Musings in Bioethics

Before I get back to lighter posts, I decided to combine homework with the blog. For ethics class, we are reading Gilson's From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A journey in final causality, species, and evolution. Next week, we have a midterm covering Card. Schonborn's forward to the book, and that part of the text treating pre-evolution ideas. In class, our professor gives us contextual information, but never refers to the text. For the mid-term, we ought to be able to pull together ideas from lectures and book to write a meaningful essay. But, I won't be there for the exam, as I will be on my way to Turin to pray before the Shroud. So, I will write before I go, and here I will brainstorm what I read yesterday at the bar.
Foreward: Schonborn on Gilson.
The purpose of Gilson's work in this particular book is to prove that final causality, being neither theological nor scientific in the modern sense, fits in philosophy of life where it further illumines that which we learn scientifically. Schonborn lauds Gilson for his effort, showing how necessary it is to combat the twin scientific heresies of materialism and scientism. He explains how materialism, while useful in calculations, is often taken to reduce all things to a collection of moving parts, rather than to acknowledge unified wholes. And he speaks of scientism as the belief that modern science is the only valid way of knowing at least anything material, effectively eliminating theology, philosophy, and common sense. He shows the development of materialism and scientism from the beginning of modern science and the overthrow of ancient and medieval philosophy. Yet he also points out weaknesses within these systems which lead to their own undoing. And final and formal causality (Bacon's "metaphysical causes) play a key role.
Ch. 1, Aristotelian Prologue, and Ch. 2, The Mechanist Objection
In his preface, Gilson explains that he has no plan to insert finality into science, nor to use theology to explain final causality, but that his intention is to show that final causality is as helpful as it is unavoidable in biophilosophy (covering species and evolution). In the first chapter, he explains Aristotle's stance on the causes--his introduction of the four causes and his surprise that no one earlier treated the final cause. In doing so, Gilson does not take the texts normally cited by philosophers (such as the Physics and On the Soul), but rather uses more biological texts, On the Parts of Animals and The History of Animals. Here he discusses Aristotle's observations on homogeneous parts (such as flesh) and heterogeneous parts (such as faces) of which all living things are made. Homogeneous parts divide only into smaller parts, such as flesh dividing into pieces of flesh, and can be explained with only the material cause. Heterogeneous parts (of which all living beings are necessarily composed) are divided into distinct parts, as, for example, faces are divided into eyes, ears, etc, and not into faces. Heterogeneous parts require more explanation that material causality, for they must be formed in some way for some reason by someone/something, and these, therefore, require formal, final, and efficient causes as well. Schonborn has already pointed out that not all of these causes are taken into consideration for modern, practical sciences which aim at finding laws, generalizations, and using such to control nature. However, final and formal causes cannot be ignored when attempting to learn, speculatively, about living things. Gilson spends most of this chapter explaining what Aristotle means by final causality, and how it is inescapable, and helpful even today, despite scientism's contrary views.
Modern science from Newton's and Galileo's, etal's scientific revolution has proved very successful in that it is very practical. Thanks to the new science, as one of my professor's has stated, we now can send kittens to the moon in microwaves. It works so practically by ignoring Bacon's "metaphysical causes," and reducing wholes to parts and explaining the parts to make sense of the whole. These scientists have no intention of answering the "why" of nature in order to know, but the"how" in order to imitate and control. Because they choose not to answer "why," which is left to the philosophers, they cannot legitimately say that there is nothing to be learned from seeking final causes.
Ch. 3, Finality and Evolution A. Fixism
Before this book, I had never heard of "fixism," though I was able to guess what it meant based on where it is used here. It had never needed to be named or defined before scientism and transformism took over, but someone wanted a name for the school of thought whereby creation is considered to have been created all at once and perfectly, as described in the book of Genesis. This idea would be held on the grounds that God is perfect, and would therefore create perfectly from the beginning, or that like begets like (rather than unlike), and can be traced back to an original parent or parental pair that is like. Then comes the danger of classification, and the problem of whether the individual or the species exists, and which is more real. This becomes dangerous when classifying similar species in one family, and, for instance, relating horses, donkeys, and mules into one family, because then one could link man and primate into one family. Of course, this is exactly realized in tranformism, coming next.