From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Sat Sep 10 2005 - 06:50:00 BST
Hello Case --
> I believe teleology has pretty much been disgarded as
> wishful thinking. The very concept of "purpose" in nature
> leads one to conclude that an event in the future "causes"
> an event in the present. Not very satisfactory.
Not a very satisfactory definition, either. A future event doesn't "cause"
natural selection; purpose in nature is demonstrated by events in the
present that progress toward a more perfect or complex form, as if by
design.
An argument for purpose (or what the vitalists called Teleology) can be
found in Paley's famous watchmaker analogy: If we find a pocket watch in a
field, we immediately infer that it was produced not by natural processes
acting blindly but by a designing human intellect. It's the function of the
fully assembled watch that implies a designer for its constituent parts.
The natural world contains abundant evidence of a supernatural creator. The
argument from design was the common explanation of the natural world until
the publication of Origin of Species in 1859. In the twentieth century,
however, biologists found holes in Darwin's theory. Science has failed to
show any mechanism by which mutation and natural selection can lead to
macroevolution, for example, and fossil records have failed to provide a
common ancestor for hominids and the lower primates, leading to the
reasonable conclusion that there is no common ancestor, and that humanity
was a special creation.
Whether you take the 'Creationist' position or side with the Evolutionists,
it is fairly evident that natural history, contrary to thermo-dynamic
systems, is an evolution from the simplest of organisms to the most complex
by a process that can only be described as "purposeful". I believe it is
reasonable to assume from this that man's life-experience also has a
purpose.
I don't see the relevance of "purpose" or teleology in the Behaviorist
School of psychology, which was mainly a "conditioning" program whose
purpose was to raise children with socially acceptable behavior patterns.
This kind of training is a form of human engineering, the "designer" here
being human as opposed to a deity or vital force.
Regards,
Ham
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