Review Essay on Faith and Science

Review Essay on Faith and Science Sean Hayden Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science. By Edward Feser. Editiones Scholasticae, 2019. 515 pp. Emergence: Towards a New Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science. By Mariusz Tabaczek. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xxii+ 396 pp. Essence in the Age of Evolution: A New Theory of Natural Kinds. By Christopher Austin. New York: Routledge, 2019. 144 pp. Logos to Bios: Evolutionary Theory in Light of Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism. By Wynand De Beer. New York: Angelico Press, 2018. 278 pp. Finality in Search of Form Three idioms of speculative philosophy have played a determining role in the history of Western culture: the Athenian visions of ancient Greece and their monotheistic interpretations, the rationalist systems of the Enlightenment, and the post-Kantian modes of evolutionary metaphysics, from Idealism and Romanticism, through vitalism, to process and emergentist thinkers. The second rose to prominence with Newtonian science and declined with it. The third has colored at times both evolutionary biology and contemporary physics, receding intermittently behind new variations of mechanistic materialism. Talk about teleology has ebbed and flowed at roughly the same rhythm. While it is true that final and even formal causality never disappeared End Page 593 entirely among the rationalists (e.g., Gottfried Leibniz), modern science eliminated both from the study of nature. With post-Kantian philosophy, final causality reappeared greatly transformed, broken out of its relation to a substantial form—teleology without a telos, as some Thomists jabbed at Henri Bergson. After decades of a neo-Darwinism fed by advances in molecular biology, one easily forgets the wide influence that something akin to Teilhard's cosmic finality of "complexity-consciousness" had at the time of the "modern synthesis." Though he was no friend to teleology, Stephen J. Gould began calling for an extended synthesis nearly fifty years ago, and evolutionary-developmental biology ("evo-devo") has of late put neo-Darwinism on the defensive.1 Now, it will not surprise Aristotelians that, as morphology and ontogenesis have become central to biology, teleology too has inevitably entered back into consideration, albeit mostly in the guise of downward causation, emergence, self-organization, or other terms associated with complexity sciences. In these same discourses, we find a groping towards formal causality as well, occasionally with reference to Aristotle himself. This essay will review some recent Aristotelian efforts to appropriate these trends, but any renewal of formal causality will have to confront the apparent conflicts between evolution and hylomorphism and respond to a range of philosophical alternatives that have remained much closer to the science. Evolution seems hopelessly to blur any constant forms and the telos that guides them. So the explanatory functions of hylomorphism collide: ontogeny cries out for the formal cause, but phylogeny dissolves it. The becoming individual demands a determinate eidos, but evolution refuses fixed kinds. The relative success of post-Kantian philosophies of nature derives, in part, from their interest in consciousness (rather than form) as a point of departure; the diverse ways in which this interest can take up the scientific particulars of phylogeny, morphology, and neurology in exploring modes of consciousness; and the vague cosmic teleology into which those can be fitted. By contrast, Aristotelian notions of essence tend to blunt the End Page 594 variety and contingencies of evolution (into eternal, unchanging kinds and ontological levels), to divide metaphysics sharply from any such atomistic explanation (and hence from science), and to rope off discussion of the human soul in particular from either set of considerations. If post-Kantian speculative philosophy has rediscovered finality in an aimless, empty cosmos, this telos still suffers perhaps from what Marjorie Grene called "eidophobia," lapsing into a lurching vitalism.2 Hence the contours of a dilemma in natural philosophy that would have perplexed Aristotle: finality in search of form. This review essay examines four recent Aristotelian interventions in philosophy of science and biology with an eye to their recovery of formal and final causes, emphasizing the particular role given to mathematics in each. Structural Realism and Substantial Form: Aristotle's Revenge Thomists come in all shapes and sizes, but only a certain sort willingly describes his philosophy as "scholastic...