The self-sufficiency of nature and the case for atheism

The self-sufficiency of nature and the case for atheism

The first argument, mentioned in the previous post, that evolution renders the need for a Creator superfluous, rests on the premise that, in the vastness of time and space, anything that could happen will happen somewhere at some time. Advocates of this idea depict biological evolution on earth as just one small instance of physical evolution by which the universe takes on the structure of elements and molecules following patterns that we call laws.  When writers such as Daniel Dennett speak of “vastness”, they do not limit themselves to the 13.7 billion years or so that mark the progress of our universe since the big bang. Rather they posit a vast if not infinite number of alternate universes that may have no spatial temporal or gravitational relationship with our universe. Every universe that could exist probably does exist and we are part of one that happens to have a structure that supports life and consciousness.

            Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow offer an atheist explanation of reality in their 2010 book, The Grand Design. The title is ironic, I assume deliberately so, because theists have traditionally argued that design implies an Intelligent Designer. But Hawking and Mlodinow posit a design without the need for a designer. They contend that the laws of physics can create new universes out of nothing. As Hawking and Mlodinow describe the universe producing laws:

Any set of laws that describes a continuous world such as ours will have a concept of energy, which is a constant quantity, meaning it does not change in time…One requirement any law of nature must satisfy is that it dictates that the energy of an isolated body surrounded by empty space is positive, which means that one has to do work to assemble the body.

It is not clear whether these laws and concepts, which dictate what energy must do, are aspects of reality or “merely” the brain products of very intelligent physicists, at this stage of human evolution. In the first chapter of The Grand Design, the authors stipulate that they are employing a “model dependent realism,” which means that our brains must employ a model to interpret the sensory data received by our senses from whatever is real. So there will always be a gap between what even our best physicists know and what really exists.

For Hawking and Mlodinow, and perhaps for all atheistic scientists, the laws constitute an uncaused cause, and given the vastness of time and space, there is no limit to the number of universes that exist, have existed, or will exist. In the view of self-creating universes, each universe may have its own local laws. We are lucky to live in a universe whose laws allow for planets like earth to exist and for life and a degree of intelligence to evolve. But the process that provides for a countless number of universes requires a basic law of energy and gravity that creates from nothing. The nothingness consists of negative energy. Neither atheists nor theists can imagine or think of nothing, so we all posit a kind of reality that enables something to come from “nothing.” For theists, the reality is a conscious Creator, for atheists the “creative” reality consists of unconscious laws. (No one can think of nothingness, because if there were nothing, there would be no thinking. We may not be able to go as far as Descartes and posit a thinking substance, but we could not deny that there is thinking.)

Not only do materialists believe that, in a universe such as ours, 13.7 billion years allows for random events to produce life and consciousness, but also that the enormity of time supports the belief that the evolutionary process occurs randomly. The slowness of the process is compatible with randomness, but not with a purposeful Creator. Atheists see the ten billion years from the big bang to the beginning of life on earth, and the 3.5 billion years from the beginning of life to the emergence of human scientists, as a prodigal waste of time. The god in whom atheists do not believe would have been much quicker and more efficient. 

The Pitilessness of Nature and the Problem of Good

The Pitilessness of Nature and the Problem of Good

Facing the facts of Evolution

            Any view of reality worthy of belief takes account of the facts that confront human beings in every aspect of our individual and communal lives, aspects such as those studied by natural science, social science, and history. These disciplines do not tell us where we should go from here, or how to get there, but they form the basis for understanding how we arrived at our present state of reality. The present discussion will focus on the facts revealed by science. Since 1859, when Darwin published his Origin of Species, the notion of evolution has impacted not only biology, but also philosophy, theology, politics, and economics. Nothing in our intellectual life has been the same.

            “Our materialistic age” in the title of this series of posts flows from the prevailing interpretation of Darwin. In this interpretation, there is no longer a need to deal with the problem of evil, a problem that vexed those who believed in a good and almighty Creator. Now, the things that we call evil are seen as simply things that we do not like, as an animal in the jungle does not like being eaten up by a predator. But the plight of the prey and our plight constitute the same process of evolution, which is blind and indifferent to the fate of all of us beasts. The problem that we must encounter is “the problem of good,” beginning with whether there is such a thing as good, beyond the enjoyment that an animal or human predator takes in eating its meal, finding its mate, or other such pleasures. This investigation must be undertaken in the context of Darwinian evolution.

Is anything really good?        

The question that defines these posts is whether the term “good” refers to an objective reality rather than to merely a subjective point of view as when a big fish eats a little fish – The big fish likes it, the little fish doesn’t. Theologians use the term theodicy, which literally means the justification of God, to describe the problem of believing in a good God in an evil universe. Theos means God, dike means justice. Perhaps we can coin the term agathodicy from agathon meaning good, to describe the problem of maintaining the reality of good in a Darwinian world. The two questions, of God and of good, are closely linked since both theists and atheists, who disagree on the reality of God, generally agree that if God is real, He She, or It is the source of goodness. If God is real how do we explain evil? If God is not real, how do we explain good?

            This investigation proceeds with an examination of whether a Darwinian understanding of biological evolution and its application to the genesis of the cosmos, forces an atheist conclusion. Some religious believers agree with the hypothetical connection, “If Darwin is right then God does not exist,” and conclude that Darwin therefore must be wrong. Materialists, of course, take the opposite position – “Darwin is right, therefore God does not exist.” But I will take up the premise that Darwin is in principle correct, and ask whether atheism necessarily follows.

The atheist argument has three main premises: First, evolution stands as a sufficient explanation of the present world, and so any appeal to a Creator is superfluous. Second, the randomness, waste, and slow pace of evolution exclude the presence of a purpose that would be the signature of a Creator. Third, and most powerful, the violence, pain and suffering of evolving life are incompatible with belief in a decent, much less an all good, Creator. 

Purpose in Evolution: All or Nothing?

Purpose in Evolution: All or Nothing?

            The argument today, at least in the popular culture, seems to favor a take-it-or leave-it choice that either the universe proceeds from an Intelligent Designer or results from blind chance. The argument for the blind chance position holds that the process of evolution bears no resemblance to what would be the work of an Intelligent Designer. This argument takes the form of the classical atheist argument based on the problem of evil. If there were a good and almighty and all wise God as Creator, the universe would be a very nice place; but the universe is not a very nice place. The second premise bears a lot of weight. The world does not look like the product of a good Creator. While things are messy and violent on earth, the ancients, even up to the time of Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century thought that at least the heavens reflected a rational order. We know now that, in the heavens, whole galaxies are colliding into each other and on earth the development of life is “red in tooth and claw.”

            One response to the denial of a clean product from a good Creator with a clear purpose is to reject the notion of good, creation, and purpose, and posit a world that emerges by blind chance. Many if not most of the materialists hold this position as their main premise. They appeal to the notion that in the vastness of time and space an infinite number of universes evolve and ours happens to have beings with life, consciousness, and a degree of intelligence. This idea seems to have worked its way into the popular culture where characters on TV and in movies casually mention alternative universes.

            Does logic force us to accept the notion that only blind chance could have produced our world? I intend to offer an interpretation that diverges radically from the materialist views that effectively deny the significance of consciousness. This series of posts concludes with a sketch of the position that will be elaborated and applied in the remaining posts.  Many instructional books on learning the art of drawing advise the budding artist to begin with a sketch to set the boundaries and proportions of the subject. Afterward, the details, accents, and shading can be applied to flesh out the picture. (Spoiler alert) I will follow this pattern by giving a sketch of my proposal. Any attempt to explain reality, whether attempted by a philosopher, a theologian, or a physicist, must involve at least a little hubris. Honesty requires Platonic humility, which means that we call our ideas “a likely story,” or in the words of Charles Sanders Peirce, “A guess at the riddle.”

            As a minimum requirement, a worldview must be possible, meaning that it exhibits both logical consistency and compatibility with known facts. The writer must then show that the view presented is probably true and at least as feasible, or more so, than other alternatives.

            We begin with the recognition of brute facts, which constitute chaos and apparently no sign of any kind of consciousness, order, or benevolence. This statement applies to the period following the “big bang,” to the development of stars and planet, and to the evolution of life on earth from the first protozoa to the “origin of species,” and even to the history of the human race. The fundamental particles seem to be inert unconscious, impenetrable, and determined by the conflicting blind forces of both necessity and chance. They do not display completely random behavior, but follow a regularity that scientists discern as laws of physics. Yet, their behavior also displays some randomness and uncertainty. Moving from fundamental particles to biology, the forces of chance and necessity are still at work. The whole premise of evolution rests on the notion that random mutations occur but then become genetically fixed. This description does not go beyond the reality of brute facts although the elements become entangled in patterns that give rise to consciousness and the ability to find patterns and study them scientifically.  

            But we human beings, at this stage of our evolution have the ability to discern something different from brute facts. We experience beauty: in each other, in nature, in music and art, in our own creative ideas, and in scientific theories. We see enough order and what we call by the name of goodness to make many believe that a Creator-God is at work. This form of consciousness constitutes my title phrase, “the problem of good.” Just as atheists deem the “problem of evil” as proof of God’s non-existence, those who believe in a spiritual reality may see “the problem of good” as a challenge to materialism.

Of course, the materialists will pass all of this off as illusion, or at best, a quirk of a particular set of random mutations in our brain. The dogma of materialism holds that whatever we cannot understand at this stage of our evolution, meaning anything that does not fit the method and content of science, does not exist. With a relatively high level of intelligence, scientists can describe objectively the movement of elementary particles and energy. The assumption of popular materialism holds that the consciousness by which we know physical nature must be a product of nature as we know it.

In posing the problem of consciousness and matter, the danger of a simplistic all-or-nothing dualism looms. A person might think that we must choose between materialism and a kind of creationism. But the complexity and depth of reality should cause us to reject both religious and scientific fundamentalism. A person can reject a literal interpretation of the Bible, in fact reject the whole Bible, without being a materialist. Likewise a person can reject materialism without being biblical fundamentalist.

An alternative vision sees the universe as a process of moving from absolute chaos to a cosmos that expresses: order, beauty, harmony, consciousness, freedom, joy, and, love. The materialists might consistently maintain that these qualities are subjective and fleeting. But the materialist view is not the only rational alternative. We can rationally maintain that these qualities are prior to our known world and that they are powerful, creative, and productive. Whatever is the source of these qualities---call it God or don’t---we may rationally maintain that evolution consists of these powers overcoming the chaos, necessity, and inertness of the elemental brute facts. To the extent that this vision is true, the qualities such as consciousness, freedom, love, and creativity, which we experience to a degree in our own lives, have their seeds in the very formation of the universe.          

            Can we posit a chaos of blind, inert, purposeless, and brutal realities tending toward further chaos and division, and also a Creator Spirit working in the whole development of the universe including human evolution on earth to bring about purpose, intelligence, freedom and cooperation? To affirm both does not mean a dualism of two layers, one material and the other spiritual. Rather the world itself reflects the interaction of the two opposing forces. In the posts to follow, I will elaborate on this interpretation and argue that it stands out as the most rational view that we can hold

Faith and Reason

Faith and Reason

The idea of teleology brings up the specter of God, which the materialists find abhorrent. They do so because they associate God with faith, and faith with blind trust and apostasy to reason. Dawkins, after defining faith as “blind trust” writes:

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry…Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses different rituals for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die--on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes have their own ruthless way of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.

Dawkins convicts faith, as the apostasy to reason, and as the generator of much of the violence and evil in human history.

The notion that faith excludes reason runs contrary to the traditional notion of Natural Law that requires that we strive to “know the truth about God.” Natural law requires believers to think rationally about God, a task which thinkers such as Dawkins believe constitutes a self-contradiction. Can a twenty-first century person accept the method and content of science and still affirm a non-materialist view of reality? This question is a paraphrase of the question that Josiah Royce (1855 -1916) asked in 1913:”In what sense, if any, can the modern man consistently be, in creed, a Christian?” Our intention here is to go beyond Christianity, as Royce also did, to include any non-materialist view. Royce’s answer to this question will be the subject of a later post, but for now we can begin to answer the question of whether we can be scientific without being materialistic by looking closely at evolution.

Evolution seems to be a trial and error attempt toward a teleological unity. Is this seeming teleology a reality or an illusion? How can we think of the process beginning? Pure nothingness is incomprehensible. Of course, we can think of “nothing” between particles or beyond the expanding universe. But in these cases we think of “nothing” juxtaposed to something. But what if nothing at all - neither God nor nature - existed? We can say the words but can have no comprehension of such hypothetical situations of nothingness. Fortunately, we can think of a material world, composed of elementary particles, whether it is created or non-created. Finding language that describes reality below human consciousness poses problem as daunting as describing reality above the level of our consciousness. We can come closest by means of analogies, metaphors, and stories about the things that we can understand.

We can imagine the world beginning in a chaos of brute facts. Does this sentence describe reality right before or right after the big bang? Such a concept of brute facts would be nightmarish and perhaps would constitute the terror and horror of some forms of psychosis. But what if there is a redeeming agape-love at work amid the chaos of brute facts? How long would it take to create a world with intelligent life? Is that what is happening as we speak? If so, how far along are we?

Evolution is a movement away from the chaos of brute facts toward a conscious universal community. We can at last come to the seeds of a contemporary Natural Law theory. In the thirteenth century St. Thomas defined eternal law as “the order by which all things are directed to their end.” We can interpret this statement in a way infinitely richer than he could since he was limited to a pre-Copernican world-view. We can see the “order” to which all things are directed as the teleological harmony to which the brute elemental facts are being called. An understanding of the “order” must include Darwinian evolution but need not be limited to the materialist interpretations of some contemporary Darwinists.

The principle that genetically brought about the replications of molecules becomes conscious in us. The struggle against the separateness of brute facts is the reason that we are here. The same struggle gives us a purpose and direction in which we can progress. The four main precepts of traditional natural law are as pertinent as ever:

1. Preserve yourself, 2. Preserve your species, 3. Know the truth about ultimate reality, and 4. Create social justice.

            The first three of these are easily understood. Self-preservation means that we strive to maintain and enhance our individual physical and psychological integrity. Preservation of our species means that we follow Dawkins’s “selfish genes” to perpetuate the human race. Materialists and teleologists agree that we should strive to know the ultimate nature of reality, although they disagree extremely on what this means. As for social justice, the materialist might see it as one meme among countless others; a teleologist more likely sees social justice as the goal of evolution.

 Social justice can be described as an arrangement of practices that would allow for both freedom and unity. Evolution is working to overcome separateness and integrating all into community. Natural Law enjoins us to take part in that enterprise of creating such a community. But social justice cannot survive in a unity based on tyranny or conformity. Rather, justice would further the evolutionary process by allowing as much freedom as possible to each. Anything that would hinder any person from evolving to his or her full potential, whether the hindrance is oppression, deliberate exclusion, marginalization, or neglect, would stand out as injustice

            The conscious movement toward a just community would constitute the culmination of the whole process of evolution from the absolute chaos of brute facts. If the freedom and unity were universal it would constitute what Josiah Royce called the “Great Community” or the “Beloved Community.” Our purpose here is not to describe a Utopia but to imagine what we could be at our best. What is the ontological status of such an idea? To some extent it already exists. You and I have a degree of freedom and a degree of unity. Many of us can actualize our potential and do not suffer oppression, exclusion and marginalization. Tragically, far too many people suffer these life choking evils, and are cut off from any sense of community. And even for those who are better off, the freedom and communal connectedness falls short of what we think it ought to be.  

Purpose in Evolution

Evolutionary Teleology   

Our view of reality can go beyond materialism and therefore be literally meta-physical. However, it is not necessary to posit an ontological break between nature and super-nature; what we need may be a larger understanding of nature. Developing a larger view begins with a critique of the materialist view.

For a proposition to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. Falsifiable does not mean false. Rather it means that there must be some conceivable experiment that could show the proposition to be false, in case it is. The materialist view is non-falsifiable. According to materialism whatever happens is known after the fact to be possible. Since this world is what it is, and since according to materialist doctrine natural selection is the only way that things develop, a world like this could have and must have evolved by natural selection. Likewise, since there is such a thing as consciousness, according to the materialistic hypothesis, consciousness obviously could and did evolve by natural selection. Given the vastness of time and space, anything that can happen probably will.

The question is whether the materialist view is the most rational one, as materialists assume that it is.  A non-materialist view holds that consciousness precedes evolution and so evolution is consciousness struggling toward more complete manifestations. Those who affirm a God-Creator, or hold to pantheism, or any form of idealism, see consciousness as a reality prior to matter. I will refer to those who hold a non-materialists view as teleologists, meaning that they believe that life is purposeful.  Teleologists take consciousness as a given and can examine the development of consciousness in human beings without appeal to a miracle. In using the term “miracle” in this context, I am not making any super-naturalist assumptions but referring to any event that is wonderful, surprising, and not understood. The materialist view holds that the evolution of consciousness is the product of unconscious particles that over time become conscious. The emergence of consciousness would seem to be a miracle, although a very slowly forming one. But materialists do not see the need for a miracle because they take consciousness for granted. The bland assumption of consciousness resembles the way that we as individuals look at our own personal consciousness. We do not consider our consciousness and the control that we have over our voluntary muscles as a miracle, because by the time we are mature enough to think about these things, they have already become so familiar as to seem ordinary.

The familiarity of consciousness is seen in the fact that it is difficult to speak of the movement of material elements toward unity without using the language of intention. In materialist descriptions the elements “strive,” they are “selfish,” they “tend.” Materialists make it clear enough that this language is metaphorical and that the elements do not really have intentions. I think most of us frequently miss a most crucial gap in our knowledge, namely that the workings of anything below the conscious level lies beyond our understanding. We think that we understand inanimate nature because of familiarity and because of analogy to intentionality. Even when we manipulate things through our science and technology, it is our intentions that we understand, not the inner working of the things.

Both the materialists and the teleologists struggle with the relation between the elements and consciousness. The materialists explain the whole, namely human consciousness as a more complicated rendition of the mechanical action of the parts; genes are complicated molecular replicators, and memes are the cultural equivalent of biological genes. Can we instead turn the relationship around and see the movement of the parts as primitive expressions of the reality that we experience at the human level? Might there be a force which American Philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839 – 1914) calls agape, meaning love, working along side of mechanical necessity and chance?  Pierce holds a view, which he calls agapaism, which affirms a force of loving attraction that moves things at every level toward a teleological unity. In this case evolutionary attraction would be seen as a more primitive instance of what we would think of as the highest form of love. Agapaism is the inverse of materialism in that it gives the movement toward meaningful unity an ontological priority rather than seeing it as a mere chance product of inert particles. This view is not provable, but it is at least as feasible as the materialist view. 

Purpose and the Meaning of Good

From at least the time of Aristotle, the Good was identified with purpose. Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics opens with the assertion: “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has been declared to be that at which all things aim.” The highest good is the end, telos, which is desired for its own sake. The task of ethics consists in understanding what this good is and how to attain it.

Aristotle’s notion of the Good as the final end or purpose came into Medieval Christian thought primarily through the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and his theory of natural law. St. Thomas defined natural law as an aspect of eternal law, the order by which all things are directed to their end. Like Aristotle, St. Thomas thought of God as pure being, pure actuality, whereas creation consisted of a process of things becoming by actualizing their potential. Using a popular example, an acorn has the potential to become a mature oak tree. Inanimate things, plants, and non-rational animals achieve their actuality naturally. We humans, as rational beings, participate in the eternal law and must seek our end voluntarily using reason and free will.

            Reason and free will, in this view constitute the human faculties that enable us to know and love that which is good. Goodness and being are co-extensive, meaning that all being is good. Evil is a lack of something that ought to be. To take an example of a physical evil, if a person loses his eyesight, we call that a physical evil, (more often we would say “misfortune,”) because we cherish sight as a good thing that ordinarily accompanies our human nature. Moral evil consists of a lack of virtue. As we humans grow from infancy to adulthood, we ought to learn to control our lives by reason. The habits of rational governance constitute virtues such as temperance, courage, and justice. Anyone who fails to develop these qualities slips into intemperance, cowardice, and injustice. Since being is good, a good human being is one who is constantly becoming more human, which means a more highly developed rational animal. As we develop in this way we actualize our potential and move toward achieving our end, our telos.   

Contemporary Evolutionary Materialism

Contemporary materialism provides a view that rejects all of the concepts that constitute traditional natural law theory. Materialists deny the reality of the soul, eternal law, teleology, and objective good.  Francis Crick states the materialist position in explicit contrast to the notion of a soul, which his wife had learned in Catholic school:

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

If this thesis holds true, then we must understand conscious behavior of human organism as nothing but a product of physical and chemical events at the level of molecules.

For contemporary materialist thought, the term: “soul” does not refer to anything real. The activities that traditional philosophy attributed to the soul are now seen as nothing but “the behavior of nerve cells and other molecules.” So it is not you and I who experience joy and sorrow, remember things past, and strive for things future - the molecules are doing all of this.

Reason itself does not have the privileged place that it had in traditional thought, but we can choose to make it a supreme value. The materialist philosophers and scientists, to their credit, or to the credit of their molecules, give reason a place of pre-eminence. Materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett says in praise of scientific researchers and in response to those who argue that “trading mystery for mechanism” will impoverish our view of human potential:

Look around at those who are participating in this quest for further scientific knowledge and eagerly digesting the new discoveries; they are manifestly not short on optimism, moral conviction, engagement in life, commitment to society.

Fortunately we can value such things as life, health, and virtue. But nature is indifferent, neither good nor bad apart from our judgments. For materialism, there can be no eternal law, and inanimate objects do not seek ends.  The question for us is whether we can show that the principle of seeking ends still applies to us humans as understood in contemporary science.

            To answer this question we must first look at what the materialists put in the place of the teleology of eternal law, namely, an interpretation of natural selection based on chance. In the materialist view, everything from the formation of molecules to the most complex human thought comes about by natural selection. Some molecules replicate themselves and therefore copies of them will survive. Of the replicating molecules, the ones that are best suited to the environment in which they find themselves and which are not self-destructive, will pass along copies of themselves. This process continues as some of the molecules happen to join with others to form more complex structures. The fittest of these survive and eventually evolve into living organisms, which by the same process of natural selection develop sensation, consciousness, and intelligence. In the materialist view there is no need to posit a design or goal at any point in the process. At the lower levels there is no striving or wanting to survive. At the level of consciousness, the desire to survive might give an organism a competitive edge, allowing those organisms who happen to have a survival instinct to survive and reproduce. At the level of intelligence, planning and deliberately working toward long range goals may greatly enhance survival.

            Daniel Dennett offers an explanation of free will based on non-biological survival structures called memes. (The term “meme” has taken on a more restricted meaning in social media.) Dennett describes Memes as “cultural replicators” parallel to genes, which are the biological replicators. Examples of memes would be anything that is part of what we call our culture, from the way we prepare food to the way we enjoy music. The memes are products of natural selection so that, for instance, an innovation in food or music may or may not be replicated depending on whether or not it is to the liking of the biological host.

            Just as our genes have a natural tendency to replicate themselves, so do our cultural memes. Dennett quotes Richard Dawkins author of "The Selfish Gene” and coiner of the term "meme." Dawkins writes”

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and if necessary the

selfish memes of our indoctrination…We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines but we have the power to turn against our creators. We alone on earth can rebel against the power of the selfish replicators.

Who are “we?” We are sharers of information. With the sharing of memes we have the beginning of a community rather than just an aggregate of individuals. The question is how we rebel against the replicators as Dawkins affirms that we in fact do. Dawkins does not say how, and so Dennett himself attempts to answer this question. The answer is that the memes open up a world of imagination, which provides a variety of options to choose from. Because of imagination we are not limited to only the option that best enhances our own individual survival, nor the survival of our genes. One person may forgo a family and children to live a life of service; another may do so to live a life of hedonistic delights. In both cases the genes’ metaphorical “desire” for perpetuation will not be met.   

There does not seem to be any reason in the nature of thing to affirm that any choices are better than any others. And although scientific thinkers like Dennett and Dawkins stand poles apart from the classical existentialists who hold that reality is absurd, the ultimate outlook on what is good or bad is strangely similar. As Jean-Paul Sartre states after arguing that values have no reality apart from the choice of a free being that choose them:

It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values.

And yet, it seems that those who pursue scientific knowledge, as well as other pursuits such as health care or social justice, do so with the assumption that they are on to something real. We need to ask whether our contemporary scientific world-view is compatible with the notion that science is really good and not just one of the myriad of memes, along with such things as astrology and sorcery, that people happen to adopt. 

Purposefulness in a Materialistic Age

 Purposefulness in a Materialist Age

Materialism and Teleology

We can look at the things around us and the events in our own lives in several ways, but two of them stand out. We can look back at the causes, or look ahead to the purpose. For example we may compare a tree that a storm knocks over to a baseball that a centerfielder throws to home-plate. In the first case, air moves from an area of higher pressure to one of lower pressure in ways that meteorologists can explain. A tree or house that happens to be in the path of the wind might be destroyed, but the destruction does not serve any known purpose. By contrast, the trajectory of the baseball results from the fielder’s intention to get the ball to home-plate before the base-runner. Explainable factors such as the skill and strength of the player, wind resistance, and gravity all play a role in the outcome of when and where the throw ends. But, unlike the storm, the throw occurs only because of the intention of the player. Some people believe everything happens for a purpose. “It was (or wasn’t) meant to be.” Others hold that apart from human intentions, such as throwing, the universe lacks any purposeful action. We might also believe that there is purpose in the universe but that not everything serves a purpose.

Examining the meaning and of purpose, we may ask the question, “Why are we here?” This question might refer to an immediate presence such as why are we here in this meeting, classroom, or social get-together; or it may address a more cosmic concern: “Why are we here on this planet? Why do we exist?”  Looking backwards in the case of the specific “here”, we may say that we are here because we were called in by our boss, it was on our class schedule, or we were invited. If we are extremely literal minded we may say that we are here because we drove or walked. Those answers look backwards at how we got here. But we may also look ahead to the purpose of our presence: to discuss how to improve our company’s safety record, to gain insight into an academic field, or to be introduced to a method of enhancing our income by selling home products. Our individual purpose might be different from that of the boss, professor, or host. But whether the purpose is that of the person who called us to be there, or our purpose for showing up, the purpose refers to looking ahead to what we expect from our action of attending.

In asking the larger question of why we are here in the sense of our very existence, we may again look backwards. Depending on our knowledge and interest we may begin with the “big bang” and trace the history of star and planet generations up to and including the evolution of life on earth. Or we may be more interested in demographics, genealogy, or how our parents met. All of these questions look backwards and involve research in physical or social science, or family history. But the question that emerges as most important to each of us asks, “Now that we are here, what should we do with our lives, what is our purpose for living?”  We might try to answer this question by believing that we are part of a larger purpose and that we need to find our individual role. Or we might believe that our purpose consists only in what we ourselves create in an otherwise purposeless universe.

 The belief that all events can be explained completely and solely by what has happened previously is called a materialist or mechanistic view. These terms reflect an older worldview that portrayed nature as composed of material particles moving according to the laws of mechanical science. But contemporary materialists think in terms of every kind of physical energy and even allow for some randomness. Purpose plays no role.

            The view that things happen for a purpose we call a teleological view. This word is based on the Greek word telos, which refers to an end or purpose. Of course, a person may believe that physical causes – pushing from behind, and teleological causes – pulling from ahead, may both be factors.  The belief that there is some purpose in nature, however little, marks a decisive contrast to the materialist world-view. The distinction between materialism and purpose goes back at least to the time of Plato. The following two posts will contrast the traditional teleological view with the prevailing contemporary materialist view.