“The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.”

― Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

 “But so often, before words can rise to the mind to imply the ineffable, the ineffable has effed off.”

― Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz

In 2004, for the book Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, philosopher Michael Ruse penned chapter 2, “The Argument from Design: A Brief History.”  Ruse loosely evaluates the “twenty-five hundred years of the argument from design.” In his evaluation, Ruse scrutinizes the impact of Charles Darwin’s writings on natural theology in the 18th-19th centuries.  He notes that people “agreed with Darwin that organized complexity is the significant feature of the organic world.” He quotes a “leading systematic theologian” of the 19th century, Charles Hodge, a professor at Princeton Seminary, from his book Systematic Theology, ”[t]he doctrine of the final cause in nature must stand or fall with the doctrine of a personal God. The one cannot be denied without denying the other.  By final cause is not meant a mere tendency, or the end to which events either actually or apparently tend; but the end contemplated in the use of means adapted to attain it.”  Hodge goes on to clarify that this “contemplation of an end, is a mental act…a function of personality, or at least of intelligent agency.” There is some evidence of uncertainty, however, in his otherwise binary and categorical challenge to those of faith, and this uncertainty persists today.  For this reason, it may be that his categorical argument is simultaneously both true and untrue, uncovering what has been called the ineffable.

​ Hodge was challenging the 19th century Christian intellectual to find and extoll God’s purpose in all life, and in the evolution of all life, on Earth.  In a later work, 'What is Darwinism?' Hodge lists his detractors’ positions, refuting pantheism, epicureanism, Spenserian philosophy, hypozoic theory, and non-textual theism.  “The conclusion of the whole matter is that the denial of design in nature is the denial of God. Mr. Darwin's theory does deny all design in nature; therefore, his theory is a theistical; his theory, not he himself. He believes in 'the Creator'. But when that Creator, millions on millions of ages ago, did something,—called matter and a living germ into existence,—and then abandoned the universe to itself to be controlled by chance and necessity, without any purpose on his part as to the result, or any intervention or guidance, then He is virtually consigned, so far as we are concerned, to non-existence. Arguably, Hodge intended to inject Darwinism into the modern Christianity of his day, but more importantly for the purposes of this discussion “denial of design in nature is virtually the denial of God” represents a shift from his earlier and absolutist “must stand or fall” position on final causes, and opens up an area of inquiry into the subject of the final cause and the Peripatetic school of thought as well as its supposed demise in the physical sciences during the Enlightenment. Reflecting on these subjects one can suss out the ineffable.

​ For Hodge, the Peripatetic school of thought heavily influenced his theology, providing a teleology and divine purpose in the “ends” of life that was both newly scientific and compatible with Christian orthodoxy.  Philosopher T.M. Forsyth elegantly explains the convergence of the four causes to answer the why of things, explaining the final cause in its context as a religious panacea. 

“…[I]n his conception of God as eternal being Aristotle depicts, as we have seen, not only a goal or object of aspiration or an exemplar for finite effort and striving, but a life or activity that comprises all, and much more than all, that is best and highest in human experience…Thus God is neither only at the beginning nor only at the end of the world process, but is its life and soul – and its body too – all through.”

And on the other hand, as well, Margaret Osler recounts the answers to questions about final causes offered by 17th century philosopher and scientist Robert Boyle, reflecting the idea that a final cause may not be found everywhere in nature. “Boyle's claim that we can know some of God's ends illustrates the broad domain of natural philosophy, which for him encompassed what we would call physics as well as what we would call theology.  Boyle saw no inconsistency between explaining phenomena physically, in terms of efficient causes, and at the same time understanding that they are the product of divine purpose.”

Boyle drives the narrative surrounding the final cause in the 17th-18th centuries for most scientists and theologians.  “I see not how by this negative way of arguing, those that employ it do not (implicitly at least) take upon them to judge of the ends, that God may have proposed to Himself in natural things. For, without a supposition, that they know what God designed in setting matter a-moving, it is hard for them to shew, that his design could not be such, as might be best accomplished by sometimes adding to and sometimes taking from the quantity of motion He communicated to matter at first. And I think it may be worth considering, whether, by this doctrine of theirs, the Cartesians do not more take upon them, than other philosophers, to judge of God's designs.” In short, Boyle argued that the discovery of efficient causes remains the primary aim of natural philosophy (Osler 1996: 388), but "the studious indignation [investigations] of them will not prejudice the contemplation of final causes."

​ The uncertainty in pantheism, deism, and non-textualist Christianity that Hodge feared was and remains ever-present in the Peripatetic school of thought.  He complained, “[pantheism] was revived by Spinoza in the seventeenth century, and subsequently became dominant in the philosophy and literature of Europe. It is coming up again. Some distinguished naturalists are swinging round from one pole to the opposite; from saying there is no God, to teaching that everything is God.  Sometimes, the same book in one half teaches materialism, in the other half idealism: the one affirming that everything is matter, the other that matter is nothing, but that everything is mind, and mind is God.” And the doubt cast by epicurean-styled Romanticism, Spenserian, and even Spinozian philosophies continually seeped into Hodge’s theology.  Forsyth illuminates. “Aristotle’s philosophy is expressed in different terms from that of Plato; but in its culminating principle the theology of the philosopher-scientist is not very different from that of the philosopher-poet…And their statement [that God is Love] anticipates in no small measure the profound words of Spinoza: ‘He who loves God cannot desire that God should love him in return’, and again: ‘The intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself,’ with the corollary ‘The love of God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one and the same.”

​ Through these lenses one can see both the truth and falsity in Hodge’s categorical statement that the doctrine of final causes in nature must “stand or fall” with Christian doctrine of a personal God.  Wedged between these absolutes is a small sliver of uncertainty, the ineffable, where science and religion continue their dance today.

References

​Boyle, Robert. “A Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things: Wherein it is inquired, Whether, and (if at all) with what Cautions, a Naturalist should admit them? (1688),” in Works. Vol. 5.

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Dembski, William, and Michael Ruse. Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004.

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Forsyth, T. M. “Aristotle's Concept of God as Final Cause”. Philosophy. Vol.22, ed. 82. 1947..

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Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology. New York City. Scribner. 1873.

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Hodge, Charles. What Is Darwinism? New York. Scribner. 1874.

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Osler, Margaret. “From immanent natures to nature as artifice: The reinterpretation of final causes in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy.” Monist [serial online]. Vol. 79 ed. 3. July 1996.