Causality and the Big Bang(er)

I’m currently reading a book on science, God and Intelligent Design theory, it’s called “God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?” by John Lennox. It is, by far, the best book I know of on science, philosophy and God. (Highly recommended). Anyway, I came upon this idea of “causality” and started learning about this old dude named Aristotle and his idea that there are 4 causes that explain the existence of every physical thing in the world. I found it very interesting.

Aristotle’s Four Causes

“Cause” just means “explanatory factor” or some type of answer to “Why?” questions.

1. Material Cause – what a thing is made of, what it consists of.

2. Formal Cause – the pattern, shape or form.

3. Efficient Cause – the process and effort that produced the thing.

4. Final Cause – the intended purpose or usefulness.

So how about an example. What are the Four Causes of a chair?

1. Material – wood, glue, nails or screws

2. Formal – this would be like the blueprint of the chair, the plan or idea of what the pieces were (legs, seat, back, glue, nails) and how they fit together to make the whole; the overall shape.

3. Efficient – this would be the “elbow grease” that went into making the chair, the effort or energy by a carpenter and his power tools.

4. Final – we sit on a chair, that’s the end goal or purpose of a chair; to sit on it.

I think Aristotle is missing one though (maybe I’m wrong, I haven’t read a lot of Aristotle… ). I think he’s missing an Initial Cause. The Initial Cause would explain not only the chair, but the tree that the wood came from, the metal that makes the screws, the carpenter, tools and electricity that made the chair. If you fancy the Big Bang theory, it would be whatever caused the Big Bang in the first place, the Un-caused Cause, which role God happens to fit quite nicely.

The application to science and ID theory is that often scientists are only concerned with Material and Efficient causes; basically, what is stuff made of (matter) and what makes it go (energy). Some biologists go further to study formal and final causes with relationship to the structure/function relationships of their proteins or cells.

My comments are:

1. Scientists largely avoid this idea of Initial Cause, meaning God, which some ID theorists might argue is the same as the Formal Cause because of the "conservation of information". Meaning, information is not produced by random events but requires a mind.

They like the Big Bang, but don’t like talking about what or Who caused it.

2. Scientists don’t have a problem applying structure/function principles to the study of small biological molecules like protein and DNA but they fail to see the inference of applying it to man. Man’s Material Causes are pretty complex (DNA, cells, tissues, organs, limbs…), they think Darwinian mechanisms can account for both Formal and Efficient Cause and that there is no Final Cause, except to pass on our genes (ala Dawkins' "Selfish Gene"). Anyways, I’m not done with the book yet, but it’s really, really good.