Whether evolution via natural selection is a counter-example to Thomas's Fifth Way

Thomas Aquinas famously shows that the existence of God may be shown through five ways.  The fifth way is sometimes called the teleological argument or the argument from design.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

Thomas begins with the rational principle that all things that act toward an end must have been designed to act toward this end.  Hence, if we find that there are ends, that agents act "as to obtain the best result", then we must agree that these agents' actions had a designer.  Thomas finds such agents in nature, agents that lack intelligence yet act in ways that are obviously "aimed" as, famously, "the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer".  Here Thomas is supposing these agents are programmed to act, they do not decide for themselves, e.g., birds fly south due to their DNA, not out of free choice.


Thomas focuses on nature and so his argument has lost some influence among modern man, who would more easily (and scientifically) attribute the ends of nature to natural selection and evolution.  To stay with the analogy, even a dumb archer will guide an arrow given enough time and motivation.  For example, Richard Dawkins argues that

Thanks to Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing we know looks designed unless it is designed.  Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance.  And among these eminences of pseudo-design are nervous systems which -- among their more modest accomplishments -- manifest goal-seeking behavior that, even in a tiny insect, resembles a sophisticated heat-seeking missile more than a simple arrow on target (p. 103, God Delusion).

Evolution is undoubtedly true, and natural selection is the most likely scientific explanation for the way in which we ended up with complex organs like nervous systems.  But I doubt that evolution by natural selection is a valid counter-example to Thomas's fifth way.  Such arguments miss the deeper philosophical point contained within Thomas's argument.


Thomas remarks that at least some natural, unintelligent agents act to obtain the best result.  They do not end up acting at random (fortuitously), but in a way that best suits them.  It is the notion of best that implies a designer, even given evolution as the method of achieving that result.  For example, a dumb archer may eventually be trained to aim at a target, but it is a rational impossibility that a dumb archer chooses his target.  He shoots where he is told.  His notions of best are external, decided by a more able mind.  So if we wish to argue against Thomas's divinely driven nature, we cannot point toward evolution because it does not provide a definition of best.  It does not aim the arrow of nature, it merely propels it.  


To make this point clear, consider what one may say is the best human organ, the brain.  In his lecture notes on Aquinas, Peter Kreeft writes

I think Aquinas would say that evolution is an excellent example of cosmic design, evidence for God. He’d say the arrow of evolution flies to the target of human brains only because it’s guided by the intelligence of a divine archer. Aquinas would not be among the anti-Darwinian fundamentalists today. I think if he saw the atheist bumper sticker of the Christian fish with the word Darwin in it, he would not understand the intended irony, he would interpret it as an argument for theism (p. 20, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas). 

Using Dawkins's words, that there are bodily "eminences", we actually argue for God's existence. If we suppose that the action of our grey matter is the pinnacle of evolution, then we must concede to Aquinas that there is a designer, aiming the arrow of evolution toward human intelligence.  (God is the intelligence designer not the Intelligent Designer.)


A proper counter-example could be formed if it could be proven that there is no notion of best.  Instead, there are just flavors and variations, each equally valid.  So Thomas's archer may hit the bullseye, or he may avoid it, but we cannot rationally suppose one target is better than another.  This is a post-modern critique of Thomas.  But such an argument is not only fatal to Thomas's fifth way, but fatal to science as well.  Science needs best too, because it tells us truths about the physical world; it needs a best hypothesis.  Without best, the flat Earth and the round Earth become equals, and science would become a glorified database of physical occurrences.


This is why science is indebted to Aquinas and his fifth way.  He justifies the otherwise arrogant claim of scientific truth by telling us why we have intelligence: because our minds, made in the image of God's omnipotence, are ordered toward reason.  And in that humble way, we may find truth.

Skeptics and Believers: Lecture 1 - Religion and Modernity

The material for this course begins at the enlightenment, or the scientific revolution, and it examines what religious and nonreligious thinkers have thought from then to the present time.  The great question that is posed is, "Can religion be modern?"  The first lecture gives an overview of Prof. Robert's attempt to answer to that question.

Prof. Roberts defines Modernity in its more philosophical sense.  The movement of Modernity is toward a greater substitution of the "authority of reason" for the Medieval "authority of faith".  He identifies Modernity with ideas of progress and the universality of reason.  Modernity innately supposes that man will be unified under reason and that, somehow, mankind itself is on a slow journey to this unification.  At the same time, man does not need God or religion to achieve this final goal, because every step is built with the human intellect ordered by reason.  By this definition, Modernity is not so much atheist as it is agnostic.  The Modern god is an outside observer.

With that definition of Modernity, it seems impossible that religion can be modern.  To be religious supposes that God is both necessary and essential for life.  So while various religions may absorb features of Modernity, they can never truly be modern.  This is only my prediction of Prof. Robert's conclusion, but I am very interested in what place he finds for religion in a Modern world.

After defining Modernity, Prof. Roberts gives an overview of the course.  He has chosen to explore the questions of religion and reason throughout time, focusing on what philosophers have thought.  We will hear from Descarte, Hume, Kierkegaard, Kant, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and others.  For this lecture, we are only given the standard nuggets of argument for which they are famous.  But he ends the lecture on a curious note.

At the end, he wants to describe the importance of philosophy.  (Afterall, what use is his lecture if we do not fully appreciate what philosophy is.)  He turns to Focault.  Philosophy, he says, is a practice of thought.  It is a testing of ideas.  This exploration of ideas, if it is deep enough, verges on the spiritual.  Philosophical inquiry, he says, is important because it allows us to change our ideas.  In fact, it impels us to change our ideas.

That definition sounds very appealing.  But if I did not know any better before I listened to these lectures, I would have put philosophy aside and forgotten about it.  Imagine if we said that the importance of science is that it is possible change our ideas about physical reality?  Imagine if we got upset because science dictated to us the nature of the world and felt oppressed by science because we could not form our own understanding of nature.  What good would science be?  But indeed it is that dictatorship that gives science its usefulness.  If science gives us truth, then we can only accept the reality it presents us, we cannot argue. Likewise, philosophy is only useful if it is a real source of truth.  It is important to be able to seek new ideas and change our understanding of the world, but only on the journey toward truth. If God exists, then positing his nonexistence is an ultimately useless exercise.  Freedom is useful only in the service of truth.  It is not an end unto itself.

So instead, if we are to continue further, we must suppose that philosophy is a exploration of the nature of reality every bit as concerned with truth as science.  With that, we can see how religion and reason are not so opposed to each other.  They are both an exploration and response to what is true and real.  Otherwise, they are pointless.

Skeptics and Religion: Beginning thoughts

I have been hoping to learn more about atheism and religion for a long time.  Although any conversion requires an evaluation of the religious landscape, I have never gone through a systematic evaluation.  And now I have a great opportunity to do that.

An atheist friend of mine often raises objections to religion and faith on Facebook, and I have certainly linked to several critiques of atheism.  Facebook was not built for weighty theological and philosophical discussions, and so often those discussions were not as useful as they could have been.  So in a spirit of dialogue, we have decided to seek out a common vocabulary by listening to lectures on skepticism and religion.  These lectures (I hope) will offer a survey of religious belief and its criticism.  What I hope to gain is perspective.  I want to understand why people have had different views from the perspective of those views.  In other words, it is usually not enough for me to understand the criticism of a worldview.  I also want to hear and understand why it is that a worldview exists.

Our first lecture series is called Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition.  These lectures are given by Professor Tyler Roberts, who is himself a skeptic.  The second lecture series is called Faith and Reason: The Philosophy of Religion by Professor Peter Kreeft, an outspoken Catholic apologist.  I hope that these two sets of lectures will give us both points of view.


To begin the discussion, I have some questions I hope are answered by Prof. Tyler over the course of the lectures:

• Will he frame the religious narrative as a search for truth or as the slow triumph of human thought?
• What does he believe is the purpose of philosophy?
• Can he explain love and the intellect from a skeptical point of view?
• Under the skeptical mindset, what stops one from becoming a nihilist?

The final question is the one that I am most interested to learn about.  Is nihilism inevitable if there is no God?

My friend's commentary can be found here.

Theology on Tap: "The Siren Song of Science"

Reflections

I gave the following talk in May.  I was horribly nervous, mostly because as I stood in front of the microphone and looked out into the crowd, I realized it was the first time I had publicly professed my faith.  But it was worth it, if only for the huge swell of calm that poured over me after I finished the talk.  This was a chance for me to form my ideas into something coherent, something understandable.

But it was also a chance for me to find my limitations.  My nervousness was not only a sign of being a novice, but also of being unconfident.  Why the lack of confidence?  Because in some parts I could only form a first-order approximation of what I wished to express, unaware of the secondary or tertiary meanings.  So for instance, when I wanted to talk about the inconsistencies in the Bible, I meant to say that there are passages in the Bible which do not easily agree with one another.  The finding of the empty tomb is the canonical example.  But I did not mean to suggest that the Bible is filled with incompatible passages, unable to be reconciled by anyone but the Catholic hierarchy.  I meant to imply only that finding the real meaning of the Bible is very difficult, so difficult, in fact, that many atheists see this as a sign that Christianity cannot be right, because it cannot put forth a coherent set of Biblical axioms.  But this very real difficulty is not troubling to most Catholics because of sacred Tradition.  I wanted to say this argument in as few words as possible, and so I called this difficulty "inconsistencies".  There is probably a better word.  

What this tells me is that I have to be more Bible literate.  I have to have a better appreciation of where my faith comes from.  So I have started to read Fr. Raymond Brown's Introduction to the New Testament again, beginning with the epistles of St. Paul.  Beginning with St. Paul is important, because, in my haste to reject Protestant Christianity, it is easy to have a distaste for St. Paul.

But what I also came to understand was that I have a fundamental hunger for philosophy, not the fake philosophy of the Internet age, but true metaphysical thought.  I want to know philosophy in the sense that it is the love of wisdom, a love of understanding.  I had begun this journey with St. Thomas Aquinas, who achieved the height of Medieval thought, but who drew upon Aristotle.  That leads me to Plato and Socrates.  In other words, I want a knowledge of classical thought.  So I am beginning to read Plato and Aristotle in that hope that, with this basis, I can feel more comfortable with my own understanding.  Again, I want to know where my faith comes from, and in many ways, it comes from the ancients.  The church often holds up Socrates as a man who, although pre-Christian, is in heaven.  I have a lot I can learn from him.

A working definition of Truth

Scientists discuss their work in elaborate ways.  They invest vast amounts of time and intellectual resources toward writing papers and creating presentations.  Often the organization of work takes as many hours to produce as the original work itself.  There is a reward, however: the more effort put into a paper, the easier it is to understand, the more precise the results, and the more convincing the argument.  But their effort would all be pointless if none of them believed their own arguments.  Instead, each scientist believes they are uncovering a previously hidden part of reality.  Science seeks to discover, not to interpret.

We often take this idea about science for granted, but it is profound.  It implies that when a scientist speaks about atoms, he does not mean that, for him, atoms are a good way of understanding physics, but that there are atoms and the universe is made of them.  To disagree is to be mistaken.

Consider the alternative.  If each of us was allowed to have our own understanding of physics, how could we communicate, how could we make progress?  It seems absurd to suggest that there can be no certainty about the physical world.  Yet, without Truth, we are forced to embrace this absurdity.  Truth is what lets us talk about the real world.  It implies there is a right understanding of reality.  It implies there is something to discover.  But it is uncompromising, because it also implies that we can, at times, be utterly wrong.

This is my working definition of Truth.  There is a reality, and we can discover it.  There is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, and these words have a meaning beyond mere feeling or interpretation.  It may be difficult to find, but it is there.

Intention

My intention in becoming an atheist was never to do harm to a certain faith or to rebel against a society which sought my conversion or for any other vindictive reason.  It was an effort to rid myself of all superfluous beliefs and their unnecessary baggage.  I attempted to reconstruct a tabula rasa, and strongly held to the conviction that I would not believe anything that I could not see with my own eyes or understand with my own mind.  This is a task undertaken only by those who feel they have the intellect to withstand a full frontal assault from reality.  I felt safe within the intellectual fortifications of the university, which, in its clean room of thought, had already declared war on ignorance and continually won virtually every battle.

Or so I thought.

Go to church

The earliest memory I have of anything related to church is leaving.  Being dragged, in fact, away into the parking lot.  I don't remember specifically what happened, but if my mother is to be believed, I had caused some trouble in Sunday school.  I do remember Sunday school, specifically coloring pictures of Jesus and his disciples, always with sandaled feet and continually in the presence of sheep.  Their faces always seemed serious, and I could never figure out exactly why.  These pictures were not like the books I colored in school.  Even at this age I was a contrarian, so if there was some hint of seriousness in my activities at Sunday school, I acted out.  No doubt, it was for this reason that I was being dragged home.

I do not want to project false, romantic ideas back on my childhood, but I can't help but feel a tinge of what would later lead me toward atheism.  In church, I remember feeling stifled.  The air was thick with condescending looks.  And the word "arbitrary" comes to mind.  Why did we go to this big room and sing boring songs and talk about Jesus?  Jesus was boring, absolutely boring.  There were about a billion better things I could to do than go to church.  Even just thinking of those three words, "Go to church," creates ill flashbacks in my mind.

My family moved often when I was growing up, so there was never a chance to settle into one particular church.  But even when we become more stable in Cincinnati, we seemed to switched churches often.  I remember my parents were fond of a particular church in California, and they wanted to find a replacement.  I don't think they ever did.  So from an early age, I was made aware of a variety of worshiping styles.  Perhaps this led me to think of church as arbitrary.  If God is universal, why doesn't everyone do it the same way?

I struggle to remember anything specific.  It all seems like a wash now, and it was over quickly.  I do not remember when or why, but we stopped going to church, because, as my mother said, "I acted up too much."  She was probably right, I did.  So from the time I was about six or seven until college, I rarely stepped inside a church.  My parents tried, after they rediscovered their faith, but there was no way they were going to get me to go to church.