This post marks my 22nd for Evolution News in as many months. I began by advocating that the notion of purpose be established as a scientific concept. I hope that the reasons I have offered over the past two years have been convincing.

I ended my last post with what many would consider a radical claim. That is, we must further recognize, on the basis of powers ontology, aka dispositionalism, that the living state undeniably manifests the power of purpose, and that this can only come from its immanent property of intentionality.

Purpose and intentionality permeate and in fact define the living state, in contrast to the inanimate. If you dissect any organism or any cell or any organelle within any cell or organism you will only find parts that contribute to the function of the whole. One might even say that within life, there is nothing else except purpose.

So the question really is, why would such a self-evident truth be considered radical? Here, I will do my best to address this question.

Modern science began with Descartes and Newton, who excluded the Thomistic/Aristotelian description of purpose from scientific discourse, believing that the best the human mind could do was to observe regularities in nature from which to derive rules reducible to mechanisms. Purpose was considered the realm of the Divine, not in need of human description.

Concomitant with these historical developments, there arose the empirical skepticism of David Hume. Hume reflected upon Newton's mechanics to derive his theory of cause and effect. He posited that notions of cause and effect were based on the experiential observation of constantly conjoined events. According to Hume, cause and effect must be separate events, and purely contingent. Most importantly, he asserted that even if one identifies a causal relation, there can be no corresponding logical entailment regarding future events. Some 180 years later, Bertrand Russell went so far as to say that "the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that in fact there are no such things. The law of causality ... is a relic of a bygone age."

Hume's skeptical elucidation of causation has continued to permeate modern science, however unwittingly on the part of its practitioners. There has remained the undercurrent of contingent uncertainty and randomness as a fundamental aspect of nature. To be sure, this probably contributed to the strictly empirical, yet deeply misguided manifesto of 20th-century scientific atheism, Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity.

As a result, this mindset has been taught to all students of science for over a century. Breaking free is difficult. This conundrum was noted by Walter Elsasser, the eminent geophysicist, who dared to question the reigning paradigm.

As Elsasser wrote, a different metaphysical framework when theorizing about biology comprises

...an entirely new way of looking at nature which has no counterpart in the quantitative physical sciences ... [T]hat idea is very hard to assimilate since it differs so much from all the traditional thinking of science which has been drilled into us ever since we left grammar school.

Empiricism and positivism have dominated modern scientific discourse for over two centuries. But that narrative now faces imminent collapse as it confronts its utter failure to go beyond the inanimate world. Because the laws of physical science are context-independent, they hold no provenance over the living state, where everything is situational and relational.

Carl Woese, arguably the greatest molecular biologist of all time, observed:

In the last several decades we have seen the molecular reductionist reformulation of biology grind to a halt, its vision of the future spent. Biology must choose to break free of reductionist hegemony, reintegrate itself and press forward once more as a fundamental science. This means an emphasis on holistic, "non-linear," emergent biology with understanding the nature of biologic form as the primary defining goal of a new biology.

So now we stand on the precipice of an entirely new paradigm that at last provides the ways and means of a truer and deeper understanding of an organism. Recognizing that a neo-Humean reductionist approach to biology can never explain specified irreducible complexity or overcome Dembski's Design Inference, we are free to move on to dispositionalism or powers ontology.

In the words of Michael Behe,

The simplicity that was once expected to be the foundation of life has proven to be a phantom; instead, systems of horrendous irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the 20th Century who have gotten used to thinking of life as a result of simple natural laws.

We can overcome the shock described by Behe with this one unifying assertion: intentionality is an undeniable property of the living state, which confers the power of purpose on the organism. Dispositionalism or powers ontology is the only metaphysical framework that accommodates this reality. Although Aristotle did not understand the origin of final causality (telos), we must emulate his willingness to recognize that a fact is a fact.

From this point onward, we stand ready to further elucidate all that these observations entail.