In my previous article, I explained how the recent book Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America, by C. W. Howell, asserts that intelligent design is incompatible with Thomas Aquinas’ teachings, based on a misreading of Aquinas’ philosophical writings. Now we’ll see that Howell’s misunderstanding of Aquinas stems from a deeper error, a failure to grasp Aristotle’s views on nature, causation, and design.
Aristotle’s writings, following the path laid by Socrates and Plato, provided the intellectual groundwork for Western thought in logic, science, ethics, and politics. They also, through Aquinas, profoundly influenced Western theology. As a result, contemporary debates about the detectability of design in nature often draw on Aristotle’s metaphysics, employing his insights into causality and the structure of reality. Unfortunately, references to Aristotle used to promote theistic evolution and deny the detectability of design invariably misinterpret his philosophical framework.
Mathematical biologist and philosopher Richard Sternberg details these errors in his chapter in God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design titled “Logos and Materialism: Why Aristotle Favors Intelligent Design and not Physicalist Thomism.” I will summarize a few of his arguments. Those who wish a full treatment of the topic should read his chapter, which extensively references leading scholars and primary sources.
Aristotle on Matter and Form
Howell contrasts intelligent design with what he believes is Aquinas’ and Aristotle’s understanding of teleology (purpose) in nature, quoting philosopher Edward Feser:
As Feser reads it, “[William] Dembski rejects the Aristotelian notion that teleology is intrinsic to natural substances and processes in favor of the Platonic-Paleyan conception of teleology as extrinsic or imposed on natural substances from outside by a designer. Again, that is precisely a mechanistic conception of causality, even if it is a theistic rather than atheistic version of mechanism.” (p. 153)
Addressing this critique requires understanding Aristotle’s framework of causation, which identifies four distinct kinds of causes operating in nature:
- Material cause — the matter out of which something is made, such as the wood and metal composing a ship.
- Formal cause — the structure or form that makes an entity what it is, like the ship’s blueprint or design.
- Efficient cause — the agent or process that brings the entity into being, such as a shipbuilder and construction process.
- Final cause — the purpose or end for which something exists, such as the ship’s role in transporting people or goods, rather than serving as a paperweight.
The materialist philosophers of Aristotle’s day reduced everything to matter and motion, denying form and purpose. Their modern heirs, scientific materialists, do the same, accepting only material and efficient causes, which they equate with the laws of physics (here, here). This reduction strips nature of intrinsic purpose, precisely what Aristotle rejected.
Aristotle on Animal Development
In stark contrast to Howell, Aristotle denied that the origin of animals could be explained purely through physical causes (Physics II.8). Instead, he believed that an immaterial soul or formal principle was transmitted from the male to the fertilized egg, serving as both the formal cause — by imparting the animal’s eternal form — and a non-physical efficient cause — by directing development toward that goal (GA 729a9-12). Aristotle likened the intelligent arranging of matter performed by the soul in this process to the activity of a housekeeper managing the operations and well-being of a household and its servants (GA 2.6 744b). His description of an intelligence guiding the construction of organisms is distinct from, yet coherent with, modern design arguments in biology.
Sternberg summarizes how Devin Henry, a leading scholar, describes Aristotle’s rejection of a materialist conception of life in favor of a design-based understanding:
Henry draws upon several of Aristotle’s works to show that he, like Plato, believed that matter by itself is inert. It has no self-creating powers that could craft the complex configurations associated with life. Aristotle also accepts Plato’s argument that chance acting over extended periods of time could never do anything creative. It will primarily corrupt artifacts and break them apart. Moreover, he accepts Plato’s view that a mind created the forms that define the arrangement of matter in living beings, and that forms direct the development of embryos toward the goals of the adult body plans. Aristotle presents a vision for life consistent with Plato’s understanding of life resulting from an intelligence shaping matter.
Sternberg details how Feser fails to appreciate the extent to which the formal principle represents an immaterial agent. This confusion coincides with a broader tendency among “physicalist Thomists” to reinterpret Aristotle through a modern materialist lens. Aristotle explicitly rejected the idea that form could be reduced to matter and physical processes. Instead, he taught that form and its guiding intelligence exist “prior to” matter, shaping it toward a purposeful end. By extension, evolutionary processes could never transform one animal into another with a fundamentally different essence or form. As Sternberg summarizes, “Defining essences are based on forms, and forms do not change for Aristotle, since they are eternal and therefore immutable.”
Reinterpreting Aristotle and Church History
One might wonder how Howell and other ID critics could so profoundly misinterpret Aristotle. Sternberg summarizes how Sophia Connell, another leading scholar, identifies the reason as pressure to conform to materialist assumptions about nature:
As Sophia Connell, senior lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, has identified in her masterful Aristotle on Female Animals: A Study of the Generation of Animals, not a few have an objective to portray Aristotle as “sympathetic . . . to materialism.” This is done so that the “idea of forms as causes in his metaphysics can then be softened and sublimated in order to fit with more modern philosophical tastes.” The reasoning is that “if forms are robust causes that must be present in order to complete physical causal chains, then Aristotle’s science is unacceptable by modern standards,” and so to be acceptable one must seek out an alternative where, say in heredity, “form has in Aristotle’s theory a totally materialist mechanism by which it is transmitted from parent to offspring.”
Christian scholars in other disciplines face the same pressure to reinterpret church history and theology to appease secular scientists. Such revisionism is illustrated in Howell’s quotation of philosopher and church historian David Bentley Hart:
David Bentley Hart contends that ID heralded a modern form of the Platonic demiurge, a creative but bungling craftsman who must work with the material already in existence in order to fashion creatures. As Hart writes, this modernist picture of God is “not the source of the existence of all things but rather only the Intelligent Designer and causal agent of the world of space and time, working upon materials that lie outside and below him, under the guidance of divine principles that lie outside and above him.”
Hart has shown a pattern of departing from historic Christian teaching (here, here, here), and his criticism of ID is no exception. He claims that the view that an intelligent agent directly created life reflects a Platonic demiurge, not the Christian God. Yet, his reference to a “bugling craftsman” does not reflect the view of Plato or ID proponents, but that of the most prominent theistic evolutionists.
The early Christians universally believed that God directly created the different forms of life, most notably humans. Many ID proponents embrace this view and argue that the extreme perfection seen in life supports it (here, here, here). In contrast, theistic evolutionists often argue that the “flawed design” purportedly identified in living systems demonstrates that different organisms resulted from what appears to be undirected natural processes (here, here). This belief parallels the gnostic heresy about creation that a demiurge ineptly created life independently of God, a belief universally rejected by early Christians. The role of the demiurge resembles the way many theistic evolutionists understand natural selection (here, here).