Reading Rosenberg, Part IV

Alex Rosenberg’s dubious use of physics was the focus of the previous installment of our look at his new book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In this post we’ll look at his dubious biological claims.  “When physics disposed of purposes,” Rosenberg tells us, “it did so for biology as well.”  Now as I’ve noted before, in fact modern physics has not “disposed” of purposes at all, if what Rosenberg means by this is that physics has somehow established the metaphysical claim that the material world is devoid of objective teleological features.  All it has done is to make the purely methodological move of confining itself to non-teleological descriptions of the phenomena it studies.  This no more shows that teleology doesn’t exist than the fact that I am confining my comments in this post to Rosenberg’s work shows that no other philosophers exist.  Moreover, the non-teleological methodology of modern physics rules out irreducibly teleological explanations in biology only if you buy into Rosenberg’s “physics or bust” brand of scientism, which he has given us no good reason to do.

But Rosenberg does at least understand the implications of his position for the question of biological adaptation:

Scientism needs more than an explanation of this or that particular adaptation -- white fur in polar bears or the fact that bottom-dwelling fish have both eyes on the side of their bodies facing away from the bottom.  We need an explanation of how, starting from zero adaptations, any adaptation at all ever comes about.  The explanation we need can’t start with even a tiny amount of adaptation already present.  Furthermore, the explanation can’t help itself to anything but physics.  We can’t even leave room for “stupid design,” let alone “intelligent design,” to creep in.  If scientism needs a first slight adaptation, it surrenders to design.  It gives up the claim that the physical facts (none of which is an adaptation) fix all the other facts. (p. 50)

We might compare the alternative Rosenberg wisely rules out -- that the naturalist might allow in a tiny bit of adaptation at the start and build up more complex adaptations on that basis -- to the strategy of “homuncular decomposition” in the philosophy of mind.  This is the idea that we can explain human thought in terms of sub-personal homunculus-like processes which exhibit a lower degree of intelligence than the thought processes we are trying to explain; that these sub-personal processes can, in turn, be explained in terms of even “stupider” homunculi; those in terms of yet stupider homunculi still; and so on until we reach a lowest level of homunculi which are so stupid that their operations can be carried out by processes that are clearly purely material and non-intentional.  As critics like John Searle and John Haldane have pointed out, this whole procedure is fallacious.  The lowest-level homunculi will be carrying out operations that can intelligibly be said to “add up” to the higher-level mental ones only if they possess some minimum degree of intentionality, in which case the naturalist’s problem of explaining intentionality in non-intentional terms will merely be relocated rather than solved.  Proponents of the strategy fail to see this because, as Haldane notes, they confuse the intentional/non-intentional distinction with the more intentional content/less intentional content distinction.  And, I would add, if they were to bite the bullet and accept that there is genuine intentional content at least at some very low level of physical reality, they will have implicitly given up a physicalist conception of matter and revived an Aristotelian commitment to finality or “directedness” as a fundamental aspect of the natural order.

Rosenberg -- who correctly sees that to be a consistent naturalist in the philosophy of mind requires being an eliminative rather than reductive materialist vis-à-vis intentionality -- also realizes that to pursue a similarly reductive strategy in biology vis-à-vis teleology would be equally fallacious, and equally fatal to naturalism.  He sees that teleology and allied notions must be completely avoided, that smuggling in even a “slight” or “tiny” amount of adaptation would give the game away.  (As I discuss in The Last Superstition, Daniel Dennett is one naturalist who does not see this, or at least who constantly helps himself to teleological concepts which he cannot successfully “cash out” in naturalistic or non-teleological terms.  Dennett is also, as it happens, a well-known proponent of the homuncular decomposition strategy in the philosophy of mind -- in for a penny, in for a pound, and all that.)

Now, I would say that in fact you aren’t going to get any biological adaptation at all from a starting point utterly devoid of adaptation, any more than you are going to get the intentional from the non-intentional.  Biological adaptation is an inherently teleological concept, and the processes from which Rosenberg would derive it are (as he conceives of them, anyway) inherently non-teleological.  Reductive versions of materialism in the philosophy of mind are always disguised forms of eliminative materialism; they make use of mentalistic vocabulary while subtly but completely evacuating it of its ordinary mentalistic content.  And Rosenberg’s reduction of the adaptive to the non-adaptive does something similar.  But while Rosenberg’s eliminativism in the philosophy of mind is explicit, he does not make it clear that he is committed to an eliminativist position with respect to biological adaptation.  (Indeed, in his -- very interesting -- book Darwinian Reductionism, Rosenberg presents his position in philosophy of biology as reductionist rather than eliminativist.  I’ll have something to say about that book in a follow-up post.)

Here’s how the “reduction” goes in Atheist’s Guide.  Rosenberg sets the stage as follows:

Natural selection requires three processes: reproduction, variation, and inheritance.  It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations.  Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or even asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction.  Any kind of replication is enough.  (p. 59)

He later puts things instead by saying that in addition to “replication and variation… fitness differences [are] the last of the three requirements for evolution by natural selection.” (pp. 64-65).

With these criteria in hand, Rosenberg devotes several pages to sketching out scenarios in which inorganic molecules can be said to replicate, vary, differ in their fitness, and thereby give rise to “adaptation.”  And he has no trouble doing so given how broadly he construes the key concepts: The formation of crystals counts as an example of “replication”; the chemical difference between sugar and Splenda counts as an example of “variation”; an inorganic molecule’s being able to “persist or replicate or both” counts as “adaptation”; and so forth.

Thus does Rosenberg “show” how “adaptation” can arise from non-adaptation in a way that doesn’t “cheat” by smuggling in adaptation in at the beginning.  But this is a little like proudly proclaiming that you didn’t cheat on your exam, because the professor handed out the answers in advance.  It’s true, but only in a completely trivial and uninteresting sense.  For given how broadly Rosenberg is willing to allow us to construe the key notions, you might as well say that pebbles are “well-adapted” to their environment.  After all, they “replicate” (when one pebble is broken into two); they “vary” (the new pebbles are smaller than the original, and differ from it and from each other in shape); they “inherit” features from their parents (the new pebble is solid and rough, just like Dad -- a chip off the old block!); and they differ in their “fitness” (the new pebbles are smaller and thus less easily broken than their ancestors).  Descent with modification, in rock gardens no less than in botanical gardens!

But what does any of this have to do with organic phenomena, with biological adaptation?  Nothing at all; certainly Rosenberg does nothing to justify the claim that it does, other than to make the obligatory hand-waving reference to the Miller-Urey experiments and hydrothermal vents, and a passing concession to the effect that “molecular biologists don’t yet know all the details, or even many of them” about how organic processes might arise from inorganic ones.  Ah yes, all we’re missing is a few details.  Except that since the question at issue is whether biological adaptation can be explained in terms of the stuff about crystals, Splenda, etc., to leave out these “details” is just to fail to answer the question at all.  Rosenberg is like the guy who contracts to build you a house, clears the ground a little, and then takes off without doing anything else -- dismissing your concerns about the absence of a foundation, framework, walls, electrical, plumbing, etc. as mere quibbling over “details.”  Well, no, they’re not mere details.  They’re the house.  

What Rosenberg owes us is an account of how biological adaptation, specifically -- and not just the kind of “adaptation” a resilient inorganic molecule or a pebble exhibits -- can arise from physical processes that initially involve no biological adaptation at all.  And that means he owes us an account of what life is -- an account that makes it evident exactly how the sort of “adaptations” he describes add up to the kind a living thing exhibits.  But “What is life?” is a question which (oddly for a professional philosopher of biology) Rosenberg does not directly address.  He just speaks of “adaptation” sans phrase, and insinuates, without argument, that having given an account of processes that might in some extended sense of the word be called “adaptation,” he has thereby given an account of life.  

Now the Aristotelian tradition has, of course, an account of what life is.  Living things, it says, are those which exhibit immanent causation as well as transeunt (or “transient”) causation; non-living things exhibit transeunt causation alone.  Transeunt causal processes are those that terminate in something outside the cause.  Immanent causal processes are those which terminate within the cause and tend to its good or flourishing (even if they also have effects external to the cause).  For example, an animal’s digesting of a meal is a causal process that tends to the good or flourishing of the animal itself (though it also has byproducts external to the animal, such as the waste products it excretes).  By contrast, one rock’s knocking into another is a transeunt causal process, in that it does not in any sense tend to the good or flourishing of the rock itself.  (I had reason to address these matters in an earlier post.  I also address them in chapter 4 of Aquinas.  The best recent treatment of issues in the philosophy of biology from an Aristotelian point of view is in chapters 8 and 9 of David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism.  If you’re up for tracking down older Scholastic works on the subject, you might look for Henry Koren’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animate Nature or George Klubertanz’s Philosophy of Human Nature.)

Whatever the details, the Aristotelian conception of life is irreducibly teleological, for the notion of causal processes that tend toward the good or flourishing of the cause is itself inherently teleological.  (Though it is important to stress that the kind of teleology characteristic of living things is only one, relatively rare sort of teleology; and also that -- contrary to what Darwinian naturalists and “Intelligent Design” theorists alike suppose -- whether there is teleology in nature and whether there is a “designer” are separate questions.  On these issues, see my article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide” and my various posts criticizing ID theory from an Aristotelian point of view.  I should also note here that the “immanent causes vs. transeunt causes” distinction in Aristotelian philosophy of biology is different from the “immanent finality vs. extrinsic finality” distinction that arises in discussions of the question of whether final causality is immanent to the natural order -- as Aristotelians claim -- or whether it is entirely extrinsic or imposed from outside -- as moderns like Newton and Paley claim.)  

Rosenberg, who claims that teleology of any sort has been banished by physics and that “the physical facts fix all the facts,” will naturally have no truck with this conception of life.  But if the Aristotelian is correct to hold that life is an inherently teleological notion, then Rosenberg’s position vis-à-vis life is implicitly eliminativist: If life is inherently teleological but there is no teleology, then there are no living things either; there only seem to be.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that Rosenberg is committed to denying that there is a real difference between you and your corpse.  But it would mean that whatever important differences there are between you and a corpse, or you and the “adaptive” inorganic molecules Rosenberg describes, the difference does not involve your having some teleological or irreducibly “life-like” features that they lack.

But you needn’t be an Aristotelian to regard Rosenberg’s position on life as implicitly eliminativist.  Rosenberg implies that his account of adaptation is not merely an account of life that is consistent with scientism; he evidently regards it as the only account that is consistent with it.  Though he finesses the details, he is committed to the proposition that there cannot be any “adaptation” in the world that doesn’t boil down to the sort of thing he describes when he tells us his story about how Splenda is an example of “variation,” resilient inorganic molecules are instances of “fitness,” and so on.  Rosenberg’s Infallible Dogma -- “The physical facts fix all the facts!” -- cannot allow anything more than this; certainly it is hard to see how we could add any more to it without bringing in something like the Aristotelian notion of immanent causation and its attendant teleology.

Now, that means that biological adaptations must in Rosenberg’s view be entirely continuous with inorganic “adaptations” of the sort he describes.  And that means in turn that we are faced with a choice if we buy into Rosenberg’s premises.  We could say, on the one hand, that Rosenberg’s resilient inorganic molecules -- and, for all I know, pebbles too -- are “really” “living” things after all, even if very simple kinds of life.  (On this interpretation, when contemplating a crystal or a pebble, Rosenberg might soon find himself channeling Colin Clive, or maybe Gene Wilder.)  Alternatively, we could say that since inorganic molecules really are inorganic and so-called “living” things are not essentially different from them, it follows that so-called “living” things are “really” no more alive than inorganic molecules, pebbles, and the like are.  Again, this doesn’t mean that Rosenberg would have to deny that you differ significantly from a corpse or an inorganic molecule -- any more than, as an eliminativist about intentionality, he would deny that there is a significant difference between the words you utter and random noises.  But just as he would deny that the words you utter really have any meaning or semantic content that random noises lack, so too (on this latter interpretation) would he deny that there is any such thing as “life” which you have and the corpse or inorganic molecule lacks.

Given that Rosenberg clearly holds that the bottom-level physical facts determine what we should say about higher levels rather than the other way around, and given that he is already more than happy to eliminate other higher-level phenomena from our picture of the world, it is pretty clear that this latter, eliminativist view of life is the one Rosenberg is implicitly committed to.  And I don’t see why he couldn’t shrug his shoulders in agreement, given the other things he’s willing to say.  (Again, Rosenberg does in his book Darwinian Reductionism claim to be a reductionist rather than eliminativist vis-à-vis biology, but what he is directly addressing in that context is the question of whether functional descriptions pick out real features of the biological realm, rather than the question of whether there is a real distinction between living and non-living things.  Anyway, as I have said, I’ll discuss that book in a follow-up post.)

The problem with all of this isn’t that it’s absolutely bizarre, though of course it is.  The problem is that there is simply no reason whatsoever to take it seriously.  In particular, there is no reason at all to think that whatever is true of bacteria and bees, trees and toads, pigs and people is entirely exhausted by what physics tells us about these things, as Rosenberg understands “physics.”  It isn’t biological science, but ideological scientism that leads him to suppose otherwise.  And as we have seen, his sole argument for scientism is entirely devoid of merit.  Biological phenomena, as Rosenberg represents them, are like something you’d find in a taxidermist’s shop -- bits of dead matter stripped from a corpse and sewn onto a framework of cold wiring and stuffing, so as vaguely to look like something living.  Here as elsewhere, Rosenberg guides us, not to reality, but to a Frankenstein’s-monster-like simulacrum of reality. 

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Radio Free Aquinas

I’ll be on The Frank Pastore Show on KKLA Radio on Thursday, December 8 (tomorrow) from 5 - 6 pm PST to discuss The Last Superstition and Aquinas. 

UPDATE: It was a great show.  The podcast is now available on Frank's site.

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Dawkins vs. Dawkins (Updated)

During my Catholic Answers Live interview last Monday, I noted that Richard Dawkins refuses to debate philosopher William Lane Craig.  Dawkins’ representative Sean Faircloth, who was also on the show, did not contradict this.  On the contrary, Faircloth defended Dawkins’ refusal to debate Craig.  Still, after the interview, Patrick Coffin, the host of the show, received the following email from Dawkins:

Dear Mr Coffin

Contrary to what was repeatedly said on your show, I HAVE debated William Lane Craig, in a nationally televised debate in Mexico in 2010, and he was DEEPLY unimpressive.  I hope you will correct the record in your next show.

Richard Dawkins

Now, I certainly want the record to be correct.  But if it isn’t true that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, where could anyone have gotten the idea that he does refuse?  Well, for starters, from the fact that Dawkins published an article in the Guardian just this past October with the title “Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig” -- an article reprinted on the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and widely discussed online.  That does rather give the impression that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, no?  So, perhaps Dawkins should send himself an email demanding a correction.  And if, in future, he doesn’t want people to get the idea that he refuses to debate with William Lane Craig, he might consider not saying -- loudly, publicly, online and in print -- things like “I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig.”

The reader of Dawkins’ weeks-old Guardian article will also notice that after recounting Craig’s repeated challenges to debate him, Dawkins does not say “I HAVE debated Craig, in Mexico in 2010, and found him DEEPLY unimpressive!”  No, not a peep about that.  Instead he explicitly affirms that “I would rather leave an empty chair than share a platform with him.”  (This just repeats a policy he had earlier expressed in some now famous remarks you can view on YouTube.)

But then, what is all this “Mexico in 2010” stuff Dawkins made no reference to in his Guardian article but now cites in his email to Coffin as evidence that what I said in the interview needs “correction”?  Dawkins is referring here, not to any one-on-one matchup between Craig and himself, but rather to a six-person panel exchange in which both he and Craig participated.  And from Craig’s own account of the episode, it seems that the participants didn’t necessarily know, before the fact, who the other participants would be; certainly Craig himself says that he found out only after he arrived, and to his surprise, that Dawkins would be there -- which raises the question of whether Dawkins even knew in advance that Craig would be there.  Moreover, Craig reports that when he conveyed to Dawkins that he was surprised by his participation, given Dawkins’ longstanding refusal to debate him, Dawkins replied: “I don’t consider this to be a debate with you.  The Mexicans invited me to participate, and I accepted.”

So, two years ago Dawkins insisted that his encounter with Craig in Mexico was not a debate; and only weeks ago he loudly and publicly acknowledged that he refuses to debate Craig.  Yet, in response to my statement on the air that he refuses to debate Craig, Dawkins now insists that this is “contrary” to the truth and needs to be “corrected,” citing the 2010 non-debate encounter as evidence.  What is going on here?  

What’s going on, I suspect, is a farcical attempt at damage control.  Dawkins’ recent Guardian article received much criticism, some of it from people Dawkins cannot easily dismiss.  In a response to Dawkins published in the Guardian, philosopher Daniel Came writes that though he “tend[s] to agree with Dawkins's conclusion regarding the falsehood of theism,” he also regards Dawkins’ refusal to debate Craig as “cynical and anti-intellectualist.”  Oxford historian Tim Stanley judges Dawkins “either a fool or a coward.”  Paul Vallely notes that Craig is widely acknowledged to be a formidable debater even by prominent New Atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and is also acknowledged even by atheists to have bested Hitchens in debate -- the implication being that Dawkins is afraid to debate Craig and is desperately seeking an excuse for not doing so.   Perhaps the criticisms and accusations of cowardice have gotten to Dawkins.  I conjecture that, finding that the “Craig defends genocide!” shtick isn’t working as an excuse for not debating him, Dawkins has now decided to shift gears and try a different excuse, viz. “Oh, it’s not that I refuse to debate Craig.  It’s that I’ve already debated him and won, and there’s no need to do so again!”  Unfortunately, he’s forgotten -- or at least hopes that others have forgotten -- what he said to Craig two years ago and what he said in the Guardian only weeks ago.

In short, whether or not Dawkins will ever debate Craig, he certainly now seems keen on debating himself.  The Dawkins of 2010 and October 2011 versus the Dawkins of December 2011.  “Never mind what I said before!  We are at war with Eastasia.  We have always been at war with Eastasia!”  Come to think of it, it all sounds very familiar…

[Note: Patrick Coffin has replied to Dawkins with an invitation.] 

UPDATE 12/6: Patrick Coffin discussed the Dawkins debacle (and his still-unanswered invitation to Dawkins) during the first few minutes of yesterday’s show.  You can listen to the podcast here.

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TLS in TMR

The Montréal Review kindly runs a précis of The Last Superstition in their latest edition.  While you’re over there, do browse through TMR’s website -- lots of interesting pieces on philosophy, religion, politics, history, science, literature, you name it.

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TLS on radio

I’ll be on the Catholic Answers Live radio show tomorrow at 7 pm ET to discuss The Last Superstition.  (You might be able to find podcasts of earlier radio interviews by following the links you’ll find here, though I believe most of them are no longer available.)

UPDATE: The podcast is now available here.

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Palmer on libertarianism

My review of Tom G. Palmer’s recent book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice appears in the latest issue of Reason Papers, now edited by Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja.  (For the full contents of the current issue and of archived issues, go here.)

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TLS and formal causes

The website Apologetics 315 kindly reviews my book The Last Superstition.  I’ll let you check out the nice things said about the book for yourself and cut to the reviewer’s main criticism:

Feser convincingly shows throughout the book that Final Causation is inevitable.  Even if someone might say they don't believe in it, no one can really escape it.  But once the Final Cause is firmly established, Feser tries to sneak in the Formal Cause as well, by piggybacking on top of it.  This seemed insufficient.  Based on what Richard Dawkins in particular has written, evolution itself undermines the Formal Cause.  He claimes [sic] that there is no static 'Form', because life is constantly and mindlessly changing.  Although Feser tackled the Final Cause aspect of this line of thinking extremely well, this reviewer would have liked to hear more about why Dawkins and others are mistaken about Formal Causality specifically.  Especially since so much rests on it.

A lot could be said about formal causes, and it’s true that I don’t say all of it in TLS.  (Useful recent treatments of the subject include chapter 1 of Eleonore Stump’s Aquinas, David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism, and James Ross’s Thought and World.)  But with all due respect to the reviewer, it is not correct to maintain that what I do say in the book amounts to “sneaking in” formal causes alongside final causes, as if the relationship between them were contingent.  It is not contingent.  For every irreducible level of immanent final causality in the natural order, there is necessarily a corresponding irreducible level of formal causality.  

Recall first that for the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, the fundamental sort of final causality that exists in nature is the “directedness” of an efficient cause toward the generation of its typical effect or range of effects.  It is similar to what contemporary writers on dispositions and causal powers like C. B. Martin, John Heil, Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, and George Molnar have in mind when they speak, for example, of the way dispositions are “directed toward” or “point to” their characteristic “manifestations,” or the way causal powers are “directed toward” their characteristic effects.  Hence the directedness of brittle objects toward shattering, of soluble objects toward dissolving, of the phosphorus in a match head toward generating flame and heat, are instances of finality as that is understood in the A-T tradition.  The A-T view is that unless we regard such “directedness” or “pointing” as immanent or inherent to the natural phenomena that exhibit such dispositions and causal powers, we have no way of making it intelligible why they have the manifestations and effects that they typically do.  Causes and effects, dispositions and manifestations would become inherently “loose and separate,” so that any effect or none might follow upon any cause.  Such Humean fantasies are for A-T an inevitable result of the abandonment of immanent final causes.

Now with that much the reviewer seems to agree; or at least, he allows that TLS makes a strong case for this position.  But what he apparently does not see is that for a cause A to be inherently directed toward the generation of some effect B is just for A to have what the A-T tradition calls a substantial form -- the immanent principle by virtue of which a natural object carries out its characteristic operations.  To deny that A has such a principle is implicitly to deny that A is inherently “directed” toward any particular operations at all, and thus implicitly to deny immanent final causes.  But the notion of substantial form was the core of the Aristotelian-Scholastic doctrine of formal causality.  Hence final causality and formal causality, as those are understood in the A-T tradition, go hand in hand; to affirm the first is to affirm the second.

Another way to make the point is in terms of the distinction between act and potency (or actuality and potentiality).  A potency or potentiality is always a potency for some actuality; to have a potency is to be directed toward or to point to some outcome.  Hence the notion of potency goes hand in hand with that of final cause.  Now as I note in TLS, a thing has the potencies it has only because of the ways in which it is actual; for instance, a rubber ball has the potential to be melted at such-and-such a temperature only because it is actually composed of rubber rather than granite or steel.   And where the potencies a natural object has are concerned, it will have them by virtue of whatever makes it actually the kind of natural substance that it is.  But that is just to say that it has them because of its substantial form; for the substantial form of a thing just is the inherent principle that makes it actually the kind of natural substance it is, with the operations typical of that kind of substance.  To deny that a thing has such a form is to deny that its basic potencies (and thus its directedness toward what those potencies are potencies for) are inherent to it.  Again, immanent finality -- inherently being “directed toward” or “pointing to” some end -- goes hand in hand with formal causality.

Indeed, act and potency, substantial form, final causality, causal powers, essentialism, and so on -- all of these notions form a tightly integrated network, and an understanding of the precise nature of their interrelationships was something Scholastic writers gradually and carefully refined over the course of centuries.  It is no accident that the moderns more or less rejected this network of ideas as a whole when it rejected Scholasticism, and it is no accident that the revival of interest in dispositions, causal powers, and the like in the work of recent analytic philosophers like Martin, Heil, Ellis, Cartwright, and Molnar has gone hand in hand with a revival of essentialism and the appearance in contemporary metaphysics of something like the act/potency distinction (in the distinction between “categorical” and “dispositional” properties) and something like immanent final causality (in e.g. Molnar’s talk of “physical intentionality” and the common suggestion that powers and dispositions are “directed toward” their effects and manifestations).  The language is often different and the details are not always worked out the way the A-T tradition would work them out, but this recent work nevertheless constitutes a partial revival of the Scholastic metaphysical apparatus.  And that so much of the apparatus has been revived by writers with no Thomistic ax to grind is itself a further indication that bringing formal causality in together with final causes is not a matter of “sneaking” something in.  The connection between the notions is, as I say, necessary, not contingent.

Now, that much shows at most only that if you allow immanent final causes at all, you are to that extent committed also to formal causes.  But someone could admit this and still deny formal causes at the level of biology.  He could say, for example, that there is immanent final causality at the level of fundamental physics -- that basic particles, say, have causal powers and dispositions by virtue of which they are “directed at” or “point to” certain effects and manifestations -- but that there is no such finality at any higher level of physical reality.  And in that case, formal causes need be admitted only at the level of physics: Fermions and bosons, say, would have substantial forms, but trees, squirrels, and human beings would not.

But such a position would be plausible only if there were no causal powers at higher levels of physical reality that are irreducible to those described by physics.  And that is simply not the case; at the very least, such reductionism is highly controversial.  Whether even chemistry is reducible to physics is doubted by most philosophers of chemistry.  Reductionism in biology and psychology are notoriously controversial.  Chemical systems, organic systems, and psychological systems have causal properties that are simply impossible (or, to put the point less controversially, at least extremely difficult) to reduce to the causal properties of their basic physical parts.   And even within the biological realm reductionism is more problematic than is often realized.  For example, the traditional Aristotelian view that there is a difference in kind and not degree between sentient life and vegetative life is routinely dismissed as a historical curiosity.  Yet even many naturalistic philosophers admit that it is at least extremely difficult to explain qualia in terms of insensate matter -- not realizing that they are thereby implicitly acknowledging that the old Aristotelian distinction has a serious metaphysical basis after all.  

[One reason why they don’t see this is that contemporary philosophers universally regard “the qualia problem” as a problem in the philosophy of mind rather than the philosophy of biology, and see it as a question of whether or not qualia, understood as “mental” properties, are “physical.”  From an A-T point of view this is entirely wrongheaded, and unreflectively presupposes a post-Cartesian conception both of mind and of matter.  If you think that the intrinsic nature of matter is more or less exhausted by the mathematical description given by physics and that anything that cannot be assimilated to this description exists only in the mind and is wrongly projected onto material reality in perceptual experience, then “qualia” are inevitably going to seem inherently both “mental” and “non-physical.”  But the Aristotelian regards modern physics’ description of matter as nowhere close to exhaustive, but rather as merely an abstraction of mathematical features from something which in its intrinsic nature is far richer than can be captured by mathematics.  Hence the Aristotelian is happy to regard qualia as material, in his sense of “material”; and where the mind is concerned, the material/immaterial divide has in the Aristotelian view to do not with qualia, nor even with intentionality considered as mere “directedness” -- even simple material causes have that -- but rather with intellectual activity in the strict sense: the grasping of concepts, the formation of judgments, and reasoning from one judgment to another.  See chapter 4 of Aquinas for more on this subject.]

Now, if there is irreducible efficient causality at a certain level of physical reality, there is also at that level (given what was said above) a correspondingly irreducible level of final causality.  For instance, if the capacity of a tree to grow roots is irreducible to efficient-causal activity within the physical microstructure of the tree, or if the capacity of an animal to have sensations is irreducible to efficient-causal activity in its nervous system, then the tree’s “directedness” toward the growing of roots and the animal’s “directedness” toward the having of sensations will constitute levels of finality irreducible to the finality exhibited by the components of the physical microstructure.  But then, given what was said above, there will also be levels of formal causality -- substantial forms -- at any such irreducible level of final causality.

Now, the Apologetics 315 reviewer appears to sympathize with my arguments in TLS to the effect that there is indeed irreducible immanent final causality at multiple levels of the natural world -- not only at the level of basic physics, but also with some higher-level inorganic natural processes, at various biological levels, and at the level of human thought and action.  But in that case he should acknowledge (given what has been said above) that such arguments indicate that there is formal causality at each of those levels as well.  Again, final causality and formal causality go hand in hand.

Nothing Dawkins says shows otherwise, because Dawkins lazily supposes (as, in fairness, so many other people do) that what makes something the kind of thing it is (i.e. its form) has something to do with its origin.  That may be true of artifacts -- a watch is a watch only because of the watchmaker’s intentions, since there is nothing inherent in the object itself that gives it its time-telling function -- but it is not true of natural substances.  If a natural substance has causal powers that are irreducible to those of its parts, then it has a substantial form.  How it came into existence -- special divine creation, natural selection, an infinite series of preceding natural substances -- is irrelevant.  To suppose otherwise is to commit one of many errors that follow upon the collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between natural substances and artifacts.

As to the suggestion that “there is no static 'Form', because life is constantly and mindlessly changing,” this sort of talk, though also very common, is just muddleheaded.  If species A gives rise to species B, that does not entail that the form of an A somehow morphed into the form of a B -- whatever that could mean -- but rather that organisms that had the form of A gave rise to organisms with a different form.  The form itself doesn’t change, any more than erasing a triangle from a blackboard changes the form of triangularity.  What happens in that case is that the matter which had the form of a triangle now has the form of a pile of dust particles -- not that the form of triangularity has itself changed, so that the geometry textbooks would have to be rewritten to make reference to dust particles instead!

So, the reviewer’s criticisms miss the point.  But he is right to say that TLS gives more explicit attention to final causality than to formal causality, at least in the latter part of the book.  The reasons for this are that final causality has been the main object of attack among critics of Aristotelianism and Scholasticism, and that among the various interrelated A-T concepts cited above, final causality is the most crucial.  It is not for nothing that Aquinas calls the final cause “the cause of causes.”  Deny that final causality is immanent to the natural world and the whole A-T edifice (the act/potency distinction, substantial forms, etc.) pretty much collapses.  Grant that final causes are immanent to the natural world, and the whole A-T edifice -- together with its implications for natural theology and natural law -- pretty much follows.  Which is no doubt one reason many people are so loath to grant it.

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