Final Causes

The Indifferent Universe of Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins says at the end of chapter 4 of his book River Out of Eden, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

The phrase “at bottom” is likely intended to exclude the interpretation which would deny the existence of purpose and of good and evil in the obvious sense of such a denial. In other words, denying these things by asserting that there is no purpose at all in human life, and that nothing anyone does or accomplishes is good or evil. It would not even be necessary to argue against such a position. It is sufficiently plain to common sense that this position is false, and even apart from this, the moral reasons to believe it is false would be compelling. And in any case Dawkins clearly believes in the existence of evil in this plain sense.

Nonetheless, there are problems with the claim even in the “at bottom” sense. In order for it to be reasonable for him to maintain his position, he should at least be able to answer these two questions:

(1) If there is no good and evil “at bottom”, why is there good and evil on the surface?

(2) Why do things tend to get better over time?

Developing the first question, why do human beings care about their own good and the good of humanity, if the universe at bottom does not? After all, human beings are a part of the universe. If the universe does not care, it would seem that human beings would not care either.

Or again: even if we can explain why human beings care about their own good, why do apples taste good? Apples could be good for health, and human beings could care about their health, without apples tasting good. It is almost as if the apples themselves cared about humanity.

Dawkins would likely attempt to respond to such questions by giving an evolutionary explanation. But while such explanations are surely a part of the truth, attempting to give a full response to such questions with such an explanation is bound to fail, because in the end it is a question of the working of human mind, and evolution cannot fully explain this.

As an example, consider the question about apples. If apples did not taste good, Dawkins might say, people would not eat them, and consequently they could not contribute to human health. And if similarly people did not eat any healthy foods, they could not survive. Evolution selected for people who could survive, and therefore for people who like the taste of health foods, including the taste of apples.

This may be all very well as far it goes, but the question has not yet been adequately answered. For we can still ask:

(1) Why do people eat things that taste good to them, instead of things that taste bad to them? If people normally ate things that taste bad to them, and rejected things that taste good, then evolution would have selected for people that eat healthy things that taste bad, and all healthy food, including apples, would taste bad to people.

(2) Why does food have any taste at all? Evolution could have easily selected for people who ate tasteless healthy food.

It is fairly evident that no evolutionary explanation will suffice to answer these two questions. The first question, about why people tend to eat things that taste good, rather than things that taste bad, is basically asking why people tend to do what seems good to them, rather than what seems bad. If people simply tended to do what seems bad to them, life would be like a dangerous roller coaster, where you are being “pushed along” on a path that you fear or dislike. But it is completely possible to imagine a life like this. It is not intrinsically absurd, and evolution is fully capable for selecting for such a thing, if it is possible at all. So the fact that this is not how things are, at least for the most part, is evidence that some explanation is necessary besides the fact of evolution.

The second question is similar, in the sense that it is asking why people’s tendency to do things is related to something known to them, rather than being unconscious. Our heart beats without there being any conscious intention for it to do so. Why could we not equally well eat without any conscious intention and without noticing any taste?

There is a debate about whether philosophical zombies are possible. But this debate may well be a red herring, because it may simply be a distraction from the true issues. It is likely impossible for such a zombie to exist, but the entire argument for this conclusion consists in the fact that human beings are in fact conscious. No explanation has been given for why this must be so, except the explanation suggested by St. Thomas: that the generosity of God requires that form be present in every disposed matter. In particular, it is evident that evolution cannot explain why we could not do everything we do, without being conscious, because exactly the same selective pressures would have been at work throughout the entire process.

To put this in another way, if philosophical zombies are impossible, this is because the universe is not indifferent to mind. And what is not indifferent to mind, is not indifferent to good and evil.

Aristotle describes the progress of the knowledge of causes among the ancient Greek philosophers:

From these facts one might think that the only cause is the so-called material cause; but as men thus advanced, the very facts opened the way for them and joined in forcing them to investigate the subject. However true it may be that all generation and destruction proceed from some one or (for that matter) from more elements, why does this happen and what is the cause? For at least the substratum itself does not make itself change; e.g. neither the wood nor the bronze causes the change of either of them, nor does the wood manufacture a bed and the bronze a statue, but something else is the cause of the change. And to seek this is to seek the second cause, as we should say,-that from which comes the beginning of the movement. Now those who at the very beginning set themselves to this kind of inquiry, and said the substratum was one, were not at all dissatisfied with themselves; but some at least of those who maintain it to be one-as though defeated by this search for the second cause-say the one and nature as a whole is unchangeable not only in respect of generation and destruction (for this is a primitive belief, and all agreed in it), but also of all other change; and this view is peculiar to them. Of those who said the universe was one, then none succeeded in discovering a cause of this sort, except perhaps Parmenides, and he only inasmuch as he supposes that there is not only one but also in some sense two causes. But for those who make more elements it is more possible to state the second cause, e.g. for those who make hot and cold, or fire and earth, the elements; for they treat fire as having a nature which fits it to move things, and water and earth and such things they treat in the contrary way.

When these men and the principles of this kind had had their day, as the latter were found inadequate to generate the nature of things men were again forced by the truth itself, as we said, to inquire into the next kind of cause. For it is not likely either that fire or earth or any such element should be the reason why things manifest goodness and, beauty both in their being and in their coming to be, or that those thinkers should have supposed it was; nor again could it be right to entrust so great a matter to spontaneity and chance. When one man said, then, that reason was present-as in animals, so throughout nature-as the cause of order and of all arrangement, he seemed like a sober man in contrast with the random talk of his predecessors. We know that Anaxagoras certainly adopted these views, but Hermotimus of Clazomenae is credited with expressing them earlier. Those who thought thus stated that there is a principle of things which is at the same time the cause of beauty, and that sort of cause from which things acquire movement.

Thus, according to Aristotle, the philosophers came to the knowledge of an agent cause that intended the goodness and beauty found in things. And they came to this conclusion because the universe they observed did not have “precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,” but properties which would be much more likely to be observed if the universe is, at bottom, not indifferent to mind, and not indifferent to good and evil, despite the random talk of Richard Dawkins.

Origin and Cause

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Yesterday’s account of before and after allows us to explain the ideas of origin and cause.

Something first is said to be the beginning, principle, or origin of the second, and the second is said to be from the first. This simply signifies the relationship already described in the last post, together with an emphasis on the fact that the first comes before the second by “consequence of being”, in the way described.

When we ask why something is the case, we respond by giving an account or explanation for the thing. There are then two orders in our understanding: the order of time, where first we saw something and then, second, we asked about it, and the order of understanding. In the order of understanding the explanation is the reason for the thing, and is said to come before it, basically for the same reasons that we said that first comes before second in the previous post.

“Cause” and “effect” simply signify that the cause is the origin of the effect, and that the effect is from the cause, together with the idea that when we understand the cause, we understand the explanation for the effect. Thus “cause” adds to “origin” a certain relationship with the understanding; this is why Aristotle says that we do not think we understand a thing until we know its cause, or “why” it is. We do not understand a thing until we know its explanation.

Aristotle sets out four kinds of causality, matter, form, agent and end. The basic division here is between causes that are intrinsic to a thing (or viewed as such) and causes that are extrinsic (or viewed as such.) Each of these divisions is itself divided into a material and formal aspect: that which causes, and why or how it causes. Thus intrinsic causes are divided into matter and form. Wood is the material cause of the chair, and it causes by having the shape of the chair, the formal cause. Likewise the carpenter is the agent cause of the chair, and he causes for the sake of sitting, the final cause and the “why” for which he causes.

Things it is Better to Believe

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Since belief is voluntary, it follows that truth is only one of the possible motives for belief, and people can believe things for the sake of other ends as well. Consequently there may be some things that it is always better to believe, even without making a special effort to determine whether they are true or not.

Consider the claim that “Life is meaningful,” understood to mean that there are purposes in life, and therefore good and evil.

If this is true, it is good to believe it, because it is true, and because we need to be aware of our ends in order to seek them.

If it is not true, then it does no harm to believe it, because good and evil do not exist in that situation. And likewise, it cannot be better not to believe it in this situation, since better and worse do not exist.

Thus the strategy of believing that life is meaningful weakly dominates the strategy of believing that life is not meaningful, although it does not “strictly” dominate, since the payoffs of the two strategies are equal if life is not in fact meaningful. Consequently the better thing is to choose to believe that life is meaningful, even without a particular investigation of the facts.

As another particular example of this kind of reasoning, we can consider this discussion from chapter 9 of Eric Reitan’s book Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers:

In his Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), Sam Harris notes that, statistically speaking, somewhere in the world right now a little girl is being abducted, raped, and killed. And the same statistics suggest that her parents believe that “an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family.” Harris asks, “Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?” His answer? “No.” According to Harris, this answer contains “the entirety of atheism” and is simply “an admission of the obvious.” He encourages his readers to “admit the obvious”: that when devout Hurricane Katrina victims drowned in their attics while praying to God for deliverance, they “died talking to an imaginary friend” (pp. 50-2). With righteous indignation, Harris condemns the “boundless narcissism” of those who survive a disaster only to “believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs” (p. 54).

After some discussion of this, Eric Reitan’s strategy is not to try to make things look any better, but to make them look even worse:

A mother, running late for a morning meeting, rushes out the door with both her children. The older son is to be dropped off at preschool, the baby girl at a nearby daycare. When the preschool lets out, the daycare’s minivan will bring the son to the daycare, where he will wait with his baby sister until their mother gets off work.

The mother gets to work, leaving the car in a sunny lot. It’s a hot day. She makes it to her meeting and has a productive day. At five o’clock she gets in her car and drives to the daycare. Her son runs to her. She picks him up and kisses his head, then looks around for her baby girl. Not seeing her, she asks one of the daycare workers. “I’m sorry, ma’am. You didn’t drop her off this morning.” The reply, tentative and apologetic, doesn’t have the tone of something that should tear a life apart. But it does. The mother’s hands go numb. Her son falls from her grasp. It feels as if all the darkness in the world is pressing outward from inside her. No. Impossible. But she has no memory of unstrapping that precious little girl, of carrying her into the daycare. No memory, in the rush of the morning, the urgency to get to her meeting on time. Driving to the daycare after work, looking forward to seeing her children, she never looked at what was in the back seat. And now her knees give out and the sobs escape even before she makes it to the car, even before she sees what’s there. Someone is soothing the son, who stands at the daycare door. The mother is beating at the car windows with her fists. In her imagination the baby girl is screaming for mommy, for comfort, as the car grows hotter and hotter, while all the while the mother is in her stupid meeting, talking about stupid contracts, feeling relieved that she’d made it to work on time. And the son, distressed beyond understanding by his mother’s behavior, breaks free of the daycare worker and runs towards her – into the path of an oncoming car.

This story is loosely based on real events. And there are life stories bleaker than this. Horror is real. According to the 2007 Global Monitoring Report put out by the World Bank, there are at present more than one billion people on earth living in “extreme” poverty (that is, on less than $1 per day). Such poverty is not only dire in itself but renders the poor terribly vulnerable to exploitation, disease, and natural disasters. I could fill a book with harrowing stories of human lives crushed by a combination of poverty, brutal abuse, and the grim indifference of nature. But that isn’t needed, I think, in order to convince most readers that there are horrors in the world so devastating that those who undergo them feel as if their entire lives are stripped of positive value, as if they’d be better off dead – while those who are implicated in them, once they come to appreciate the full measure of their complicity, are torn apart by self-loathing. If there is a God, His reasons for permitting such evils are hidden from us. And, as Marilyn Adams has pointed out, even if traditional theodicies give some general sense of why God might create a world in which evils exist, these theodicies bring no comfort to the mother as she turns away from her infant’s corpse just in time to see her son crushed under the wheels of a screeching car. It won’t give meaning to her life. It won’t eliminate the horror. Her existence has, in a few heartbeats, become worse than a void. It’s become come a space of affliction compared to which the void would be preferable. This woman needs salvation.

In order to survive such a situation, Reitan says, it is necessary to believe in the redemption of evil, namely that in some way a greater good is brought out of such horrors:

For most horror victims, the sense that their lives have positive meaning may depend on the conviction that a transcendent good is at work redeeming evil. Is the evidential case against the existence of such a good really so convincing that it warrants saying to these horror victims, “Give up hope”? Should we call them irrational when they cling to that hope or when those among the privileged live in that hope for the sake of the afflicted? What does moral decency imply about the legitimacy of insisting, as the new atheists do, that any view of life which embraces the ethico-religious hope should be expunged from the world?

He concludes the chapter with this response to Sam Harris:

Somewhere, even as I write this, a girl is being raped and murdered. Her parents believe in a transcendent God of love who will redeem even the most shocking horrors.

Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

In the darkness of affliction, Harris’s answer rings hollow.

This example differs in some ways from my original example of the claim that life is meaningful. The original claim was understood to be the assertion that good and evil exist in life, and thus the denial would be that there is no good and evil in life. But in Reitan’s discussion, the claim is stronger, namely something like “God exists and will always bring good out of evil.” Harris’s denial of this claim does not in itself imply the non-existence of good and evil, at least not without additional consideration. In fact, his position is that very great evils exist and that we should not try to explain them away with this claim about God, so he is not, on the face of it, denying that good and evil exist. Consequently one cannot immediately deduce that believing the claim about God is a dominant strategy.

Nonetheless, if Reitan’s and Harris’s views are compared here with respect to the good of the people concerned, a fair comparison, since Harris was the one who the claimed that it was bad for people to believe such things, it does seem that Reitan has a much stronger case. The woman does seem much better off believing the claim about God and the redemption of evil.

But this is not the whole story.

Love and Choice

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Is it possible to choose to love someone?

Choice regards the means, and is chosen for the sake of an end. So if we choose to love someone, that would have to be for the sake of some end. But normally if you do something for someone, but order it to something else, that would not count as love. Thus if you give someone alms in order to make them like you, that does not seem to be true love. But then we could respond by saying that we can choose to give them alms for their own good, and this would be love.

But why did we seek their good? Either we already desired it, and thus we already loved before we made a choice, or we did not desire it in advance, but chose to seek it. In the latter case, there must have been some end for the sake of which we chose to seek their good. If this end is extrinsic, then once again this does not seem to be real love — we sought their good, but only because it was useful for something else. If the end is not extrinsic, for example God, who as the Supreme Good is not extrinsic to any good, then this choice presupposes that we already loved God.

In this way it follows that choosing to love always presupposes at least a love of the ultimate end. But what if we do not already love the ultimate end? How can we obtain love, given that no act that we make can be real love, without already having this love?

We can however choose to dispose our lives to love, namely to act in the way one would act who loves. According to St. Thomas, in such a case a person will always receive true love. This happens, he says, because of the generosity of God, who gives form to every disposed matter.

Aristotle and Bacon on the Sciences

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Aristotle, as stated in the last post, held that the highest knowledge is for its own sake, not for the sake of other things. Francis Bacon, on the other hand, is famous for saying that knowledge is power (Novum Organum, Bk. 1, Aphorism 3):

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

Although Aristotle is correct regarding the purpose of the sciences, this difference between the two of them may partly explain their difference of opinion regarding the state of completeness of the sciences. Aristotle basically believed the sciences complete, as I said in the last post, but part of the reason for this may be that he did not care much about potential improvements in the mechanical arts. Bacon, on the other hand, was concerned precisely with such improvements. In particular, he wishes to make gold, as he suggests here in Bk. 2, Aphorism 5:

The rule or axiom for the transformation of bodies is of two kinds. The first regards a body as a troop or collection of simple natures. In gold, for example, the following properties meet. It is yellow in color, heavy up to a certain weight, malleable or ductile to a certain degree of extension; it is not volatile and loses none of its substance by the action of fire; it turns into a liquid with a certain degree of fluidity; it is separated and dissolved by particular means; and so on for the other natures which meet in gold. This kind of axiom, therefore, deduces the thing from the forms of simple natures. For he who knows the forms of yellow, weight, ductility, fixity, fluidity, solution, and so on, and the methods for superinducing them and their gradations and modes, will make it his care to have them joined together in some body, whence may follow the transformation of that body into gold.

This desire for gold in particular is probably a desire for money, which seems to be a kind of universal power, although one might question whether money would be necessary for someone who can change anything into anything else whenever he pleases. In any case, Bacon is engaging in a kind of wishful thinking here. He recognizes, in fact, that human beings have a limited ability to transform nature (Bk. 1, Aphorism 4):

Toward the effecting of works, all that man can do is to put together or put asunder natural bodies. The rest is done by nature working within.

From this it should follow that it may be impossible to effect certain transformations, if they will not follow upon such putting together or asunder of natural bodies. But instead of waiting to learn from experience, Bacon simply assumes (and this is the wishful thinking) that any possible transformation, such as the transformation of lead into gold, will definitely be possible. Since the sciences of his day could do nothing of the sort, he concluded that the sciences still had a great deal of room for improvement.

There are good reasons to think that Bacon’s assumption was false. For example, the no-cloning theorem says that perfectly copying a quantum state is impossible. There may be no particular reason why you would need to do this, but that is not the point. Rather, Bacon claims that any form can be induced upon anything, and this seems to be false.

Nonetheless, his conclusion that the sciences of his day were very imperfect was indeed correct. Thus, although his idea of the purpose of the sciences was inferior to Aristotle’s position, his idea of the state of their progress was superior.

Progress in the Truth

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Individuals start out knowing nothing, and then they learn things over time, which constitutes progress in the knowledge of the truth.  Of course sometimes they adopt false views, but even false views contain some truth. And sometimes they regress, as by forgetting some truth that they knew, or by abandoning true views and adopting false ones. But surely for most people most of the time, they are learning new things, refining true views, or improving false views so that they are less false. Naturally this will not apply to everyone at all times, but surely it is the norm.

This growth in knowledge will automatically carry over to some degree to communities and institutions, and to humanity as a whole, insofar as each of these is composed of individuals. However, this applies mainly over short periods of time, and there is no such guarantee for communities over longer periods, since individuals die and are replaced by other individuals who need to learn everything over again.

Over time, people have devised ways to overcome this problem to a greater or lesser extent, beginning with tradition. The wise man who has arrived at some knowledge by experience can pass it on to others simply by telling them about it, without the need for everyone to have the same experience. However, this is an imperfect method of transmission, since without experience the thing is not known as well, and sometimes the tradition is distorted, misinterpreted, or ultimately forgotten. Writing was a still stronger means of passing on knowledge, preserving knowledge intact for longer periods of time and allowing a greater possibility for building on the knowledge of the past. The internet is a still stronger means, more or less in the same vein, with a greater guarantee of common knowledge over the entire planet. Thus for example many Eastern European countries under communism used textbooks stating that Galileo was burned at the stake, a historical falsehood. With the internet it becomes easier to eliminate mistakes of this kind.

There are also protocols that apply mainly to certain topics, more convincing ways to transmit truth so that all or the great majority accept it. Thus mathematics and various sciences have become more or less universal, not in the sense that everyone knows them, but in the sense that those who study them basically agree on the conclusions. This allows for the possibility of progress in mathematics, physics, and the like over periods of time much longer than a human lifetime.

There are also many areas which do not have such protocols, such as religion, philosophy, politics, ethics, and the like. This does not mean that there has been no progress in these areas, but it may mean that there has been less. Thus the fact that polytheism is now very uncommon suggests progress in religion.

There are various possible ways that the transmission of truth might be improved in the future, both in general and in regard to specific topics. But even if these ways are not devised, the worst that can happen is that certain areas will stagnate on account of the original problem mentioned, the fact that individuals die and are replaced by others. There is no reason to believe that in these areas considered overall, knowledge will decrease over long periods of time. This means that the overall trend will be one of growth in the truth (since the combination of stagnating areas and growing areas will be an overall trend of growth).

Another way to summarize all of this is that “ways of learning the truth” and “ways of transmitting the truth to future generations” are two technologies, and humanity has been improving both of these technologies, resulting in overall growth in the truth for humanity.

The Progress of Humanity and History

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Pope Francis says in Laudato Si’:

113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.

Here he denies that technological progress is the same as progress for humanity, and elsewhere he criticizes those “who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.” This criticism seems to be related to the above statement. The Pope is not saying that progress does not exist; the “myth of progress” is not that progress exists, but that it is constituted by “the application of new technology.” In the same way, although he begins paragraph 113 by saying “people no longer seem to believe in a happy future,” he continues by saying that there is a “growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” In general, then, the myth may consist in saying that technological growth is sufficient for progress, and that progress is guaranteed without any special effort.

I stated in the previous post that a successful world will in fact tend to grow in goodness. This however does not guarantee that a world will always be successful in this way, and it is clear enough that improvement in one respect, such as technology, does not guarantee improvement overall. So it remains a question whether or not the world we live in is in fact successful, if it is in fact getting better, or not. It is certainly not staying the same, which means that it must be getting better or getting worse, but it could be that overall things are constantly getting worse, or that they go back and forth such that on average it is much the same as staying the same. The following posts will consider this issue.

The Order of the World

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Aristotle gives five meanings of before and after:

1. Before in time. 2:00 PM is before 3:00 PM.

2. Before by nature. The existence of man implies the existence of animal, but the existence of animal does not imply the existence of man, so animal comes first.

3. Before in understanding. The premises of an argument come before the conclusion.

4. Before in goodness. The better thing is first.

5. Before in causality. The cause is before the effect.

The world is ordered in all of these ways, and the various orders have certain relationships. The order of time lines up with the order of nature to some extent, since if a thing implies the existence of something else, it cannot exist temporally before the thing the existence of which it implies. Thus animals existed before human beings, but not human beings before animals. This order is never reversed, but sometimes the order of nature does not also include an order of time. Thus the first bodies must also have been some particular kind of body; there was no temporal sequence there.

For material, formal, and efficient causes, the cause is always simultaneous in time with the effect. However, on account of its causal priority, that which constitutes the cause sometimes comes temporally before that which constitutes the effect, and never the other way around. Thus in this sense the order of the things which are causes to some extent shares in the temporal order in the same way that the order of nature does.

The final cause is sometimes taken as that which is loved, and in this sense it has no definite temporal relation to its effect. Thus sometimes it comes after, as the money which is loved makes a man work for it, and sometimes it comes before, as the wife who is loved makes a man praise her even after her death.

But when the final cause is taken as that which is desired but not yet possessed, it always comes after its effect, assuming that it comes to be at all. This results in a temporal order which is reversed according to final causality, but which corresponds to the order of goodness. What possesses the good is better than what does not possess it, and comes after in time, unless something fails such that the efficient cause which sought the final cause does not succeed in attaining the good it desired.

Thus a successful world is one in which the order of time basically corresponds with the order of causality and the order of goodness. This is what St. Thomas means when he says that the good of the world consists in its order, and that its order consists principally in the fact that one thing is the cause of another, and that one thing is better than another.