Atheism and Theism 13actually affect embryological development as well as all the other continuing
activities in living cells. These last have indeed been given detailed explana-
tions in certain particular cases which have lent themselves to investigation or
which have been the object of intense study because of their importance for
medicine and agriculture.
The new teleology does not at all rest its case, then, on the appearance that
the organs of animals and plants are as if they were designed for a purpose.
It rests its case on the grand structure of the universe and the beauty of its
laws as discovered by contemporary physics and cosmology. There are also
arguments from the appearance of ‘fine tuning’ in the ultimate laws, such as
that the universe is of such a nature that it is suitable for the emergence of
intelligent life. Such a teleology need not be in the least controverted by the
mechanistic nature of modern biology.
Have I exaggerated the mechanistic nature of contemporary biology?
It may be easy enough to catch biologists in their laboratories engaging in
apparently teleological talk, e.g. ‘What is the purpose of T-cells?’ ‘What
is this enzyme for?’ However, this is only ‘as if ’ talk. Natural selection
mimics teleology. So it is heuristically valuable for biologists who are invest-
igating how an organ or an enzyme works to help themselves by asking
what purpose the organ or the enzyme subserves. The biologist does not
believe that the organ or the enzyme came about by design, as might a certain
feature of an electronic circuit. The feature of the electronic circuit was put
in by the engineer who designed the circuit. Someone external, puzzling
about how the circuit worked, might be helped by conjecturing the purpose
for which the designer put it in. Similarly a biologist might ask heuristic-
ally ‘What is the purpose of T-cells?’ even while recognizing that there was
no equivalent of the electronic engineer or of the engineer’s purpose. It is
useful ‘as if ’ talk.^18 I think that this ‘as if ’ teleology is recognized by most
professional biologists, though there are probably some who are not explicitly
sure about the philosophical issues, and others, especially in the more periph-
eral parts of biology, nearer to ‘natural history’, who may believe in genuine
teleology.
Usually it is ‘as if ’ a feature of an organism is for some purpose connected
with the survival of the organism, or more accurately (remembering Richard
Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’) of replication of the genetic material, so that, for
example, helping a near relative and other altruistic behaviour can lead to
such replication, i.e. survival of genetypes.^19 Of course this heuristics or ‘as
if ’ purposiveness can backfire. Recalling the example of the ‘sump hole’ of
the human sinus that is at the top not at the bottom, we should be misled
if we thought that it was as if it was there for a purpose, unless of course we
were referring to its being as if for good drainage in four-legged mammals
from which we are all descended. There can also be features of an organism