Does Nature Have a Purpose?
The modern scientific mindset is characterized by a hard rejection of Aristotle.
Aristotle identified four causes to all substances that undergo change:
Efficient cause (that which brings the substance into being, such as parents for a child);
Material cause (what the substance is made out of, such as flesh, bone, blood, muscle, tissue);
Formal cause (what the substance is, such as a human being);
Final cause (for a human being, living a virtuous life according to rationality)
From at least Descartes onwards, this was rejected. Matter became mindless. Substances are collections of particles. In a sense, substances are either illusions or exist merely in the eye of the beholder. The world is mere quantity. Quality is found only in individual minds. A purposeless universe has only the appearance of purpose, or causality.
This would be solidified ideologically by the highly influential David Hume, who would assert that causality is only a perception, all metaphysics a deception, and all morality purely a matter of emotional sentiments rather than reason (what ought to be can never be derived merely from what is).
But, there is absolutely no reason, philosophically, to believe in any of this. Aristotle abides. We only choose to believe Hume when we want some relief from our consciences, consciences which are not mere mirrors of commands from authority, but are informed by purpose.
The rest of the time, we live by Aristotle.
We speak of substances as though they were not simply collections of atoms. We believe in some kind of sexual ethic, not simply the principle of ‘consent.’ We love the children we have brought into being. We denounce injustices against ourselves as a matter of course.
Yet, philosophically, so many of us continue to insist on materialism, blind evolution, an atomic reality devoid of mind and essence.
Aristotle addressed this counter-position himself in the Physics:
A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man's crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this - in order that the crop might be spoiled - but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity - the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food - since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose?
In a sense, Aristotle is providing a pre-emptive caricature of his own thought. Today, philosophers of science will mock Aristotle for asserting unscientific, primitive ideas, such that rain falls to water corn, or rivers flow to provide mankind with fish, as though nature was akin to a human-dug well or a man-made ship. No, nature is blind, purposeless. Any cause or end is just the retrospective appearance of one, because of its exploitation by the survivors of natural selection.
But this is besides the point…
Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way; but of not one of the results of chance or spontaneity is this true. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but frequent rain in summer we do; nor heat in the dog-days, but only if we have it in winter. If then, it is agreed that things are either the result of coincidence or for an end, and these cannot be the result of coincidence or spontaneity, it follows that they must be for an end; and that such things are all due to nature even the champions of the theory which is before us would agree. Therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.
Forget for a moment what effect molars or incisors or rain have.
Focus instead on the inescapable conclusion that such things have an end, and do not form by chance.
Aristotle continues:
Further, where a series has a completion, all the preceding steps are for the sake of that. Now surely as in intelligent action, so in nature; and as in nature, so it is in each action, if nothing interferes. Now intelligent action is for the sake of an end; therefore the nature of things also is so. Thus if a house, e.g. had been a thing made by nature, it would have been made in the same way as it is now by art… Each step then in the series is for the sake of the next; and generally art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and partly imitates her. If, therefore, artificial products are for the sake of an end, so clearly also are natural products. The relation of the later to the earlier terms of the series is the same in both. This is most obvious in the animals other than man: they make things neither by art nor after inquiry or deliberation. Wherefore people discuss whether it is by intelligence or by some other faculty that these creatures work, spiders, ants, and the like. By gradual advance in this direction we come to see clearly that in plants too that is produced which is conducive to the end - leaves, e.g. grow to provide shade for the fruit. If then it is both by nature and for an end that the swallow makes its nest and the spider its web, and plants grow leaves for the sake of the fruit and send their roots down (not up) for the sake of nourishment, it is plain that this kind of cause is operative in things which come to be and are by nature. And since 'nature' means two things, the matter and the form, of which the latter is the end, and since all the rest is for the sake of the end, the form must be the cause…
Note his example of the plant. A plant has no intelligence. Yet the seed reaches towards the fulfillment of some innate potential. The leaf and roots do the same. The uniformity of this can only suggest essential purpose, even in mindless nature. In fact, this is precisely what we mean when use the term ‘nature’.
In short, Darwinism, ‘the blind watchmaker’, and all of that, represents nothing but some kind of wishful thinking.
Why wish for meaninglessness though (even a meaninglessness contradictorily expressed in meaning)?
I have mentioned this already. Meaning imposes a burden on human beings. Conscience, goals, potential: these all denote obligation and opportunity. Ironically, these things can interfere with a kind of bovine happiness we too often seek. Netflix and chill. Atoms and vibrations. Health and safety.
There is also something deeper going on here.
If you hold to Aristotle’s physics, you find yourself drawn along the path of his next book, that which comes after physics, namely ‘metaphysics.’
If you hold to Aristotle’s theory of causation (and you in fact already do), you hold to the theory that all change is the actualization of potentiality. Pull on the thread a little more. If there is change and movement in a world of purpose, at some point causation must necessarily begin in something uncaused. Something unmoved must be at the heart of all movement.
Thomas Aquinas perhaps put it best in his Summa Theologica, ‘Everything that seeks its own perfection is seeking God.’
Who dares to do that?
More on Aristotle to come. There are manifold reasons we ignore him today: theological, artistic, and political.