamarkian explanation of evolution, which is that use modifies inheritance. Another would be more gene savy, but deny that mutation proceeds like, as Gould said in Full House, a drunk man walking... Instead, the telos of the first life form was the human. A kind of unconscious force, as it were. Now ...