Leibniz’s Mill

In section 17 of his Monadology, Leibniz puts forward the following argument against materialism:

Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions.  And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill.  That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception.  Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for.  Further, nothing but this (namely, perceptions and their changes) can be found in a simple substance.  It is also in this alone that all the internal activities of simple substances can consist.

Because of the example he alludes to, this argument is sometimes referred to as “Leibniz’s Mill.”  How is it supposed to work?  Given the emphasis on simplicity, Leibniz’s point is clearly at least in part that a mind cannot be a composite thing, as a mill is composite insofar as it has parts which interact.  Rather, a mind has to be simple in the sense of something non-composite or without parts.  A useful exposition of the argument so interpreted can be found here.  So understood, the argument is akin to Descartes’ “indivisibility argument” and to anti-materialist arguments from the unity of consciousness.  (I discuss the indivisibility argument in chapter 2 of Philosophy of Mind and the unity of consciousness in chapter 5.)

Another way to read the argument, though, would be to take it to be saying that the mill example shows there to be a gap between material-cum-mechanical facts on the one hand and mental facts on the other.  If the brain were made the size of a mill so that we could walk around in it, we would never encounter in it anything that corresponded to thinking, feeling, and perception.  All we would encounter are material parts interacting causally (even if the causal interaction would be more complex than what the mill analogy suggests).  The point would seem to be that we could know all the material facts without knowing any mental facts (thus making the argument akin to Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument), or that the entirety of the material facts does not entail any mental facts (thus making it akin to the zombie argument).  On this reading, considerations about simplicity versus compositeness arguably would not be essential to the main, anti-materialist point of the argument – though Leibniz himself presumably thought that the gap between material and mental facts should lead us to regard the mind as simple rather than composite.

In his new book Leibniz’s Mill: A Challenge to Materialism, Charles Landesman seems to be reading the argument in this second way.  William Hasker reviews the book here, and understandably complains that Landesman overlooks the “simplicity” aspect of Leibniz’s argument.  (Hasker, by the way, provides a very useful exposition of the anti-materialist argument from the unity of consciousness in his important book The Emergent Self.)  In fairness to Landesman, though, Leibniz’s Mill is (despite the title) not primarily intended as an exposition of Leibniz, who actually plays a relatively small role in the book.  And it is in any event worthwhile considering this second reading of the argument, whether or not it corresponds entirely to Leibniz’s own intentions.

Landesman considers the following objection raised by John Searle in his book Intentionality:

An exactly parallel argument to Leibniz’s would be that the behavior of H₂O molecules can never explain the liquidity of water, because if we entered into the system of molecules “as into a mill we should only find on visiting it pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain” liquidity.  But in both cases we would be looking at the system at the wrong level.  The liquidity of water is not to be found at the level of the individual molecule, nor are the visual perception and the thirst to be found at the level of the individual neuron or synapse.  (p. 268)

It is ironic that Searle should put forward such an objection, given that he is also a critic of materialism who has himself elsewhere denied that such cases are “exactly parallel.”  In particular, he has insisted that whereas liquidity, solidity, and other such properties of material systems have what he calls a “third-person ontology” insofar as they are entirely objective or “public” phenomena equally accessible to every observer, consciousness has by contrast a “first-person ontology” insofar as it is subjective, “private,” or directly accessible only to the subject of a conscious experience.  But then it would seem to follow that if we observed a system of water molecules on the large scale – not just an individual molecule or two but the whole system – and noted that they were moving around in such-and-such a way relative to one another, we would (given the standard scientific account of liquidity) just be observing the system’s liquidity.  By contrast, if we observed, on the large scale, the system of neurons which makes up the brain, we would not thereby observe the conscious experiences of the person whose brain it is.  This is a consequence of Searle’s own distinction between third-person and first-person ontology, and his own insistence that consciousness is unique in having the latter sort of ontology.  (See my paper “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist” for references and for further discussion of Searle’s views.)

Landesman makes a related point in response to Searle when he notes that when observing either a mill-sized brain or a mill-sized system of water molecules, we would not be limited to observing the individual neuron or molecule but could imagine instead observing the systems on the large scale.  And when we do so, Landesman continues, we would certainly be able to observe the liquidity of the water if by “liquidity” we mean a certain kind of interaction between molecules.  On the other hand, we might instead mean by “liquidity” the phenomenal features liquid water presents to us – the way it looks or feels to us, for example – and these, Landesman allows, would not be observable as we walked through a mill-sized system of water molecules.  But then, liquidity in this sense would really not be a feature of the water itself in the first place, but only of our experience of it.  And in that case it is irrelevant that we would not observe it in observing the system of molecules.  (Cf. my discussion of the fallacy Paul Churchland commits when he suggests that the red surface of an apple is really just “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths.”)  By contrast, thought and perception are features of the mind itself, and yet we would not be aware of them in observing the large-scale interactions between neurons in a mill-sized brain.  Thus, Landesman concludes (quite correctly, in my view), Searle’s objection fails.

Now one might, as Landesman notes, respond by insisting that in observing the interactions between neurons, it might be that “we are in fact observing thoughts and perceptions, although we fail to recognize them for what they are” (p. 24).  But as Michael Lockwood writes in Mind, Brain and the Quantum:

To [Leibniz’s argument] I suppose one could retort by asking Leibniz how he expected to know if he had found something that explained Perception.  Except that that is supposed to be his point: one wouldn’t know and hence nothing one encountered could explain Perception. (p. 35)

And as Landesman says, it is hard to see how one could justify the claim that in our stroll through a mill-sized brain we would “in fact” be observing thoughts and perceptions without realizing it, unless one is assuming the truth of some particular theory about the mind/brain relationship that could ground this suggestion.  But in that case one would merely be begging the question against Leibniz, whose point is that the mind is not susceptible of explanation in terms of such a theory.  And if one instead took the eliminativist view that the mind is illusory and that mentalistic descriptions should simply be replaced by neuroscientific ones, then one would in effect be conceding Leibniz’s point that an inspection of neural processes will never reveal thought or perception.

Still, one might suggest that Leibniz’s argument can be seen to fail when we consider that if we were to walk through a computer expanded to the size of a mill, we wouldn’t observe the program it is running, the symbols it is processing, etc.  But it is still running the program and processing the symbols for all that.   (Lockwood considers such an objection at p. 35 of Mind, Brain and the Quantum.)  But this analogy is no good either.  The problem is that – as Searle has trenchantly argued – “computation” as usually understood is not an intrinsic feature of the physical world in the first place, but an observer-relative feature.  Nothing counts as the processing of symbolic representations, the running of algorithms, etc. except relative to human interests – in particular, those of the designers and users of computers.  That is why we wouldn’t observe the distinctively computational features of a mill-sized computer – they aren’t there intrinsically in the first place, but only ever assigned by us.  (Similarly, if we examine the physical features of a written word – whether normal-sized or expanded to the size of a mill – we will never observe its meaning or semantic content, but that is because the meaning or semantic content is not intrinsic to the physical properties of a written word in the first place, but rather derived from us as language users.)  But mental features would have to be intrinsic to the brain, if materialism were true.  So the proposed analogy between computers and brains fails.

But what if Searle is wrong and something like computation really is an intrinsic feature of the material world after all?  For example, isn’t DNA rightly said to contain the “program” or “information” for an organism?  And yet, if a DNA molecule were made the size of a mill, we wouldn’t observe this “program” or “information.”  So, doesn’t this show that Leibniz is mistaken?

I don’t know if using computationalist language is the best way to put the point, but I think such a response would be a promising one.  But it would not help the materialist in the least.  For if we say that there is something intrinsic to a material system in virtue of which it “points to” something beyond itself (as “information” does) or to a certain end-state (as a “program” does), then we are either attributing to matter something like final causality as it is understood in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition (as I have noted in earlier posts, such as this one) or we are attributing to it something like intentionality and thus adopting either a panpsychist, or dual-aspect, or neutral monist account of matter.  And in either case, we are thereby abandoning a materialist conception of matter – and thus conceding the main point of Leibniz’s argument.

Gillespie on modernity

Some time back I reviewed Michael Allen Gillespie’s book The Theological Origins of Modernity in The Review of Metaphysics.  I notice that the review is now available online here.  (Gillespie traces the origins of modernity to the nominalism of William of Ockham.  That is a theme I explored in a recent post.)

Are you for real?

In a recent post, I gave as an example of an obviously wrongheaded conception of God’s relationship to the world the idea that we are literally fictional characters in a story He has authored – though I also allowed that as a mere analogy the idea may have its uses.  Vincent Torley wonders whether there might not be something more to the idea, though, citing the use Hugh McCann makes of it in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Divine Providence” (see especially section 6 of the article).

So, let's examine the idea.  Torley writes:

One obvious objection to McCann's "storybook" analogy is that we are real, but the characters in a story are not.  But what does "real" mean here?  The characters in a story are real to each other; while the author exists at another, higher level of reality.  We can make stories, but it is certainly conceivable that we ourselves are characters in a story written by God, who, as the Ultimate Reality, exists in a level of reality beyond our own.

Another objection to McCann's "storybook" metaphor is that the characters in a story do not interact with their author, as we do when we pray to God.  However, there seems to be no logical reason why an author of a book could not write a story in which the characters interacted with him or her.  I believe some computer games already incorporate this feature…

Now it seems to me from the passage Torley cites that McCann himself does not take the view that we are really just fictional characters; he appeals to the notion only as an analogy useful for helping us to understand why divine causality is not incompatible with human freedom.  The idea is that God’s causality is not like that of one character, object, or event in a story among others; it is more like that of the author of the story.  Hence to say that God is the ultimate source of all causality is not like saying that He is comparable to a hypnotist in a story who brainwashes people to do his bidding, or a mad scientist who controls them via some electronic device implanted in their brains.  He is more like the writer who decides that the characters will interact in such-and-such a way.  And so His being the ultimate source of all causality is no more incompatible with human freedom than the fact that an author decides that, as part of a mystery story, a character will freely choose to commit a murder, is incompatible with the claim that the character in question really committed the murder freely.

In fact this is precisely the sort of thing for which I think the analogy is useful.  It is also useful as a way of illustrating the difference between the classical theist’s conception of God and other conceptions.  Just as the author of a story is not one character among others but transcends the story altogether as its source, so too the God of classical theism is not “a being” among others but Being Itself.  (As Ralph McInerny put it in the title of one of his books, we are like “characters in search of their Author.”)

All the same, the world is not literally a mere story and we are not literally fictional characters (comparable, say, to the protagonists of the famous Twilight Zone episode "Five Characters In Search of An Exit").  There are at least two problems with the idea that we are, one philosophical and one theological.  The philosophical problem is that there is an obvious difference between us and fictional characters: we exist and they don’t.  Metaphysically speaking, we can understand the difference in terms of Aquinas’s famous distinction between essence and existence.  To borrow an example from his On Being and Essence, a phoenix, unlike a human being, has no “act of existence” conjoined with its essence (if there is such a thing as the essence of a phoenix).  That’s why there are no phoenixes – they are fictional creatures – while there are human beings.  You exist because God conjoins your essence to an act of existence; phoenixes do not exist because God does not conjoin the essence of any phoenix with an act of existence.  To regard ourselves as fictional characters in a story God has written would be to deny this obvious difference, and to make it mysterious what it could mean to say that God has created human beings but not phoenixes.  (See Aquinas for discussion and defense of Aquinas’s doctrine of essence and existence.)

But what of Torley’s suggestion that “the characters in a story are real to each other; while the author exists at another, higher level of reality,” and that this is comparable to our relationship to God as a divine Author?  The answer is that while both we and God are real – we have acts of existence conjoined with our essences and God just is Being Itself – the characters in a story are not real at all precisely because (being merely fictional) none of them has an act of existence conjoined with an essence.  When we say that “they are real to each other,” all this can mean is that the author has written the story in such a way that the characters say the sorts of things to each other that normal human beings would, and do not say things like “We are mere fictional characters.”  For the same reason, the characters in a story do not literally “interact” with the author (contrary to Torley’s suggestion) for the simple reason that they do not exist and thus cannot interact with anything.  Rather, an author may write a story in such a way that some of the characters’ dialogue makes reference to the author himself.

You might say that precisely because the characters do not exist but are purely fictional, they are not true causes the way real things are.  Everything they seem to do is really done by their author: We say that Spider-Man punched out the guy who shot his uncle, but all that happened in the real world is that Steve Ditko (in collaboration with writer Stan Lee) first drew a panel in which Spider-Man punches the guy and then drew a panel in which the guy is unconscious.  Strictly speaking, Spider-Man didn’t do anything, because there is no Spider-Man.  By contrast, when we think we bring about effects, we (usually) really do.  Of course, God, as the First Cause of the world, is the source of all the causal power anything else has, and apart from Him nothing in the world could generate any effect even for an instant.  (This is the thrust of the Aristotelian-Thomistic argument from motion.)  But (from a Thomistic point of view, anyway) created things are nevertheless true causes, even if only “secondary causes.”  Their causal power is entirely derived from God, but it is still real.  To say that we are fictional characters would, it seems, be implicitly to deny this, and to adopt the occasionalist view that there are no secondary causes and that God is the only true cause of anything.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia article on occasionalism notes, “Nicolas Malebranche developed Occasionalism to its uttermost limit, approaching so near to Pantheism that he himself remarked that the difference between himself and Spinoza was that he taught that the universe was in God and that Spinoza said that God was in the universe.”  And something similar could be said of the suggestion that we are fictional characters: If we and everything else in the universe are, in effect, mere ideas in the mind of a divine Author, then the distinction between God and the world collapses.  The universe would be “in” God in the same way that the story an author has come up with is “in” the author’s mind.  But pantheism is unacceptable both from the point of view of philosophical theology (since the traditional arguments for God’s existence entail that the First Cause is utterly distinct from the world) and from the point of view of dogmatic theology (since pantheism is unorthodox).  Hence any view that entails pantheism – as the suggestion that we are fictional characters arguably does – is doubly objectionable.  And in this case, pretty odd in any event!

Happy Anniversary, Bill

My friend Bill Vallicella kindly offers his congratulations on the birth of my daughter, and I offer my congratulations to him on the seventh anniversary of the Maverick Philosopher blog.  As I’ve said before, I have long regarded Bill as something like the Platonic Form of a philosophy blogger.  His blog contains just the right mix of serious posts and light ones, polemical political pieces and coolly intellectual ones, long posts and short posts, original pieces and links to the work of others, along with the occasional cooking tip or link to YouTube.  Plus he is a terrific aphorist and a solid technical philosopher.  If any of you readers find my own blog worthy of your time, you might give Bill some of the credit, since he has been my model.  Chalk the defects up to yours truly.

Reply to Torley and Cudworth

This is the second installment of a two-part post on the dispute between Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics and “Intelligent Design” (ID) theory (a post which I hope will put the subject to rest for a while).  Having in my previous installment set out the Aristotelian distinction between “nature” and “art” (or natural objects and artifacts), I now turn to consider the recent remarks of ID defenders Vincent Torley and Thomas Cudworth over at the blog Uncommon Descent.  (Those who haven’t read the previous installment are urged to do so before reading this one.  It also wouldn’t hurt if you had some familiarity with the other things I’ve said on this topic in many previous posts.)

I’ll begin with Torley’s post of April 18.  Torley’s arguments are not easy to discern.  He writes at great length and the discussion seems to me to meander a fair bit.  Moreover, his arguments are severely compromised by the fact that Torley consistently presents the debate as if it were over the question of whether natural objects are “designed.”  As I have made clear in previous posts and made clear once again in the previous installment of this one, that is not what is at issue.  Both sides agree that God is in some sense the designer of the world.  What is at issue is whether natural objects are “artifacts” in the relevant, Aristotelian sense spelled out in the previous installment.  I will respond to Torley’s points with this fact in mind, and I hope that I have not misunderstood his position.  It seems to me that he makes three key claims, which I will address in turn.

1. Torley seems to think (if I understand him correctly) that an artifact could exhibit a kind of immanent or built-in teleology, so that natural objects can intelligibly be regarded as artifacts of a sort.  He gives corn as an example, since it does not exist in the wild but was domesticated by human beings out of teosinte.  Now if it seems odd to call corn an “artifact,” that is because (I would say) it is odd.  Certainly I don’t think any A-T philosopher would regard corn as an artifact.  The reason Torley thinks it is, apparently, is that corn is in a sense “man-made.”  But being man-made is not sufficient to make something an “artifact” in the Aristotelian sense I spelled out in my previous post – otherwise dog breeds, water synthesized in a lab, and indeed human infants would count as “artifacts” since they are also in some sense man-made.   But they are not artifacts.

For something to be an “artifact” in the Aristotelian sense, it is also necessary that its parts have no immanent tendency to function together as a whole, and this is not true of corn any more than it is true of the various dog breeds or of human infants, while it is true of a hammock or of the other examples of artifacts I gave in my previous post.  When human beings domesticated corn from teosinte and when they domesticated dogs from wolves, what they did was merely draw out tendencies that were already there in the teosinte and in the wolves, rather than imposing some accidental form of their own invention on them (as they do when they construct hammocks and the like).  This kind of thing in fact happens with some frequency, and writers on A-T are willing to count all sorts of “man-made” things as natural objects rather than as artifacts given the evidently immanent tendencies they manifest.  For example, Eleonore Stump suggests in her book Aquinas that even Styrofoam is, in the relevant sense, “natural” rather than “artificial,” even if it is a kind of “natural” substance (meaning one that has a substantial form and immanent teleology rather than an accidental form and extrinsic teleology) which has come about only because of human action. 

In short, when Aristotelians distinguish “art” from “nature,” what they mean by “natural” is not “occurring in the wild” or “coming into being with no human assistance.”  What they do mean, as I explained in the previous post, is “having a substantial form” or “having parts which have an immanent tendency to function together as a whole.”  Purely accidental arrangements (such as random piles of dust or of stones) are not “natural” in the relevant sense even though they don’t necessarily come about through human action, and while all artifacts do come about through human action, not everything that comes about through human action is an artifact.  Hence corn and similar examples do not show that Torley seems to think they show.

2. Torley also seems to think that God’s making a natural object like an oak tree out of pre-existing matter would involve “design” in the ID theory sense and would thus (again, if I understand him correctly) in effect be the making of an artifact.  But that is not so.  When God makes a natural object out of pre-existing matter, this is not a case of taking parts which already have their own substantial forms and immanent teleology and imposing some accidental form and extrinsic teleology on them (like Tarzan’s twisting of liana vines into a hammock would be).  It can’t be that sort of thing, since if it were it wouldn’t be a natural object that we’re talking about in the first place.  Rather, what it involves is causing the prime matter that underlay the original material object He starts with to lose the substantial form it had before and to take on a new substantial form instead.  For example, if we imagine God making an oak tree out of a stone, what that would involve is His causing the prime matter that had once been informed by the substantial form of a stone to be informed instead by the substantial form of an oak tree.  What it does not involve is a kind of super-engineering – as if God took parts of the stone, each of which had their own immanent teleology and substantial forms, and cleverly found a way to impose upon them the accidental form and extrinsic teleology of a tree (whatever that could mean).  Creation is nothing as mundane as that.

Now Torley may respond that he is aware that an A-T philosopher would reject the idea that God creates by virtue of a kind of “super-engineering” or imposition of an accidental form.  He might say that his only point is that an oak tree created by God would still receive its form – a substantial form rather than an accidental form – from God and would in that sense be “designed” by God.  Now of course, I would not deny for a moment that a tree can be designed by God in that sense.  As I have said many times, my beef with an ID theorist like William Dembski is that he rejects the A-T conception of natural objects as composites of substantial form and prime matter and operates instead with a conception of natural objects as artifacts, in the sense of “artifact” spelled out in my previous post.  But this brings us to Torley’s next point.

3. Torley claims that I misunderstand Dembski’s views vis-à-vis the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature.  What is Dembski’s view?  Here is how I summarize it in my Philosophia Christi article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide”:

[I]n discussing Aristotle in The Design Revolution, Dembski identifies “design” with what Aristotle called techne or “art” (pp. 132-3).  As Dembski correctly says, “the essential idea behind these terms is that information is conferred on an object from outside the object and that the material constituting the object, apart from that outside information, does not have the power to assume the form it does.  For instance, raw pieces of wood do not by themselves have the power to form a ship.”  This contrasts with what Aristotle called “nature,” which (to quote Dembski quoting Aristotle) “is a principle in the thing itself.”  For example (again to quote Dembski’s own exposition of Aristotle), “the acorn assumes the shape it does through powers internal to it: the acorn is a seed programmed to produce an oak tree” – in contrast to the way the “ship assumes the shape it does through powers external to it,” via a “designing intelligence” which “imposes” this form on it from outside.

Having made this distinction, Dembski goes on explicitly to acknowledge that just as “the art of shipbuilding is not in the wood that constitutes the ship” and “the art of making statues is not in the stone out of which statues are made,” “so too, the theory of intelligent design contends that the art of building life is not in the physical stuff that constitutes life but requires a designer” (emphasis added).  In other words, living things are for ID theory (at least as Dembski understands it) to be modeled on ships and statues, the products of techne or “art,” whose characteristic “information” is not “internal” to them but must be “imposed” from “outside.”  And that just is what A-T philosophers mean by a “mechanistic” conception of life.  As Dembski says elsewhere, in putting forward ID theory, “I don’t want to give the impression that I’m advocating a return to Aristotle’s theory of causation.  There are problems with Aristotle’s theory, and it needed to be replaced.” (Dembski, Intelligent Design, p. 124, emphasis added.  Cf. Dembski’s No Free Lunch, p. 5. The context of the discussion in both cases is the early modern philosophers’ rejection of Aristotelian formal and final causes, and Dembski makes it clear that his problem is not with the rejection of Aristotle’s position, but only with how “what replaced it” ended up “excluding design” of any sort.)

Now these quotes seem to me to provide clear evidence that Dembski rejects the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature, and in particular that he would assimilate natural objects to artifacts.  (I discuss another relevant passage from Dembski here.)  And while it is true that Dembski has denied that A-T and ID are incompatible, I have argued elsewhere that his attempt to explain how this can be so only makes things murkier rather than clearer.  Torley nevertheless alleges that I have misinterpreted Dembski.  In a lengthy exegesis of the relevant passages, Torley claims that what Dembski really thinks is that design could involve either the imposition of a substantial form on prime matter or the imposition of an accidental form and extrinsic teleology on some pre-existing materials which already have substantial forms of their own, after the fashion of the construction of an artifact.  Torley also claims that what Dembski really means when he says that “the art of building life is not in the physical stuff that constitutes life” is only that matter devoid of the information content characteristic of life could not of itself give rise to matter which does have such information content, and that this much is something A-T would accept.

But there are several problems with Torley’s assertions.  For one thing, Dembski does not actually say the things Torley attributes to him in the passages in question.  For example, in telling us what Dembski “actually” means, Torley makes much use of various A-T concepts – substantial form, accidental form, prime matter and the like – that you will not find Dembski himself deploying as one possible means among others of spelling out ID theory.  It is misleading, then, for Torley to claim that I have “misconstrued,” “misread,” or “misunderstood” Dembski.  The most Torley can reasonably say is that there is arguably a way of interpreting, or even of modifying, developing, or reconstructing Dembski’s position so as to make it compatible with A-T. 

Not that I think that even that much is true.  For a second problem is that Torley’s proposed interpretation of Dembski does not in fact fit with what Dembski does actually say in the passages in question.  As I have already noted, Dembski seems explicitly to contrast the ID view of natural objects with the Aristotelian conception of “nature” and explicitly to identify the ID view of natural objects with the Aristotelian notion of “art.”  This is a very odd thing to do if what one “actually” intends is to leave an Aristotelian interpretation open as one possible way among others of construing ID.

A third problem is that Torley’s proposed interpretation of Dembski isn’t consistent with other aspects of Dembski’s exposition of ID.  Consider Dembski’s conception of how natural objects come to have the “information” they exhibit.  In chapter 20 of The Design Revolution, he speaks of the natural world as a “receptive medium” for information and of the designer as “imparting information” and “introducing design” into the world by virtue of “co-opt[ing] random processes and induc[ing] them to exhibit specified complexity.”  He offers as an illustration of the sort of thing he has in mind a scenario involving “a device that outputs zeroes and ones and for which our best science tells us that the bits are independent and identically distributed so that zeroes and ones each have probability 50 percent.”  Suppose, Dembski says, that “we control for all possible physical interference with this device, and nevertheless the bit string that this device outputs yields an English text-file in ASCII code that delineates the cure for cancer.”  Here we have a model, he says, of a designer imparting information to a system – and without imparting energy to it, which is something he is keen to avoid so as to sidestep the issue of whether postulating an immaterial designer would violate the conservation of energy.

Now, this way of framing the issue makes perfect sense if you think of living things and other natural objects as artifacts in the Aristotelian sense of “artifacts,” but it makes no sense if you think of them as natural in the Aristotelian sense of “natural.”  In particular, it makes sense if you think of a living thing or other natural object on the model of a clock or a paperweight, where you’ve got material elements – bits of metal arranged in such-and-such a way, or a single piece of stone – that can intelligibly be said to have initially a kind of functionless existence before having a time-telling or paperweight function “imparted” to them.  It makes sense if you think of the “informational” aspects of a natural object as a kind of “add-on” to an otherwise complete and free-standing material substance, like the meaning we give an otherwise meaningless set of pre-existing physical marks in order to make of it a symbol.  It makes sense, that is to say, if you think of natural substances as “in themselves” devoid of information, function, final causality, teleology, or the like.

But that is simply a completely wrongheaded way of conceiving of living things and natural objects in the first place, from an A-T point of view.  A natural object is not a collection of otherwise meaningless or information-free parts to which information, function, teleology or final cause has to be “imparted,” and making a natural object is not a kind of two-stage process which consists first of creating an otherwise meaningless but free-standing material structure and then “introducing” some information or functional properties into it.  In the case of a snake or a strand of DNA, for example, there is for A-T simply no such thing as a natural substance which somehow has all the material and behavioral properties of a snake or a strand of DNA and yet still lacks the “information content” or teleological features typical of snakes or DNA.  And so, when God makes a snake or a strand of DNA, He doesn’t first make an otherwise “information-free” or teleology-free material structure and then “impart” some information or final causality to it, as if carrying out the second stage in a two-stage process.  Such a way of thinking of “design” is possible only against the background of a modern conception of matter which has extruded from it the notions of substantial form and immanent teleology.  In short, it is possible only given a rejection of the Aristotelian conception of nature.  For on an Aristotelian conception, to be a natural substance at all in the first place is necessarily to have a substantial form and immanent teleology – and therefore, necessarily, already to embody “information.”

Again, that doesn’t mean that God isn’t ultimately the source of the “information”; He is, and necessarily so if Aquinas’s Fifth Way is correct (which I think it is).  Rather, the point (as I keep saying) is that thinking of natural objects as “artifacts” is simply a wrongheaded way of arguing for God as the source of the information natural objects exhibit – just as (to borrow an analogy from my previous post) thinking of living things as fictional characters would be a wrongheaded way of arguing for the existence of God as the “Author” of the natural world.

Let’s turn now to Cudworth’s post.  Cudworth proposes conceding for the sake of argument that the various philosophical and theological commitments (A-T metaphysics, classical theism, etc.) that I’ve deployed in criticizing ID are correct.  Still, Cudworth asks, why couldn’t God have intended something like the following in creating the world:

“I wish to create a universe in which, over time, primal matter will form into galaxies, galaxies will produce stars and planets, planets will produce life, and life will evolve, through gradual steps, to produce intelligent beings worthy of receiving my Image and Likeness; and I further wish that these intelligent beings will, as a proper reflection of the rationality that they share with me, take up the study of nature, and come to understand their own origins through the evolutionary process which I have devised.  And I further wish that they will come to understand, from the clues I will leave in nature — cosmic fine-tuning, irreducible complexity, and other such things — that this evolutionary process could not have been guided primarily by chance, but must have been in large measure planned to produce them as its result.  Thus, I wish them to be able to infer my existence as Creator from what they observe in nature.”

But if I allow that God could have willed this, then why, Cudworth asks, am I so hostile to Paley-style arguments?

What puzzles me about Cudworth’s questions is that he doesn’t already know the answers, given that he says that he’s “read thousands of words of what Dr. Feser has written on the matter.”  In response to his first question – could God have willed what Cudworth describes Him as willing – the answer is Yes, of course God could have willed this (though I might express things slightly differently here and there).  What is there in anything I’ve written that implies otherwise?  Perhaps Cudworth has been misled by Torley’s insinuation that I deny that God “designed” the world.  But as I have said, I have never denied and would never deny that God has designed the world or that we can know that He has.  On the contrary, I have at length and in two books defended several arguments for God’s existence – including Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which is an argument from the (immanent) final causality evident in the natural world to the existence of God.

As to Cudworth’s second question, I have explained at length in many previous posts on these issues what I object to in Paley: I object to his misguided treatment of living things as if they were “artifacts” (in the Aristotelian sense discussed in this post and the previous one), for reasons I’ve explained in a great many posts on this subject and summarized in my previous post.  And I object to Paley’s univocal application of predicates both to human designers and to God (in the sense of “univocal” as opposed to “analogous” predication familiar from Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy), because I take it to lead to an unacceptably anthropomorphic conception of God at odds with classical theism (where I take classical theism to follow both from sound philosophical theology and from a sound understanding of biblical revelation).  Does Cudworth think that if I accept what I take to be good arguments for a certain conclusion then I must also accept what I take to be bad arguments for that conclusion?  Surely not.  But then, I do not understand why he seems to think that if I answer “Yes” to his first question then I should have no objection to Paleyan arguments.  But perhaps I have misunderstood him.