![]() Natural selection is actualization (survival) of potency (genetic variation) - and variation and selection are the complete explanation for biological adaptation. Chance and Necessityįor Darwin, change in nature is undirected - for Darwin, “chance and necessity” completely explains life. For Aristotle nature is grounded on purpose - change in nature is directed to ends. Evolution, in Aristotelian terms, is blind without purposes. The cornerstone of biological knowledge is knowledge of the purpose a biological process serves. He called it the “cause of causes.” Hearts circulate blood they don’t secrete bile. In fact, for Aristotle, purpose - final cause - is the most important cause. To understand a thing, you must know each of its causes - material, formal, efficient, and final cause. ![]() For Aristotle, elevation of potency to act (material and formal cause) make no sense without inherent direction in nature. Nature is pulled along by purposes - by final causes built into nature. Survival of the fittest is Aristotelian potency and act applied to evolution.īut Aristotle differed from Darwin in a fundamental way: for Aristotle, nature has purposes. Natural selection actualizes potentialities generated by genetic variation. Natural selection makes potential adaptations real. A litter of pups is a litter of potential adaptations. Natural selection is the extension of this metaphysical principle of change - of actualization of potency to act - to the evolution of species. Mammals can give birth to offspring, and do. Oxygen can catalyze respiration, and does so. For Aristotle, nature is characterized by change, and change is actualization of potency - nature is the continuous realization of potentialities. Darwin borrowed some of his metaphysics from Aristotle, without attribution and probably without understanding. Metaphysics More than Biologyĭarwinian natural selection is metaphysics, more than biology. Darwinism purports to explain how a story can be written without purpose and implicitly without an author. but the purposes are merely the outcome of natural selection - survival of the fittest. Biology appears to have purposes - hearts pump blood, kidneys excrete urine, etc. Purpose, according to Darwin, is an illusion. Darwin proposed that all of the specified complexity in living things is the product of undirected differential survival.ĭarwinism is the denial of purpose in nature. Differential survival alone can explain “purpose” in nature. Purpose in biology, Darwin insisted, is an illusion. It was the view that there is no teleology - no purpose - inherent to nature. As ID pioneer Phillip Johnson observed, Darwinism was really a new philosophical theory. Natural selection is an “empty” theory - “survivors survive” has no genuine explanatory power. Natural selection, as atheist philosopher Jerry Fodor has pointed out, isn’t a meaningful level of scientific explanation. It was hardly a scientific theory in any meaningful sense. Nineteenth-century Darwinism was much more than a revolutionary scientific theory. What is it that ties all of this together? Darwinism is framework for much of this change in our country. The ID experience with Darwinian repression seems like a dry run for the America’s metastasizing cancel culture. Now cancel culture has moved out of the lab and the classroom and into our public square. I have a friend who is an internationally respected biologist and Evangelical Christian who tells me that he strongly supports ID but he dares not say a word about it publicly, because it would end his career. ID folks know well what it’s like to be on the receiving end of anti-intellectualism and censorship - we’ve been censored and professionally cancelled for decades merely for asking questions about Darwinism and for proposing science that didn’t fit the Darwinian narrative. Many of us in the intelligent design movement have a sense of déjà vu when we watch the nightly news - censorship and intolerance of intellectual diversity have taken over our public square. Image: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, by Jakob Schlesinger / Public domain.
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