What is the Purpose of it all?"

"BEFORE one can raise with C. S. Lewis the question, "What is the Purpose of it all?", one has to affirm that purposive act is a reality, an act inseparable from that conscious being which is man. Such an affirmation is indispensable if one is to consider the broader meaning of that question. It relates to much more than the purpose of the entire series of purposeful actions in an individual life. It implies even more than the purpose of all such series, that is, the purpose of mankind at large. It bears on the purpose of all living and of all that non-living material reality that makes life possible and is indeed an integral part of all life, non-conscious as well as conscious life.

"To answer that question one has therefore to answer the question about the sense in which the reality of purposeful conscious action can serve as a justification for seeing some evidence of purpose in non-conscious living organisms. To see that evidence one needs eyes different from the ones used in science. There, in ultimate analysis, one can see only measurable data, their correlations and their succession. When a scientist claims to see more, he uses the eyes of philosophy whether he knows this or not, or whether he admits it or not. Further, his use of those philosophical eyes cannot be justified by his seeing, measuring, and correlating data. The predicament of the biologist, as the one who, even more than a physicist, cannot think without philosophy, is well summed up in the now more than a century-old dictum: "Teleology is a lady without whom the biologist cannot live but with whom he would not appear in public." [E. von Brücke]  In spite of its close resemblance to theology, teleology, or the study of purposive or goal-directed activities, is philosophy. Whatever the possibility of exorcising theology from teleology, the philosophical nature of teleology cannot be changed by, say, Monod's tactic of replacing it with the word teleonomy."

~Stanley L. Jaki: Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth, Chap. 5.

Available at Real View Books

The Purpose of it All

Recommended Reading:

THE PURPOSE OF IT ALL
By Fr. Stanley L. Jaki

"What is the purpose of it all? Is an abiding sense of purpose assured by scientific and technological progress? Is biological evolution a carrier of purpose? What is the ultimate purpose of economic prosperity? These and similar questions turn up in most unexpected contexts. One such context was a blueribbon conference hosted in Moscow by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in June 1989. There a US Senator effusively praising free-market economy was stunned by a Soviet scholar's blunt question: "What is the purpose of life?" An answer to that question is offered in this book, the expanded version of eight lectures the author delivered in Oxford in November 1989. True to his reputation as an internationally acclaimed historian and philosopher of science, Professor Jaki, winner of the Templeton Prize for 1987, casts in a new mould the argument from design. In doing so he submits its traditional and modern forms, among them the anthropic principle and process philosophies, to penetrating criticism. He shows that both historically and conceptually the idea of purposeful progress is rooted in the biblical recognition of free will as a carrier of eternal responsibilities and prospects."

@ Real View Books  

Excerpt from the INTRODUCTION by Jaki:

"In making this book available again, after it had been out of print for ten years, I find it necessary to make more specific only one point. It relates to my further reflections on Darwinism as science, as distinct from philosophy [or, ideology]. Today I would emphasize more forcefully two factors which give the theory of evolution as proposed by Darwin and other Darwinists a truly scientific status. Those factors are the variability of offspring and of the environment. They can in principle be evaluated in quantitative terms, which is the indispensable condition for an intellectual to qualify as science, that is, exact science. Recent developments, known as the genome project, have made a tremendous progress concerning the first factor. The second factor remains very elusive to a fully quantitative analysis.

"Such are the scientific limits to evolutionary theory, which more than any other such theory implies a large number of philosophical considerations. These must stand or fall with their philosophical merits. The latter point is very much to be kept in mind, in respect to the so-called "intelligent design" argument constructed with an eye on biochemical data. While a very good case can be made in support of the contention that some biochemical processes connote a very high degree of improbability, this does not eliminate the fact that even the highest degree of improbability is not equivalent to impossibility. Champions of "intelligent design" invariably fail to show sufficient sensitivity to strictly philosophical questions. Among these is the one, amply discussed in this book, which relates to the extrapolation of one's immediate assurance of having a purpose and acting for a purpose to non-conscious biological processes. Unfortunately, those who take evolutionary theory for an ideology, indeed for the chief support of the religion which is secularism, are refractory to philosophical arguments. Even more is to be deplored that advocates of "intelligent design" show time and again a woeful lack of philosophical sensitivity."

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Intelligent Design

Hear two Catholic scientists, Dr. Stacy Trasancos and Dr. Michael Behe, debate Intelligent Design theory at Chronicles of Strength

In this conversation:

• What does Intelligent Design (ID) actually say about the theory of evolution?
• Is ID an argument from ignorance, or an inference to the best explanation?
• At what level is design obvious in nature?
• Is ID too narrow, or telling of something much greater?
• Can you settle the matter of design (or no design) apart from evolution?
• How do we best explain the complex structures and genetic codes we’ve discovered in life?
• Can Neo-Darwinian processes account for this?
 • What does “random” or “unguided” mean with respect to natural selection?
• Can “brute forces and matter” account for the structures and complexity we see in nature?

"Cosmic contingency"

"WHILE THE ABSOLUTENESS ascribed to the speed of light in special relativity reveals something specific valid across the whole cosmos, the latter is given special recognition in general relativity, a point made by Jaki with striking originality. The true philosophical import of general relativity lies in its ability to give, for the first time in scientific history, a consistent or contradiction-free treatment of the totality of gravitationally interacting things. Therefore, Jaki argues time and again, from the viewpoint of science the notion of the universe is a valid one, a point of utmost importance with respect to Kant's criticism of the cosmological argument.

"Jaki also notes that the general theory of relativity provides further data about the specificity of the cosmos. Through that theory one can obtain specific data valid for the whole cosmos, such as it's curvature or space-time. This specific value determines, depending on whether it is a small positive or a small negative quantity, the net of permissible paths of motion. In the former case, the universe is spherical; in the latter case its total matter is distributed in a hyperbolic space-time, analogous to a saddle with no edges but with well-determined slopes. Jaki, who wrote extensively on the paradoxes of an infinite homogenous universe, can therefore authoritatively note that "the only possibility which is excluded is Euclidean infinity whose curvature is 0, an age-old symbol of non-existence."

"According to Jaki, the universe looks "no less specific than a garment on the clothier's rack, carrying a tag on which one could read if not its price at least its main measurements." Such a tag, in Jaki's words, "cannot help evoke the existence of a dressmaker," because there is no need for the garment to be of a particular size. Analogously, there is no scientific reason why the universe has to have the overall specificities established about it by modern cosmology. Consequently, those specificities can be taken for so many pointers of cosmic contingency which in turn can legitimately be used as a ground for invoking the existence of a Creator." (*To be continued)

~Reverend Dr. Paul Haffner: Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought of S.L. Jaki, Chap. 3. (Christendom Press)

Sacraments as Continuity

"CONTINUITY is the principle and reality that comes up whenever one wants to understand what Catholicism is about on any particular point. On seeing this Catholics may take pride in the fact that it was the continuity of "the great church" that turned the word Catholic into the finest of epithets. . . . let the sacraments be taken first. Luther still wanted to retain two of them, baptism and the Eucharist, though in vain. For if the individual's act of faith was the means of salvation, there could remain no logical room for baptism as a means for salvation. Means mean nothing if they do not effect something. But there was nothing to effect, either by faith or by baptism, if justification was merely imputed. The right of baptism could only be a sign of something existing only in the mind of God as He was "imputing." No room then for a rite that confers the kind of continuity which is a new nature, the status of supernatural grace. Within Protestantism the custom of baptizing became indeed a blind bow to a custom, about which it is not possible to say that the Church was without it even in its very beginnings.

"As to the Eucharist, Luther could retain the sense of the real presence only for the 'moment' of communion. Ockham must have nodded. It was then logical not to conserve the sacred species, not to expose the Blessed Sacrament, not even to genuflect in adoration. Surely, the Church is logical in holding that the word "transubstantiation" is a most apt designation of what happens in the Sacrament of the Altar. If there is no real presence, which, let it not be forgotten, is continuity through space and time, there is no need for real priests, no need for men who "are priests forever according to the order of Melchizedech." As the prophet of ecclesial discontinuity, Luther was nowhere more logical than when he declared in his "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," that some had to be ordained in the Church but only to prevent cacophony on Sundays in the churches." . . . [to be cont.]

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Gist of Catholicism

(Artwork: Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, by Rogier van der Weyden. Oil on oak panel, A.D. 1445-50. (Central panel, left wing & right wing). Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp)

"Einstein's real achievement"

"SCIENCE, exact science that is, has become synonymous with the theory of relativity and with quantum mechanics. In the broader cultural context the science of relativity is all too often taken as a proof that everything is relative. This might not have happened if Einstein had followed the suggestion of a friend of his, E. Zschimmer, who in 1922 urged him to rename his theory of relativity as "Invarianten-theorie," or the theory of invariance. In his reply, Einstein admitted that the expression "relativity theory" "is unfortunate and has given occasion to philosophical misunderstanding." Yet he felt that although the new name would "perhaps be better, it would cause confusion to change the generally accepted name after all this time."

"Apart from cultural considerations, the new name, "theory of invariance," would have done much more justice to the science of relativity. On hearing physicists talk everywhere of "the theory of invariance" the broader public would have come to suspect that Einstein's real achievement consisted in shedding light on some very absolutist aspects of the physical world. Such are the independence of the speed of light of the velocity of its source as well as of its detector, and the unchanging form of the basic equations of electromagnetism regardless of the motion of the coordinate system with respect to which they are formulated. The theory of relativity is a form of physical science far more reliably absolutist than Newtonian physics was with its doctrines of absolute space and time."

~Stanley L. Jaki: "Science, Culture, and Cult," in Lectures in the Vatican Gardens. (RVB, 2009)

That dammed eye...

That dammed eye─the human eye!

─G. Hardin

"LUCIEN CUÉNOT, the great French biologist, reserved a central place for his reflections on the eye in his book on finality in biology. If one considers, he wrote, the most specific interconnections involved in the structure of the eye which can be vitiated "by the smallest deviation, the idea of a finalist direction is born invincible.... It is not daring to believe that the eye is made for seeing." These two statements enclose Cuénot's expression of philosophical despair. Its cause is his seeing an irresolvable conflict between the finalist direction, which "amounts to explaining the obscure by the more obscure" and the impossibility "to forgo a guideline in the train of [biological] events." Despair or not, he at least registered the difference between two different perspectives. 

"Clearly, as long as a guideline leads somewhere, it means goal-directedness, the very concept which the Darwinian biologist cannot justify on the basis of his method, a method of sheer mechanism. The Darwinian biologist also finds, to continue with Cuénot, "that each type of eye from the most rudimentary to the most developed is complete in itself.... When one examines an animal, one does not hesitate for a moment to identify the eyes." Then the question, "How could one assign to chance variations the recurring origin of such complexes with multiple interconnections?", [Cuénot] becomes an expression of despair about that method. The despair can indeed become so annoying as to make the Darwinian biologist explode: "That dammed eye─the human eye!"[Garrett Hardin]

"Such a reaction makes sense only if it betrays at least a tacit admission on the part of the Darwinian biologist that natural selection is not  a wholly satisfactory explanation of the formation of the eye."

~Stanley L. Jaki: The Purpose Of It All, Chap. 3─Pattern Versus Design.