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Creation and End-Directedness

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Abstract

Does the act of creation show itself anywhere within the creation? A common contemporary ontology tends to see two possibilities for those who want to defend a notion of creation. The first is to argue that an original set of materials was brought into existence out of nothing by divine action a long time ago. The second, in the tradition of Paley, posits a specific divine action that oversees the development of some of the materials into entities with an end-directedness. Much contemporary energy focuses on the second possibility. The argument of the paper is that the ontology behind both of these possibilities, which limits itself to the notions of a creation of materials and the building of some of the materials into end-directed entities, conceals rather than reveals the idea of creation. The paper tries to show how an Aristotelian sense of nature, with its recognition of internal teleology and original spontaneity, offers a better starting point for coming up against the mystery of divine creative activity.

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Notes

  1. A poultry company situated in northern Victoria

  2. ‘(I)f a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for its present purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct forms’ (Darwin 1862: 348).

  3. The point is nicely summed-up in a title of William A. Dembski: No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence (Dembski 2002).

  4. For example, Nancey Murphy believes that as neuroscience progressively reduces faculties of the mind to the functioning of certain regions or systems of the brain ‘it becomes more and more appealing to say that it is in fact the brain that performs these functions’ (Murphy 1998: 13).

  5. The philosopher Michael Ruse has a succinct expression of this view: ‘it has proven impossible to distinguish between a biological phenomenon like sweating and a non-biological phenomenon like a swinging pendulum, because, questions of function apart, there is no essential difference’ (Ruse 1973: 192).

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  1. Lecturer in Philosophy, Good Shepherd College, 20 Ponsonby Rd., Box 3440, Auckland, 1011, New Zealand

    John F. Owens

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  1. John F. Owens
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Correspondence to John F. Owens.

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Owens, J.F. Creation and End-Directedness. SOPHIA 49, 489–498 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0218-0

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