Is there a Purpose for a Porpoise?

"Being put under water is fine for fish but bad for zebras."

Mary Midgley

That example, presented by the philosopher Mary Midgley, was such an unexpected scenario that it brought a smile to my face.  Although humorous, what she states is obviously true once it is stated.  And that was her intent -- to provide an example so obvious that it would support a more general point.  As she put it before giving her zebra example:

"Our own planet...is full of organisms,
beings which all steadily pursue
their own characteristic ways of life,
beings that can only be understood by grasping
the distinctive thing that each of them
is trying to be and do."

And behind that statement (which could be demonstrated by taking a tour of a zoo) lay Midgley's even broader philosophical point:

          "It is obvious that our own planet...is riddled with purpose."

Why was Mary Midgley having to jump through so many argumentative hoops (such as imagining zebras under water) in order to support her main point that there was purpose on our planet, and therefore purpose to be found in the universe?  It was because so many scientists with high media-profiles over the past few decades have been claiming that the world is without purpose.  One of the most quoted of such claims has been that of the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, who wrote:

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect
if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

The whole problem can be traced back to the limitations our modern form of science placed upon itself as it began to develop in the 17th century: In order to obtain objective information that was clear and precise, it set out to exclude questions about value, meaning, and purpose.  The consequence is that if you more and more view the world solely through the lens of science’s knowledge, the world can easily come to look as if there is no purpose in it.  Similarly, it can come to look as if the world contains no values, consisting of only those objective facts science extracts from it.  But again, as Midgley points out:

"Value, in fact, is not an extra feature pasted onto the facts by human observers. 
It is a real emergent property of situations in the world. 
Each kind of organism acts according to its own values,...
the characteristic pattern of needs and capacities which determines its direction."

How many pieces?

What can make an overall pattern hard to discern is that there is such a multitude of entities in the world, each with its own capacities and direction.  Even though science can provide us fascinating and sometimes useful information about the world, we have to enlarge our vision beyond the limitations of science to perceive the larger patterns of the world.  We need more than scientific facts.  We also need a philosophical or spiritual vision that discerns a larger pattern in which facts and values coalesce, allowing meaning to emerge.

Another philosopher, Max Oelschlaeger, provides an example, writing:

"By using the telescope, Galileo’s eyes gathered additional light,
and the telescopic image itself was magnified, thus extending his mental vision....
What he lost was the sweeping field of view of the naked eye astronomy....
And perhaps, in his intense concentration,
he lost also the sounds and smells of the night
and the awareness of himself as a conscious man
beholding a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle."

~ ~ ~

(Do you have a way of "stepping back" to gain a broader, more meaningful perspective on our world?)

(The quotations by Mary Midgley are from "Why The Idea Of Purpose Won't Go Away,"
originally published in Philosophy, Oct., 2011. pp. 558 & 559.)

(The quotation by Richard Dawkins is from River Out of Eden, © 1995. p. 155.)

(The quotation by Max Oelschlaeger is from The Idea of Wilderness, © 1991. p. 78.)