10.21.09
Kant, teleology, biology
Archive
Post rescued from google: from an older version of a ‘darwiniana’ blog before this one.
Interesting take on Kant, teleology, and biology
8/15/2005
Kant, Design, Darwinism
Leon Weiseltier, in an article at the New Republic, takes on the Intelligent Design movement by citing the work of Kant. Good idea. This is a welcome approach, and this writer deserves credit for this ‘risky’ tactic that most Darwinists don’t even bother with, oblivious to just how well Kant summed up their confusions, not only those of the ID movement. Mr. Weisletier quotes chapter and verse from the Critique of Pure Reason, in one of the celebrated passages from Kant’s famous work. The problem is that one has to be something more than a part-time Kantian here, and go the full mile to see that Kant’s methodology works as well on the empiricist presumptions of Darwinians.
Here the issue is not the fact of evolution, which has a powerful, though not fully adequate, empirical basis, but the theory of natural selection, which trespasses into the metaphysical, and is in its own way a de facto ‘designer’ argument in reverse (in the sense of displacing explanation of unobserved complexity into a mere abstraction), and which makes a host of assumptions about the nature of science, and reality, that would not comfortably pass muster in a Kantian critical discourse. The Darwin debate is almost specimen case of all the things Kant warned of. The age of scientific positivism forgot all this, and actually deluded itself in thinking science had swept away all the issues of philosophy. This decline and fall into methodological idiocy goes a long way to explaining the deadlocked character of the current evolution frenzy.
However, the point is well taken, Kant exposed the metaphysical traps in much theological thinking. The intelligent design movement is exploiting people’s ignorance of the history of design arguments, and Mr. Weiseltier’s reminder is most apt. Kant’s thinking is a liberation for many from the direct exploitations of institutional religion where proofs of the existence of god were/are the foundations of temporal authority. That’s not an historical curio, since evangelical business is Big Business and the fire and brimstone wouldn’t keep revenues flowing during the organ music if it was diluted with Kant.
Mr. Weiseltier’s words return on themselves: ‘The theory of intelligent design must be intelligently designed’. So must any theory of evolution, and one thing is sure, Darwin’s theory is a bungled job. Not only divinity, but issues of ‘soul’ and ‘free will’, join the list of confusions. Kant’s point is the need to produce a science of metaphysics to produce a science of evolution. Certainly Darwinists have not done that, and therefore certainly have no such science. We should recall the reservations of Kant, as to the hope ‘that one day there would arise a second Newton who would make intelligible the production of a single blade of grass in accordance with the laws of nature the mutual relations of which were not arranged by some intention’.
Darwin’s theory, at least, does not resolve such doubt. The resolution here must be more than what we are currently offered, and it seems that the parties to the debate get the opposition they deserve, destined to tear each other to pieces, for good Kantian reasons. Critics of intelligent design (and I am one of them) often proceed in such a clumsy way with false certitude about Darwin’s theory, or Darwinian thinking, in the naive scientism that competes with theological belief in its true-believing innocence. The sense of design may not work as science, but then what does? Kant provided a disproof, successful or not, of the design argument, but we should recall Kant’s distinction of constitutive and regulative judgments and his sense that you wouldn’t decipher these questions at the boundary of physics using strictly scientific, i.e. causal, arguments.
Regulative judgments, or a sense of the ‘as if’, provide a powerful, though inconclusive insight into the structure of living organisms. Beyond that Kant suggested the existence of a ‘natural teleology’ whose contradictions and obscurities were likely to defeat our scientific reasoning. Surely the debate over the fine structure of DNA, for example, gives evidence to the prophetic words Kant uttered several generations before Darwin. Darwin’s, or Behe’s, ‘black box’, is a clear case of the way this teleological complexity gets mistreated by intelligent design impositions on the data, data Darwinists can handle no better.
A whole school of thought in a Kantian vein of biology flourished in the generation before Darwin and the Darwinists swept it all away in the idiocy over natural selection. Histories of biology don’t even remember this history. The chickens have come home to roost. In any case, it is hardly fair to cite Kant to skewer the intelligent design group, then ditch Kant for Darwin, with the claim that his theory of natural selection is the effective equivalent of the ‘designer’. Current science put a man on the moon, but otherwise it has succeeded in the ‘trained stupidity’ that drives them into their just deserts, harassment by the Bible Belt All of this is a reminder that Kant’s skepticism about a theory of evolution has so far been born out by the facts of the case of the intractable Darwin debate, a study in metaphysical abuse on both sides.
From the Article:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050822&s=diarist082205
The cunning souls who propound intelligent design are playing with fire, because they have introduced intelligence into the discussion. It is a standard to which they, too, must be held. The theory of intelligent design must itself be intelligently designed. I cannot judge the soundness of their science, but that is not the only standpoint from which they must be judged. Their science, after all, is pledged to a philosophy. Philosophically speaking, I do not see that they have demonstrated what they congratulate themselves for demonstrating. The “argument from design,” the view that the evidence for the existence of God may be found in the organization of the natural world, is an ancient argument, but philosophers have grasped, at least since the sixth section of the third chapter of the second book of the Critique of Pure Reason, that it may establish only the wisdom of a creator, and not the existence of one. It is impossible, of course, not to marvel at the complexity and the beauty of the natural order; but marveling is not thinking. The mind may recoil from the possibility that all this sublimity came into being by accident, but it cannot, on those grounds alone, rule the possibility out, unless it is concerned only to cure its own pain. (Cosmic accident is also an occasion for awe.) Intelligent design is an expression of sentiment, not an exercise of reason. It is a psalm, not a proof.
posted by john @ 10:30 PM