In order to not drive away too many people from my Peace Corps blog, I'll write a couple more technical posts here. I was just reading this article: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/steven-poole-teleology/. In sum: The author is reviewing the book Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, in which Nagel argues that it makes sense to talk about a "teleological cause" in the universe. Put another way, the universe acts towards a goal, in a way that might be said to be purposeful. Such a view has been popular in the history of thought, starting with Aristotle and continuing largely through religious thinkers who have held that the "goal" of the universe is something in the mind of God or even is God.
In discussions of whether there are really teleological causes in the world, it seems to me that we end up talking about different sorts of teleology. So let's get a couple of these sorts straight, and see where that leads us. I will describe teleological causes as those that explain behaviour as leading to some telos (pl. teloi), or end. I use the Greek because I would rather not be hindered by anthropomorphic talk of "intents" or "purposes" or "desires."
Picture a ball rolling down a hill (for those looking for an example and not merely an analogy, replace this with talk of lipid molecules heading toward cis- or trans- states, or in a more complicated fashion the gravitational pull of matter on matter). One could talk about the efficient cause that set it rolling in the first place: Someone pushed it, a breeze started the motion, it was dropped from an airplane onto the slope, whatever your imagination wants. The ball will head down to the bottom of the hill. This would be its telos. It is the end goal, the low-energy state, the point to which it will arrive, barring other external forces.
Saying that there is such a telos seems rather uncontroversial. So one view of teleological causality is that it might be trivially true, but unhelpful.
Another view might be that it explains the natural world in a useful way. We can talk of the ball on the hill with all of its movers, of the material of the ball, of the shape of the ball and the hill, etc. In doing so, we might be able to say with certainty that the ball will end up in one telos. But let's say that we add someone halfway down the hill, who is going to kick the ball. This will change the ball's course of action, but it still makes sense to say that it would have ended at the bottom of the hill on its original path. Even without an outside agent, we could look at the ball's path and ignore what set it in motion, only looking at where it is heading. In other words, we could look at the teleological cause independently of the efficient causes.
Such a view of teleology doesn't necessarily add any new information to the world. There is no fact that it adds that could not have been said using efficient causes, the material of the ball and the hill, and the shapes of everything involved. But it lets us talk about such facts in a different way. It is like using rectangular and polar coordinates. Either system lets you talk about everything the other system describes, in theory, but I would not want to plan out the polar equations for a straight line.
So teleology could be a different and useful way of explaining the world which nonetheless posits no new facts or forces. On a final reading, teloi could actually act as a sort of "backwards-causation," adding a necessary explanatory element to the world which cannot be captured in any other way.
We'll have to drop the ball example for this one, since to imagine inanimate objects having such teleology would be to create a straw man. Let's think about living beings. On the present view, even if one has all the information about a human being, her precise physical and mental make-up, all of the influences in her life, etc., one cannot fully explain her actions. She acts for goals, and these absolutely cannot be reduced to other explanations. Furthermore, there is some telos (or collection of teloi) which is the goal of a human life, the good life, for which human beings strive.
Now, in order for such teloi to be irreducible to other causes, we cannot find this goal anywhere. There is absolutely no empirical investigation which would be sufficient. Looking through neurons and brain chemicals, of psychological studies of the conditions under which human beings report flourishing, and so on, would be insufficient.
I'm not sure why I should hold that. I seek to live a good life precisely by looking at how people live, the conditions under which they flourish, and so on. I find as much empirical data as possible to aid my quest. The good life would then seem to be a alternate way of talking about human make-up and structure.
Perhaps, though, teleology adds in this piece of information: "Beings should act in such a way that fulfills their potential/nature/whatever." Or something else that adds values to a merely-fact laden universe. If this were true, then we would have some reason to hold to a teleology that is irreducible to other causes. But one could also hold that values are merely part of living in the midst of things, of existing in a particular spot already shaped by the world and having causes already acting on one. A big picture of the world such as philosophers and scientists often hold might have a fact-value dichotomy, but we do not live in the big picture. As already being acted upon ("thrown", to use Heidegger's terminology), we already have our projects and our values, just as much as the ball is already rolling down the hill. In that case, then, an explanation of whatever causes make us up would be sufficient, combined with the additional fact that we are living out those causes and not dissecting them in a philosophical lab. A discussion of human flourishing would start by looking at what projects human beings actually want.
But what about the universe at large? Some have claimed that there is a telos to the whole universe, and this would be God. But such a proposition is far from clear, and one could even ask if it makes sense. The telos of a lion is to be as much of a lion as possible. What that means will be filled out by the empirics of lion-ness, but it generally seems to entail eating antelope. Antelope, by contrast, have a telos that generally involve not being eaten by lions. (And of course, this could be re-written as "lions are the sort of creatures that chase and eat prey animals, while antelope are the sort of creatures that run away from predators, in much the same way that molecules seek low-energy states, yada yada, qualifications, etc.") So in the predator-prey relationship, there does not seem to be a single telos which fits both aspects of the situation. Why should we suppose that there is a unified telos for all beings? (Other then, perhaps, the heat-death of the universe.)
Perhaps we could think of the Universe as a single organism. I'm not terribly opposed to the notion, but I'm also not sure how much further it gets us. If the Universe has a telos as an organism, then we still have to explain in what fashion this would be something separate from other facts about the Universe. If the telos is something external, from outside the Universe, then we need an example of what this might be and why we should believe it. Or perhaps someone will say that the universe is actually a bunch of discombobulated parts, and the fact that it functions together harmoniously is precisely the evidence of such an external telos. To this response, I need significantly more clarification on what "harmonious" means. Does it simply mean that the parts all exist together? Why is that so miraculous? Does it entail that the parts exist for the good of each other? But on what level? The antelope eaten by the lion begs to differ. Does it entail that the parts exist for the greatest maximal good? But what does that mean, as if good could be simply summed up (pace Bentham), or as if we actually had any evidence that this were the case? And why is the introduction of an external telos a better explanation than that the multifaceted aspects of the universe have existed with each other the entire time, evolving together with each other, with every part affected by every other? For example, in a given ecosystem, the different species evolve together, with each ones environment and fitness functions formed by all the others, so it is no wonder that they evolve in ways that form a unified ecosystem. (One might ask where the universe came from, but that is a completely different question and does not appear to have any direct relevance to the question of teleology.)
So, in sum, teleology appears to be a legitimate way of talking about the world, even on a naturalist view. However, this does not mean that there are additional teleological causes running around the world or the necessity of any Mind making this whole shebang hang together.
