I think you must mean "is not itself only a 'mechanism'." Because the universe is certainly a mechanism in many of its aspects. If there were no "if we do this, it'll do that" machinelike predictability, we wouldn't be able to land a spaceship on Mars or use the computers we're typing on right now.
But even "mechanisms" must have designers; and the ones we know of operate according to a rule (e.g., an algorithm, or a program maybe) which the mechanism did not itself create.
I would regard that as an unproven assertion. The mechanism that puts Mars right where we predicted it would be--did its algorithm necessarily have an outside designer?
Forgive me if I see associations between this historical fact and the behavior of some — not all — enthusiasts of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Fair enough. The same is true, of course, of many of those who are anti-evolution for religious reasons.
As for me, I do believe that the universe is an evolutionary development. But I don't just assume that it's a giant machine. Thus, I do not agree with materialists of dogmatic Darwinian persuasion,...
I think we've been here before. It's confusing, because it often sounds (to me, anyway) like you're framing your statements as a critique of evolution. And certainly many of the other posters who applaud your statements reject evolution. But if you're okay with evolution but think there must be something more than purely mechanistic, materialist evolution, I'm not sure we have much of a disagreement.
You can't make a vaccine without understanding what a virus is and how it works.
Ah, but you can. People were getting vaccinated against smallpox hundreds of years before anyone had any idea viruses existed, much less how they worked. It was the result of another "if we do this, it does that" observation: if we give people a mild dose of smallpox (or cow pox), they don't get sick when exposed to a larger dose later. No understanding required.
Nice to see you, too. And now I must head to the post office before it closes.
I would say "YES." Because an algorithm is a mathematical entity. And mathematics is a universal language. Universals are never the products of mechanistic behavior — mechanics is a result of, not the cause of, universals.
Universals include not only mathematics and by extension logic; but also the natural (e.g., physico/chemical) laws, and I daresay the moral law as well. All mechanics pertains to finite, physical entities. It has no operational scope beyond them.
The beauty here is that the mind of man has the capacity to engage universal ideas. Which tells me right there that man is not a machine.
Actually getting to Mars, however, did require man to conceive of algorithms that would operate towards the achievement of that purpose. If the algorithms achieved their purpose, it must be because the mathematical "truth" they purport to represent actually corresponds with the way the world really is, independent of human wishes and desires.
Which is NOT to denigrate that human beings wished and desired to get to Mars. If they didn't, "we" wouldn't have gone there. This is only to say that human wishes and desires were not the principal or sufficient cause of their success in so doing.
In sum, the algorithmic specification of the world at large is not a human design. Rather, the truth of Reality as discernible by humans depends on the correspondence of natural phenomena to universal specifications which pre-exist and post-exist the human mind. The truth of the world is not a human design — but the truthfulness of human investigations of Reality absolutely depends on recognition by humans of what David Bohm called the "implicate order" of all that exists — which is not a human creation.
I just think the term "mechanism" as a description of a universe that gives all indication of somehow being "alive" in toto is unfortunate and grossly misleading. I would rate it as a prime example of Whitehead's famous Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.
IOW, just because something "looks like" a machine doesn't actually make it one.
You wrote: "... if you're okay with evolution but think there must be something more than purely mechanistic, materialist evolution, I'm not sure we have much of a disagreement."
Oh my, I'm very, very glad for that!
You also wrote: "...if we give people a mild dose of smallpox (or cow pox), they don't get sick when exposed to a larger dose later. No understanding required."
Aristotle's famous claim is that "all men desire to know." Lately I've begun to suspect that this maxim is not universally true. But for those men who do want to know the "why" of things, understanding is required. And that's how we learned about viruses.
Science's role in such matters is indispensable — but not completely sufficient. There is more to the world than what can be directly observed, weighed, and measured. Certainly, no universal falls into the category of things that are amenable to such methods of investigation.
Thank you truly, dear HHTVL, for your outstandingly thought-provocative essay/post!