Actually really proud that I was able to pull this paper off tonight. Did not think I would get this thing done. Here is the introduction, with my favorite song. The ubiquitous feelings of wonder and inspiration that come from the observance and study of the natural world—from the smallest to the largest of scales—appears, at least in the first instance, to be the same impulse that guided the Greeks to define what we now call the ‘cosmos.’ Our English noun ‘cosmos’ derives from the Greek kosmeō, or ‘to set in order’ or ‘arrange.’1 It was used most primitively in the context of arraying an army or marshaling of troops. It later simply came to mean to rule (for example, over a city), and to be ruled beautifully and well. It developed aesthetic components; as Gregory Vlastos put it, “a derivative use of kosmos [came to mean] not order as such, but ornament, adornment; this survives in the English derivative, cosmetic, which, I dare say, no one, without knowledge of Greek, would recognize as a blood-relation of cosmic. In the Greek the affinity with the primary sense is perspicuous since what kosmos denotes is a crafted, composed, beauty-enhancing order.”2 The Greeks further derived a source of moral order and unity by way of this kosmos. A sense of justice and profound harmony permeated every normative impulse in the Greek consciousness. At least, this is the case for those that had any commitment to a project of rationalization.3 From the very outset, then, in European cultural life the understanding of the universe has been guided by linguistic, aesthetic and moral impulses towards structure and divine rule. It was this splendid view of world-order that Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and his mentor Albert the Great maintained. They claimed it was obvious perhaps most in the structure of living creatures: a cosmic principle of order and design. All living creatures have tendencies towards certain ends that are beneficial to them, and in so tending sustain the existence of their form, the form of which explains their tendencies. So, all explanations of their parts have reference towards that end, or the structural, teleological, goal-directed unity of the creature. Because this is the case even for those creatures that are unaware, such a semblance of intentionality must rather be seen as a reflection of divine intentionality. For Aquinas and Albert, this reflection—or the ordered tendencies in nature towards what is best—serves as a proof of the Creator God. In what follows, I will present two recent papers that defend the credibility of either facets of or the entirety of Aquinas’ arguments in the light of contemporary science and metaphysics. They begin by attempting to demonstrate that, in the first instance, contemporary biology is identical to Aristotelian biology, and in the second instance, that all contemporary scientific methodology is compatible with Aristotelian (teleological) science. Inasmuch as this is the case, Aquinas’ argument is consistent with contemporary scientific practice. One of those papers seeks to demonstrate that God is immediately derivable thereby (though given importantly different conditions of what Aristotelianism means than the other). I will argue that both fail in being sufficiently convincing, in the first instance because their account of the practice of contemporary biology is not wholly satisfactory, though even where we may grant that natural teleology in a strictly (conservative) Aristotelian sense exists, they fail to show a true link between such a natural teleology and a more robustly universal teleology or view of science (for it isn’t clear that non-biological systems can have a sustaining ‘function’ on their account), and lastly any account of non-artifactual purpose that builds its way from this ground up in order to make room for divine intentional final causality is starting from the wrong direction. I propose, rather, that if these scholars wish indeed to maintain a kind of Platonizing cosmic teleology (because that is what they are trying to do)—or a holistic worldview that looks to beneficial forms of existence as the ontological foundation for their existence, or roughly, ‘that things exist because it is best’ given by the divine fashioner—one should not begin by appealing to Aristotle’s natural teleology (which effectively can be reconciled with Darwinian materialism, but nothing more significant), but from a more immanently cosmic sense of purpose and intention, namely, time’s arrow, which is irreducible and is pure cosmic impulse and tendency. youtube/watch?v=5Rfmjn_zSK8
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:13:45 +0000