Author Archives: Jon Garvey

In two recent posts here and here I tried to show, via the route of Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way, that “randomness” as it is actually found in the world is a sign of order, not disorder, and therefore points to God no less than does final causation in nature.

In the last post I tried to unpack Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way of reasoning to the existence of God by the existence of consistent cause and effect (seeing teleology or final causation as just as real in the world as efficient causation). Of course, it’s not a proof, or if it is it’s one that doesn’t compel skeptics, which amounts to the same thing. But it is powerful, time-honoured and has never been refuted. It may surprise some, as it surprised me, that the Fifth Way makes allowance for chance as evidence for this aspect of causation.

OK, that title was just an attention grabber, because Aquinas didn’t propose a Sixth Way, and the point I want to make in the next two two posts is covered in Aquinas’s Fifth Way, but it’s seldom appreciated. And that is that chance itself is part of the metaphysical argument for God. I think that’s worthy of discussion.

The Third Way is the project of a group of scientists dissatisfied with Neo-Darwinism as a theory of evolution, yet also committed to naturalism. I’ve commented on it a couple of times before, firstly last August, when I praised its openness to exploring new ideas, including those involving teleological mechanisms; and subsequently in discussion to demonstrate that, despite frequent claims of total solidarity, there are indeed those within science wanting to replace, rather than merely extend, Neodarwinism.