And you OldNavyVet replied: "Rocks collected on the Moon — not subject to wind, rain, and erosion — tell us that it's been 4.6 billion years since"... the Earth was spun from dust and rock around the sun." ...
Okay, OldNavyVet. But tell me: How is your statement responsive to the question of how order — and particularly of biological order — can arise in a "random" system?
This goes to my dearest sister in Christ, Alamo-Girl's observation that we cannot possibly know what is "random" in a system, if we don't know what the system "is." And unless you are going to take a "whole system" approach to the natural world, how can you find out?
Contemporary science seems to be taking the position that the "whole system" is simply an additive "piling up of its parts." Thus, if you get down into the weeds, and study the parts, you can figure out what the whole is. Stochastic methods help us do this.
This is the problem that Darwinism refuses to engage: They want, they require, that everything that exists "supervenes on the physical" — than is, on simple matter in its motions, as determined by Newtonian mechanics. And that somehow matter presumably is able to bootstrap itself into life and consciousness, via a process of random mutation and natural selection. (Selection for what? Selection itself implies the existence of a final cause. See more below.)
It might be said "random" is virtually undistinguishable in meaning from "chaos".... If so, what is the natural propensity of chaos to organize itself? On any time scale???
"Random" is also the way to eliminate the problem of final cause. Rather than having natural evolution working towards and for a purpose or goal, purposes and goals are stipulated to be emergent from purely material processes (i.e., they are epiphenomena or by-products of something else). But even then you can't call them purposes or goals!
Contemporary science does not want to deal with final causes, period. Evidently on the basis that if you admit a purpose or goal, then the next question becomes: Whose purpose? And then quite possibly, God "gets a foot in the door," and we cannot allow that! [according to Richard Lewontin]
But with or without God, there are final causes in nature. Biological functions depend on final causes, as the mathematician Robert Rosen has pointed out.
“Final cause” in the phenomenal sense does not invoke the idea of telos [purpose, goal, end, limit] on cosmic scale. It only invokes the idea of finality of a process in nature. Such as a biological function — you know, those little things like metabolism, respiration, cell repair, etc., etc.
Finality in this sense pertains to the necessary causal closure for efficient causation to depend solely on the resources of the “isolated” system in which it operates. A further indispensable insight is, from the standpoint of the biological Whole, there are no isolated systems; there are only a multiplicity of particular systems, each of which produces its “desired” effect in contribution to the already elaborate, multifarious multiplicity of other effects which altogether are necessary to sustain the integrated biological Whole.
Which I gather is why Rosen thought he ought to seek out complex systems theory for guiding helps. (Simple systems are not biological ones as a rule)…. Stochastic methods having already shown their shortcomings….
It seems to me that one cannot speak of a “function” absent the idea of system closure, which can be described at the causal level if the idea of final cause can be admitted to the table.
If these ideas seem overly abstruse, we can easily simplify them just by taking a hint from Robert Rosen. He suggested that the entire idea of “final cause” is exactly equivalent to positing the natural human question, “Why?” Anytime we ask the question, “Why?” about anything in natural experience, we are invoking — or soliciting — a final cause explanation.
Aristotle explained final cause this way:
Further, the final cause is an end, and that sort of end which is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there is no such term, there will be no final cause, but those who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good without knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit); nor would there be reason in the world; the reasonable man, at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for the end is a limit. — Aristotle Metaphysics Book II, Part 2In sum, the fact that the physical earth "was spun from dust and rock around the sun," while most likely valid, does not even engage the possibility that this process was merely a step, or a way station, on the road to an end (purpose, goal, telos) in nature. In this case, a preparatory stage necessary for the emergence of life on this planet. In short, a movement towards a final cause.
About which the dust and rock are totally silent, nor can they be otherwise.
Well, JMHO FWIW.
Thank you so much for writing, OldNavyVet!
You know this guy? ? Catholic, Thomist, funny, smart.
Please note the use of the word “phenomenal” in the following.
“Final cause” in the phenomenal sense does not invoke the idea of telos [purpose, goal, end, limit] on cosmic scale. It only invokes the idea of finality of a process in nature. Such as a biological function — you know, those little things like metabolism, respiration, cell repair, etc., etc.
Given that, and then reading your Aristotle quote carefully … To wit:
“Further, the final cause is an end, and that sort of end which is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there is no such term, there will be no final cause, but those who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good without knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit); nor would there be reason in the world; the reasonable man, at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for the end is a limit. — Aristotle Metaphysics Book II, Part 2
… I’d say that Aristotle was looking at practical reality in explaining the phenomenal aspect in “infinity,” while saying that looking at things “infinite” is not reasonable.
Given that, I went to Ayn Rand for her thoughts on causality and found this.
”Only a process of final causation – i.e., the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it – can you give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man’s actions.
Thank you for your patience … it is one of Aristotle’s “virtues.”
From DNA analysis; Steve Jones, in Darwin's Ghost (pg 284), tells us that ...
"About a thousand genes are shared by every organism, however simple or complicated. Although their common ancestor must have lived more than a billion years ago, their shared structure can still be glimpsed. It shows how the grand plan of life has been modified through the course of evolution."
snip: This goes to my dearest sister in Christ, Alamo-Girl’s observation that we cannot possibly know what is “random” in a system, if we don’t know what the system “is.” And unless you are going to take a “whole system” approach to the natural world, how can you find out?
Spirited: The questions being asked cannot be logically answered within the larger context of “naturalism” for the reason that naturalism subsumes everything within itself.
In other words, naturalism is monism, which means that the cosmos and everything within it are parts of something else-—a One Thing.
Naturalism is like a coin. One side is materialism and the other is pantheism.
Materialist monism says that this One Thing is Brute Matter hence all things spiritual, ie., God the Father, mind, souls,conscience, free will, angels, and demons are excluded.
Using Eastern pantheism as the example, this type of monism says that the One Thing is impersonal, nonliving but divine spirit and everything is part of this spirit. By extension, everything from cancer to bedbugs and dung, from cows to trees and men are god because they are parts of the One Thing which is divine spirit.
In this view, not only are all things material an illusion, but so too are individual souls-spirits, mind, free will, and conscience, all of which are concepts unique to the Biblical worldview.
In short, the Biblical view says man is both material (body, brain) and spiritual (mind, conscience, free will). In that his mind transcends the material, man is uniquely enabled to be an objective observer of the material dimension. He can know something about the material dimension precisely because his mind, which is spiritual, transcends and is therefore free of the material.
Naturalism effectively nihilizes man’s spiritual endowments by making him a part of something else in the way that grains of sand are merely parts of a beach (materialism) or drops of water are merely parts of a cosmic ocean (pantheism). Because we are parts of the system, we cannnot logically “know what the system “is” anymore than a drop of water can know about the ocean of which it is a fractional part.
In the name of evolutionism and progress, we have marched backwards in time. Though the terminolgy is changed, the underlying arguments are the same, tired arguments made by naturalistic Greek philosophers. We stand once more in the Greek aeropagus with Paul as he is mocked and scoffed at by proud, arrogant Epicureans (materialists) and Stoics (pantheists).
If that truly is the position of contemporary science, it's rather uncomfortably reminiscent of the folks in the late 19th century, who felt that science had reached its perfection, and that the rest was just a compilation of results.... (I can't recall which big-name scientist made the claim.)
What “random system”?