Teleology Quotes

“Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.

Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.”
― Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe

“As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Science of Discworld

“It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation).”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so doing—that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be altered, without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. Darwinism affirms on the contrary, that there was no express construction concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudinous variations of the Feline stock, many of which died out from want of power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they throve and persisted, in proportion to the advantage over their fellows thus offered to them.

Far from imagining that cats exist 'in order' to catch mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist 'because' they catch mice well—mousing being not the end, but the condition, of their existence. And if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation of the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that the cats have remained invariable, but that such varieties as have incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, less fitted to get on in the world than the existing stock.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Criticism on "The Origin of Species"

“According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.

For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found.

Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are perfect and cannot be improved; the Darwinian theory simply affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but admits the possibility of indefinite improvement.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Criticism on "The Origin of Species"

“Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“The ultimate foundation of spirituality is the recognition that there can't be such a thing as a purposeful life in a purposeless universe.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“إن إنجازات البشرية الكبرى في كل المجالات تقوم أساساً على هذه القصية الذاتية الفردية والجماعية في الاخيتار والقرار وتعبئة الطاقات وتدبر السبل، وصولاً غلى تحقيق غايات البناء والنماء. تلك هي كذلك الخاصية الأساس لطاقات الحياة الوثابة المصرة والمثابرة والمتحدية ص 156”
― مصطفى حجازي, إطلاق طاقات الحياة: قراءات في علم النفس الإيجابي

“Defendamo-nos de dizer que há leis na natureza. Existem apenas necessidades: não existe ninguém que comande ou obedeça, ninguém que infrinja. Quando souberdes que inexistem fins, sabereis igualmente que inexiste acaso; pois, unicamente sob um mundo de fins é que a palavra “acaso” toma sentido. Excusemo-nos de dizer que a morte é o contrário da vida. A vida não passa de uma variedade de morte e variedade mui rara. Defendemo-nos de acreditar que o mundo cria incessantemente o novo. Inexistem substâncias eternamente duráveis; a matéria é um engano semelhante ao deus dos eleatas.

Quando acabaremos com nossos cuidados e nossas precauções? Quando deixaremos de ser obscurecidos por todas essas sombras de Deus? Quando teremos despojado dos atributos divinos a natureza? Quando teremos direito, nós homens, de nos tornarmos naturais, com a natureza pura, reencontrada, liberada?”
― Nietzsche Friedrich, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.]”
― George Gaylord Simpson

“Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God.”
― Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

“For in the ever-repeated origination of highly organized individuals from an infinitesimal germ, the working-out of a prearranged plan of growth and development seems obvious. Thus the very idea of “development” which the facts of reproduction suggested stood in the way of applying to the living kingdom the same categories of genesis that were applied on mechanistic principles to reality at large. Indeed, the term “evolution” denoted originally just this phenomenon of individual genesis, and by no means the genesis of species. On the contrary, “evolution” in its literally sense presupposes the existence of the species, because it is precisely this which, in the person of parent individual, provides the prearranged plan to be “evolved” in every given case of generation. What evolves is not the model itself but its re-embodiment in each generation from germ to maturity: what evolves was involved in the germ, its potency there derived from its act in the progenitor. In terms of cause-effect relation, then, the parent accounts not only for its offspring’s existence, but also for its offspring’s form by its own possession of this selfsame form. This is a pattern very different from mechanistic chain of cause and effect and strongly suggest the operation of a causa formalis in addition to a causa effciens, or the existence of a substantial form, which were otherwise banned from the whole system of natural explanation. In short, the very concept of development was opposed to that of mechanics and still implied some version of other of classic ontology.”
― Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology

“It happened improvisationally, indeed probably unintentionally. Participants solved one problem and created others; they reacted as often as they acted affirmatively; they moved by experience and intuition, without an overarching theory; and the whole affair took decades, involved many different actors, and coheres largely in retrospect.”
― Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

“There is in human nature a distinct drive to know, a distinguishable theoretical impulse or urge to understand. It is at work at every level of cognition, from the simplest impersonal judgment, like ‘it is hot’, to the most comprehensive mathematical or metaphysical system. But like other fundamental drives, the moral, for example, and the aesthetic, what it is seeking - what will ultimately satisfy it - is far from apparent at its lower levels and is defined only gradually in the course of a long advance. But that advance is not simply a matter of blind trial and error. Its direction is set by its end, which works as an immanent ideal within the process of thought. The pressure exerted by this ideal increases as intelligence rises in the scale. …

As thought matures and realizes in fuller measure the end it is seeking, that end lays its movement under increasingly firm constraint. … The higher our altitude on the long ascent of intelligence, the better is our position to discern what lies at the summit. To be sure we never see this clearly. In no human activity do we ever fully know what we are about. We are aware of the end, or we could do nothing but wander aimlessly. We never see it clearly, so we are condemned to much groping.”
― Brand Blanshard, Reason & Analysis

“Just by looking at accelerating complexification of the Universe of which we are an integral part, we can conclude that we are not subjected to a random walk of evolution, nor are we subjected to a deterministic script of Nature, the truth lies somewhere in between – we are part of teleological evolution.”
― Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution

“There appears to be no end to the evidence of fine-tuning and design coming from scientific discovery.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“If a purposeful Tuner exists, it makes sense that the deeper our search into the features of the cosmos, the more evidence of fine-tuning this search will reveal. If no purposeful Tuner exists, then a deeper search will reveal less and less specificity and intentionality. A fine-tuner's attributes and purposes will become either increasingly clear or increasingly vague.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“My hope is that evidence for the exquisite fine-tuning observed at all astronomical levels, from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the ground beneath our feet, arouses a profound sense of awe and wonder. My greater hope is that this awe and wonder will inspire readers to ponder the deep questions raised by a close-up glimpse of nature's unfolding story.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“More than 140 different 'exterior' features of the universe, including the values of the constants that govern the laws of physics, must fit within narrowly specified ranges. This reality reasonably points to a Source with the capacity for intentionality, for deliberate, purposeful design and implementation—in other words, a Creator who transcends the well-crafted cosmos.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“The history and features of the solar system's asteroid-comet belts, along with the gravitational influences of the Moon's mass and early orbital proximity, ensured that Earth would receive sufficient impact events, especially before animals appeared, to salt Earth's crust with rich ore deposits. These ores played a crucial role in the early launch of metallurgy and, more recently, in the development of global, high-technology civilization. On the other hand, major impact events during the human era have been so infrequent as to pose no risk to humanity's survival nor to global civilization.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“Physical life is not fluid. It will not and cannot adjust to any old universe. The fine-tuning that astronomers observe indicates that even very slight alterations to the universe's characteristics would rule out the possible existence of physical life.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“Just as the interior structure of our supercluster of galaxies, our galaxy cluster, our galaxy, our local galactic neighborhood, our star, our system of planets, asteroids, and comets, and our Moon differ from the normal pattern in precise ways that favor the possibility of advanced life on Earth, so, too, does Earth's core.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“The 8% level is the minimum required for the existence of large-bodied animals that lack digestive tracts and internal organs (the Avalon animals, e.g. sponges and jellyfish). The 10% level is the minimum required for animals with complex internal organs (the Cambrian animals). One of the great marvels of life history is that the Avalon and Cambrian animals representing several Avalon phyla and 30+ Cambrian phyla appeared in what may be considered a geologic 'instant' after each of the oxygen levels was attained.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“Like the Great Oxidation Event, the Great Unconformity injected an enormous quantity of oxygen into the atmosphere through a massive and efficient subduction of organic carbon into Earth's mantle. When this event occurred, the oxygen quantity in Earth's atmosphere jumped from 1% or less up to 8%. Just before the time of the Cambrian explosion 543 million years ago, another major continental erosion event coupled with oceanic sediment subduction led to a jump in the atmosphere oxygen level from 8 to 10%.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“[The features of Earth's mantle], among others, appear so intricate and specific that Earth may well be the only rocky planet on which plate tectonic activity, at a survivable level for life, has been operating for an extended period, much less approaching 4 billion years.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core

“Neptune's complex migration history, known as the 'jumping Neptune' altered the Kuiper Belt's properties in the ways, all of which have a bearing on the possibility for advanced life and civilization on Earth.”
― Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core