Thomas and Aristotle have loomed large on this blog recently. I would like to have weighed in on these discussions, but I have too many other things on my plate right now. I therefore offer this brief post.
One critic, going after me directly, asserts that I’m committed to a mechanical view of nature and that I develop ID in ways inimical to an Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of nature, according to which nature operates by formal and final causes. Life, according to this view, would be natural rather than artifactual. ID, by contrast, is supposed to demand an artifactual understanding of life.
I don’t think this criticism hits the mark. I have to confess that I’ve always been much more a fan of Plato than of Aristotle, and so I don’t quite see the necessity of forms being realized in nature along strict Aristotelian lines. Even so, nothing about ID need be construed as inconsistent with Aristotle and Thomas.
ID’s critique of naturalism and Darwinism should not be viewed as offering a metaphysics of nature but rather as a subversive strategy for unseating naturalism/Darwinism on their own terms. The Darwinian naturalists have misunderstood nature, along mechanistic lines, but then use this misunderstanding to push for an atheistic worldview.
ID is willing, arguendo, to consider nature as mechanical and then show that the mechanical principles by which nature is said to operate are incomplete and point to external sources of information (cf. the work of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab — www.evoinfo.org). This is not to presuppose mechanism in the strong sense of regarding it as true. It is simply to grant it for the sake of argument — an argument that is culturally significant and that needs to be prosecuted.
This is not to minimize the design community’s work on the design inference/explanatory filter/irreducible-specified-functional complexity. ID has uncovered scientific markers that show where design is. But pointing up where design is, is not to point up where design isn’t.
For the Thomist/Aristotelian, final causation and thus design is everywhere. Fair enough. ID has no beef with this. As I’ve said (till the cows come home, though Thomist critics never seem to get it), the explanatory filter has no way or ruling out false negatives (attributions of non-design that in fact are designed). I’ll say it again, ID provides scientific evidence for where design is, not for where it isn’t.
What exactly then is the nature of nature? That’s the topic of a conference I helped organize at Baylor a decade ago and whose proceedings (suitably updated) are coming out this year (see here). ID is happy to let a thousand flowers bloom with regard to the nature of nature provided it is not a mechanistic, self-sufficing view of nature.
This may sound self-contradictory (isn’t ID always talking about mechanisms displayed by living forms?), but it is not. As I explain in THE DESIGN REVOLUTION: Read More ›