Machines
No Christian could ultimately escape the implications of the fact that Aristotle’s cosmos knew no Jehovah. Christianity taught him to see it as a divine artifact, rather than as a self-contained organism. The universe was subject to God’s laws; its regularities and harmonies were divinely planned; its uniformity was a result of providential design. The ultimate mystery resided in God rather than in Nature, which could thus, by successive steps, be seen not as a self-sufficient Whole but as a divinely organized machine in which was transacted the unique drama of the Fall and Redemption. If an omnipresent God was all spirit, it was all the more easy to think of the physical universe as all matter; the intelligences, spirits, and Forms of Aristotle were first debased and then abandoned as unnecessary in a universe that contained nothing but God, human souls, and matter.
—A. R. HALL, THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION, 1500–18001
The Scientific Revolution, that stupendous change in world-view, is usually dated from the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) in 1543, the work that put the sun rather than the earth at the center of the universe—the change from the geocentric to the heliocentric worldview—to Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687, the work that gave the causal underpinnings of the whole system as developed over the previous one hundred and fifty years. Historian Rupert Hall (quoted in note 1 above) put his finger precisely on the real change that occurred in the revolution. It was not so much the physical theories, although these were massive and important. It was rather a change of metaphors or models—from that of an organism to that of a machine.2 By the sixteenth century, machines were becoming ever more common and ever more sophisticated. It was natural therefore for people to start thinking of the world—the universe—as a machine, especially since some of the most elaborate of the new machines were astronomical clocks that had the planets and the sun and moon moving through the heavens, not by human force but by predestined contraptions. In a word, by clockwork! Referring specifically to a device built in the late sixteenth century, Robert Boyle (1627–91) was explicit: the world is “like a rare clock, such as may be that at Strasbourg, where all things are so skillfully contrived that the engine being once set a-moving, all things proceed according to the artificer’s first design, and the motions of the little statues that at such hours perform these or those motions do not require (like those of puppets) the peculiar interposing of the artificer or any intelligent agent employed by him, but perform their functions on particular occasions by virtue of the general and primitive contrivance of the whole engine.”3
Final Cause?
The great French thinker René Descartes (1596–1650) argued that ontologically God created two basic substances—res extensa and res cogitans, things extended and things thinking. The mark of the material world is that it has spatial dimensions. It is completely inert, unthinking, basic. Prima facie, Descartes adopted a version of the pre-Socratic atomist thinking, where material substance comprises “corpuscles” moving blindly according to unbroken law. In spirit his thinking was very different—the atomists accepted the void while necessarily Descartes denied it (because it has spatial dimensions and hence is substance), and they thought the atoms could not be broken apart, whereas his spatial substance is infinitely divisible. The mark of the spiritual world is that it has thought. It conversely has no physical dimensions. Rocks and planets, seas and rivers are res extensa. So are plants and so, notoriously, are animals. Angels are pure res cogitans. Humans likewise are thinking substance. Picking up on a thought to be found in the City of God, Descartes made it central to his philosophy. Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Humans, however, are unique in that, as well as thinking substance, they are also material substance, connected via the pineal gland. Hence, Descartes was a dualist, like Plato, but unlike Plato in that for the Greek philosopher, the mind was clearly located in the body, the very point of Descartes’s system was that mind could be nowhere spatially.
In Descartes’s (“Cartesian”) system, influential in its own right and representative of general thinking by the mid-seventeenth century, there simply was no place for Aristotelian final causes. The idea that matter itself has a kind of motive force, directed toward ends and hence incorporating values, was a contradiction in terms. Ends and values are precisely the sorts of things that res extensa cannot have. In any case, Descartes noted (perhaps somewhat disingenuously), one could never be quite sure what end God intended: “there is an infinitude of matter in His power, the causes of which transcend my knowledge; and this reason suffices to convince me that the species of cause termed final, finds no useful employment in physical [or natural] things; for it does not appear to me that I can without temerity seek to investigate the [inscrutable] ends of God.”4
God! Descartes may have kicked final causes out of his science, but God was as important to the Frenchman as he was to Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas. It was God who guaranteed what Descartes referred to as “clear and distinct” ideas, the very foundations of his system of knowledge. Without God, an all-deceiving Evil Demon (introduced in the First Meditation) could be wrecking everything. This meant that, after the Scientific Revolution, purpose and value were far from gone. And why should they be gone? Even if final cause was no longer that helpful within the system—what end does the moon serve as it moves through the heavens?—the system overall, as God’s artifact, had to be considered teleologically. “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). No one denied this. The universe generally and Planet Earth specifically are the place created by God for his favorites, made in his image, Homo sapiens. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).
This rather suggests that although after the Scientific Revolution there was no place for an Aristotelian take on purposes and values, at a somewhat generic level there was still place for, and need of, a Platonic take. The God of the Timaeus, the Divine Artificer. As it happens, we can go beyond the generic and become very specific, because another way of regarding the Scientific Revolution is as the triumph of Platonism over Aristotelianism! Start with Copernicus. From the beginning, everyone saw that his move to heliocentrism (sun-centered universe) was not something dictated by the evidence. He wasn’t much into that sort of thing at all. He could plausibly have been influenced by Aristarchus of Samos (ca. 310–230), the “Copernicus of Antiquity,” who had proposed a heliocentric world system. But there are deeper, earlier causes—the Pythagoreans, who were virtually sun worshippers and who had the earth and the sun going around some unseen central fire, and, of course, their follower, Plato, who made the sun so great a factor in his philosophical system. As the Form of the Good in the rational world is the foundation and sustaining cause of the other Forms, so the sun in the physical world is the foundation and sustaining cause of the objects of this world. And as the Good lets us know the Forms through the intellect, so the sun lets us know the world’s objects through vision. Copernicus was a fanatic.
The Sun sits enthroned in the midst of all. In this surpassingly lovely temple, could this luminary be placed in any position which would better illuminate all at once. He is justly called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe. Hermes Trismegistus named him the Visible God; Sophocles’ Electra called him the All-Seeing. So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne, ruling the planets, his children, who circle about him.5
Kepler thought much the same way, for all that it was he who dethroned the circle from its privileged status as the perfect geometrical form that the heavens must obey. Try as one might, “by the highest right we return to the sun, who alone appears, by virtue of his dignity and power, suited for this motive duty and worthy to become the home of God himself, not to say the first mover.”6 This Platonism—obsession with the place of the sun, esoteric mathematical knowledge, insistence that things are governed by perfect figures or forms—is right there at the heart of Kepler’s most modern-sounding work. Famous is the way in which he spaced the planets out from the sun according to measurements yielded by the five perfect solids, something of which Plato made much in the Timaeus. Don’t think it is just chance that there are six and only six planets (including the earth)! The Great Geometer in the Sky knew what he was about. Perhaps less famous but as committed is the way in which Kepler argued that there is a Platonic world soul governing physical reality. “The view that there is some soul of the whole universe, directing the motions of the stars, the generation of the elements, the conservation of living creatures and plants, and finally the mutual sympathy of things above and below, is defended from the Pythagorean beliefs by Timaeus of Locri in Plato.”7 Having given a Christian blessing to this kind of speculation, Kepler explored in some detail the analogies between the functioning of the earth’s soul and more familiar bodily workings, arguing that “as the body displays tears, mucus, and earwax, and also in places lymph from pustules on the face, so the Earth displays amber and bitumen; as the bladder pours out urine, so the mountains pour out rivers; as the body produces excrement of sulphurous odor and farts which can even be set on fire, so the Earth produces sulphur, subterranean fires, thunder, and lightning; and as blood is generated in the veins of an animate being, and with it sweat, which is thrust outside the body, so in the veins of the Earth are generated metals and fossils, and rainy vapor.”8
Galileo, if less ebullient, was as committed as any to the Platonic insistence on the significance of mathematics. “That the Pythagoreans held the science of number in high esteem, and that Plato himself admired the human understanding and believed it to partake of divinity simply because it understood the nature of numbers, I know very well; nor am I far from being of the same opinion.”9 We have a Creator God, a Divine Artificer, separate from his creation, but structuring it according to his purposes and imbuing it with his values.
The Anglican Compromise
One should add that for the English particularly—not the Scots—this was a particularly happy state of affairs.10 Roiled by religious controversy for much of the sixteenth century, under Queen Elizabeth a “compromise” was achieved. Steering a middle way between the authority of the Church, which was central to Catholicism, and the authority of the Bible, which was central to Protestantism, especially the Calvinism of John Knox and his coreligionists to the north of the border, the Anglican Church made much of natural theology—God as revealed through reason and especially the senses. Christianity was put on a nice, comfortable, empirical basis.
There is a book, who runs may read,
which heavenly truth imparts,
and all the lore its scholars need,
pure eyes and Christian hearts.
The works of God above, below,
within us and around,
are pages in that book, to shew
how God himself is found.11
Many parsons, secure and well provided for by lifetime benefices, found time hung heavily on their hands, especially if they could afford curates to do much of the donkey work. Hence, seeking to avoid the temptations of the turf or the bottle—or worse—they turned, often in a very professional way, to the study of nature. An ongoing hobby of beekeeping or of orchid growing was not only a happy way to fill the hours but could be justified theologically as study of God’s creation.
It is perhaps little surprise that, reflecting the Renaissance discovery of antiquity and the new emphasis on language skills, one of the most significant British philosophical movements of the seventeenth century was so-called Cambridge Platonism. Henry More, its most influential member, was sympathetic to much of Descartes’s thinking. However, he broke with the Frenchman (and sided with Plato) in thinking that mind or spirit has dimensions. He thought it existed in space, just as does matter. For this reason, More had no trouble with a physical vacuum. Spirit exists even if matter does not. “A substance incorporeal, but without Sense and Animadversion, pervading the whole matter of the universe, and exercising a plastical power therein according to the sundry predispositions and occasions in the parts it works upon, raising such Phaenomena in the World, by directing the parts of the Matter and their Motions, as cannot be resolved into meer Mechanical powers.”12 It is not that this planet of ours is an organism as such, but that in a way the whole of the universe is infused with life. Not necessarily in a conscious way—note in the passage just quoted the life force seems more vegetative than animal—but in a way that animates and moves brute matter.
All very comforting and probably quite influential. The Cartesians always critiqued the Newton system on the grounds that gravitational attraction relies on the quite unacceptable (and Aristotelian-like) notion of “action at a distance.” For Descartes and his followers, one thing can only move another thing if they are touching or end points of a chain of touching things. The Newtonians defended their system on instrumental grounds. Whatever the ontology, the predictive power of their system was definitive. But that there was something slightly occult about gravity was undeniable. It is likely that Newton was reflecting the influence of his good Cantabrigian friend More, and relying on a kind of world soul to keep things moving along.13 But, of course, all of this came with a price or consequence. God is in the world but he is not part of the world. The physical world is a lifeless machine. Kepler, for all his Platonism—or perhaps because of his Platonism—knew the score. As for Robert Boyle, the clock metaphor rules triumphant: “It is my goal to show that the celestial machine is not some kind of divine being but rather like a clock.”14 And what this means then is that, although talk of purpose and value has its place in philosophy and theology, as far as science is concerned, increasingly it was seen to be superfluous. Simply not part of the discussion. Not useful and, if anything, liable to mislead. God, purpose, value—these are out of the discussion. In the words of one of the most eminent historians of the Scientific Revolution, God had become “a retired engineer.”15
There was a rift in the lute. Or, perhaps more appropriately, a fly in the ointment. Robert Boyle, a leading mechanist, saw clearly that organisms did not fit this nice, tight picture. As he wrote in his “Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things,” happily taking the opportunity to make a philosophical point while putting the boot into the French: “For there are some things in nature so curiously contrived, and so exquisitely fitted for certain operations and uses, that it seems little less than blindness in him, that acknowledges, with the Cartesians, a most wise Author of things, not to conclude, that, though they may have been designed for other (and perhaps higher) uses, yet they were designed for this use.”16 Boyle continued that supposing that “a man’s eyes were made by chance, argues, that they need have no relation to a designing agent; and the use, that a man makes of them, may be either casual too, or at least may be an effect of his knowledge, not of nature’s.” Apart from anything else, this takes us from the chance to do science—the urge to dissect and to understand how the eye “is as exquisitely fitted to be an organ of sight, as the best artificer in the world could have framed a little engine, purposely and mainly designed for the use of seeing”—but it takes us away from the designing intelligence behind it.17
Boyle was being forced into playing a double game here. His stance supposedly is not something threatening to the mechanical position. It complements it! How can this be so? Boyle is distinguishing between acknowledging the use of final causes qua science and the inference qua theology from final causes to a designing god. First: “In the bodies of animals it is oftentimes allowable for a naturalist, from the manifest and apposite uses of the parts, to collect some of the particular ends, to which nature destinated them. And in some cases we may, from the known natures, as well as from the structure, of the parts, ground probable conjectures (both affirmative and negative) about the particular offices of the parts.”18 Then, the science finished, one can switch to theology: “It is rational, from the manifest fitness of some things to cosmical or animal ends or uses, to infer, that they were framed or ordained in reference thereunto by an intelligent and designing agent.”19 From a study in the realm of science, of what Boyle would call “contrivance,” in the realm of science, to an inference about design—or rather Design—in the realm of theology.
No one was really deceived, nor did they want to be. John Ray was the most eminent of a line of “parson-naturalists,” stretching from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth century, who did their (biological) science, happy in the knowledge that this testified to the existence of the Creator, and to his great and good designing powers. Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) was an exemplar, containing sophisticated discussions of taxonomy (classification) that anticipate the work of Carl Linnaeus in the next century. No one, certainly not Boyle or Ray, was challenging the machine metaphor. It was just that when it came to organisms, it was felt that something more was needed—and that something more was, in a very Platonic fashion, the guiding hand of the Great Anglican up above.
Cutting Both Ways
Of course, one way in which you might get Platonic purpose out of science—or, more particularly, from hugging and enveloping and (some might say) constricting or confining science—would be to get rid of God altogether. At the least then you would no longer feel compelled to look for purpose and value when faced with some disgusting animal like a leech or a dung beetle. But that proved more difficult than you might think. If anyone should have been able to do it, it would have been the great Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711–76). And this indeed he set about to do with some vigor in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, started in the 1750s but eventually published (anonymously) in 1779, shortly after the philosopher’s death. He showed that the traditional argument from design—the argument of Plato and Augustine and Aquinas—is riddled with problems. On the one hand, who is to say that there is only one designer, and who moreover is to say that this designer got things right straight off? Our experience of complex entities is that usually this is a group effort, drawing on the experience of many attempts—sometimes failures, sometimes successes—in the past. “But were this world ever so perfect a production, it must still remain uncertain, whether all the excellences of the work can justly be ascribed to the workman. If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving?”20 And was it just one workman? “And what shadow of an argument … can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world?” The trouble is, of course, that you are reading in your conclusion—a unique, all-powerful deity—right into your premises and then thinking that you have discovered or proved something.
Even worse when, on the other hand, you turn to the nature of this deity. Hume was not the first to bring up the problem of evil. It is there in the thinking of Epicurus a century after Plato. “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”21 However, Hume (explicitly acknowledging Epicurus) put the case as forcefully as anyone had done before or after. What of “racking pains” brought on by “gouts, gravels, megrims, toothaches, rheumatisms, where the injury to the animal machinery is either small or incurable?” It is all very well to stress the good side to things; there is a bad side also. “Mirth, laughter, play, frolic, seem gratuitous satisfactions, which have no further tendency: spleen, melancholy, discontent, superstition, are pains of the same nature. How then does the Divine benevolence display itself, in the sense of you Anthropomorphites?”22 Acknowledging the existence of both moral evil (the evil brought about by human actions) and natural evil (the evil brought about by natural processes), Hume argued that neither is compatible with an all-loving God who is in control of things. The argument from design simply doesn’t do what it is intended to do.
Yes, but … Right at the end of the Dialogues, Hume (through the spokesman who seems most closely to resemble his position) does a virtual U-turn. Perhaps there is a god—even a God—after all.
That the works of Nature bear a great analogy to the productions of art, is evident; and according to all the rules of good reasoning, we ought to infer, if we argue at all concerning them, that their causes have a proportional analogy. But as there are also considerable differences, we have reason to suppose a proportional difference in the causes; and in particular, ought to attribute a much higher degree of power and energy to the supreme cause, than any we have ever observed in mankind. Here then the existence of a DEITY is plainly ascertained by reason: and if we make it a question, whether, on account of these analogies, we can properly call him a mind or intelligence, notwithstanding the vast difference which may reasonably be supposed between him and human minds; what is this but a mere verbal controversy?23
How should we take this passage? Is Hume in the end really a theist, believing in a God much like the Christian God? Is Hume a deist, believing in a God who is an unmoved mover, perhaps setting all in motion at the beginning, but now sitting back and letting nature unfold on its own? Is Hume an agnostic or skeptic, thinking that we simply cannot say whether or not there is a deity and, if there is, of what nature? Is Hume an outright atheist, denying absolutely the existence of God or gods? We can sidestep this issue. The fact is that at the end of the Dialogues, Hume does qualify his arguments. One possible reason that strikes me as plausible is that although the argument from design is being presented as an argument from analogy—artifacts show the marks of design and do in fact have a designer; the world seems designed in the same way as artifacts; hence, by analogy, the world must have a designer or Designer—truly it is what Charles Sanders Peirce called an “abductive” argument and what today is often labeled “an argument or inference to the best explanation.”24 In The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes nailed it in his explanation to Dr. Watson. “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” The point is that the organized complexity that we see in organisms particularly has to have some explanation and—pace the atomists—pure chance will not do the job. Hence, there must be a designer, and since we know that the designer was not human, there must be a God. Of course, this line of argument only works until a new and more successful challenger comes along; but until this happens, the conclusion reigns supreme.
It is quite possible that this is a major reason why, twenty-five years after Hume’s work was published, the textbook writer Archdeacon William Paley was able to write and publish his hugely successful Natural Theology, a work that actually mentions the Dialogues, and yet with the most famous and, in respects, most influential positive exposition of the Design Argument.
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 show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired 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.25
The watch shows organization, marks of design. The stone does not. Hence, there has to be a God. Shall we simply say that the watch just happened? “Or shall it, instead of this, all at once turn us round to an opposite conclusion, viz. that no art or skill whatever has been concerned in the business, although all other evidences of art and skill remain as they were, and this last and supreme piece of art be now added to the rest? Can this be maintained without absurdity? Yet this is atheism.”26
One should add that there was undoubtedly a social element to all of this. Remember that natural theology for the Anglican Church represented the via media, the middle way between the extremes of Roman Catholicism and extreme Protestantism, notably Calvinism. The Church was—still is—part of the governing fabric of England, with leaders (bishops) members of the legislative body. The end of the eighteenth century was a tense time in Britain, with the awful example across the Channel of the French Revolution and then the rise of Napoleon and nigh twenty years of ongoing warfare. God—the warm, friendly God of the Church of England—was needed to maintain and justify stability. This held right through the middle of the nineteenth century—when the teaching of Paley at the older universities was at its peak.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.27
Not just the nineteenth century. In the late 1940s, the infant lungs of Michael Ruse used to bellow out those words in assembly in (the state-run) Whitehall Primary School in Walsall, Staffordshire.
Immanuel Kant
Was there any way forward? Aristotelian final causes had been removed from the physical sciences. Purpose was gone. As Hume said, it was no longer acceptable to move from statements about matters of fact to statements about matters of value. Too often he found “that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.” As he continued: “This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”28 Science is science and values are values, and yet that simply didn’t seem to be true when we turn to organisms.
If anyone could extract us from this conundrum it would be the greatest philosopher of modern times, the late-eighteenth-century German Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The key to his thinking lies, as it does for so many of us, in his childhood, and in particular in his being raised in a Lutheran Pietist family. Kant grew up in an atmosphere of intense Protestant spirituality, where the Bible was the guide and faith was the foundation. This in itself was going to make him wary of natural theology—the great Reformers Luther and Calvin were very suspicious of reason—and the arguments of people like Hume finished the job. One then sets this against the other great driving passion in Kant’s intellectual life, his total confidence in Newtonian mechanics and the belief that we now can understand the nature of the physical world. Realizing that he had in some way to rise above the skeptical philosophical thinking of Hume, this led Kant to his critical philosophy, and in particular to his great leap forward—his philosophical Copernican Revolution—in seeing that our understanding of the world comes from within as well as without. Hence the synthetic a priori, necessary thinking for all rational beings, something Kant extended from science to morality also.
Hence also Kant’s adamant insistence that knowledge, Newtonian physics, and proper moral thinking—guided by the Categorical Imperative—can only go so far. It cannot get us to God. It might point that way, but genuine knowledge is impossible. The arguments of natural theology not only fail but were bound to fail. “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”29 Note that for Kant this does not make God’s existence any less secure or immediate or important. In fact, God is supremely important in understanding morality. For instance, the Categorical Imperative imposes an absolute ban on lie-telling. How can one justify this when some lies—what you might say to the Gestapo searching for rebels or a child dying of cancer—are surely morally demanded? Only by putting it within the context of God, who will make all right in the end. “If the strictest obedience to moral laws is to be considered the cause of the ushering in of the highest good (as upshot), then, since humans can’t bring about happiness in the world proportionate to worthiness to be happy, an omnipotent moral being must be postulated as ruler of the world, under whose care this proportion is achieved. That is, morality leads inevitably to religion.”30
A nice, neat solution until Kant turned to biology in the second half of the Third Critique, The Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). Influenced by the biology of his day, and one very strongly suspects the philosophy of Aristotle, Kant came right up against the problem of purpose, of final cause. Kant is writing post–Scientific Revolution, so he wants nothing to do with final causes in physics nor does he (qua science) want anything to do with general ends. He is with the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) on this: “There is no need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments.”31 God is a retired engineer. Kant did see (as did Aristotle) that not everything to do with organisms demands a teleological analysis. Grass grows but not in order to feed animals, although it is true that they take advantage of the grown grass. However, when it comes to organisms, Kant sees that they do seem to be organized, and that this organization leads to a kind of functioning—survival and reproduction. This means in some sense that the parts of organisms are both cause and effect, with the kind of forward-looking, value-impregnated dimension that one expects in a world of purpose. The eye, for instance, brings about survival and reproduction, which in turn brings about another eye. But this seems to take us beyond the machine metaphor. “In a watch one part is the instrument for the motion of another, but one wheel is not the efficient cause for the production of the other: one part is certainly present for the sake of the other but not because of it. Hence the producing cause of the watch and its form is not contained in the nature (of this matter), but outside of it, in a being that can act in accordance with an idea of a whole that is possible through its causality.”32 Kant goes on to say that it is a matter of organization or even self-organization. “This principle, or its definition, states: An organized product of nature is that in which everything is an end and reciprocally a means as well. Nothing in it is in vain, purposeless, or to be ascribed to a blind mechanism of nature.”33
At one level, it seems that Kant is introducing an Aristotelian force of some kind. “An organized being is thus not a mere machine, for that has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in itself a formative power, and indeed one that it communicates to the matter, which does not have it (it organizes the latter): thus it has a self-propagating formative power, which cannot be explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is, mechanism).”34 We have seen that for Aristotle the formative power is not a thing like a mist above a swamp—it is more a principle of organization. Hegel thought the buck stopped here. Kant took over an Aristotelian position as against a Platonic position. “By means of the notion of Inner Design Kant has resuscitated the Idea in general and particularly the idea of life. Aristotle’s definition of life virtually implies inner design, and is thus far in advance of the notion of design in modern Teleology, which had in view finite and outward design only.”35 Perhaps. Kant certainly agrees with Aristotle that teleology is uneliminable. You cannot go the way of the atomists. But Kant doesn’t see that the Aristotelian ontological given is really allowable in the Newtonian world. Hence, barred as he is from the external teleology of Plato (faith cannot be knowledge), and barred as he is from the internal teleology of Aristotle (Newtonian physics does not allow principles making for final causes), Kant is driven to the third alternative: the teleology of biology is heuristic.
The concept of a thing as in itself a natural end is therefore not a constitutive concept of the understanding or of reason, but it can still be a regulative concept for the reflecting power of judgment, for guiding research into objects of this kind and thinking over their highest ground in accordance with a remote analogy with our own causality in accordance with ends; not, of course, for the sake of knowledge of nature or of its original ground, but rather for the sake of the very same practical faculty of reason in us in analogy with which we consider the cause of that purposiveness.36
Kant is caught in a difficult bind. Of course, he thinks God is responsible for all of this. Given his underlying philosophy and theology, he cannot bring God into the scientific discussion. He cannot opt for an Aristotelian solution making final causes in some sense real. But he realizes that you cannot do biology without final-cause thinking. So the best he can do is say that teleology is a guide, a heuristic. He cannot say why, ultimately, we need it, but there we are. Although it doesn’t stop Kant from being rather nasty about biology. You want to make the life sciences equal to the physical sciences? Fuhgeddaboudit! “[W]e can boldly say that it would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny this insight to human beings.”37
We enter the nineteenth century with a more fully articulated third option for purpose. Plato: God put purpose into the world—external teleology. Aristotle: purpose is part of the fabric of the world—internal teleology. Kant: purpose is heuristic, needed to do science but in itself of no ontological content—mind-given teleology. Obviously, in an important sense, this is in the tradition of the atomists. There is no teleology actually out there in the living world. Equally obvious, as just noted, it is not in the tradition of the atomists. Teleology is not just a product of sloppy or weak thinking. It is, in some sense, essential, and from this follows its vital heuristic nature. We cannot do without it,38 which, in a way, flips us out of the atomist frying pan and into the Kantian fire. For the atomists there is nothing to explain because there is nothing. For Kant, there is a problem. We want to know why this appeal to ends is needed in biology and not physics. And that is about as good as we can get for the moment—which, as we shall see, turned out to be quite a good moment. Kant’s insistence on the need of final-cause thinking in the biological domain bore heavy fruit. But we get ahead of ourselves.