The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [24]
In late 2007, there was apparently enough money left over after giving the 1,000,000 pound prize for the Templeton Foundation to take out a double-page ad in the New York Times. At the top in bold was the question, Does the universe have a purpose? and there followed the beginnings of 12 answers (all continued on a website): 6 yes votes, mainly from scientists (but no biologist), 3 noes, an “I hope so,” and a couple of not sures.
But as we saw in the last chapter, the issue is not in doubt if you have any confidence in science. The banishment of purpose from the universe as a whole also provides for the banishment of purposes that are supposed to make sense of human and other biological activities. When physics disposed of purposes, it did so for biology as well. It is the causal completeness of physics that purges purpose from all living things and their lives. It does so by deploying the process that Darwin discovered. Because all biologists embrace Darwin’s theory and understand its implications, the Templeton Foundation has a hard time finding a prizewinner among biologists. (The only biologist ever to win, a distinguished evolutionary biologist and ex-Catholic priest named Francisco Ayala, was honored for insisting that science can answer all questions except the ones about meaning, purpose, and moral values. What he really meant was that he just can’t accept the answers science provides.)
When it comes to the biological realm, all that is needed to banish purpose is the recognition that the process of natural selection Darwin discovered is just physics at work among the organic molecules.
NO NEWTON FOR THE BLADE OF GRASS?
Outside of physics, for a long time it was hard to see how nature could get by without purpose or design. The biological realm seems replete with beautifully, intricately designed objects and processes. There was no way science could deny this, nor, apparently, any way physics could explain it.
Even the most hardened Newtonian couldn’t figure out how physics alone brings about the exquisite suitability of means to ends that we find everywhere in biology. Perhaps the greatest of Newton’s defenders among philosophers was the late-eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tried to show that when it came to physics, Newtonian mechanics was the only game in town. But, he insisted, no one could ever do for biology what Newton did for physics—banish purpose and design from it. In 1790, he famously wrote, “It is absurd to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who shall make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no design has ordered.”
“No Newton for the blade of grass” became the slogan of those who drew a line in the sand of science and dared physics to cross it. What Kant meant was that when we get past physics and into biology, the physics of matter and fields was not going to be enough to explain things. Only purposes could do the job. As in so many other areas of science and philosophy, Kant managed to get this one badly wrong. Only about 20 years after he wrote those immortal words, the Newton of the blade of grass was born to the Darwin family in Shropshire, England.
Kant was not alone in making this mistake. It continues to be made right down to the present. Its source is people’s love of stories with plots. That’s how explanations that invoke purposes or designs work: they are stories with plots. Because only such explanations provide relief from the psychological discomfort of curiosity, we seek them everywhere. Because they are absent in physics, most people have very little interest in it. Not only is physics too hard—too much math—what it explains is either boringly obvious (the motion of billiard balls on a table), absolutely scary (nuclear explosions), or completely unintelligible (quantum superpositions). Worst of all, it’s not stories. What most people are really interested in is biology. And the reason