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.)

When the “Lightning” Strikes

"Lightning, a kite, and an almanac by Dick."  It almost sounds like a Jeopardy clue under the category-heading of "Founding Fathers."  And the contestant who can hit their button first and say "Who was Benjamin Franklin?" gets the points.

So frequently repeated are the story of Franklin flying a kite in the lightning storm and the title of Poor Richard's Almanack that we rarely get a chance to learn about the other contributions of Franklin. (Whose face and build are also widely recognized from the many portraits of him, some with the illumination of a lightning strike.).  Some people in the general public might know a bit about his having lived in France for awhile as part of his public service for his countrymen back in America.  Or maybe know about his fiddling with science even beyond that kite.  But we hear little about his religious habits or his spirituality.

That omission is why I was struck by one page in the book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment by Tom Shachtman. That author emphasizes that:

"The Founding Fathers' science was in no way opposite to their religion. 
The notion that science and religion were antithetical
is a nineteenth-century construct."

And in regard to Franklin, Shachtman writes:

"By the age of fifteen, Franklin wrote in his Autobiography, he had become
a doubter of organized religion...until he chanced upon printed lectures that
tried to debunk Deism: [Franklin wrote:] ' They wrought an effect on me quite contrary
to what was intended by them, for the arguments of the Deists...appeared to me
much stronger than the refutations; in short I soon became a thorough Deist.' 
In his twenties, he set out his religious beliefs
in a ten-page liturgy, complete with a hymn."

Benjamin Franklin's explanation of his newly found religious orientation continues:

"I think it seems required of me, and my Duty, as a Man,
to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING....
When I stretch my Imagination thro' and beyond...the visible fix'd Stars themselves,
into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill'd with Suns like ours...,
then this little Ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow Imagination,
to be almost Nothing, and my self less than nothing."

There were two things I liked in these passages.  The first was Franklin's ability to remain sufficiently open to change his mind.  He had apparently began reading the arguments trying to refute the existence of God because they aligned with his doubts about organized religion; but he turned in a different direction when he found the refutations lacking.  That turn in direction put him on a course where, several years later, he could put to pen his own majestic expression of religious belief.

The second thing I liked was Franklin's expression of his need to feel reverence (the paying of "Divine Regards," as he interestingly put it). Our media today are so quickly drawn towards brash voices and dominating personalities that it is easy to forget that we are often better served by humility.  And in religious and spiritual lives, humility is cultivated through following a path of reverence.

~ ~ ~

How do you think we can find a good midpoint between the extremes of brashness and timidity?

(Quotations are taken from Shachtman's Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries, © 2014, pp. xii-xiv.)
(Both pictures are details from the originals, both of which are in the public domain.)

“Music, ‘Arabian nights,’ and Darwin”

It is sometimes the small, unexpected details that catch my eye when I am reading history or biography.  So it was when I was reading part of Gertrude Himmelfarb's book Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution.  I have read a number of books about the response to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.  But my attention was caught by what the British novelist George Eliot wrote in her diary on the evening of the very day Darwin's revolutionary book was published.  Describing how she had occupied herself that very evening, Eliot wrote:  "music, 'Arabian nights,' and Darwin."  What a combination of evening activities and reading before turning into bed!

George Eliot

George Eliot (a woman who wrote under that pseudonym) is most known for her somewhat psychological novels.  But she was also part of a movement of intellectuals who could no longer find credible the church's theological descriptions of the world.  To many such intellectuals, the church's theological concepts could no longer illuminate life.

When I was in college, I read an English translation made by George Eliot of Feuerbach's difficult book The Essence of Christianity, which was part of those 19th-century struggles. Feuerbach maintained that statements about God were actually just projections of human beings' own ideal image of themselves.

However, when I think of George Eliot's writings, what comes to mind are not those difficult religious struggles of the 19th century, but instead a coincidental conjunction I once experienced between Nature and Eliot's novel Silus Marner.

My high-school English class was reading together part of the novel in class.  Our English class was held in one of the wood, portable buildings that had been set up because the student body had grown larger than the main brick building.  Most students did not like having a class in one of those wood "shacks," but I did.  I liked the way the shacks (without air-conditioning) had windows on both sides of the classroom, thus allowing more air and sunlight to flow in.

On the particular day I remember, we were reading a passage in which the outcast Silus Marner experiences what seems to him a miracle.  While he is in a catatonic state, a small child with radiant golden hair crawls into his house through the open door, thus seeming to Silus to appear suddenly when he awakes.  He feels as if he has been graced with a gift from God upon seeing the child, which seemed to have a wonderful glow about it.

Although I knew the scene was contrived, the beauty of that scene seemed to stand out even more brightly to me because, as we read it, I was so aware of the sunlight right there at that moment, shining beautifully into our classroom.

~~~

Have you read a novel or story in which a scene was uncannily real to you?  Why?

(The painting of Eliot is in the public domain

because its copyright has expired.)