There is no escaping "first philosophy."

Francis Beckwith on Dawkins' inevitable reliance on philosophy:

Second, critics often issue normative judgments that depend on the reasoning of first philosophy. Take, for example, Dawkins’ criticism of the career path of paleontologist Kurt Wise. In The God Delusion, Dawkins laments that even after earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. under the renowned Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, Wise did not abandon his belief in young-earth creationism, the view that the first chapters of Genesis should be interpreted literally and that the Bible teaches that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

Although, as I have noted elsewhere, I share Dawkins’ puzzlement with Wise’s tenacity, there is something strangely, and delightfully, non-scientific about Dawkins’ lament. He writes: “I find that terribly sad . . . the Kurt Wise story is just plain pathetic – pathetic and contemptible. The wound, to his career and his life's happiness, was self-inflicted, so unnecessary, so easy to escape. . . . I am hostile to religion because of what it did to Kurt Wise. And if it did that to a Harvard educated geologist, just think what it can do to others less gifted and less well armed.”

This is an odd lament for someone of Dawkins’ philosophical leanings, for he denies that nature, which presumably includes Wise, has within it any intrinsic purposes from which we may draw conclusions about our moral obligations to not frustrating those ends. Dawkins claims that Darwin has shown us that natural teleology of any sort, including intrinsic purpose, is an illusion, and thus maintains that belief in teleology is “childish.” (This, by the way, is rhetorical bluster of the worst sort, since as virtually anyone who has studied the subject knows, Darwinism may count against some versions of design but not all, as Ed Feser, Etienne Gilson, and my former professor, James Sadowsky, S. J., have convincingly argued.)

In order to issue his judgment, Dawkins must know something about the nature of the sort of creature Wise is and the obligations that such a creature has to his natural powers and their proper function. But since Dawkins cannot discover the human being’s intrinsic purposes or our obligations to them by the methods and means of the natural sciences, he opines – when he is not lamenting another person’s life choices – that these purposes and obligations must be illusory and to believe in them childish. Yet Dawkins’ brief against Wise depends on these “childish” illusions.

The key to escaping such counter-intuitive dead-ends is to abandon the failed project that the methods of the natural sciences are the model of rationality for all human endeavors. But don’t just take my word for it. Just observe how Richard Dawkins does not practice what he preaches.

First, click on through to the Gilson book and give me a "helpful" vote.

Second, Dawkins' smuggling of teleology into his life occurs constantly. In one interview he explained that "we’re not put here to be comfortable.” [See this video, at 9:30 minutes.]

"Put here"?

By who?

For a purpose?

So, even Dawkins who claims that he can only "dimly" understand the compartmentalization of the mind in the "rational" and "irrational" cannot escape from teleology.

Is "Meaning" the Ghost in the Machine?

Is it the case that while words can be arbitrary, meanings - or propositions - can never be arbitrary?


"Meanings", it seems to me, are developed, constructed or drawn from "truth" in the sense that "truth" is the "conformity of the mind" to what really is "the case." (Which is an Aquinas meets Wittgenstein mashup.)

So, meanings are "discovered" outside of the "meaning being," which means that they are not invented by the "meaning being" and so cannot be arbitrary.

But meanings - or propositions - are not material entities. They can't be measured, weighed, scanned, seen or tested by the methods of science in themselves. As Etienne Gilson notes in "From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution."

"Since he himself is a material being, the knowledge of the scientist is assuredly tied to matter, but it is not matter.We have seen the face of Einstein, but have we seen his knowledge (savoir), his thought ceaselessly moving between two or more possible physical universes? We have heard his voice, which was sensible, but how is it that we have perceived the sense of the words he pronounced? If there is that which is knowable, and that which is known, then there is that which is immaterial, and since it is tied to our body, which is sensible, the knowable then exists in the sensible. There is a fact which constitutes one of the oldest constants of philosophy. The inevitability of Platonism, in its own right or mediated through Aristotle, comes visibly to the surface here. Since only knowledge could have conceived these things, matter then has the immaterial in it. Centuries, millennia of philosophical speculation have puzzled over the source from whence this immaterial could come. Aristotle replied before them, "From without." Translated: scientifically speaking, we do not know." (Gilson, 149)"

Without meanings or propositions, we couldn't do science. But, it seems, that (a) the most important aspect of science as a human enterprise is immaterial and (b) that most important aspect is an immaterial, metaphysical - perhaps even, supernatural - element planted right in the heart of our material universe.

Which should be a weird thought for anyone who believes that they are pure materialists.

Amazon Book Review - Etienne Gilson,  "From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution."

Go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

"Not for everyone, but useful for those with a deep interest in the project of  science," September 25, 2011


By Peter S. Bradley "Peter Sean Bradley"

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution (Paperback)

This book is a lot like physical exercise; difficult, occasionally enjoyable, often a slog, but worthwhile after the fact.

Gilson's book is not facially anti-Darwinian. Gilson's real concern is in defending the idea of final cause or teleology in biology from those who would say that such an idea has been disproven by science. Final cause, or teleology, is the idea that things are directed towards some end, either by something external to themselves or by their own internal existence. Gilson's argument is that Darwinism either doesn't disprove teleology because Darwin's method of science isn't interested in science or that Darwinism actually incorporates teleology by its incorporation of the idea of "evolution" itself.

Gilson is primarily writing as a historian of science and philosopher. Consequently, is method of analysis is historical. He reviews the history of ideas, rather than criticizing evolution or Darwin on a scientific basis. On the whole, Gilson appears to be quite sympathetic to Darwin as a person and a scientist.

Gilson's first chapter is on the "Aristotelian prologue." Gilson examines Aristotle's idea of final cause, and how Aristotle responded to those who would deny final cause. Gilson points out that Aristotle's interest in biology led him to conclude that there was clear and convincing evidence of final cause in the biological world. This evidence grew out of Aristotle's observations that natural things developed regularly and orderly in the direction of an end, e.g., calves grew up to be cows and seed grew up to be plants. Moreover, things in nature develop to a "limit." Calves grow up to be cows, and then develop no more, which implies a limit or an end toward their development. Aristotle's observations - based as they were on truth - carried the day, and from Aristotle onward, any person who sought to examine nature was compelled to include in their description some idea of final cause.

Gilson's next chapter is on the "Mechanist Objection." In a nutshell, that objection, formulated by Rene Descarte and Francis Bacon, was that science ought to be useful, and that final cause was not useful. Gilson observes that the Aristotelian approach found its end in the "contemplation" of nature, and that "contemplation" was tied up with appreciating "final cause." Gilson notes that for scientists, the appreciation for the truth of a theory is often related to an appreciation of the beauty of a theory, which is itself tied up in the wonder of "final cause." However, a scientific approach that incorporates final cause may find that science is being "retarded" in its ability to produce practical results as scientists become "critics" of nature, rather than "mechanics."

So, for Bacon and Descarte, "final cause" had to go, not because it was wrong, but because it was either not useful, or it was retarding scientists from focusing on the useful.

After clearing the ground, Gilson then addresses the history of the idea of evolution. Gilson's argument here seems to be that neither "fixism" - the idea that species were fixed from the beginning - and "transformism" - the idea that species change over time - is conceptually opposed to the idea of final cause. In fact, it seems that Darwin was not opposed to the idea of final cause, but on one occasion accepted the congratulations of a friend that he had restored final cause to science.

The truth appears to be that Darwin simply wasn't concerned with final cause. Being nurtured in an understanding of science that had developed after Bacon, final cause simply wasn't a thing that Darwin was concerned about.

Darwin's big target was the idea of "special creation." Gilson argues that when Darwin felt that his observations disproved special creation, it meant that the Bible could not be trusted by itself as an accurate description of truth. From that point on, it seems, Darwin made common cause with those "partisans" who opposed "special creation," whether or not they accepted Darwin's notion of natural selection, or its chief competitor, Lamarckianism.

One of the partisans who came into Darwin's camp, even though Darwin did not like him personally, was Herbert Spencer. It was Spencer who popularized the notion of "evolution," not Darwin. According to Gilson, in his first editions of the Origin of the Species, Darwin did not use evolution, rather he spoke of "transformation." It was Spencer who spoke of "evolution," but in Spencer's usage evolution had a clear teleology in that their was an internal dynamic by which things progressed from the simple to the complex. Eventually, Darwin began to speak of his theory as "evolution," but by doing so he incorporated, sotto voce, Spencer's teleology.

Gilson discusses other contributors to Darwinism. His take-down of Parson Thomas Malthus is a must-read example of ironically damning someone with faint praise.

So, Darwinism, or "evolution", did not eliminate the notion of final cause, and how could it if final cause is true? Rather, Darwinism is either irrelevant to the notion of final cause, or it incorporates that notion without explicitly acknowledging that it does.

Gilson ends his book by explaining why we ought to continue to think that final cause is necessary for our understanding of truth. That reason primarily is that we see it all around us, even if we don't have a mechanistic explanation for it. Gilson notes, for example, that one of the things that we see in evolutionary development is a progress toward individuation: slime mold is less individual than plants which are less individual than bees which are less individual than cows which are less individual than lions which are less individual than human beings, who have a mind and self-awareness. Is this observation wrong? No. Can it be explained mechanistically? No. Does this teleology, showing a development toward limits, exist? Yes.

Is this science? Probaby not, but it seems to be "common sense" as that term was classically understood as meaning a first order inference from undisputed facts and ideas. To paraphrase a source quoted by Gilson, scientists need to be careful in ruling out "common sense" because where the results of a scientific inquiry conflict too strongly with common sense, it may not be common sense that it wrong.

Gilson concludes by pointing out that final cause may not be scientifically useful, but it is a necessary concept for understanding reality, and it is attested to by numerous real world examples. Its truth may not be scientifically verifiable, but many things we take for granted are not scientifically verifiable. The meaning of ideas, for example, is not scientifically verifiable. We hear words, but the meanings behind the sounds and symbols that are words cannot be measured. Meanings are sense independent, and, in fact, immaterial. Does that mean that meanings don't exist?

Likewise, science relies a variety of theoretical principles to reach its conclusions, including Occam's razor, the principle of least action, etc. Why are those things any more true and real than final cause? Gilson concludes with the following:

"Compared to generalizations such as the principle of least action, economy of thought, and other similar ones, the notion of natural teleology cuts a modest figure. It can be reproached for being anthropomorphic, but in a science which is the work of man, what is not? Furthermore, the important thing is to know whether or not it expresses a fact given in nature for if we object to final causality as an explanation, it remains as a fact to be explained."

Gilson's book is difficult, but I think that on reflection - and reflection is required to put together Gilson's arguments - it pays dividends.