If a car were assembled by chance....

Bunthorne posted some interesting thoughts about natural teleology. I posted a long response on his blog, but then realized that I had essentially written my own blog post about natural ordering towards an end. It surrounds the question of whether a car assembled by chance would have a natural ordering towards an end.

I would say not. If a car came to be by random processes, what it would have is an order, but not an order to an end; or perhaps I should say that it would have an order towards a motion, but not an order towards an end, if that makes any sense at all.

I have two reasons for saying this.

First, only a mind can intend the good, and so only a mind can make an ordering towards an end. This is the foundation of Thomas’s 5th way. If no mind made the car, it would have a foundation for order towards an end–namely order–but it would not have actual ordering towards an end.

Second, a car is not a single substance and so does not have a good. The motion towards which the car has an order is not a good for the car, and so someone else whose good it is has to enter into the equation before the car’s motion can be considered an end.

Folks like Searle thing of a plant as like a car, that is, as a multitude of substances rather than as a single substance. Because of this, they do not think of the plant as having a good. Because of this, they do not think of the plant’s order towards a motion as ordering towards a good. Because of this, they do not perceive that a mind must stand behind the plant. Because of this, they fail to perceive the existence of God.

(Perhaps that last paragraph was overly ambitious, but it was rhetorically pleasing, so I did it.)

The reason people think of plants as multiple substances is because of a trick of the imagination. Everything we think of a part–part of a plant, part of a human, part of anything else–we imagine it, and our imaginations necessarily present that part to us as though it were a whole. Then we think of the parts of the parts as though they were wholes, and the cycle never ends. There is no ultimate substance for the imagination.