The development of science is often portrayed as a conflict between science and religion, between the natural and the supernatural. But it was equally, if not more so, a conflict with Aristotelian concepts: a change from Aristotle’s emphasis on why to a dominant role for how. To become the mainstream, science had to overcome resistance, first and foremost, from the academic establishment and only secondarily from the church. The former, represented by the disciples of Aristotle and the scholastic tradition, was at least as vociferous in condemning Galileo as the latter. Galileo, starting from when he was a student and for most of his career, was in conflict with the natural philosophers. (I decline to call them scientists.) His conflict with the church was mostly towards the end of his career, after he was fifty and more seriously when he was nearing seventy. The church itself even relied on the opinions of the natural philosophers to justify condemning the idea the earth moved. In the end science and Galileo’s successors won out and Aristotle’s natural philosophy was vanquished: the stationary earth, the perfect heavens (circular planetary orbits and perfectly spherical planets), nature abhorring a vacuum, the prime mover and so on. For most of these it is so long and good riddance. So why do philosophers still spend so much time studying Aristotle? I really don’t know.
However, Aristotle did have a few good ideas whose loss is unfortunate. The baby was thrown out with the bath water, so to speak. One such concept, although much abused, is the classification of causes given by Aristotle. The four types of causes he identified are the formal, material, effective and final causes. He believed that these four causes were necessary and sufficient to explain any phenomena. The formal cause is the plan, the material cause is what it is made of, the effective cause is the “how”, and the final cause is the “why”. If you think in terms of building a house the formal cause is the blueprint, the material cause is what it is built of (the wood, brick, glass, etc.), the effective causes are the carpenters and their tools (are hammers obsolete?) and the final cause is the purpose the house was built for.
Aristotle and his medieval followers emphasized the final cause and pure thought. Science became established only by breaking away from the final cause and the tyranny of “why”. The shift from concentrating on pure thought and the final cause (why) to concentrating on observations and effective causes (how) was the driving factor in the development of science. Science has now so completely swept Aristotle aside that, at the present time, only the effective cause is considered a cause in the “cause and effect” sense.
However, in dealing with human activities all four of these types of causes are useful. For example consider TRIUMF where I work. The formal cause is the five-year plan given in a brilliantly written (OK. I helped write it and they pay my salary so what else could I say) 800-page book that lays out the program for the current five years and beyond. The material cause is what TRIUMF is built of (many tons of concrete shielding among other things). The effective cause is the people and machines that make TRIUMF work. The final cause is TRIUMF’s purpose as given in the mission and vision statements. A similar analysis can be done for any organization. The usefulness of the final cause concept is shown by it being resurrected in good management practice under the heading of mission and/or vision statements.
Now, when we go from human activity to animal activity, we lose the formal cause. Consider a bird building a nest. The material cause is what the nest is built of, the effective cause is the bird itself and the final cause is to provide a safe place to raise its young. But the formal cause does not exist. It is doubtful the bird has a blueprint for the nest; rather the nest is built as the result of effective causes – the reflexive actions of the bird. No bird ever wrote an 800-page book outlining how to build a nest. Just as well, or the avian dinosaurs (otherwise known as birds) would have gone extinct along with the non-avian ones.
A similar analysis exists for simpler organisms. A recent study of yeast showed why (in the sense of the final cause) yeast cells clump together: to increase the efficiency of extracting nutrients from the surroundings. Thus in dealing with human, animal or even yeast activities, science can and does answer the why or final cause question. In the case of the yeast the effective cause would be the method the yeast cells used to do the bonding and the material cause the substances used for the bonding.
When we go from animate to inanimate we lose, in addition to the formal cause, the final cause. Aristotle explained the falling of objects in terms of a final cause: the objects wanted to be at their natural place at the center of the universe, which Aristotle thought was the center of the earth. The reason they speed up as they fell was they became jubilant at approaching their natural place (I am not making that up). Newton, in contrast, proposed an effective cause: gravity. There was no goal, ie final cause, just an effective cause. A river does not flow with the aim of reaching the sea but just goes where gravity pulls. Similarly with evolution by natural selection, it has no aim but just goes where natural selection pulls. This freaks out those people who insist on formal and final causes. With much ingenuity, they have tried to rectify the situation by proposing formal and final causes: intelligent design and theistic evolution respectively. Intelligent design posits that at least some of the structures found in living organisms are the result of intelligent design by an outside agent and not the result of natural selection while theistic evolution posits that evolution was controlled by God to produce Homo Sapiens. Neither has been found to increase the ability of models to make accurate predictions; hence they have no place in science. It is this lack of utility not the role of a supernatural agent that leads to their rejection as science.
To summarize: for the activities of living things, science can and does answer the why question and assigns a final cause. However, for non-living things science has not found the final cause concept to be useful and has eliminated it based on parsimony. Aristotle, his followers and disciples made the mistake of anthropomorphizing nature and assigning to it causes that are only appropriate to humans or, at best, living things.
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Tags: evolution, how vs why, philosphy of science
There was no goal, ie final cause, just an effective cause.
Sigh, I don’t know where to begin with this schoolbook story.
First, Newton was very much a believer in God. If anything, it was his faith that misguided his ideas about effective cause, and the Aristotlean occult that gives his science its edge. Don’t forget that Bruno was burned at the stake, not Galileo. Galileo was far, far less dangerous to the Church, because he was not as familiar with the true neoplatonism in the recovered Greek works, whereas Bruno was. Aristotle wrote a book on this subject, but it was conveniently lost. So, Galileo’s dogma that the Earth should move, when we know it is all relative, probably had the holy men sniggering behind his back that he was just as dogmatic as they were themselves.
True, Aristotle was no scientist, but for his time, he was something of a logician. I once shared your opinion of him, but I was young and foolish then. There are final causes in any theory of gravity that contains black holes. Einstein despaired at the ongoing absolutism of the new Riemannian aether, because he knew it should not be there, just as Newton’s insightful aether took on a materialism that he never intended.
Thanks for a good read
Your argument is very interesting and one I may have to apply myself one of these days. I wanted to mention a few things about the introductory part of the article, although they are somewhat orthogonal to the argument you made:
1) Aristotelian principles were accepted by the Roman branch of the church as truths about God’s Plan – and of course, the scholarly tradition lay in the study of books kept within church walls, something only clerics traditionally had both the means and an interest in studying. So why the church could certainly sit back and let scholars do the arguing for them, they did have a vested interest in keeping Aristotelian ideas alive and kicking.
2) Galileo’s insistence on circular orbits are one of the main reasons that scholars were able to stick with Aristotle for so long: while Galileo’s ideas certainly came *closer* to explaining observations than did Aristotle’s, there were still significant anomalies in his predictions that allowed scholars to make compelling arguments against his ideas. It was only when Kepler worked out how elliptic orbits work and applied them to the planetary orbits, thereby in some ways departing from his teacher’s dying wish that he prove Galileo right, that predictions became so elegant and accurate that others finally had to accept them (in addition, arguably, to many of the old guard dying off).
Interesting essay; the question of “why” anything happens as it does is metaphysical. The causes Aristotle wrote about strike me as “ecclesiastical” categories like those of St. Anselm, St. Augustine and other Middle Ages thinkers. It is not surprising that GOD is always imputed in Aristotelianism in order to explain the nature of things, as *intelligence* is required to create something with an end.
Your example of TRIUMF is consistent with the break from this type of philosophy, into the scientific realm, i think. Because the team of designers are human and therefore can create a goal. It is difficult to imagine nature working along these lines, unless we overestimate the power of living things to have a goal. We define intelligence as belonging to sentient beings only.
One thing we don’t know is whether the world is created by an intelligent being, or even created at all. So we are stuck between the causality of scientific description, and the teleological description of volition or will.
At the end of the day though, all things do come to some similar end according to the nature of things. Maybe the question is not so much “why” but “that”. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
The question of why anything happens is not in my mind metaphorical,but, rather simple. Everything seeks equilibrium. Matter will always seek the lowest form of equilibrium while living matter will always seek the highest level that it percieves to be most beneficial to it.
No, this post sidesteps the issue of “why are the laws of physics the way they are” – sure science can’t answer it the way it can use the laws themselves to explain other things, that’s the point of appreciating its limitations – but those are its limitations, not the limitations of “thought” or “reality” itself. To someone with a hammer (or who worships hammers) everything is a nail (or “ought” to be), but they aren’t.
As for what could be “behind” things, the field is rather wide open but need not *have to avoid* “purpose” anymore than it would have *to* have purpose. We don’t know. BTW, no mathematical or logical argument can explain why some possible worlds exist and others don’t, as the modal realists and MUH people rightly argue (since math only refers to equations themselves, it can’t define extra traits like “materially embodied” – there is no way to tag some ellipses are “just math” and others as “represent something in a real world, or ought to” etc.)
That said, I don’t agree their 2nd-stage presumption is correct: that therefore there is no difference and all “structures” or “descriptions” exist. I think some do and some don’t, but then there’s no way to analyze that with the tools we use to simple describe them (which is what science really does, although at deeper level than just the observable phenomena themselves.)
Maybe the world could not exist if the laws of physics were not the way they are. Alternate laws might lead to contradictions. Contradictions would lead to non-existence. This is assuming that logic has an empirical role in nature.
Not all questions that can be ask are meaningful, or at least can be meaningfully discussed. I have in a previous post, http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/09/30/the-limits-of-science/ discussed the limits of science and there are question science cannot answer. In a future post (Dec 30) I will discuss that some questions are cannot usefully be discussed. At the present time there is no way of providing useful answers to the questions you pose.
There is NO conflict between science and traditional Catholicism. Traditional Catholicism is the truth. Science is the truth. They cannot be opposed. It doesn’t matter what science proves, nor what scientists discover. If science offers the truth, then traditional Catholicism cannot contradict it, and doesn’t contradict it. There are absolutely no examples where traditional Catholicism is inconsistent with scientific fact. Rather, traditional Catholicism invites scientific inquiry and discovery, because traditional Catholicism is not afraid of being in conflict with science — since that’s an impossibility. However, 99.99% of people, including 99.99% of the billion plus “modernist-catholics” in the world, have no idea about the facts of traditional Catholicism. Instead they recite modern false interpretations and humanistic relativism, among other devices, which are intended to create confusion and a false divide which purport that science and “religion” are opposed. It depends entirely on what you define as “religion”. Traditional Catholicism is absolutely not opposed to, nor in conflict with, science.