To appreciate the power (and ultimate fallacy) of this argument, we must recover some forgotten terminology to explicate the notion of “final cause” in the light of Aristotle’s celebrated analysis. (Boyle cared little for Aristotle’s physics, but he followed the master’s traditional explication of the categories of causality.) Aristotle proposed that causality included four separate components, as illustrated in the classic “parable of the house.” The stuff of construction counts as a “material cause,” for the house will be different (as the three little pigs discovered) if the building be made of straw, wood, or stone. The mason who actually puts the pieces together works as an “efficient cause.” The blueprint only represents a plan on paper and does nothing to build the house directly. But without a plan, you never get beyond a pile of stones, so the blueprint counts as a “formal cause.” Lastly, without an intended purpose, no one would bother to build at all, so the owner’s desire to live in the house counts as a “final cause” (not “final” in the temporal sense of coming last, but in the literal Latin meaning of an end, or a purpose).
In one of the most striking changes in the definition of science between Boyle’s day and our own, our concept of the meaning of causality has shifted in a fundamental way. One change is only terminological and therefore less important. We would still acknowledge the vital character of material and formal factors, but we no longer choose to label them as “causes.” As the fundamental change, the mechanical revolution unleashed by Boyle and his generation succeeded so thoroughly that the actual building and manipulation of things, called “efficient” causes by Aristotle, became enshrined as the only acceptable definition of causality. Meanwhile, and in consequence, the notion of purpose, or final cause, was banished from science. We no longer believe that inorganic objects have intended purposes, defined either in human or in any other terms. As for organisms, we surely allow a notion of purpose in the vernacular sense that good designs have functions (yes, eyes evolved for seeing)—but we now view such functions as products of the efficient cause of natural selection, and not as conscious intentions either of organisms themselves or of a creating deity.
But final causes remained orthodox (in science as well as religion) during Boyle’s time, and he wrote his 1688 treatise to define the appropriate domain of final causes and to assess the evidence for their action. Interestingly, Boyle sets up the issue as a “Goldilocks” problem by identifying one class of objects as too little, another as too big, and a third as just right. In defining the good design of organisms as “just right,” Boyle firmly linked the venerable notion of final causes to biology, and therefore rooted his natural defense of religion in the phenomena that Darwin’s revolution would later identify as a product of ordinary efficient causality. Boyle’s argument—that good organic design implies benevolent purpose in the cosmos—provides a comfort and appeal that we have not been able to relinquish. So we shore up the pedestal that Darwin should have smashed, and we spin-doctor our interpretation of evolution to view organic change as predictably purposeful (rather than fortuitously contingent), thereby converting Darwin’s mechanism into a false argument for the same comfort that Boyle’s God once provided.
Boyle begins his argument by stating that two schools of philosophical thought deny the existence of ascertainable final causes for opposite reasons—the Epicureans, who view material objects as constructed by chance, and the Cartesians, who regard God’s wisdom as so inscrutable that mere earthly mortals could never discern his true purposes:
Epicurus and most of his followers banish the consideration of the ends of things [final causes] because the world being, according to them, made by chance, no ends of anything can be supposed to have been intended. And on the contrary, Monsieur Des Cartes, and most of his followers, suppose all the ends of God in things corporeal to be so sublime, that ‘twere presumption in man to think his reason can extend to discover them. So that, according to these opposite sects, ’tis either impertinent for us to seek after final causes, or presumptuous to think we may find them.
Boyle then applies his Goldilocks approach to ask what class of natural objects might display final causes indicating creation by an omniscient and loving deity. In Momma Bear’s category of “too little,” Boyle places the inorganic objects on our earth—“inanimate in the sublunary world,” in his terminology. Rocks and waters are so simple in composition that they might either be formed by chance (and therefore subject to the Epicurean objections against final causes) or built directly by nature’s constant and simple laws. (God ordained the laws, to be sure, but objects assembled by physical forces under laws of nature, and not created by God, do not display God’s purposes directly.) Boyle writes:
As for inanimate bodies, as stones, metals, etc. . . . most of them are of such easy and unelaborate contextures, that it seems not absurd to think that various occursions and jostlings of the parts of the universal matter, may at one time or another have produced them, since we see in some chemical sublimations and crystalizations of mineral and metalline solutions, and some other phenomena, where the motions appear not to be particularly guided and directed by an intelligent Cause that bodies of various contextures as those are wont to be, may be produced.
In Poppa Bear’s category of “too much,” Boyle places the massive, inorganic objects of the cosmos—our sun, the planets, and the stars. They are so vast, so distant, so ineffable. God must have made them, but not for us (remember that Galileo and company had already smashed the first pedestal). These bodies, therefore, cannot display satisfactory final causes that might comfort or enlighten human beings. Stars and planets fall prey to the Cartesian claim that God’s purposes are too arcane for human understanding. The stars extol God’s greatness, but not his loving-kindness—and proper final causes must display both God’s existence and his benevolence: “The Cartesian way of considering the world is very proper indeed to show the greatness of God’s power, but not, like the way I plead for, to manifest that of his wisdom and beneficence.”
What objects shall then occupy Baby Bear’s category of “just right”—“the way I plead for,” in Boyle’s terminology. Boyle proposes animals and plants as proper evidence for final causes that prove God’s existence and goodness. First, in contrast to Momma Bear’s simplicity of inorganic objects, animals are sufficiently complex to require a direct creator:
If we allow chance, or anything else, without the particular guidance of a wise and all-disposing cause, to make a finely shaped stone, or a metalline substance . . . there are others that require such a number of and concourse of conspiring causes, and such a continued series of motions or operations, that ’tis utterly improbable, they should be produced without the superintendency of a rational agent, wise and powerful . . . I never saw any inanimate production of nature, or, as they speak, of chance, whose contrivance was comparable to that of the meanest limb of the dispicablest animal.
Second, against Poppa Bear’s ineffable grandeur of stars and planets, the parts of animals are familiar enough to reveal their purposes, and therefore to show their creator’s intent: “I cannot but think,” Boyle writes, “that the situations of the celestial bodies do not afford by far so clear and cogent arguments of the wisdom and design of the author of the world, as do the bodies of animals and plants.”
I wish that I had space to explicate Boyle’s detailed and clever (but also forced and ultimately invalid) arguments for optimal design and utility of every part and function of organisms. Instead, I will only discuss how this classic argument for God’s existence and benevolence both builds and reinforces the pedestal that we seem so loath to smash in order to complete Darwin’s revolution—for if the biosphere operates as a well-oiled machine of divine construction, and if purposes should be construed in terms of utility to humans (as the most perfect of all God’s creatures), then natural theology affirms our domination and right to rule. One last time, in Boyle’s words:
The terraqueous globe and its productions . . . and espec
ially the plants and animals ’tis furnished with, do . . . appear to have been designed for the use and benefit of man, who has therefore a right to employ as many of them as he is able to subdue . . . Therefore the kingly prophet had reason to exclaim: How manifold are thy works O Lord! How wisely hast thou made them all!
When Darwin set out, with conscious intent, to revolutionize human attitudes about the status and history of plants and animals, he did not deny Boyle’s premise that organisms are well designed—and that excellence of anatomy and function establishes the primary problem for natural history to resolve. Darwin writes, in the preface to the Origin of Species, that evidence of taxonomy, embryology, paleontology, and biogeography would be sufficient to prove the operation of evolution, but that we could not be satisfied until we had explained “that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration.”
But Darwin then turned Boyle and Paley upside down in accepting their premise (excellence of organic design), while inverting their explanation. Instead of a benevolent deity making organisms expressly for higher purposes (with human utility paramount among divine intentions), Darwin postulated a mechanistic process called natural selection (an efficient cause). Moreover, and most contrary to older traditions, Darwin’s cause does not operate on such “higher” entities as species and ecosystems, but only on organisms struggling for personal reproductive success—and nothing else! The very features of nature that Boyle and Paley had read as proofs of God’s existence and goodness—the excellent design of organisms and the harmony of ecosystems—became, for Darwin, side consequences or sequelae of a process without overarching purpose, and working directly only for the benefit of individual organisms!
Unlike Boyle, Darwin had no abiding interest in formal theology. But we must wonder what he thought about the wider implications of evolution and natural selection for human status. In other words, how much did Darwin explicitly desire to smash the pedestal that has prevented the completion of his revolution in Freud’s sense? How far did he wish to go in undoing Boyle’s traditional view of human domination (or at least superiority) in a sensibly constructed world?
Since Darwin did not write books about such philosophical questions, we must go to his private letters and jottings. One famous letter stands out as particularly revealing (and beautifully expressed)—a proof that Darwin aspired to revolutionary status in Freud’s sense. Darwin’s most famous American colleague, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, read the Origin of Species (then hot off the presses) with both exhilaration and distress. In a heartfelt and deeply moving letter, Gray told Darwin that he could accept natural selection as an efficient cause of evolutionary change, but that, as a convinced theist, he could not abandon the conviction (however unprovable) that God must have revealed some higher purpose in constructing nature to work by such a principle. Darwin, in his wonderful reply of May 22, 1860, answered with compassion, but also with profound doubt about this traditional comfort:
With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Darwin then penned his key line about design and intention in the history of life—in my view, one of the “great quotes” in the annals of Western thought:
On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.
We now reach the crucial point in explicating Darwin’s view on this most fundamental of all questions. He can accept lawlike predictability, perhaps even with some underlying intent in some ill-defined theological sense, for background generalities. But Darwin also holds his hammer in the pedestal-smashing position for what he designates as “the details”: they are left “to the working out of what we may call chance.” By this careful choice of words, and by his examples, I am convinced that Darwin meant what we now call contingency (or unpredictability due to the extreme complexity of historical sequences), rather than chance in the dice-tossing sense. (This distinction could not be more crucial, because pure chance precludes any explanation of particulars, but contingency, while denying that predictions can be made with confidence at the outset, does assert the possibility of explanation after a particular history has unfolded. Contingency represents the historian’s mode of know ability; pure chance denies that particulars can be explicated at all.)
We now come face to face with another Goldilocks problem. Darwin proposes a conventional realm of generalities and a revolutionary domain of particulars. But which factor dominates in the history of life? Do the particulars only represent a few insignificant bumps and pits on a ball that rolls according to fixed laws of motion, perhaps established with a purpose? Or do the particulars form mountains and gashes so high and deep that the ball’s course must follow these dominating irregularities? Do the particulars lie in Momma Bear’s little bed, or on Poppa Bear’s king-sized mattress (sorry for the sexist implications of these categories, but I refuse to write politically correct bedtime stories—if only, and all the better, to acknowledge history’s sad legacies).
Darwin’s canny continuation of his argument to Gray indicates that he places the particulars in Poppa Bear’s camp of “too much”—that is, too many and too influential to validate the traditional comforts of predictable human domination. He sneaks up on a ruling role for contingency with a series of three examples, the first two undeniable, the third more challenging, but eminently plausible once you accept the first two.
Example one: “The lightning kills a man, whether a good one or bad one, owing to the excessively complex action of natural laws.” Fine. No arguments. The event was not random. The lightning struck a particular spot as an outcome of physical principles, but no one would say that the man happened to be in this spot by design. His death is contingent and unpredictable.
Example two: If we admit contingency for deaths, why not for births as well? “A child (who may turn out an idiot) is born by the action of even more complex laws.” Again, if we understood embryology better, we would know (in a physical sense) why a child entered life with severe mental handicaps. But would we ever want to argue that a beneficent God intended such a particular, and tragic, result in establishing sensible principles of embryonic development? This particular outcome must be read as a contingency without moral meaning.
Example three: the evolutionary extension. Evolution is also a process of birth and death—of species and populations this time. If individual births (the retarded child) and deaths (the man killed by lightning) are contingent, then why not extend the same analysis to the birth and death of species as well—for species are the biological individuals of geological time scales. And, since Homo sapiens is but one species among many, why should our birth (and potential death) be viewed as anything more than another contingency? “. . . and I can see no reason why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws.”
My high school drama teacher once told me that the most famous stage direction in English occurs in act III, scene iii of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where the Bard writes, after Antigonus’s long soliloquy: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Dare we hope that the false, harmful, and traditional comfort of evolutionary progress and human supremacy might finally make its exit—as Poppa Bear, strengthened by the dominating weight of contingency’s realm, brings down his mallet upon the pedestal that Robert Boyle codified, William Paley
enshrined, and Charles Darwin deprived of meaning?
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THE TALLEST TALE
AS A SCHOLARLY DEVOTEE OF ARMCHAIRS AND IVORY TOWERS, I BEGIN with two strikingly similar legends about standing up at events designed for sitting. In high culture’s version, the audience rises at the opening chords of the Hallelujah Chorus and remains standing throughout the piece. (Choral singers—I am one—love the ritual, for we thereby obtain our only guaranteed standing ovation. The intermission after part two of Handel’s Messiah directly follows this great chorus.) In pop culture’s primary example—the seventh-inning stretch—fans by the tens of thousands stand before their team comes to bat in the seventh inning of a baseball game. (The effect is almost eerie. No one makes any announcement, and an unruly crowd behaves, for this one moment, as an entity. Countless fathers have taken advantage of this ritual by telling gullible children at their first ball game: “I can make the entire audience stand at my command”—and then issuing the appropriate order just before the predictable response. Has any kid ever been tricked into obedience by believing that “father sees all”?)
Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Page 28
