12 Does the Gaia hypothesis bring myth back to the world?

In the nineteenth century myth was seen as competing with science and as losing out in the competition. In the twentieth century myth was seen as diverging from science and therefore as compatible with it. But the price paid in the twentieth century was the removal of myth from the physical world. Either myth was no longer about the physical world, or the function of myth was no longer explanatory, or both. The current “myth” of Gaia, because it is about the earth, offers the possibility of bringing myth back to the physical world in both subject matter and function, but now in a scientifically acceptable way. The questions are whether the “myth” of Gaia is truly scientific and whether the “myth” really amounts to myth.

Nineteenth-century theories of myth

In the nineteenth century myth was commonly taken to be the “primitive” counterpart to science, which was assumed to be entirely modern. Myth originated and functioned to do for “primitive” peoples what science now did for moderns: account for all events in the physical world. One could not consistently hold both kinds of explanations, and moderns, who were defined as scientific, were logically obliged to abandon myth. The rise of science spelled the death of myth.

The leading exponents of the nineteenth-century view of myth were the pioneering anthropologist E. B. Tylor, whose main work, Primitive Culture, was published in 1871, and the classicist and fellow pioneering anthropologist J. G. Frazer, whose key work, The Golden Bough, was first published in 1890. For Tylor, myth provides knowledge of the world as an end in itself. For Frazer, the knowledge that myth provides is a means to having control over the world, above all for securing food. For both Tylor and Frazer, the events explained or effected by myth are ones in the external world, such as rainfall and death, rather than ones in the social world, such as marriage and war. Myth is the primitive counterpart to natural, not social, science. It is the counterpart to biology, chemistry, and physics rather than to sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. For Tylor, myth is the exact counterpart to scientific theory. For Frazer, myth is the exact counterpart to applied science.

Myth, which is part of religion, attributes rain to a decision by a god; science attributes it to impersonal, meteorological processes. For Tylor and Frazer, the explanations are incompatible because both are direct. In myth gods operate not behind or through impersonal forces but in place of them. God does not set meteorological processes in motion but instead likely dumps accumulated buckets of water on a designated spot below. Therefore one cannot stack the mythic explanation atop the scientific explanation, crediting science with the direct explanation and crediting myth with the indirect explanation. Rather, one must choose between them. Because moderns by definition have science, the choice has already been made. They must give up myth, which is not merely outdated but outright false. Moderns who still cling to myth have failed either to recognize or to concede the incompatibility of it with science.

Twentieth-century theories of myth

In the twentieth century myth was reconciled with science. Moderns, while still defined as scientific, could now retain myth. Tylor’s and Frazer’s theories were spurned on many grounds: for ignoring myths about other than the physical world, for precluding modern myths, for subsuming myth under religion and thereby precluding secular myths, for deeming the function of myth scientific-like, and for deeming myth false. Yet twentieth-century theorists did not try to reconcile myth with science by challenging science. They did not take any of the easy steps: “relativizing” science, “sociologizing” science, making science “masculine,” or making science “mythic.” No less than their nineteenth-century predecessors did they accept science as the reigning explanation of the physical world. Rather, they recharacterized myth as other than a literal explanation of the physical world. Myth was, then, made compatible with science, but only by removing it from competition with science, which meant only by largely and often wholly removing myth from the physical world.

Twentieth-century theories of myth can, accordingly, be divided into three groups. First are those theories which maintain that myth, while still about the world, is not an explanation of the world, so that its function diverges from that of science. The true function of myth can range from acceptance of the world to escape from the world. The pre-eminent theorists here are the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. Second are those theories which maintain that myth is not to be read literally, so that the subject matter of myth is not the physical world. The true subject matter of myth can range from the impact of the physical world on human beings to human beings themselves. The leading theorists here are the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann and the philosopher Hans Jonas. Third and most radical are those theories that maintain both that myth is not an explanation and that myth is not to be read literally. Here fall Freud and Jung. As much as the two differ from each other, both deem the subject matter of myth the human mind and deem the function of myth the experience of that mind. (For a review of these twentieth-century theories, see chapter 1 of this book.)

Bringing myth back to the world

Where theorists of the nineteenth century assumed that myth could not be dislodged from the physical world and therefore could not be saved from science, theorists of the twentieth century saved myth from science, either by removing myth altogether from the world or by removing it as an explanation of the world. The question for the twenty-first century, I suggest, is whether myth can be returned to the world in both subject matter and function—but in a way still compatible with science. The postmodern dismissal of the authority of science, evinced in the labeling of science as itself mythic, cheapens both myth and science. I, for my part, am not prepared to efface the line between science and myth. Twentieth-century theorizing commendably sought to accommodate myth to science rather than to spurn science in the name of myth. Elsewhere I consider one possible way of restoring myth to the world: through Jung’s concept of synchronicity.1 Here I consider a more direct way: the worship of earth, or Gaia.

Gaia is the Greek name for one of the first four gods in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Greek counterpart to the two Genesis creation myths (1.1–2.4a and 2.4b–3.24). In Theogony, in contrast to Genesis, gods come into existence rather than, as in Genesis, are presupposed. Hence the title of the work: the “genesis of gods.” Where in Genesis God is separate from the world that he creates—he creates by himself but not out of himself—in Theogony gods are identical with the forces of nature after which their very names come. (To be sure, in the second biblical creation myth God breathes into Adam to give him life, but the rest of Adam comes from dust, not from God.) The creation of gods is thus simultaneously the creation of the world. More precisely, the initial four gods—Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros—are identical with the forces after which they are named. Where these gods come from, we are never told. Creation myths often begin in medias res.

Soon after their creation, however, these four animated forces of nature become full-fledged personalities. Gaia at first bears a child, Ouranos, parthenogenetically, but then mates with her son to bear 12 Titans, three Cyclopes, and three hundred-handed monsters. Ouranos, out of hatred for the last three among the progeny, thrusts them upon birth back into Gaia, who groans in pain. The youngest Titan, Kronos, comes to her rescue and castrates his father when Ouranos next comes to have sex with his mother. The act prevents Ouranos from fathering any more children. By now, Gaia is a thinking, deliberative figure, whether or not physically separate from the earth. She can, then, be called a god.

Subsequent generations of gods are separate from the forces they control. There are also personified abstractions, such as Fear. Still later generations of gods, along with depictions of them by later Greek authors, are so human as to be divine only by degree and not kind. Moreover, gods acquire responsibilities far beyond those of the physical world. For example, Zeus is the god of justice, strangers, and suppliants as well as of the sky and the weather. And he presides over his fellow Olympians as their king. Homeric religion, which is commonly taken to be the epitome of paganism, is much more than the worship of nature, even if what is called contemporary paganism is not. And in most classical myths natural occurrences, such as rainfall, are incidental to the story, which is as often about the human world as about the natural one.

For the earth to be a living entity, it need not be a personality. But for the earth to be a goddess, it must be. For the earth to be the object of worship, it must surely be a goddess.

The view of the earth or indeed of the cosmos as a living entity is ancient. It is found not just in popular Greek religion but also in Greek philosophy, including Plato, for whom the world “might be in the fullest measure a living being whole and complete, of complete parts; next, … might be single, nothing being left over, out of which such another might come into being; and moreover … might be free from age and sickness” (Plato, Timaeus 32D-33A [Cornford 1937, p. 52)].

Modern science, or at least mainstream modern science, has “killed” the notion of a living earth. As the common, popular explanation of events in the physical world, modern science has displaced religion and thereby myth, which traditionally has been part of religion. Both religion and myth have had to undergo retraining to survive. For both, retraining has meant surrendering the job of explaining the physical world to science and either doing something else or meaning something else. The best example is Dionysus, who ceased to be taken as a god and instead became a symbol—either of something in the world, and not just of wine, or of something in humans. Myth has frequently been decoupled from religion and has survived in secular form.

The argument from design

On the one hand the sheer presence of a god in the world or in control of the world by no means guarantees design in the world. Many creation myths, including Hesiod’s, begin with instinctual procreation as the cause of creation. Even creation produced by intention need hardly spell a master plan. The planning evinced in the biblical creation myths is atypical. And in the second biblical creation myth, that of Adam and Eve, much of creation, not least that of woman, is ad hoc.

On the other hand the absence of god in the world or in control of the world need not remove design from the world. For Aristotle, all physical entities, such as trees, have design without a designer. Design means purpose, or teleology. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover is not a designer.

Aristotle’s view of design in the world has, however, long been superseded by the modern, scientific one, which has eliminated not merely a designer but design itself from the physical world. The world is explained by impersonal processes and is therefore purposeless. Purposeless does not mean chaotic or cruel. It means without a goal. If Aristotle’s view of the world as designed has been supplanted by that of modern science, even more has the religious view of the world as designed by a designer been supplanted. Modern science is wary of allowing even design back into the physical world, lest design bring with it a designer.

Paley and Hume

The debate over design in the world long antedates Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). Epicurus maintained that the world arose not from design but from the random creation of many creatures, only the best equipped of which survived. This view was presented in classic form in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, revived this view, or at least put it in the mouth of Philo, one of Hume’s interlocutors. In Natural Theology (1802) Archdeacon William Paley, writing after Hume but in ignorance of him, famously used the analogy of a watch to argue for a cosmic designer: “In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to shew the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there… . [W]hen we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the several parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use, that is now served by it… . [T]he inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use” (Paley 2006 [1802], pp. 7–8).

The world is like a watch—as in the phrase, which is not Paley’s, “clockwork universe.”

Most of Paley’s hundreds of examples of design are not analogies. They are cases of parts of the body that work so well as seemingly to preclude any origin but design. Paley’s confidence in his explanation, while hardly absent from the start, seems to grow. Near the middle of the book he declares design not merely the best possible explanation but the only possible one:

Paley takes his examples from animals and plants as well as from humans, and he does not limit his cases to organs. He also considers bones, muscles, the blood, body structure, skin, senses, suitability for environment, and instincts. While most of his evidence thus comes from anatomy, he also discusses both “the elements”—air, fire, water, and light—and the planets, the orderly motion of which he celebrates.

If Paley’s favorite analogy is that between the cosmos and a watch, his next favorite is the one that follows, that between the eye and a telescope:

Paley proceeds to argue that the eye evinces even greater design than a telescope. For Paley, design means adaptation—not, as for Darwin, to the environment but to the function of the item at hand. Just like a telescope, the eye must have been designed because it is so well geared to seeing. Hume’s reply, in anticipation of Paley, is that if the eye did not enable us to see, it would not work. Hume thus refuses to equate effectiveness with design.

Paley’s approach is like that of Hume’s Cleanthes in offering a logical argument rather than an invocation of the Bible, which by Paley’s time had ceased to be enlisted by sophisticated thinkers. Paley’s argument is commonly assumed to work by analogy:

The analogy that Hume occasionally mentions in passing is that between a watch and the whole universe rather than that between a watch and an organism or, as in the Gaia hypothesis, that between a watch and the earth. (See, for example, Philo’s summary of Cleanthes’s Paley-like appeal to artifacts in Hume 1962 [1947], p. 146.) More important, Hume assumes that the argument from design is an argument from analogy, whatever the analogy used. Against Cleanthes’s argument from analogy, Philo offers many damning rejoinders.

First, design is not the sole or even the central feature of our world: “Thought, design, intelligence, such as we discover in men and other animals, is no more than one of the springs and principles of the universe, as well as heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred others, which fall under daily observation” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 147). How does the analogy to a watch explain these non-design-like features of the cosmos? The analogy, which is assumed by Cleanthes to be the argument from design, breaks down.

Second, our world “plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable, than it does a watch or a knitting-loom.” If we appeal to analogy, the cause of our world is thus more likely to be “generation or vegetation” than design (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 176).

Third, the gap in scale between the earth and the cosmos as a whole makes unwarranted the assumption that the cosmos operates the way the earth does: “Is there any reason to conclude, that the inhabitants of other planets possess thought, intelligence, reason, or any thing similar to these faculties in men?” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 148). And if even in our world thought “has … so limited a sphere of action; with what propriety can we assign it for the original cause of all things?” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 148). The disanalogy between the earth and the cosmos is a separate issue from that of the orderliness of the earth itself.

Fourth, the analogies to other worlds that we do have come from observations—of motion—and not from sheer reasoning: “Is not the moon another earth, which we see to turn round its centre? Is not Venus another earth, where we observe the same phenomenon?” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 150). We cannot observe the cosmos beyond the solar system and therefore cannot analogize from any design in the solar system to design in the cosmos generally—an argument that obviously no longer holds.

Similarly, even when we do know the origin of something in our world—for example, the building of a house—we cannot analogize to the origin of something very different: “Can you pretend to show any such similarity between the fabric of a house, and the generation of a universe?” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 151). The construction of a house can be observed from start to finish. By contrast, “Have you ever seen nature in any such situation as resembles the first arrangement of the elements?” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 151). One is analogizing from the known origin of one thing—a house or, equally, a watch—to the unknown origin of a much different thing: “The dissimilitude”—between a house or a watch and the cosmos—“is so striking, that the utmost you can here pretend to is a guess, a conjecture, a presumption concerning a similar cause” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 144).

Fifth and last, the observation of the operation of something provides a scant clue to its origin: “From observing the growth of a hair, can we learn any thing concerning the generation of a man?” (Hume 1962 [1947], p. 147). This argument is separate from the issue whether origin means design.

The philosopher Elliot Sober asserts that Paley can be taken as arguing not from analogy, as Hume assumes of any design argument, but from the complexity of organisms in themselves. According to Sober, Paley may be using the analogy only “to help the reader see that the argument about organisms [in themselves] is compelling” (Sober 2000, p. 35). Paley may simply be arguing that the world is designed and then be asking whether chance or a designer better accounts for the design. Taken this way, Paley’s argument is an instance of inference to the best explanation, and Hume’s argument against analogy, when applied to Paley, would thus be misplaced (see Sober 2000, pp. 30–36).

Yet contrary to Sober, Hume can be taken as arguing from inference to the best explanation (see Dupré 2003, pp. 50–51). Hume’s Philo notes imperfections in the world that dispel any uniform design. There is evil, suffering, and fighting to the death in the world. Is our world therefore best explained as the product of a designer, let alone of an omnipotent and benevolent one? And as noted in the first point made by Hume against the argument from analogy, “heat or cold, attraction or repulsion, and a hundred” other processes are as much “the springs and principles of the universe” as design. The disanalogies between designed entities and the world show that design is not the best inference to explain the world.

Hume’s Philo asks with how many worlds are we familiar. Writing long before space travel, on which the comparison of earth to Mars by James Lovelock of Gaia fame relies, he answers: just our own. But then there is no generalization about worlds on the basis of which the following argument can persuasively be made:

The inference is weak because the generalization is based on so tiny a sample. In fact, as Sober observes, the sample size is zero since we do not even know whether our own world was designed (see Sober 2000, p. 36).

But if Paley is arguing by inference to the best explanation, he is not appealing to any sampling. He is appealing to the most plausible explanation of the nature of our world, not of any other world or of all other worlds. To be able to refute Paley, Philo must be arguing against design as the best inference.

Darwin

Hume’s Philo does not deny that the world is orderly, though not in the synchronized fashion of a watch or a telescope and certainly not to the exclusion of imperfections like evil and suffering. What he denies is that that order, such as it is, must have come from design. Yet he cannot explain the order. He cannot rule out the possibility that the order could have arisen randomly, as for Epicurus and Lucretius. Therefore “a total suspense of judgment is here our only reasonable resource” (Hume 1962 [1947], pp. 186–187).2

Darwin supplies the explanation: natural selection. The concept of evolution, which evinces the orderliness of the world, is far older than Darwin, who himself cites dozens of predecessors. Before Darwin, the explanations for evolution were either randomness (Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius) or design (Paley). But there was also Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. On the one hand most of the scientists and social scientists committed to evolution did not initially embrace natural selection as the explanation and instead remained Lamarckians (see Bowler 1988). On the other hand Darwin, for all his disdain for Lamarck’s theory, accepted part of it (see Oldroyd 1986, pp. 146–147). Natural selection offered an alternative to randomness, to design, and to Lamarckism.

Randomness, or chance, is less an explanation for the survival of some organisms over others than the absence of an explanation. As the fervently Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins notes, “But ‘chance’ is just a word exposing ignorance. It means ‘determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means’ ” (Dawkins 1989, p. 218). Yet insofar as natural selection involves no plan for the survival of some organisms over others, it seemingly makes survival random as well. But natural selection actually accounts for the survival of some organisms over others, so that survival is anything but random. Natural selection means the passing on through heredity of those characteristics that favor survival by being best suited to the environment. In Darwin’s own words,

To cite everyone’s favorite example, “If giraffes are fitter with longer necks, allowing them to reach higher leaves and survive food shortages, for example, and if long-necked giraffes have longer-necked baby giraffes, then a population of giraffes will evolve longer necks” (Dupré 2003, p. 17).3

Even with natural selection, some randomness remains, but not total randomness. As the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr states,

If natural selection is not random, it is not designed either. As Mayr points out, “How could an elimination process”—the dying out of those living things least able to adapt to the environment—“be teleological?” (Mayr 2002 [2001], p. 133). No god pronounces the world good, the way God does at the end of each day of creation in the first biblical creation myth. The world is akin to the world for secular existentialists like Sartre and Camus: it is not malevolent but is pointless or absurd.4 Natural selection means the response by organisms to the environment as they find it. The environment—climate, natural upheavals, sources of food, and competing organisms—has not been planned. Without planning, there is no planner.5

Whether the world is even getting ever better, let alone in conformity with any plan, is a separate issue, on which the staunchest Darwinians disagree. For Richard Dawkins, “There is nothing inherently progressive about evolution” (Dawkins 1988 [1986], p. 178). Similarly, for Ernst Mayr, there is no

For Edward O. Wilson, by contrast to both, “If progress is defined as being goal-directed, then there hasn’t been progress, because evolution is essentially mindless. But if we’re talking about progress in the sense of increasing complexity, abundance and diversity—things which most humans would equate with progress—then it has occurred. In this sense, evolution has had a fabulous history of progressive change” (Wilson 2005, p. 158).6

Natural selection presupposes the fit between an organism and the environment given that it highlights the adaptiveness of the organism to its world. Natural selection stresses “fitness for purpose.” An organism with the best chance of survival does not merely harbor the most advanced version of the key body part but also harbors the version best suited to the world in which it finds itself. That Cinderella-like fit does not, however, stem from design. For Darwin, there is no watchmaker—or else, in Dawkins’s phrase, only a blind one:

Natural selection is not simply an alternative to design but also a superior alternative. It is tied to observations far more systematically and precisely than is the argument from design. To quote the philosopher of biology John Dupré,

Paley also assumes an unchanging world rather than, as is now known, a changing one (see Farrington 1966, p. 42).

In myth the physical world is explained the same way the human world is: as the result of decisions by personalities. Rain falls because a god decides to send it. To be sure, Frazer, though not Tylor, alternates between reading myth as attributing a physical event to a decision by a god and reading myth as attributing a physical event to the physical state of a god. In Frazer’s stage of religion, which supposedly follows the stage of magic, crops die because the god of vegetation decides to kill them. But in the following stage, which combines religion with magic, crops die because the god of vegetation is either dead or ailing. Still, the direct cause of physical events is a god, not a mechanism.7

Whether or not myth is assumed to explain the human world, as it does not do for either Tylor or Frazer, gods act in the physical world in the same deliberative way that humans act in the human world. Tylor argues that gods are postulated on analogy to humans: just as human action is assumed to be deliberate, so is action in the outer world assumed to be deliberate. Following the assumption of his day that “primitives” are for the species the counterpart to children, Tylor maintains that for “primitives,” just as for children, nothing is inanimate. A stone over which one has tripped has placed itself there. The god of the stone may reside in the stone or may control it from outside, but either way, the god has decided to trip one. A myth about the incident would explain why the god has chosen to do so. A myth, or a potential myth, exists for every physical event. Impersonal causes are precluded. But there need be no grand design for the world for any specific event to be attributed to some immediate purpose.

The rise of science has introduced a disjunction between the way that the physical world is explained and the way that the human world is explained. Natural science explains physical events nonteleologically. Rain results from meteorological processes, not from the decision of a rain god. Biology explains humans the same way that it explains all other living things. Natural selection applies equally to humans and to nonhumans. If biological explanations are considered to be teleological, then there is no disjunction between the explanation of humans and the explanation of everything else.

The debate is over how much of human nature is biological and how much is cultural. This debate goes back to at least the nineteenth century, where culture was taken to be the outward expression of biology. The distinctive culture of each society and, even more, of each race was assumed to be genetic. In the twentieth century culture was separated from biology, and the distinctiveness of each culture was now attributed to nurture rather than to nature. Efforts to subsume culture under biology remain, and the most prominent recent case has been that of sociobiology, now called evolutionary psychology. To quote a few of the most memorable passages in Wilson’s Sociobiology, “scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized” (Wilson 1975, p. 562). Even more boldly,

Wilson concentrates on universal rather than distinctive cultural characteristics. The main evolutionary mechanism at work in the development of culture is assumed to be natural selection.

As a whole, the humanities explain human behavior teleologically. But philosophy is divided into multiple camps. At one extreme are those who argue for the distinctively teleological character of human behavior. Teleology assumes the distinctiveness of the mental, within which fall intentions, sensations, feelings, and above all consciousness. But there are many options within this dualism—notably, interactionism (Descartes), parallelism (Leibniz), and epiphenomenalism (T. H. Huxley). Epiphenomenalism denies teleology insofar as the mental is considered the mere byproduct of the physical. There is also the division within dualism between substance dualism and property dualism.

The opposite of dualism of any kind is monism, according to which everything is either physical (materialism [Hobbes]) or mental (idealism [Berkeley]). Clearly, materialism allows no place for teleology. Materialism itself can take either reductive (Hobbes) or eliminative (Paul and Patricia Churchland) form. In reductive materialism the mental is really the physical, but one can still speak of the mental. In eliminative materialism, which is more radical, one cannot even speak of the mental, which is spurned as the legacy of folk psychology.

A more recent and tamer alternative to reductive, not to say eliminative, materialism is supervenience (Donald Davidson). Only the physical exists, but the translation of mental talk into physical talk is recognized as difficult and perhaps even impossible. Instead of being reduced to the physical, the mental is said to “supervene” on the physical: there is no change in the mental without change in the physical because the mental (mind) is fully determined by the state of the physical (brain).

Different from materialism is behaviorism, which can likewise take varying forms. In methodological behaviorism (B. F. Skinner) the mental—for example, the intention to drink water—is simply a mere response to a stimulus. In logical behaviorism (Gilbert Ryle) the mental is really only the disposition to behave a certain way.

The social sciences are also divided. Some social scientists explain human behavior nonteleologically. For example, the sociologist George Homans explains behavior in wholly Skinnerian ways. Other social scientists explain behavior teleologically—partly or wholly. In the social sciences one distinction often made is that between explanatory and interpretive social science—with the term “explanation” thereby restricted to nonteleological explanations. For “interpretation” the term “hermeneutics” is frequently used. But the term “explanation” can, alternatively, be used to encompass both approaches.

Even the term “cause” is used variously. Like explanation, cause is sometimes set against reason, but other times reason is considered just a variety of cause.9 Aristotle distinguished four kinds of causes, of which purpose or function is one. And for Aristotle, the purpose, function, design, or final cause of an entity requires no designer and therefore no reason. Only the explanation of human action involves reason, or the intentional pursuit of a goal. Thus even for Aristotle, who ascribes purpose to the physical world and not merely to the human world, there is a divide between the explanation of the realms.

But the restriction by Aristotle of reason to humans reveals two distinct notions of teleology: that by humans and that of humans. Human actions, insofar as they are purposeful, are teleological in the sense of being goal directed. But the eyes, ears, heart, and kidneys are teleological in the sense of being designed.10 The divide between Paley and Hume, and in turn that between Paley and Darwin, is over teleology in this second sense. The issue is not whether organs, organisms, the earth, and the cosmos are intentional beings but rather whether they are designed, or seemingly designed, including designed to have intent. The analogy between natural phenomena and artifacts is over teleology in this second sense. In fact, the analogy between the cosmos and a watch or between the eye and a telescope is intended to efface the divide between the supposedly nonteleological natural world and the teleological human world. By contrast, the divide between the explanation of the physical world and the explanation of the human world is over teleology in the first sense: that of being goal directed.

Teleology in this first sense is what usually pits myth against science. Myth is teleological in that the cause of a physical event is a decision by a god, or a personality.11 The decision of a god can still be capricious and without any consideration of design—this teleology in the second sense. Still, myth can be teleological in either sense. In one myth a sky god may intentionally thrust a thunderbolt on persons below—here teleology in the first sense. (The effectiveness of the bolt assumes laws of nature, but the emphasis in myth is on the intent.) Another myth may attribute the creation of thunder bolts to a plan on the god’s part—teleology in the second sense.

There are at least four possible meanings of teleology:

  1. (1) It rains today because god decides to send rain. TELEOLOGY AS INTENT.
  2. (2) Rain exists because god decided to create it. TELEOLOGY AS DESIGN.
  3. (3) Rain exists because god decided to create it for a “useful” purpose—for example, to water the crops. TELEOLOGY AS DESIGN.
  4. (4) The creation of rain to water the crops is part of the creation of the world (whether just earth or the cosmos) as a whole: the world is synchronized, like a watch. TELEOLOGY AS DESIGN.

Teleology in science

Despite the touted elimination from modern science of teleology in the second main sense—that of design—biology itself seemingly cannot dispense with it. As philosopher Michael Ruse writes of biologists,

There is no designer here. And design means adaptation to the environment. But there is teleology in at least the sense of design, whatever the cause.

If teleology is permitted in biology, then teleology in the social sciences or even the humanities is not automatically unscientific. A disjunction in modern thought remains, but it is within science. It is between biology and the other natural sciences. But the linking of teleology in biology to teleology in the social sciences and the humanities is misleading because in the social sciences and the humanities teleology is in the first sense of the term: that of intent. In biology teleology is in the second sense of the term: that of design.

Darwin, who entered Cambridge intent on becoming an Anglican priest, was much influenced by Paley, whose works he read with pleasure as an undergraduate (see Darwin 1958 [1887], p. 59).12 His Origin of Species is often taken as a nonreligious version of Natural Theology: an attempt to account for the indisputable orderliness of the world but without appeal to God. The orderliness of the world means its adaptability in two senses:

  1. (1) The parts of the world are adapted to fulfilling their function: the eye sees because its parts are so well synchronized.
  2. (2) Those entities with sight, or with the best sight, are adapted to securing food and thereby to surviving.

Where Paley concentrates on adaptability in the first sense of the term—serving a function—Darwin concentrates on adaptability in the second sense—functioning to survive.

For Paley, the likeliest source of the adaptability of the world in his sense is a divine designer. For Darwin, the likeliest source of adaptability in his sense is natural selection: in the competition for limited resources, those living things best adapted to the environment survive and reproduce. But Darwin really combines the usages in that the design-like capacity of the eye to see enables its possessor to survive. As Darwin describes his rejection of Paley:

In The Origin of Species Darwin considers the human organ most fully appealed to by Paley—the eye—and accounts for it through natural selection rather than through design:

Darwin also “takes on” Paley’s parallel between the eye and a telescope. He denies that the eye must be the product of design just because a telescope is:

No differently from the eye, a telescope can continually be improved. Yet from the outset a telescope was built for seeing. The eye was not. But however the eye arose, it was so well adapted to seeing that its possessor could secure food more readily and thereby survive more readily than could organisms without eyes or with less effective eyes. That is what natural selection means. The eye works so well that it seems as if it has been designed, but it has not been. As Dawkins puts it, “Thanks to Charles Darwin, it is no longer true to say that nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed” (Dawkins 2007 [2006], p. 103).13

Hume can appeal only to our ignorance of the origin of the world to argue against any analogy between its possible design and the design of a house. Darwin appeals to our knowledge, albeit incomplete, of the origin of the eye through natural selection over time to argue against any analogy between its possible design and the design of a telescope.

Yet Darwinians, and even Darwin outside Origin, still write about the living world as if it were designed.14 Before the publication of Origin Darwin considered natural selection a law established by God (see Bowler 1988, pp. 28, 32–33). To quote Ruse again,

The question is whether talk about the world as if designed means talk about the world as designed.

Scientific objections to teleology are multiple. Teleology, it is said, is unprovable: intent can only be inferred, not observed. Teleology, it is said, involves backward causation: the cause of behavior is the effect, which comes after the behavior rather than before. Teleology, it is said, predicts poorly: to know the purpose of behavior is not to know whether the purpose will actually activate (cause) the behavior. Teleology, it is said, is prescriptive rather than neutral: it describes what function an entity ought to perform, not what an entity does perform, because an entity may fail: the eyes may go blind. Teleology, it is said, assumes that behavior is always functional, yet it is not easy to find a purpose in all behavior.15

If these and other scientific objections to teleology cannot be met, then teleology is unscientific and teleological talk must be translated into nonteleological talk.16 To quote the historian of science Michael Ghiselin, who offers a foil to Ruse, “Especially in the thinking of biologists, the idea of purpose is looked upon as an unnecessary and delusive anthropomorphism” (Ghiselin 1984 [1969], p. 135). Any effort at bringing the teleology of myth back to the world would thereby fail to do what any theory of myth must do: keep myth and science compatible. To the argument that the science of biology retains teleology, the rejoinder would be so much the worse for biology as science.

The Gaia hypothesis

The figures who created the concept of earth as a self-regulating system were scientists: the eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton and, much more, the present-day multidisciplinary English scientist James Lovelock, who is now 100 and, even more than the earth, is still going strong.17 Both propose the concept as outright scientific and not just as compatible with science. The novelist William Golding suggested to Lovelock the name “Gaia.” The name has proved to be as problematic as it is provocative.

Is the concept, or hypothesis, of Gaia either scientific or even compatible with science? To begin with, is the claim being made that the earth is merely like a living entity—an argument from analogy—or is a living entity? Is the claim being made that the earth has design? Is the claim being made that the earth designed itself? Is the claim being made that the earth is a god? Unless the claims made are that Gaia is a god that itself designed the earth, the “myth” of Gaia does not bring myth back to the world. Now myths need not be about gods—they can also be about humans and animals—but myths of the physical world must be about gods, though physical events, including creation, are sometimes attributed to animals, especially those called tricksters. While gods need not be identical with the physical world, the way that Gaia initially is for Hesiod, gods must at least control parts of the physical world. Modern Gaia is like ancient Gaia: it is the earth itself and not some creator separate from the earth. The question is whether modern Gaia, like ancient Gaia, is a personality.

Having noted the contrast between the absence of life on Mars and the presence of life on earth, Lovelock came to maintain that “the only feasible explanation of the Earth’s highly improbable atmosphere was that it was being manipulated on a day-to-day basis from the surface, and that the manipulator was life itself” (Lovelock 1979, p. 6). The Gaia hypothesis is the view of earth “as a [uniquely] complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet” (Lovelock 1979, p. 10). In other words, the earth is a self-regulating organism. Where Hume’s Philo pointedly asks Cleanthes how many worlds Cleanthes is familiar with and so on the basis of what generalization he can claim that the earth is designed, Lovelock appeals to the distinctiveness of earth vis-à-vis Mars to argue that the earth is designed.

In Gaia (1979), his first book on the subject, Lovelock writes of the earth in terms of design and of the earth as its own designer. For example:

In the introduction to his book Lovelock puts his view heartfeltly. The Gaia hypothesis, he tells us, is “an alternative to that equally depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship, forever travelling, driverless and purposeless, around an inner circle of the sun” (Lovelock 1979, p. 11). If the earth is neither driverless nor purposeless, then it has a designer as well as a design.

Yet Lovelock comes to assert that he has been misunderstood: “Gaia is an evolving system… . It is an “emergent domain.” … In this system, the self-regulation of climate and chemical composition are entirely automatic. Self-regulation emerges as the system evolves. No foresight, planning, or teleology (suggestion of designer or purpose in nature) is involved” (Lovelock 2005, p. 12).

But then Gaia is not a personality and so is not a god, in which case there is no myth. When he denies any teleology to Gaia, he presumably means any Aristotelian final cause. But if for him there is no design at all, just what is left of the Gaia hypothesis, which is now called the “Gaia theory”?18

The philosopher Mary Midgley calls a myth the version of the Gaia theory which trusts that the earth will save itself. But by “myth” she means blind faith—faith blind to the scientific evidence of the vulnerability of the earth. For her, myth is the opposite of science. She embraces Lovelock’s original view of the earth as alive and as self-regulating.

But Midgley notes that Lovelock switches to a medical analogy, by which the earth is an ailing patient in need of help from humans, who are the equivalent of doctors (see Midgley 1996, pp. 148–149; 2002 [1985], pp. 72–75; 2004, pp. 11, 133; 2005, pp. 209–210; 2006 [2001], pp. 237–259, 280–288). To quote Lovelock, who emphasizes ever more the responsibility of humans for the earth,

Lovelock is now concerned with the curbing of carbon emissions by us, not by the earth. But if we do not curb emissions, Gaia will preserve itself, and we will suffer: “The Earth, in its but not our interests, may be forced to move to a hot epoch, one where it can survive, although in a diminished and less habitable state” (Lovelock 2010 [2009], p. 2). So we are back to self-regulation and so perhaps to personification.

If Lovelock is prepared to continue using teleological talk merely metaphorically, the way many biologists insist that they are doing, then there is no Gaia theory. But if, to have a Gaia theory, Lovelock means his teleological talk literally, then he faces the objection that the earth—while containing living things, some of which themselves act intentionally—is not itself a living thing, let alone one that behaves intentionally, let alone one that designed itself.

The most straightforward objection to the earth as a living thing is that it does not reproduce. Reproduction is the key to natural selection for Darwin and is also the key characteristic of ancient Gaia, who reproduces first parthenogenetically and then with her son Ouranos. The objection to the earth as a living thing that behaves teleologically is that the seeming design of the earth is explicable otherwise. Here we return to Darwinian natural selection versus design. But then Lovelock typically backs away from his claim by denying that he really means that the earth is alive:

In Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) and other books Richard Dawkins puts the objections to the Gaia theory with characteristic bluntness. There is cooperation among genes, but only within a species. There is no “universal cooperation,” which is what a unified earth would require. On the one hand

On the other hand genes are mixed only within species, so that there is no cooperation between genes of different species: “Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa” (Dawkins 1998, p. 218).

Furthermore, cheetah genes harbor no commitment to the preservation of the species:

The forest, to use Dawkins’s example, may seem to work like “a single harmonious whole, with each unit pulling for the benefit of all, every tree and every soil mite, even every predator and every parasite, playing its part in one big, happy family” (Dawkins 1998, p. 221). But in actuality, the forest is “an anarchistic federation of selfish genes, each selected as being good at surviving within its own gene pool against the background of the environment provided by all the others” (Dawkins 1998, pp. 221–222). Even if the behavior of one species abets that of others, the consequence is unintended. Soil bacteria

The biologist Richard Lewontin sees the “holism” of the Gaia theory as a reaction to the atomism of modern science. Lewontin seeks a middle ground between atomism and the yearning “to return to a [pre-scientific] description of the world as an indissoluble whole” (see Lewontin 1993 [1991], pp. 14–15).

Unlike some philosophers of science such as Ruse, Dawkins rejects teleological talk altogether. He does not, like Ruse, retain it as even an apt metaphor. For Dawkins, the metaphor is misleading. The world does not in fact operate even as if designed. The elements of the world serve their functions, but their functions do not amount to design even when “design” is used metaphorically.

If the earth cannot be spoken of even metaphorically as designed, then it can hardly be designed, in which case it can hardly be a designer, in which case it can hardly be a personality, given that for Lovelock a personality not merely intends to behave a certain way but also intends to do so out of design. In that case the earth cannot be a god. But if the earth is not a god, then stories about the earth are not myths, and the “worship” of Gaia does not bring myth back to the world in either subject matter or function. But even if, as for Ruse, the earth can be spoken of metaphorically as designed, it is not thereby in fact designed, in which case it cannot thereby be its own designer, in which case it cannot be a god. Again, then, Gaia does not bring myth back to the world. The choices for theorists of myth remain either the nineteenth-century view or the twentieth-century one. No twenty-first-century option yet exists.

Lovelock wants to reconcile myth with science. But when challenged, he discards the myth to save the science. He wants above all to retain scientific respectability. Still, he retains the metaphor of myth: the earth as a personality. The use of metaphor is not the issue. Metaphor is used throughout science. The use of the metaphor of a personality is the issue. A mere metaphor Gaia may be, but for what is it a metaphor? If on the literal level neither Lovelock nor even Ruse is deeming the earth a deliberative, self-regulating entity, is not the metaphor of even design, let alone designer, inappropriate?

Perhaps the Gaia theory can be treated as the equivalent of adult play, or make-believe, for the psychoanalyst Winnicott. But make-believe for Winnicott means more than mere metaphor. It would mean really treating the earth as if it were an intentional being, not just talking about it that way. It would make Gaia the equivalent of Hollywood stars. Perhaps only this way can Gaia bring myth back to the physical world.20

Lovelock cares about the earth. He believes that humans have a responsibility for it—a view that goes back to Genesis 1, in which humans are given “dominion” over the earth. He uses the image of a personified earth to garner concern. But the Gaia theory is about the ability of the earth to save itself and to do so intentionally. And the theory claims to be scrupulously scientific.

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