The Human Question

One bit of evidence that it might be is the fact that (I think in chapter 19 of The Design Revolution ) BD makes an analogy with art (not art as in paintings but art as in techne: e.g., the art of ship building, medicine, carpentry, etc.), saying that, just as the art of shipbuilding is not in the wood, and the art of letter writing does not reside in the letters, so too the art of building life lies not in the stuff that constitutes life (as with the other two cases) but in its designer. I am not remembering this very clearly, but it IS worth noting that he may be denying that an inner teleological principle guides the actions of cells, etc.... I dunno.

Interesting point by Bill Dembski in The Design Revolution: that Robert Boyle introduced a mechanistic view of the world in order to safeguard theism from the immanent teleology of Aristotelianism, which in his view did not seem as open to the divine. Makes me anxious to reread Timaeus on the nature of nature. Every mechanistic universe needs a non-mechanistic motor: think of gravity for Newton: it is not mechanically caused. Interesting that Aristotle's thoroughly non-mechanistic universe does have some push and pull to it: spheres drive much of the movement that occurs on earth. But the natural movement of the four elements as well as organic activity are not mechanically driven. Most importantly, the spheres while themselves responsibile for pushing a lot of things around, are drawn by love of what is higher. Aristotle may have rejected a lot of what Plato proposed, but when it came to the Good being supreme, he would have agreed with his teacher, albeit while describing ...