Evolution
Intelligent Design
The Metaphysics of Irreducible Complexity

In a previous post I discussed the reducibility of materialist natural law in contrast to divine natural law. I noted the reason for the failure of materialist natural law to explain the specified complexity of organisms: those laws are formally constructed on the basis of the context independence of the variables within their explanatory domain. Yet given the reality that all of life is utterly context dependent, the necessity for the failure of materialist natural law to explain life then becomes abundantly clear.
Thus it is no overstatement to claim that the concept of irreducible complexity (articulated by A. N. Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, and Michael Behe) stands as one of the most significant pillars of intelligent design theory. The inability of materialists to convincingly argue against its validity has led many life scientists and philosophers to move away from their previously long held commitment to the neo-Darwinian paradigm. Michael Behe’s articulation of the concept of irreducible complexity, in Darwin’s Black Box (1996), can be seen as a seminal event in the search for a new paradigm that explains life.
But while the specified complexity of life is irreducible in scientific terms, can we still understand it at some fundamental level? Or does the failure of conventional mechanistic science to account for irreducible complexity leave us with no rational means of comprehending the world around us?
Not Just Enormous or Spectacular
The physical scientist and the humanist philosopher alike must acknowledge what biology now tells us: that the complexity of life isn’t just enormous or spectacular. For not only is it irreducible, it is quite literally unfathomable. Its vastness exceeds that of the universe itself!
For example, David Gelernter and Anthony Flew conceded the inadequacy of Darwinian theory on the basis of the complexity of proteins. In Arrival of the Fittest (2015), Andreas Wagner, one of the foremost modern-day defenders of neo-Darwinism, found it necessary to propose a painstakingly intricate theoretic model to explain the emergence of functional polypeptide/proteins via the neo-Darwinian paradigm, only to unwittingly acknowledge “that the principles of (life’s) innovation are concealed, even beyond the molecular architecture of DNA, in a hidden architecture of life with an otherworldly beauty.”
But Consider This
A single protein is far, far less to an organism than what a single nut or bolt is to a Boeing 787! The 90 billion neurons in your brain with their 100 trillion synapses, all appropriately arranged to give you the ability to read this sentence, arose from a single fertilized cell, which also spawned 36,000,000,000,000 other highly specialized cells. And within each of these thirty trillion cells is another galaxy of molecular components that must operate, cooperate, and orchestrate with exquisite, unfailing precision, every nanosecond of every day, in order for you to keep breathing!
Where did all this come from? How did we get here? How can we achieve even the dimmest apprehension of the cause and genesis of these facts of life? Neo-Darwinism and Newtonian mechanics utterly fail to provide those answers.
Acknowledging that mechanistic science cannot now, nor ever will, reduce the irreducible, there is only one source to which we can turn…: the science of knowledge itself, the meta of physics, i.e., metaphysics.
Explicating the Inexplicable
There are numerous metaphysical systems at our disposal to employ, from Plato to Pythagoras to Newton to Descartes to Kant to Wittgenstein, etc. But in order for any metaphysical system to succeed, it must be capable of explicating the otherwise inexplicable complexity of life. And in my view, the metaphysical system most capable of this inquiry is Thomistic Aristotelianism (TA). It is the one of the few systems that translates the facts of life into comprehensible language. But most importantly, it also includes that most fundamental context-dependent facet of life on which all organisms depend and operate: purpose.
And the unique and straightforward way in which TA invokes purpose is by proclaiming the self-evident truth that purpose isjust as real as matter and energy. Going further, according to TA, purpose is more fundamental even than matter and energy.
Four Basic Causes
That’s because TA defines four basic irreducible causes that account for every existing object: material, formal, mechanistic/efficient, and final. The first three refer to the matter of a substance, the form/function it embodies and/or performs, and the mechanical/efficient process by which the matter was constructed into its form. And this is where the comprehensibility of TA is illustrated. I challenge the reader to identify any natural existent that does not embody form and matter and a process of actualization, from subatomic particles to supernovae.
But the fourth cause is the most important of all: final cause, aka telos. Because it is in fact the cause of the other three causes.
And this is why purpose is more fundamental than even matter or energy. Because matter and energy are embodied by material, efficient, and formal causation, and final causality is what causes them to be manifest in physical reality.
And by now, if you’ve been reading previous essays in this series on the science of purpose, you know that final causality is purpose, such that purpose is immanent in nature.
T. rex and Mastodons
From here, an explanation of how and why there are such irreducibly complex entities as coagulation cascades, bacterial flagella, fingernails, and the human brain, and why other complex entities like T. rex and mastodons (that’s an adult and a calf at the top of this article) no longer exist, becomes just a matter of invoking these basic principles. For example, if you are a vertebrate and you need to prevent fatal exsanguination from superficial injuries, you must form blood clots. If you are a bacterium, and you need to be mobile to retreat from noxious stimuli or to acquire food, you need a flagellum. If you once were T. rex or a mastodon, you failed to rearrange your form in order to survive in a changing environment.
Now, these examples may seem to be nothing more than vastly oversimplified truisms. But that is because we have been indoctrinated in the habit of reducing empirical observations to mechanism. But Behe has already quite thoroughly pointed out that there is no known mechanism for how bacteria acquired flagella or how blood clotting emerged in vertebrates. Again, it is for the simple reason that none of this can happen by pure mechanism. In order to overcome the ceaseless and pervasive indoctrination of mechanism, one must acknowledge the foremost imperative of Thomistic Aristotelian metaphysics: purpose, not mechanism, is indispensable to understanding the complexity of life.
In an Evolution News post by Daniel Witt, my thinking on this was compared to that of one of the most important theoretical biologists of the last fifty years, Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman has written, “… we are at the end of reductionism, and at the watershed of evolving life. Now the machine metaphor since Descartes, perfected by Newton, leads us to think of organisms, as Monod stated, as molecular machines. …But in the diachronic becoming of the biosphere, life is an ongoing unprestatable, non-algorithmic, non-mechanical process selected for fitness” (emphasis in the original).
And as stated many times previously throughout this series, I challenge any reader to identify anything whatsoever that does not serve a purpose in the biosphere, from the quaternary open valences of the carbon atom, to the properties of hydrogen and oxygen fundamental to reduction and oxidation, or the particular qualities of water for solvency, UV protection, thermal regulation, and life’s internal fluidity, all the way up to every single chemical reaction in every organelle in every cell in every organ in all organisms.
Life Itself
The vastness of life’s complexity is no longer unfathomable when seen through the light of purpose. Purpose or telos thus restores the comprehensibility of that which is most spectacular, wondrous, and beautiful in nature: as Robert Rosen put it in the title of a 1991 book, Life Itself.
As I said, it is comprehensible, yet so simple that Aristotle figured all this out 2,400 years ago, through pure logic and honest observation. Honest enough, that is, to be sure to include that most immanent and fundamental aspect of our existence, purpose.