134 Paul Sheldon Davies
But suppose I am mistaken. Suppose McLaughlin is right that Blumenbach’s view,
relative to the standards of his own day, did indeed expand their view of the natural
order. It nevertheless remains that Blumenbach’s formative power, relative to what is
known today, belongs to a worldview we no longer regard as true. Like Paley’s God,
Blumenbach’s formative power serves the theoretical function of a surrogate agent, that
is, a center of command and control with respect to the perpetuation of living forms.
Paley’s God, after all, creates and perpetuates the forms of life by virtue of the intentional
capacities of any creative agent, namely beliefs, desires, and intentions. But desires
and beliefs are just beneath the surface of Blumenbach’s formative drive. This drive, as I
have said, is a motivating source. It provides the creative urge that drives living things to
grow, reproduce, and so forth, much like the desires or the will of Paley’s God. This drive
is also a form-giving source. It provides the species-specifi c architecture that directs
development, and in that regard it plays the same role that beliefs play in the mind of a
creating God. And all this, of course, is something we no longer accept as true. According
to contemporary theories of development, reproduction, and evolution, the forms of life
that exist are not the products of any center of command and control but are rather the
temporary and evolving products of a host of decentralized causal factors.^8 So even if
Blumenbach’s appeal to Newton’s argument for gravity is more credible than I suggest,
there nonetheless is an equally powerful analogy between Blumenbach and Paley. And
that analogy, relative to today’s sciences, places both views beyond the pale of a natural-
istic worldview.
Kant of course famously refused to commit himself to any ontological claim concerning
the source of these originating and motivating types. He insisted instead that such sources
are beyond the reach of human cognition and thus that we must settle for the regulative
claim that in order to investigate living things we must conceptualize them “as if ” created
by a superlative form of intelligence.^9 On this view, human knowledge in biology rests
upon our seeing the living in terms that, for all we can know, do not truly apply—an
acceptable cost in light of Kant’s critique of human knowledge.^10 Some of Kant’s contem-
poraries and successors, however, were not so modest.^11 The most likely source of Goethe’s
abstract, archetypal forms, for example, is presumably the creativity of the divine. Not
that Goethe’s God acts in the world by trumping laws of nature but rather that the deity
so structured the world that living things were formed and continue to be perpetuated by
a power that operates from within every living being. And that is to say that several of
Kant’s contemporaries and successors, like Paley and Blumenbach, were ultimately driven
outside the natural order in their attempt to understand the living.
These, then, are some of the most obvious historical roots of our concept “purpose.”^12
And it is telling that they descend to us from a range of theological worldviews we no
longer regard as true or promising. This, as I say, is not to assume that all theological
claims are false. It is to point to the undeniable fact that progress in modern biology has
been marked by the growing irrelevance of theological concepts to our knowledge of living