https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2017/...s-biology/
EXCERPT: Emily Dickinson often had a rather chilly view of things. Around the end of the Civil War, five years after Charles Darwin had published his Origin of Species, she wrote this short poem about the life of worms [...] Notice how, right at the beginning, the poet identifies us humans with worms. Things only go downhill from there! The worms are gobbled down by a bird, and much the same seems to be said of our relationship with God. [...] As we see the worm has a purpose, so God sees that we have a purpose; but just as the purpose of the worm has no connection to the worm’s wellbeing, so our purpose seems not to have much to do with our wellbeing.
[...] Breaking with tradition, Immanuel Kant argued in the eighteenth century that final-cause thinking is essentially heuristic: final causes don’t exist out there in nature, but are instead something we impose on nature to make sense of things. [...]
The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these ends or purposes don’t actually exist in the real world. So in a sense, Kant was right: teleological thinking is heuristic, something imposed on the world by us. It is no less useful or legitimate for all of that. Physics doesn’t have need of final-cause talk because, not having been produced by natural selection, the objects of physics do not appear designed in the same way.
While this takes God or occult forces out of the scientific picture, don’t think that going this direction means that all is secular or meaningless — Kant and Darwin today, Richard Dawkins tomorrow. Far from it! The believer can continue to see nature as God’s creation and natural processes as God working His purposes out. It is just that God does it through evolution, rather than by intervening miracle. Moreover...
MORE: https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2017/...s-biology/
EXCERPT: Emily Dickinson often had a rather chilly view of things. Around the end of the Civil War, five years after Charles Darwin had published his Origin of Species, she wrote this short poem about the life of worms [...] Notice how, right at the beginning, the poet identifies us humans with worms. Things only go downhill from there! The worms are gobbled down by a bird, and much the same seems to be said of our relationship with God. [...] As we see the worm has a purpose, so God sees that we have a purpose; but just as the purpose of the worm has no connection to the worm’s wellbeing, so our purpose seems not to have much to do with our wellbeing.
[...] Breaking with tradition, Immanuel Kant argued in the eighteenth century that final-cause thinking is essentially heuristic: final causes don’t exist out there in nature, but are instead something we impose on nature to make sense of things. [...]
The answer is natural selection. So here we have the reason why final-cause talk is permissible and necessary. Thanks to the processes of evolution, organisms appear design-like, even though they are ultimately the result of random variations plus natural selection. In order to make sense of this fact, we often think and talk in terms of ends or purposes, although these ends or purposes don’t actually exist in the real world. So in a sense, Kant was right: teleological thinking is heuristic, something imposed on the world by us. It is no less useful or legitimate for all of that. Physics doesn’t have need of final-cause talk because, not having been produced by natural selection, the objects of physics do not appear designed in the same way.
While this takes God or occult forces out of the scientific picture, don’t think that going this direction means that all is secular or meaningless — Kant and Darwin today, Richard Dawkins tomorrow. Far from it! The believer can continue to see nature as God’s creation and natural processes as God working His purposes out. It is just that God does it through evolution, rather than by intervening miracle. Moreover...
MORE: https://www.bigquestionsonline.com/2017/...s-biology/