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Chance or Design? The Teleological Argument

Roy Ahmed-Jackson

‘ What could be more clear or obvious when we look up to the sky and contemplate the heavens, than that there is some divinity of superior intelligence?’ (Lucilius)

–  Cicero (106-4 BC) ‘De Natura Deorum’

For Cicero’s character Lucilius, the wonder of the heavens was enough to conclude that there must be some kind of superior intelligence. In a similar vein, Xenophon in the fourth century BC, quotes Socrates as saying: “With such signs of forethought in the design of living creatures, can you doubt they are the work of choice or design?”.

When we look at the history of the teleological (from the Greek ‘telos’, meaning ‘purpose’) argument we can find references that go back much further than the Christian tradition. This is a point to bear in mind when studying what is commonly referred to as the Design Argument: in its broadest sense it is an argument to support the thesis that the universe is  designed ; not necessarily the creation of a theistic God. When the Greeks spoke of a cosmic designer they obviously had no idea of the God conceived by the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions.

In examining the Design Argument, therefore, we need to divide it into two parts: firstly, the argument in support of a ‘Theistic God’; secondly, the argument in support of a ‘Cosmic Design’

The Design Argument to Support the Existence of a Theistic God 

It is important to be aware that under the term ‘theism’ there exists a diverse range of polytheistic and monotheistic beliefs. However, in this particular argument, as it was developed in the eighteenth century, theism was usually understood as a reference to the ‘classical’ concept of God, as elaborated by Thomas Aquinas and most commonly understood by the Catholic and Anglican traditions of the period. Briefly, God is perceived as single, omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and benevolent (all-good). This is also the orthodox view for Jews and Muslims.

The Case For

The argument was elaborated by the Archdeacon of Carlisle  William Paley  (1743-1805) in his book Natural Theology. He asks us to imagine walking across a heath:

‘suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone?’

What is Paley suggesting here? If you were to inspect the watch more carefully you would note that it has several parts that work in an orderly, regular and precise manner. Assuming you have never seen a watch before you would still infer that the watch has a purpose of some kind and that it must, therefore, have had a maker. What Paley is doing here is using the  argument from an effect to its cause : you look at the effect (the watch), and then determine what caused it (the Watchmaker). But what has this got to do with the Universe? Paley also uses the  argument from analogy : does not a natural object, like, for example, the eye, also seem to be similar to the working of a watch? In fact, when we look at various aspects of nature, can we not conclude that nature itself is like a very complex machine? If we are to infer that the watch has a watchmaker, then we must also conclude that the universe has a Divine Maker!

Before Paley, David Hume wrote his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (written in the 1750s). In this book, a conversation takes place between three philosophers, Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo. Cleanthes represents the supporter of the Argument from Design, describing the world as a great machine sub-divided into lesser machines. A study of the world shows that its order and arrangement resembles the results of human contrivance. We are, therefore, led to infer that “the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man”, though far superior in intelligence to that of man. The character of Philo then proceeds to demolish the argument. We can probably safely assume that the arguments of Philo are that of Hume’s.

The Scottish philosopher was a great  empiricist  (relying on experience to obtain knowledge) and atheist; a dangerous thing to be at the time. As a precaution, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was not published until after his death at his request. ‘Natural religion’ is a reference to the belief that religious knowledge could be attained by inference from the facts of the natural world. God has left his ‘signature’ upon His creation. Thus, the Design Argument is ‘ a posteriori’  (comes after being verified by experience). This is to be contrasted with ‘revealed religion’ which argues that religious knowledge comes from revelation and is, therefore,  a priori  (comes before being verified by experience). As an empiricist, Hume was keen to show that a study of the natural world could not succeed in telling us anything about the Christian concept of God.

The Case Against

Some of the arguments put forward by the character of Philo are:

Cause and Effect Argument . Adopting the empiricist approach: our knowledge of causes and effects is based on our experience. For example, you know that if you cut yourself with a knife then you will bleed and feel pain. But how do your know this? Either because you have experienced it before (by now I would be surprised if you haven’t at some stage bled, or felt pain. If you have not, well done!), you’ve seen it happen to someone else, or you have been told by an authority that you trust that this is what happens. Whatever the source of your knowledge, the fact is that you were not born with this fact, it is not  innate  knowledge. You had to learn it. Now, following from this, you know that when you see a house it had a builder (or, rather, builders: we’ll come on to that point later) and an architect. How? Again, not because you were born with this knowledge or that it just ‘came to you!’. You know by experience. You have seen many houses being built. But can you same about the world? Or the universe? Have you witnessed a world being built?

Comparison Argument . How can we be sure that this world is so perfect? Related to the above argument, you can usually determine the quality of a house based on your past experiences of houses. You can determine whether a house, a piece of furniture, etc. is well made or not and it is fair to infer that a well-made house has a skilled builder and architect. How many worlds have you seen? This world, if it is made by a creator, could actually be something of a ‘botched job’ compared to other worlds! However perfect it may seem to us, we only have this world (and, now, a few others we’ve partially explored in this solar system) to go on.

The First Cause Argument . Also used in the Cosmological Argument (as in ‘who caused the causer?’): If the universe is the creation of a complex Cosmic Mind, then who designed the designer?

The Problem of Evil . This problem is a long and complex one, and is best detailed in a future article. Briefly, if the Cosmic Designer is the theistic omnipotent and benevolent God, then why is the world so full of evil? When we look at the world it does not appear to be as happy and harmonious as one might wish: seemingly arbitrary mass destruction, disease, creatures torturing and killing other creatures, pain and illness…Why would a benevolent God let such things happen? Or why would an omnipotent God create a world where such things have to happen?

The Design Argument to support the Existence of a Cosmic Design

The Problem of Evil does raise a very important point: here Philo is not just attacking the argument of God’s existence, but is questioning the nature of God as understand by orthodox Christianity at the time. If we are to accept the idea of there being a ‘Cosmic Design’ then one may have a stronger argument.

However, consequently, the concept of ‘God’ may need to be altered:

God is not benevolent . The fact that there is evil in the world could be accepted if the Designer were not a benevolent one. How many of you have ‘played God’ by building your own world in one of the computer strategy games, only to find world military conquest far more exciting than peaceful diplomacy? (Come on, admit it!)

God is not omnipotent . Perhaps God’s powers are limited. It is possible to create something and yet have limited power over your creation, whether by choice or otherwise. Again, you might imagine creating a computer world with artificial intelligence (AI). You might also give the creatures of this world free will and choose not to interfere in their development. What could be the result?

The argument could go much further. When you do consider the workings of a watch would you automatically think that a single skilled craftsman designed the watch? Certainly less so these days when most human production is the result of more than one producer. In fact, the larger and more complex a construction, then the more people are required. Does it not, therefore, follow that such a complex construction as the universe must have many designers?

This could lead to:

Ditheism . The concept of two divine beings goes back a very long way. Zoroastrianism, a religion that goes back to possibly 3,000 BC and influenced the development of Judaism (and, therefore, had an indirect influence on Christianity and Islam), taught that Ahura Mazda was the Good Creator of all things, but that evil comes from Angra Mainyu. The world, therefore, is a battleground between these two conflicting forces and, in many ways, helps to explain the presence of evil better than the monotheistic religions do. However, the acceptance of ditheism does not fit in with the monotheistic concept of God and the Devil.

Polytheism . We are now going even further away from theism; into the world understood by ancient Greeks, Romans and Hindus. A collection of gods creating and preserving the world. They need not even be particularly intelligent gods: Hume, in reference to shipbuilding, noted that a shipbuilder could be a ‘stupid mechanic’ who had leaned his trade by trial and error. Perhaps the mess the world is in could be explained better this way?

We could go even further than this by dismissing the idea of anthropomorphic god or gods altogether. Rather, the Designer is some kind of living organism, a single ‘life force’. It may be helpful to view the earth as a biological organism in itself, but this does not help to support the Argument from Design .  James Lovelock, in his book The Ages of Gaia (the Greek name for the Earth goddess), viewed Earth as a living organism, but not in any teleological sense. The earth is, rather, a self-regulating organism for which mankind is merely a part of: such human considerations of ‘purpose’ miss the point!

It must be remembered that both Hume and Paley were writing at the time of the Scientific Revolution. The new scientific picture of the world that emerged in the seventeenth century, following the discoveries of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, caused religion to also alter its perspective. On the one hand, science demanded that theories could be empirically testable, hence Hume’s empiricism. On the other hand, the universe was perceived in a mechanical way: Newton saw the motion of the planets, and all motion, to be subject to the same laws of mechanics; hence Paley’s analogy of the world and the machine. God thus became the Great Machine-Maker! However, while science could be seen by many to support the teleological argument; it also undermined it as new discoveries came about:

Natural Selection . In 1859,  Charles Darwin  (1809-1882) published The Origin of the Species, which concluded that species evolve from other species, and that natural selection is the principal mechanism that produces these changes. Although this theory has been much modified since Darwin’s day, evolutionary theory still regards natural selection as an important factor in species change. The main relevance of this theory for the teleological argument is that new species could be formed without the need for a God. Life evolves naturally; it was not created in the sense of Genesis; nor is God required to regulate the world. Lovelock, though his science has a ‘mystical’ element to it, is using Darwinian theory to support his Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is an automatic, but not purposeful, goal-seeking system, governed by the laws of natural selection and subject to the constraints of nature.

Chaos Theory . Another significant scientific theory that may undermine the whole Design Argument is the belief that the universe is not really all that ordered at all! As quantum theory developed early this century, it became clear that at the microscopic level, physical processes were indeterminate; they were not predictable! Over the past thirty years or so it has become clearer that the motion of many physical systems (including planets) are not as regular as Newton had suggested. In other words; nature is not as mechanical as the machines we make at all, and, therefore, the analogy does not work! Such a theory also lends support to Hume’s thesis that there is no obvious sense in which the universe resembles human production. In fact, it could be argued that human production is ‘better’ than the universe, which is why we feel the need to produce things in the first place!

We have by no means exhausted the arguments for the Design Argument. For many it is considered the most attractive argument for, at the very least, the existence of a ‘Cosmic Designer’. Part of its attraction lies in its relative simplicity compared with, say, the ontological argument. It should be noted, however, that  Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804) believed that the teleological argument (and, indeed, the cosmological argument) is held to assume the a priori ontological argument! It is not within the scope of this essay to go into detail over Kant’s account of categories. Nonetheless, it is an important part of the argument against design in the sense that Kant believes we impose order on the universe; not merely that the universe imposes order on us! As science learns more about the universe, it appears to be considerably less ordered, spatial and temporal than we believe. Consequently the whole argument falls apart because we are pre-supposing a reality that is not what it seems.

If such is the case, this also weakens more contemporary supporters of the Design Argument that you should investigate.  Richard Swinburne  believes that it is self-evident that the world contains temporal order. As he said in The Existence of God, “The orderliness of nature to which I draw attention here is its conformity to formula, to simple, formulable, scientific laws…The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not – it is very orderly.” Although this is not Swinburne’s only point, it is an important one. There is still plenty of mileage in the Design Argument but, ultimately, its very attraction seems to be its weakness: its lack of tight, logical argument; relying more on its appeal to the human capacity for wonder over the workings of the universe.

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Thomas Aquinas and the Teleological Argument: Understanding the Fifth Way

Profile image of René Ardell Fehr

In this thesis I conduct exegesis on the Fifth Way of St. Thomas Aquinas. I begin by showing the historical and textual context of the argument, and proceed by providing my own translation and careful analysis. I argue that the Fifth Way revolves around unknowing natural bodies operating for ends, and that these operations arise naturally from them. The thrust of the argument is that this cannot be due to chance, but only from something knowing the ends in question and which directs said natural bodies. I also argue that the Fifth Way is not an Intelligent Design argument as they are commonly understood today, and I examine the archer analogy that Thomas makes use of. Further, I compare the Fifth Way to five similar arguments found in Thomas's body of work. Finally, I argue for the value and limits of the Fifth Way.

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Chris Lilley

teleological argument essay pdf

Studies in Comparative Theology

Syed M Waqas

Thomas Aquinas is most renowned for his so-called "Five Ways" developed in the pursuit of determining and demonstrating the existence of God. The Five Ways originally revolve around the principles of natural theology, which is the basis of the cluster of arguments Thomas Aquinas presents within the five mainline arguments. These five arguments constitute only an introduction to a rigorous project in natural theology. In order to understand his work on natural theology, it is important that we define and appreciate the nature and scope of natural theology within the proper context of his arguments. In principle, natural theology is such that is purely and properly philosophical and hence it does not make use of appeals to religious authority in order to establish a basis for truth. Thomas Aquinas' work on natural theology, which reflects Aristotelian metaphysics, runs through thousands of tightly argued passages and assigns a new dimension to the subsequent work on theology within the Catholic Church.

Jonathan L Stute

The topic of teleology is one which is widely misunderstood in popular and academic debate. This aspect of classical metaphysics is one which has wide-ranging implications touching on topics from ethics, philosophy of science, and the existence of God. In this paper, the author will present the arguments for teleology as an intrinsic feature of the natural world from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas which will then be explored in its implications through the Quinta Via as found in ST I, Q. 2, Art. 3. The paper ends with an analysis of how and what it means to say that Aquinas' fifth way leads one to the belief that God exists.

International Journal For Philosophy of Religion

Fergus Kerr

Stephen L Brock

paperback and epub: https://wipfandstock.com/the-philosophy-of-saint-thomas-aquinas.html hardcover: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Saint-Thomas-Aquinas/dp/1498279783/ Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Saint-Thomas-Aquinas-Sketch-ebook/dp/B0195PIIWW/ This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas’s philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations. The excerpt that can be downloaded is used with Permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Softcover and epub versions are available from their webpage. Amazon has a kindle version.

Daniel D. De Haan

This paper will argue that the order and the unity of St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways can be elucidated through a consideration of St. Thomas’s appropriation of an Avicennian insight that he used to order and unify the wisdom of the Aristotelian and Abrahamic philosophical traditions towards the existence of God. I will begin with a central aporia from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle says that the science of first philosophy has three different theoretical vectors: ontology, aitiology, and theology. But how can all three be united into a single Aristotelian science? In his Metaphysics of the Healing, Avicenna resolved the impasse by taking the ontological vector as the subject of metaphysics. He then integrated the question of the four first causes into the penultimate stage of his demonstration for the existence of God, thereby placing aitiological and theological questions among the ultimate concerns of a unified Aristotelian metaphysics. In the five ways, St. Thomas integrated Avicenna’s Aristotelian search for the first four causes into the last four of his five ways, by showing that each of the four aitiological orders terminate in an ultimate first cause that we call God. Finally, by appending the proof from the Physics to the beginning of the five ways, St. Thomas was able to show that the ultimate aim of both natural philosophy and metaphysics is the divine first principle, which is the beginning and subject of sacra doctrina.

Francisco J Romero Carrasquillo

Copyright © 2013-15 Francisco J. Romero Carrasquillo. All rights reserved. Abstract: The believing practitioner of natural theology is keenly aware of how necessary it is to interpret Scripture (be that the Jewish or Christian Scriptures, the Qur’an, etc.) in a non-literal way in order to accommodate it to the findings of natural theology. For instance, the classical theistic attributes of divine simplicity, immutability, and eternity have forced philosophers like Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas to read in a non-literal way scriptural passages that apparently allude to God as having parts, as changing through time, and as being somehow in time. As a result, many classical theists, in particular Averroes and Maimonides, have developed theories of biblical interpretation that capitalize on an allegorical and inner meaning that is hidden to the uninitiated underneath the veil of Scripture’s literal sense, and that is meant to be discovered by the philosopher’s trained scientific mind. Moreover, in these theories the literal sense is shot through with falsehood, whereas only the inner or allegorical sense is presented as always true and harmonious with the findings of philosophy. Aquinas, however, diverges from this approach: although he acknowledges the presence of a spiritual sense distinct from the literal, he claims that the scientific study of Scripture (sacra doctrina) hinges not on the spiritual but on the literal sense of Scripture, and that all theological arguments must always proceed from this literal sense. Moreover, nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense, no matter how bizarre the text may be. Thus, whereas it is relatively easy to see how Averroes and Maimonides’ views on the interpretation of Scripture are coherent with their philosophical thought, in the case of Aquinas this is not so easy to explain. This paper examines and compares the views of these three thinkers on the interpretation of Scripture and inquires whether Aquinas successfully develops a theory of biblical interpretation that is in harmony with his natural theology and other philosophical views.

Essays Presented to the Rev'd Dr Robert D. Crouse

Wayne J Hankey

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

This paper presents a philosophical argument for divine providence by Aquinas. I suggest that upon returning to Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics to prepare his commentaries on these texts, Aquinas recognized that his stock argument from natural teleology to divine providence (the fifth way and its versions) needed to be filled out. Arguments from natural teleology can prove that God’s providence extends to what happens for the most part, but they cannot show that God’s providence also includes what happens for the least part. In order to prove the latter, Aquinas claims that one must argue from a higher science, which he then does with all characteristic clarity. This paper presents this argument, discusses what this means for his previous arguments from teleology, and discusses the argument’s relevance to the contemporary discussion about creation and evolution.

Thomas Riplinger

Summarizing the fruits of some 50 years of research into the cognition theory of Thomas Aquinas, this publication reproduces the author's original lectorate dissertation "Experiential, conceptual and intuitive moments in the knowledge of faith", written back in 1967 but still valid in essentials. To bring the reader up to date, the dissertation is flanked by two hitherto unpublished recent papers by the author, "The phenomenology of cognition according to Thomas Aquinas" and "Philosophia and sacra doctrina: new insights into Thomas Aquinas' understanding of the relationship between science and philosophy, sacred scripture and theology". In these works, the author practices a twofold hermeneutic. First he reads the text historically against the background of medieval natural and human science and philosophy; then he translates the insights so gleaned into the framework of contemporary natural and social science, in particular neurobiological cognition theory and social psychology. POSTSCRIPT: Since this Internet publication in 2004 my thinking has made rapid strides in achieving a deeper and more accurate understanding of how Aquinas understood the human knowing process Thomas's intentions came to be misunderstood in the course of the late medieval and baroque controversies launced by the debate with Scotism, and these misunderstandinrgs tramitted through such eminent Thomists as John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas), R. Garrigou Lagrange, and L.Regis are reflected in my original dissertation, which largely relied on these sources, and are only partially corrected in the accompanying later papers. I know see that Thomas never taught that we "intuit" the nature of a material thing by an act of abstractive simple apprehension. To hold this is in effect to say that we know intellectually in much the same way as angels do, in a single un-composed intellectual concept. Instead, we only gradually build up (construct) our real definitions of natural things by a succession of judgments based on a growing fundus of experience "experimentum'" built up by systematic observat4ion of diverse individuals of a given species. I hope to correct this and ot4her errors contained in the present version in a new version of this book, t4hat i am current4ly working on.

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The Existence of God (1st edn)

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8 Teleological Arguments

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The argument from temporal order (from the operations of laws of nature) is one form of teleological argument, expanded by Aquinas as his ‘fifth way’. God can make a universe subject to laws of nature, and has reason to do so in that only thereby can finite agents grow in power and knowledge. But it is extremely improbable that the universe would be governed by laws of nature if there is no God.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Arguments for the Existence of God

Introduction, general overviews.

  • Anthologies
  • Assessing Arguments
  • Anselm’s Proslogion
  • Modal Ontological Arguments
  • Gödel’s Ontological Argument
  • Aquinas’s Five Ways
  • Arguments from Sufficient Reason
  • Arguments from Contingency
  • Kalām Cosmological Arguments
  • Biological Arguments for Design
  • Cosmological Fine-Tuning Arguments for Design
  • Moral Arguments
  • Arguments from Religious Experience
  • Arguments from Miracles
  • Arguments from Consciousness
  • Arguments from Reason
  • Aesthetic Arguments
  • “Cumulative” Arguments
  • Pascal’s Wager

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Arguments for the Existence of God by Graham Oppy LAST REVIEWED: 01 September 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 26 February 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0040

Philosophical discussion of arguments for the existence of God appeared to have become extinct during the heyday of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. However, since the mid-1960s, there has been a resurgence of interest in these arguments. Much of the discussion has focused on Kant’s “big three” arguments: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, and teleological arguments. Discussion of ontological arguments has been primarily concerned with (a) Anselm’s ontological argument; (b) modal ontological arguments, particularly as developed by Alvin Plantinga; and (c) higher-order ontological arguments, particularly Gödel’s ontological argument. Each of these kinds of arguments has found supporters, although few regard these as the strongest arguments that can be given for the existence of God. Discussion of cosmological arguments has been focused on (a) kalām cosmological arguments (defended, in particular, by William Lane Craig); (b) cosmological arguments from sufficient reason (defended, in particular, by Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss); and (c) cosmological arguments from contingency (defended, in particular, by Robert Koons and Timothy O’Connor). Discussion of teleological arguments has, in recent times, been partly driven by the emergence of the intelligent design movement in the United States. On the one hand, there has been a huge revival of enthusiasm for Paley’s biological argument for design. On the other hand, there has also been the development of fine-tuning teleological arguments driven primarily by results from very recent cosmological investigation of our universe. Moreover, new kinds of teleological arguments have also emerged—for example, Alvin Plantinga’s arguments for the incompatibility of metaphysical naturalism with evolutionary theory and Michael Rea’s arguments for the incompatibility of the rejection of intelligent design with materialism, realism about material objects, and realism about other minds. Other (“minor”) arguments for the existence of God that have received serious discussion in recent times include moral arguments, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, arguments from consciousness, arguments from reason, and aesthetic arguments. Of course, there is also a host of “lesser” arguments that are mainly viewed as fodder for undergraduate dissection. Further topics that are germane to any discussion of arguments for the existence of God include (a) the appropriate goals at which these arguments should aim and the standards that they should meet, (b) the prospects for “cumulative” arguments (e.g., of the kind developed by Richard Swinburne), and (c) the prospects for prudential arguments that appeal to our desires rather than to our beliefs (e.g., Pascal’s wager).

There are few works that seek to provide a comprehensive overview of arguments for the existence of God; there are rather more works that seek to give a thorough treatment of arguments for and against the existence of God. Mackie 1982 is the gold standard; its treatment of arguments for the existence of God remained unmatched until the publication of Sobel 2004 . Other worthy treatments of a range of arguments for the existence of God—as parts of treatments of ranges of arguments for and against the existence of God—include Gale 1991 , Martin 1990 , and Oppy 2006 . The works mentioned so far are all products of nonbelief; they all provide critical analyses and negative assessments of the arguments for the existence of God that they consider. Plantinga 1990 is an interesting product of belief that also provides critical analyses and negative assessments of the arguments for the existence of God that it considers, although in the service of a wider argument in favor of the rationality of religious belief; first published in 1967, this work was clearly the gold standard for analysis of arguments for the existence of God prior to Mackie 1982 . Of the general works that provide a more positive assessment of arguments for the existence of God, consideration should certainly be given to Plantinga 2007 and, for those interested in a gentle but enthusiastic introduction, Davies 2004 .

Davies, Brian. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wide-ranging introduction to philosophy of religion that includes a discussion of ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, and moral arguments. Good coverage of a range of arguments for the existence of God.

Gale, Richard. On the Nature and Existence of God . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Entertaining and energetic discussion of ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, arguments from religious experience, and pragmatic arguments (e.g., Pascal’s wager).

Mackie, John. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God . New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Superb presentation of cumulative case argument for atheism. Considers ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, moral arguments, arguments from consciousness, arguments from religious experience, arguments from miracles, and Pascal’s wager. Benchmark text for critical discussion of arguments for the existence of God.

Martin, Michael. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Comprehensive cumulative case for atheism. Considers ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, arguments from miracles, arguments from religious experience, Pascal’s wager, and minor evidential arguments. Worthy contribution to the literature on arguments for the existence of God.

Oppy, Graham. Arguing about Gods . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511498978

Detailed discussion of cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, Pascal’s wager, and a range of other arguments. Discussion of ontological arguments that supplements Oppy 1995 (cited under Ontological Arguments ). Also includes some discussion of methodology: the mechanics of assessment of arguments for the existence of God.

Plantinga, Alvin. God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Groundbreaking discussion of cosmological arguments, ontological arguments, and teleological arguments. Instrumental in setting new standards of rigor and precision for the analysis of arguments for the existence of God. First published in 1967.

Plantinga, Alvin. “Appendix: Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments.” In Alvin Plantinga . Edited by Deane-Peter Baker, 203–228. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511611247

A collection of sketches or pointers to what Plantinga claims would be good arguments for the existence of God. Divided into (a) metaphysical arguments (aboutness, collections, numbers, counterfactuals, physical constants, complexity, contingency), (b) epistemological arguments (positive epistemic status, proper function, simplicity, induction, rejection of global skepticism, reference, intuition), (c) moral arguments, and (d) other arguments (colors and flavors, love, Mozart, play and enjoyment, providence, miracles).

Sobel, Jordan. Logic and Theism: Arguments for and against Beliefs in God . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Brilliant discussion of major arguments about the existence of God. Contains very detailed analyses of ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, teleological arguments, and arguments from miracles. Brought new rigor and technical precision to the discussion of these arguments for the existence of God.

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Teleological Notions in Biology

The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role.

Historical and recent examples of teleological claims include the following:

The chief function of the heart is the transmission and pumping of the blood through the arteries to the extremities of the body. (Harvey 1616 [1928: 49]) The Predator Detection hypothesis remains the strongest candidate for the function of stotting [by gazelles]. (Caro 1986: 663) The geographic range of human malaria is much wider than the range of the sickle-cell gene. As it happens, other antimalarial genes take over the protective function of the sickle-cell gene in … other warm parts. (Diamond 1994: 83) Despite the substantial amount of data we now have on theropod dinosaurs, more information is necessary in order to determine the likelihood that early feathers served an adaptive function in visual display as opposed to other proposed adaptive functions such as thermoregulation. (Dimond et al. 2011: 62)

The ubiquity of claims such as these raises the question: how should apparently teleological notions in biology be understood?

Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology. For instance, Ernst Mayr (1988), identified four reasons why teleological notions remain controversial in biology, namely that they are:

  • vitalistic (positing some special ‘life-force’);
  • requiring backwards causation (because goal-directed explanations seem to use future outcomes to explain present traits);
  • incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2);
  • mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none).

A fifth complaint is that they are not empirically testable (Allen & Bekoff 1995). The current philosophical literature offers both Darwinian and non-Darwinian accounts of teleology in biology that aim to avoid these concerns. In this article, we hope to bring some clarity to the contemporary debates over the role of teleological notions in biology by sketching a taxonomy of the various accounts of biological function on offer (see Allen & Bekoff 1995 for a more comprehensive taxonomy that forms the basis of this presentation). We primarily focus on naturalistic accounts of biological function, since this is where we see the most lively and productive current debates (see, e.g., Garson 2016 for an extended survey). We also briefly discuss the notion of goal-directedness in section 2.

1. Framing the Debate

2. explanatory teleonaturalism, 3. assimilation to non-biological explanations, 4.1 indirect, 4.2 direct natural selection approaches, 5. unification and pluralism, anthologies, other internet resources, related entries.

The discussion about biological teleology has ancient origins. It is particularly prominent in Plato’s depiction of the divine Craftsman or ‘Demiurge’ in the Timaeus and Aristotle’s discussion of final causes in the Physics (see the section on teleology in the entry on Aristotle ). However, Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of teleology, as well as their arguments for teleology in the natural world, are distinct (Lennox 1992; Ariew 2002; Johnson 2005). Whereas Plato’s teleology is anthropocentric and creationist, Aristotle’s is naturalistic and functional. On the Platonic view, the Demiurge is the source of all motion in both the heavens and on earth, and the universe and all living beings within it are artifacts modeled on the Forms (see the relevant sections of the entries on Plato and Plato’s metaphysics ). The goal toward which all things, including living beings, are directed is the external and eternal good of the Forms. In contrast, on the Aristotelian view, the teleology that directs the behavior of living beings is immanent. For instance, in organismal development, the impetus for this goal-directed process is a principle of change within the organism, and the telos , or goal, of the development is also an inherent property. Although often conflated, the views of Plato and Aristotle on teleology have been influential in historical debates on biological teleology, and one can still find Platonic and Aristotelian ideas in the current debate on biological functions.

In addition to its role within ancient philosophy and cosmology, teleology has long been an important topic within physiology and medicine. Galen’s On the Use of the Parts ( De usu partium ) is an early example of teleological reasoning applied to physiology (see the section on teleology in the entry on Galen ). In this text, Galen presents a functional analysis of the various parts of living organisms, in which “existence, structure, and attributes of all the parts must be explained by reference to their functions in promoting the activities of the whole organism” (Schiefsky 2007: 371). For Galen, a teleological account of parts is superior to a purely causal-mechanical one, since the function or purpose of the part plays an ineliminable role in the explanation of the part and its activities. This Galenic view of anatomy, with its explicitly Aristotelian reliance on final causes, largely dominated medical thought until the seventeenth century. William Harvey’s On the Motion of the Heart and Blood ( De motu cordis ) was seen by many of his contemporaries (e.g., Hobbes, Descartes) as a turning point away from the Galenic or Aristotelian approaches to anatomy, with their appeal to final causes, toward the new mechanistic and experimental science of the seventeenth century (French 1994). His attempt to empirically establish the structure and motion of the heart without ever claiming to have identified the final cause of circulation, as well as his use of mechanical analogies, such as the analogy from the expansion of the arteries to the inflation of a glove, provide some support for this assessment. Robert Boyle, however, offered a different interpretation of Harvey’s work. Boyle saw it as amenable to his ‘compatibilist’ approach that attempted to show that “mechanical and teleological explanations of biological phenomena are compatible” (Lennox 1983: 38). Recent commentators have also suggested Harvey was strongly influenced by Aristotelian teleological thinking, and thus is a liminal figure in the transition from vitalist to purely mechanistic explanation in physiology and medicine (Distelzweig 2014, 2016; Lennox 2017), although Lennox notes that “Harvey appears to be pressing the analogy between art and nature in ways that are not Aristotelian but more Platonic in spirit” (Lennox 2017: 191).

Immanuel Kant’s analysis of teleology in the Critique of Judgment (Kant 1790 [2000]) also played an influential role in biology. According to Kant, humans inevitably understand living things as if they are teleological systems (Zammito 2006). However, on Kant’s view, the teleology we see in the natural world is only apparent; it is the product of our limited cognitive faculties (see section 3 of the entry on Kant’s aesthetics ). But in addition, according to Kant, there is a certain non-machine-like character of organisms, evident in their ability to grow and reproduce, that leads to a type of mechanical inexplicability. Hannah Ginsborg (2004) argues that for Kant this impossibility of explaining organisms in solely mechanistic terms does not itself distinguish them from complex artifacts; but, she argues, Kant thought that the regenerative and reproductive aspects of organisms lead us to attribute a kind of natural purposiveness that is absent in artifacts, paralleling Aristotle’s justification for natural, immanent teleology. Kantian analysis of this sort shows up in early nineteenth century research in what would come to be called organic chemistry. Scientists at that time sought to determine whether living systems were nothing more than complex chemical systems, fully analyzable in terms of physical and chemical processes. Those researchers adopting a Kantian approach advocated a teleo-mechanist strategy to make sense of the goal-directed nature of living systems, which sought to treat the organism as both a means and an end and thus incorporated elements of both teleological and mechanistic explanation (Lenoir 1982).

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the status of teleology in biology was also contested as part of the vitalist-mechanist debate in physiology and medicine (for an overview, see the first section of the entry on life ). Whereas mechanists sought to describe all living things in purely mechanical terms, vitalists argued that physical properties alone could not explain the goal-directed organization of living things. They claimed that ‘vital forces’ were also necessary to explain the difference between physical and living systems. Although they fell out of favor, some vitalist accounts persisted through the twentieth-century, for instance, in philosopher Henri Bergson’s ‘ élan vital ’ (see the section creative evolution in the entry on Bergson ) and in biologist-cum-philosopher Hans Driesch’s concept of ‘entelechy’ (Driesch 1908).

Much debate over the role of teleology in biology in the twentieth century, especially amongst the architects of the ‘modern synthesis’, traces back to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Biologist and philosopher Michael Ghiselin, expressing a common interpretation of Darwin’s role in this debate, claims in his preface to Darwin’s work on orchids that Darwin’s theory succeeded in “getting rid of teleology and replacing it with a new way of thinking about adaptation” (Darwin 1862/1877 [1984: xiii] cited in Lennox 1993: 409). On this view, the theory of natural selection explains how species “have been modified so as to acquire that perfection of structure and co-adaptation” without any appeal to a benevolent Creator (Darwin 1859: 3). Prior to Darwin, the best explanation for biological adaptation was the argument from design, most influentially presented in William Paley’s Natural Theology (Paley 1802): living things have the structure and behaviors that they do because they were designed for certain purposes by a benevolent Creator (see the entry on natural theology and natural religion ). Darwin’s theory provides biology with the resources to resist this argument, offering a fully naturalized explanation for adaptation. Although most agree that Darwin’s theory does indeed purge evolutionary biology of any illicit appeal to external, Platonic teleology, there is disagreement as to whether or not Darwin’s evolutionary explanations are teleological (see the relevant section of the entry on Darwinism ). Even Darwin’s contemporaries disagreed as to whether or not the theory of natural selection purged teleological explanations from biology or revived them (Lennox 2010). In any case, it is clear that Darwin used the language of ‘final causes’ to describe the function of biological parts in his Species Notebooks and throughout his life; he also reflected frequently about the relationship between natural selection and teleology (Lennox 1993).

Philosophical naturalism denotes a broad range of attitudes towards ontological questions. We use “teleonaturalism” to denote a similarly broad range of naturalistic accounts of teleology in biology that are united in rejecting any dependence on mental or intentional notions in explicating the use of the teleological terms in biological contexts. Thus, those who reject teleomentalism typically seek truth conditions for teleological claims in biology that are grounded in non-mental facts about organisms and their traits.

Some teleonaturalists analyze teleological language as primarily descriptive rather than explanatory, maintaining that teleology in biology is appropriate for biological systems which show purposive, goal-directed patterns of behavior (for which Pittendrigh (1958) coined the term “teleonomic”). For such views, the primary scientific challenge is to explain teleonomy, not to use teleonomy as explanans (see Thompson 1987). While cybernetics lost its appeal in the latter part of the twentieth century, more recent approaches to living systems that treat them as self-organizing or “autopoietic” (Maturana & Varela 1980) bear certain affinities to the descriptive attitude towards teleonaturalism—although most proponents claim that the concepts developed within these approaches are explanatory.

Hence, most teleonaturalists favor accounts of biological function which make the explanatory role of this notion a desideratum. Naturalistic accounts typically aim to satisfy two additional desiderata. They should distinguish genuine biological functions from accidental utility (such as noses supporting glasses), and they should capture the normative dimension of function in order to preserve a function-malfunction distinction. Although these three desiderata are neither universally accepted nor are they adequacy conditions in the strict sense, they have nevertheless achieved canonical status within the contemporary debate over biological functions.

In the subsequent sections we divide various ways in which different teleonaturalist accounts of function can be distinguished. Our first distinction is between (a) views which assimilate functional explanations in biology to patterns of explanation in the non-biological sciences, and (b) views treat functional explanation as distinctively biological.

Ernest Nagel (1961) and Carl Hempel (1965) provide early attempts by philosophers of science to directly assimilate functional explanation in biology to more general patterns of explanation. In particular, they both consider functional explanation within the framework of the Deductive-Nomological account of scientific explanation . They consider the functional claims to be related to explanations of the presence of a trait in an organism. Their accounts differ primarily on whether to say that a trait T has function F in organism O when T is sufficient to produce F in O (Hempel’s version) or when T is necessary to produce F in O (Nagel’s version).

Larry Wright (1973, 1976) also offers an explanatory account targeted on the presence of the trait, but he criticizes the prior accounts for failing to capture the apparent goal-directedness of functional traits. His so-called “etiological” analysis holds that the function of X is Z means (a) X is there because it does Z , and (b) Z is a consequence (or result) of X ’s being there. Because of the intended breadth of Wright’s analysis, it has been attacked on conceptual grounds (e.g., Boorse 1976), but the general thrust of the etiological account survives in accounts of function based on natural selection, discussed in section 4.

Cummins (1975) criticized both Hempel and Nagel on the grounds that the proper target of explanation of biological function claims is not the presence of a trait, but the capacities of biological organs and organisms. Sophisticated capacities can be analyzed in terms of the contributions that their components make to those capacities. For example, the heart of a bilaterian animal pumps blood, which in this way contributes to the capacity of the organism to deliver oxygen and nutrients to its tissues. The heart itself can be further decomposed into parts (chambers, valves, etc.) which each play different functional roles in contributing to that organ’s capacity to pump blood. Among philosophers, this approach to functional analysis is most associated with Cummins (1975), although biologists have advanced similar ideas, sometimes independently (Hinde 1975; Lauder 1982), and indeed the approach can be traced much further back, as the quotation from William Harvey in the introduction suggests. Cummins’ ideas about functional analysis have been incorporated in recent discussion on mechanisms in the biological sciences (see the entry on mechanisms in science ). For instance, Craver (2007) explicitly draws on Cummins (1975) in his account and is important for moving teleological descriptions down to the molecular level (see also, Craver 2001, 2013).

According to Cummins, although biological systems certainly have capacities that are uniquely biological, there is nothing specifically biological about the pattern of explanation offered by functional analysis; it applies equally well, for example to the contributions made by the components of artifacts (Lewens 2004), for example the contributions of the engine’s pistons in the capacity of an automobile to transport people. Because of the generality of the framework, it is also possible to give a functional analysis of how some part of a biological system contributes to outcomes usually treated as negative, such as disease or death. Some commentators regard this as a virtue of the approach, while others regard it as too detached from standard biological practice. Relatedly, the functional analysis approach fails to live up to the commonly-held desideratum that an adequate account should provide an analysis of malfunction—a desideratum that Cummins explicitly rejects (see also Wouters 1999 and Davies 2001). A heart with a hole in its septum may not circulate blood at a level sufficient to sustain life, but it thereby simply lacks that function.

4. Natural Selection Accounts

Many philosophers of biology believe that functional explanation is uniquely appropriate to biology, turning to Darwin’s theory of descent with modification to ground the practice of attributing functions. Like Wright, Hempel, and Nagel, natural-selection teleonaturalists take the primary target of explanation to be the presence of various traits in organisms.

Here we distinguish between two ways of using natural selection to ground biological teleology.

  • Indirect approaches treat the adaptive, self-organizing nature of living cells and organisms as the natural basis for teleological properties of their traits, but give background credit to the power of natural selection to produce such self-organizational complexity as is found in living systems.
  • Direct approaches invoke natural selection explicitly when explicating functional claims, either in an etiological sense based on the history of selection or in a dispositional sense based on the fitness of organisms possessing the traits.

The primary motivation for the earliest indirect, cybernetic accounts of biological teleology were to explain the apparent purposiveness of biological organisms, for instance, the maintenance of constant body temperature in endotherms. These accounts aimed to provide a naturalized explanation for the goal-directed behavior of biological systems through reference to their organization. In an influential early paper, Norbert Wiener and colleagues sought to explain the goal-directed behavior of biological organisms and machines as arising from their utilization of negative feedback mechanisms (Rosenblueth et al. 1943; for further development see also Braithwaite (1953), Sommerhoff (1950) and Nagel (1953)). Attributions of teleological, or goal-directed, behavior to animals or machines, they argued, meant nothing more than “purpose controlled by feed-back” (Rosenblueth et al. 1943, 23).

This cybernetic account of teleology inspired biologist Colin Pittendrigh to introduce the term ‘teleonomy’ into the literature (Pittendrigh 1958). With this neologism, Pittendrigh hoped to purge biology of any vestiges of Aristotelian final causes whilst providing biology with an acceptable term to describe adapted, goal-directed systems. This term was taken up in the 1960s by evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr (1974) and George Williams (1966), as well as by scientists studying cell metabolism and regulation, who were just beginning to elucidate the structural and molecular basis for cellular feedback mechanisms (Monod & Jacob 1961; Davis 1961). According to proponents, adopting a cybernetic account of goal-directed behavior in biological systems splits the explanatory problem in two. On the one hand, teleological activity in the biological world could be explained by the presence of teleonomic systems with negative feedback mechanisms, whereas the very presence of those teleonomic systems in living organisms, on the other hand, could be explained by the action of natural selection (Monod 1970 [1971]).

Although explicit cybernetic accounts of biological teleology have fallen out of favor, other organizational approaches to biological function have had a recent resurgence in the function literature. These organizational, or systems-theoretic, approaches often build upon early cybernetic accounts or aim to extend Maturana and Varela’s (1980) influential notion of autopoiesis, which refers to the self-organizing, self-maintaining characteristic of living systems (see the entry on Embodied Cognition for further description). These accounts identify the function of a biological trait through an analysis of the role the trait plays within an organized system in contributing to both its own persistence and the persistence of the system as a whole (Schlosser 1998; McLaughlin 2001; Mossio et al. 2009; Saborido et al. 2011; Moreno & Mossio 2015). Although they differ in their details, organizational approaches to biological function generally agree that a trait token T has a function F when the performance of F by T contributes to the maintenance of the complex organization of the system, which in turn results in T ’s continued existence. For example, the heart has the function to pump blood, according to these accounts, because it contributes to the maintenance of the entire organism by causing the blood to circulate, which facilitates the circulation of oxygen and nutrients. At the same time, this circulation is also responsible in part for the persistence of the heart itself, since the heart also benefits directly from this function (i.e., the cardiac cells receive the oxygen and nutrients necessary for their survival).

Similar to direct natural selection accounts, organizational accounts can be forward or backward-looking: the function of a trait may identify its dispositional contribution to the complex organization of the system which results in its own persistence or reproduction in the future (forward-looking; Schlosser 1998), or a functional attribution may identify a trait’s past contribution (etiological, or backward-looking; McLaughlin 2001). Alvaro Moreno’s group adopts a third position. They claim their organizational account of function unifies these two perspectives (Mossio et al 2009; cf. Artiga & Martinez 2016). All these organizational accounts differ from direct natural selection accounts, however, in that they make no appeal to the selection history of the trait. Instead, the function of a trait can be inferred from the present or past role of the trait in maintaining itself within the complex, organized system without further holding that the trait was selected for that role. On this view, functional attributions in biology are explanatory not because of selection, but rather because of the causal role traits play in contributing to the maintenance of the organization of a system, which in turn enables the traits themselves to persist.

Accounts of biological function which refer to natural selection typically have the form that a trait's functions causally explain the existence or maintenance of that trait in a given population via the mechanism of natural selection. William Wimsatt (1972), Ruth Millikan (1984), and Karen Neander (1991a), all treat the past history of natural selection as the selection process that legitimizes the notion of a biological function. Within such approaches there is a dispute about the exact role of natural selection, whether as a source of variation (sometimes referred to as the “creative” role of natural selection, e.g., Neander 1988; see also Ayala 1970, 1977), or only as a filter on variations that arise independently (Sober 1984).

Positions which ground functional claims in natural selection have much in common with Wright’s etiological account. However, because the grounding is specific to biology, they may avoid the kinds of counterexamples to Wright’s account introduced by critics such as Christopher Boorse, predicated on the idea that Wright’s account is intended to provide a more general conceptual analysis. A related challenge stems from the claim that pre-Darwinian thinkers such as Harvey correctly identified functional properties of biological organs, and that natural selection cannot therefore be a requirement for the proper conceptual analysis of function. Defenders of direct natural selection accounts of function have responded in different ways. One way, exemplified by Millikan (1989), is to argue that conceptual analysis has no role to play in articulating what is essentially a theoretical term within modern evolutionary biology. Another way, exemplified by Neander (1991b), is to say that the task of conceptual analysis is appropriate but restricted to the concepts of the relevant scientific community.

Paul Davies (2001) and Arno Wouters (2005) argue that both Millikan and Neander are incorrect to treat malfunction as an important theoretical or conceptual aspect of the practice of attributing functions by biologists. Wouters declares the wish that the study of biological function should be liberated “from the yoke of the philosophy of mind” (2005: 148). However, Ema Sullivan-Bissett (2017) argues that while the task of explicating biological practice by philosophers of biology is usefully distinguished from the broader goals of philosophers pursuing naturalistic accounts of mind and language (see the entry on teleological theories of mental content ), the latter serves legitimate goals. She regards an account of malfunction to be integral to the latter project even if not to the former. Davies (2001) argues that the natural selection accounts are unable to provide an account of malfunction insofar as they individuate traits functionally, entailing that a putatively malfunctioning trait is not an instance of the functionally-defined kind. Sullivan-Bissett addresses Davies’ objection by incorporating a structural condition on the individuation of traits. (See also Garson 2016: 48–49, for additional discussion and critique of Davies’ view.)

Returning to the kinds of traits studied by biologists, some theorists make a distinction between the initial spread of a new phenotypic trait in a population and the more recent maintenance of traits in populations. Take a trait such as feathers, arising in a population by whatever means. Initially this trait may have spread because of a role in mating displays. Later, feathers may have contributed to improved thermoregulation. And still later, the trait may have become more widely distributed because feathers make good flight control surfaces. If display or thermoregulatory functions of feathers become less important in some niches, the trait may nonetheless be maintained in a population due to selection for its flight-control function. The shifting functional profile may also be correlated with differentiation in form, such as between downy feathers and flight feathers.

Some biologists used the term pre-adaptation to capture the idea that a trait selected for one function may turn out to be very useful for something else. However, Gould and Vrba (1982) introduced the term ‘exaptation’ to capture such transitions, and avoid what they saw as the overly teleological implications of pre-adaptation, as well as to recognize that non-selected traits of organisms could also be co-opted to serve a function, increasing fitness without having any further modification by natural selection (Lloyd & Gould 2017). Critics of the etiological natural selection approaches sometimes argue that backward-looking approaches are too vague with respect to questions about the point at which traits acquire or lose functions, and that they are consequently untestable empirically (Amundson & Lauder 1994). Godfrey-Smith (1994) independently proposed a “modern history” theory of functions to address these problems. Similarly, Griffiths (1993: 417) invokes a notion of the “last evolutionarily significant time period” to handle these issues, but many critics remain unconvinced (e.g., Wouters 1999; Davies 2001).

Another issue confronting direct natural selection accounts is the evident utility of attributing functions to novel traits of organisms developed within a single lifetime such as the capacity of brains to acquire new concepts of kinds of things not previously experienced in the evolutionary lineage, or of the immune system to develop antibodies to new infectious agents. Previously, Millikan (1984) had suggested a notion of “derived proper function” to capture this kind of example. More recently, Bouchard (2013) and Garson (2017) have developed more detailed accounts of derived function, respectively using “differential persistence” and “differential retention” within an organism’s lifespan to play the role that differential reproduction plays in direct natural selection accounts.

Some biologists and philosophers of biology have been motivated by problems with the backward-looking etiological approach, or by seeing examples from biology that seek to identify the present functions of a trait. To deal with these issues they propose a dispositional or forward-looking approach that analyzes function in terms of those effects it is disposed to produce that tend to contribute to the present or future maintenance of the trait in a population of organisms. Various ways of spelling this out include Hinde’s (1975) account of strong function, Boorse’s (1976, 2002) biostatistical theory, Bigelow and Pargetter’s (1987) propensity theory, and Walsh’s (1996) relational theory (see also and Walsh & Ariew 1996).

Some theorists have argued for the pluralistic idea that biology may incorporate (at least) two notions of function, one to explain the presence of traits and the other to explain how those traits contribute to the complex capacities of organisms (Millikan 1989; Sober 1993; Godfrey-Smith 1994). Ron Amundson and George Lauder (Amundson & Lauder 1994) argue that paleontology is a part of biology which cannot make use of the etiological account because the selection regime for extinct organisms is generally inaccessible, and it must therefore depend on Cummins-style functional analysis of fossilized remains. However, defenders of pluralism may respond that even if it is correct to say that not all parts of biology can use both notions of function, this is consistent with both accounts having a role within biology.

Some theorists have argued that these two apparently distinct notions of function can be unified by regarding the target of explanation as the biological fitness of a whole organism (e.g., Griffiths 1993; Kitcher 1994; and perhaps Tinbergen 1963 according to Peter Godfrey-Smith 1994). Moreno and colleagues (Mossio et al. 2009; Moreno & Mossio 2015) have also claimed that their organizational approach unifies across backward-looking and forward-looking accounts by describing activities that atemporally account for the continuing persistence of traits. The viability of this account as one that is distinct from etiological accounts has been challenged by Marc Artiga and Manolo Martínez (Artiga & Martínez 2016), who argue that the necessarily multi-generational characterization of organizational closure needed to accommodate biological functions for parental endowments to offspring (whether transmitted via gametes or behavior) entails the standard etiological structure found in Wright’s account.

Attention to the actual explanatory practices of contemporary biologists is central to these discussions. This focus on scientific practice reflects broader trends within the philosophy of science, expanding beyond the general and abstract questions about scientific epistemology and metaphysics that dominated the twentieth century. The diversity of life itself is reflected in the variety of scientific attempts to understand it, and as philosophers of biology pursue further engagement with this variety, novel perspectives on the role and appropriateness of functional and teleological notions seem likely to result.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jim Lennox and Justin Garson for helpful comments on previous drafts of this entry.

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Teleology and evolution education: introduction to the special issue

  • Marcus Hammann 1 &
  • Ross H. Nehm 2  

Evolution: Education and Outreach volume  13 , Article number:  16 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Introduction

Teleology is a major challenge to evolution educators who strive to provide students with a scientifically accurate understanding of evolution. Teleological explanations commonly appeal to ends, goal-directedness, agency, purpose, and intent. Teleological explanations of evolution include the ideas that organisms evolved according to some predetermined direction or plan, purposefully adjusted to new environments, or intentionally enacted evolutionary change; these are scientifically unacceptable teleological explanations.

There are two main reasons for addressing teleology in this special issue: First, evolution educators consider scientifically unacceptable teleological ideas to be major obstacles to students’ understanding of evolution. Second, teleological explanations take multiple forms and there are scientifically acceptable and scientifically unacceptable types of teleology; fine distinctions are necessary in order to differentiate among them. Such distinctions, however, are rarely taught to students unless they take specialized courses in the philosophy of biology at the university level. There is consensus among most contributors to this special issue that teleological explanations should not be avoided altogether; rather, teachers and their students should be cognizant about the different types of teleology in order to develop robust evolutionary understanding.

Contributions to the special issue

In the biological sciences, teleological ideas and language are ubiquitous. The first article by Werth and Allchin ( 2020 ) provides numerous examples of teleology at different levels of biological organization (i.e., molecules, tissues, organs, organisms, populations and ecosystems) to substantiate the claim that teleological thinking is deeply entrenched in biology and is not limited to student thinking. In particular, Werth and Allchin argue that teleological thinking is an integral part of how people (including biologists) think and talk about nature. Common to teleological imagery, conceptualizations, and language is the idea that the biological world unfolds as a part of a prescribed plan. More generally, Werth and Allchin argue that teleology is intricately bound to normative ideas about how nature should be. According to the ‘balance of nature’ metaphor, for example, nature is believed to purposefully stay in balance. Furthermore, Werth and Allchin hypothesize that teleological reasoning may have evolutionary roots. Humans evolved in a social context and attributing agency to any observed behavior in the social environment may have been advantageous. Werth and Allchin’s main argument, however, is that teleology blurs the distinction between normative and descriptive reasoning about nature: “Through teleology, nature becomes normative.” Teleology’s dark shadow, then, is the naturalizing error. More specifically, Werth and Allchin argue that the belief that nature embodies purpose can be easily used by humans to argue that human behavior, culture, and society should be modelled after nature. Teleology, thus, has cultural implications and the authors argue that educators need to address teleology in a range of biological and socio-cultural contexts.

Are students’ teleological explanations problematic? Kampourakis ( 2020 ) answers this question by arguing that it is the underlying design stance and not teleology per se that renders teleological explanations problematic. Generally, teleological explanations make reference to a final end (telos). Looking at the nature of teleological explanations in detail, Kampourakis distinguishes between two types of teleology: explanations that are based on design (design teleology) and explanations that are based on natural selection (selection teleology). In design teleology, a feature exists because of an external agents’ intention (external design teleology) or because of the intentions or needs of an organism (internal design teleology). External and internal design teleologies are clearly illegitimate in biology because there is evidence that organisms are not designed and because evolution does not follow intentions or needs. In selection teleology, an organism’s features exist because of their consequences that contribute to survival and reproduction and are thus favored by natural selection. The contribution that the heart makes to the body, for example, is to pump blood. Therefore, Kampourakis argues, it is possible to reason that a feature performing a function exists because of the benefit that this function confers to the organism and because, as a result of this, it has been favored by natural selection. For this reason, it is not necessarily wrong if students express the idea that a feature exists in order to perform a function. The core challenge in evolution education is not students’ teleological explanations, but the illegitimate assumption of external or internal design in such explanations.

Students tend to argue that the function of a trait is the only causal factor explaining why the trait came into existence without linking the function of the trait to evolutionary mechanisms. Trommler and Hammann ( 2020 ) explore the relationship between biological function and teleology. Drawing on a range of recent positions from the philosophy of biology, Trommler and Hammann argue that biologists use the notion of telos as an epistemological tool when they consider a structure or a mechanism to be functional. For example, biologists use survival and reproduction as epistemological reference points when attributing functions to structures (epistemological teleology) without making the assumption, of course, that survival and reproduction are ends inherent in nature. Ontological teleology, in contrast, is the inadequate assumption that functional structures and mechanisms came into existence because of their functionality. Means-ends analyses—as an integral part of epistemological teleology—can be misleading to students, the authors argue, because students might confuse the idea that traits function and exist for survival (adequate epistemological teleological reasoning) with the idea that traits came into existence for the purpose of functioning and maintaining survival (inadequate ontological teleological reasoning). Such ontological reasoning is illegitimate because there are no ‘ends’ in nature. To teach students that nature is not directed towards ends, Trommler and Hammann suggest that students distinguish between biological functions and mechanisms, and educators explicitly address the fact that there are no ends in nature.

Given that attempts to completely eliminate teleological thinking from evolution education are philosophically problematic and educationally counterproductive, how should biology educators approach the topic of teleology? González Galli, Peréz, and Gómez Galindo’s (2020) work seeks to answer this question. They review theoretical frameworks from science education and cognitive psychology and conclude that the most productive strategy would be to help students regulate their teleological thinking. Specifically, they emphasize that self-regulation requires both metacognitive knowledge (what we know about our thinking) and metacognitive regulation (how we control our thinking and learning). In line with prior research on metacognition, González Galli et al. advance a “metacognitive vigilance” perspective on teleology that involves three competencies: (i) knowledge of what teleology is, (ii) recognition of its multiple expressions and acceptable applications, and (iii) intentional regulation of its use. Student mastery of all three of these features emerges as an important learning outcome for evolution education. González Galli et al.’s intriguing proposal bridges the divide between theoretical and practical discussions about teleology and motivates the development and application of educational materials that foster students’ metacognitive vigilance.

Over the past several decades, “tree thinking” has emerged as an essential tool for biological reasoning and problem solving. An important but unanswered question in evolution education is whether the ways in which phylogenetics is taught influence students’ teleological perspectives about the history of life on Earth. Schramm and Schmiemann ( 2019 ) engage with this important topic and identify multiple ways in which phylogenetics instruction can inadvertently reinforce teleological thinking (e.g., presenting taxa in order of biological complexity aligns with pop-culture iconographies of ‘the great chain of being’; positioning focal taxa such as humans on the outermost edges of phylogenies reinforces notions of evolutionary goals and “development”). After identifying teleological pitfalls, Schramm and Schmiemann provide practical teaching strategies for overcoming them (e.g., altering focal taxa placement, rotating topologies, using ‘evograms’). Their paper also identifies important gaps in the literature on teleology and motivates future empirical studies on the role that phylogenetics instruction could play in altering students’ teleological thinking across biological scales (e.g., micro-, macroevolution).

The final two articles focus on young learners. Gresch ( 2020 ) presents a video-based analysis of a seventh-grade biology course on evolution. In the teaching unit, the students engage in the activity of designing an imaginary animal perfectly adapted to its environment. Later in the unit, the teacher addresses the evolution of whales and the students are encouraged to discuss the statement “evolution has no goal”. Gresch’s analyses focus on how the teacher and the students situationally address teleology. Additional interviews provide insights into how the teacher’s teaching norms and rationale relate to teaching practices regarding teleology. Using a documentary method for analyzing the videos of the lessons, Gresch ( 2020 ) argues that the teacher encourages the students to elaborate on their teleological explanations and eventually validates them. Thus, Gresch characterizes the teacher’s practices in the unit on evolution as ambiguous: Although the teacher aims at the biologically correct view of evolution, he does not clearly reject students’ teleological ideas about internal needs and goal-directed evolution because, among other reasons, he does not want to demotivate them. Teaching norms are clearly in conflict because the teacher values both student creativity—which often involves teleological reasoning—and scientifically correct ideas. The result is a confusing combination of teleological and scientific elements in the teaching unit on evolution, and the teacher offers no clear evidence that evolution has no goals. Gresch suggests that videos or transcripts of classroom interactions are a rich but underutilized resource for preservice teacher professional development.

It is widely recognized that teleological thinking emerges very early in human development, and for most biological phenomena young children prefer teleological explanations over mechanistic ones. However, few studies have empirically examined whether teleological thinking is a barrier to learning about natural selection in young children. Brown, Ronfard, and Kelemen ( 2020 ) advance work in this area in multiple ways. First, they investigate the impact of a teacher-led (but researcher-designed) storybook intervention on young children’s teleological thinking in a school setting; prior studies, in contrast, have largely been researcher-led, small-scale, and lab-based. Second, they generate a conceptual framework for characterizing teleological ideas (e.g., explicit teleology, ambiguous, elaborated) that permits careful scrutiny of whether more or less elaborated teleological ideas differentially impact learning. Third, they examine whether teleological ideas pose a greater challenge to learning natural selection compared to other preconceptions. Brown et al. report on impressive learning gains in response to the teacher-led intervention and demonstrate that teleology is much less of a barrier to learning than expected. Their work calls into question the notion that young children are only capable of learning isolated facts about evolution and motivates further studies of more mechanistically-based evolutionary concepts. The findings also raise fundamental questions about why teleological ideas appear to present much less of a barrier to learning natural selection in young children than in young adults.

Next steps for evolution education

The collection of articles in this special issue advance theory relating to the role that teleological ideas should play in evolution education and practice concerning how educators should engage with student ideas about teleology.

One strand of argumentation in this special issue emphasizes that teleological ideas are an obstacle to students’ understanding of evolution. More specifically, novice learners often struggle with understanding evolutionary concepts because they prefer the intuitive teleological ideas of goal-driven and intentional change to scientifically acceptable—but more complex—explanations grounded in evolutionary processes. In particular, many students think that organisms need to adapt to new environments in order to survive. Therefore, biology educators consider “the need to adapt” and “the need to survive” as major teleological misconceptions. Taking such unacceptable teleological explanations into consideration, several authors in this special issue discuss ways in which evolution can—and should—be taught so that students understand that evolution is characterized by the absence of ends and purposes. Furthermore, evolution is neither predetermined nor guided by intention. In particular, the argument is made that teleological reasoning must be addressed (rather than eliminated) because it causes substantial difficulties in understanding evolutionary mechanisms. This also includes educational reflections on how to avoid typical teleological pitfalls when teachers use external representations, like phylogenetic trees.

A second strand of argumentation regarding the role that teleological ideas should play in evolution education is that teleology is an ambiguous concept because there are scientifically acceptable types and scientifically unacceptable types of teleology. Several contributions in this special issue draw on positions in the philosophy of biology to elaborate on the fact that teleological reasoning takes many forms. Not all of the multiple forms of teleology are scientifically and educationally problematic. Important acceptable types of teleology focus on the notion of biological function, which is a teleological idea because biological structures are conceptualized as a means to an end. As a consequence, several authors in this special issue argue that students would benefit from instruction about acceptable and unacceptable forms of teleology at a meta-level. Instead of avoiding teleology altogether, which is questionable given that biologists use teleological reasoning themselves, students need to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of teleology and regulate their use.

Concerning practice, the authors in the special issue largely agree that (1) only some forms of teleology are scientifically and educationally problematic and (2) explicit attention to teleology is needed in biology classrooms. Teleology, therefore, cannot and should not be eliminated from the teaching of biology and evolution. Rather, teleology needs to be addressed in ways that enable students to avoid the pitfalls of scientifically and educationally problematic forms of teleological reasoning. In particular, Werth and Allchin ( 2020 ) suggest coupling teleological and non-teleological perspectives together so that students understand the differences between explanations characterized by teleological (and normative) purpose and the non-teleological descriptive alternative. Kampourakis ( 2020 ) suggests explicitly addressing design teleology and creating conceptual conflict so that students understand that design-based explanations are problematic. He also suggests comparing and contrasting acceptable natural selection teleology and unacceptable design teleology. Trommler and Hammann ( 2020 ) propose explicitly addressing acceptable epistemological teleology and unacceptable ontological teleology to prevent students from unknowingly slipping from one form of teleology into another. González Galli et al. ( 2020 ) suggest familiarizing students with the different forms of acceptable and unacceptable teleology in a range of different contexts so that students can distinguish between them and metacognitively regulate their use. Collectively, this work motivates a reformulation of how educators approach teleology in evolution education.

Future perspectives for evolution education and research also emerge from the three contributions in this special issue devoted to reading evolutionary trees, video-based analyses of classroom practices, and the teaching of evolution to young children. Focusing on the teleological pitfalls of reading evolutionary trees, Schramm and Schmiemann ( 2019 ) hypothesize that teleological mindsets, tree design, and fragmentary knowledge about evolution interact and argue that experimental research approaches are needed to investigate these interactions. This is a valuable research perspective for the interface between teleology and representational competence. Gresch ( 2020 ) identifies ambiguous teaching practices in his video-based analyses of an evolution unit and suggests using classroom videos to prepare future biology teachers. Such approaches could help future biology teachers avoid confusing ambiguities regarding teleology in their classrooms. Gresch argues for evaluating the effectiveness of such novel approaches to teacher professional development. Brown, Ronfard and Kelemen ( 2020 ) provide evidence from a teaching intervention showing that young children are surprisingly good at overcoming teleological reasoning in evolution. They suggest future research on conceptual restructuring in young children to build upon their encouraging results.

Overall, this special issue on evolution education and teleology marks an important turning point; scholars from many disciplines (education, philosophy, psychology) are moving away from an “eliminative” perspective on teleology and towards a more nuanced stance that differentiates acceptable and unacceptable forms of it. In order for this more informed perspective to be adopted in evolution education, nearly all of the authors of the special issue argue for explicit attention to teleology in the classroom. Educational design and development work is needed to make this possible. For example: resources about forms of teleological reasoning and language should be included in teacher education programs; age-appropriate curriculum materials are needed to help students understand what teleology is and how to differentiate acceptable and unacceptable forms of it; metacognitive strategies must be operationalized for use in classrooms; and assessments for measuring student thinking about evolution must be revised to encompass updated perspectives on teleology. As this special issue makes clear, important conceptual progress is being made concerning teleology and evolution education, and future work must be directed at more practical educational applications. The contributions of the special issue have provided an important first step for addressing one of evolution education’s greatest challenges.

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Brown SA, Ronfard S, Kelemen D. Teaching natural selection in early elementary classrooms: can a storybook intervention reduce teleological misunderstandings? Evol Educ Outreach. 2020;13:12. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-020-00127-7 .

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Gresch H. Teleological explanations in evolution classes: video-based analyses of teaching and learning processes across a seventh-grade teaching unit. Evol Educ Outreach. 2020;13:10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-020-00125-9 .

Kampourakis K. Students’ “teleological misconceptions” in evolution education: why the underlying design stance, not teleology per se, is the problem. Evol Educ Outreach. 2020;13:1. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-019-0116-z .

Schramm T, Schmiemann P. Teleological pitfalls in reading evolutionary trees and ways to avoid them. Evol Educ Outreach. 2019;12:20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-019-0112-3 .

Trommler F, Hammann M. The relationship between biological function and teleology: implications for biology education. Evol Educ Outreach. 2020;13:11. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-020-00122-y .

Werth A, Allchin D. Teleology’s long shadow. Evol Educ Outreach. 2020;13:4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12052-020-00118-8 .

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Acknowledgements

We thank the authors for their contributions to the special issue.

Funding for this study was provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Inclusive Excellence Science Education fund.

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