Co-Opting Purpose: How Materialists Redefine Biological Agency
Purpose has been a fundamental part of our understanding of nature for millennia. But the rise of scientific materialism and Darwinism saw purpose get left out of the scientific pursuit. In recent years, materialists have found it necessary to bring purpose back into the equation, and they’re looking for a way to explain it without recourse to intelligent design. On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes his conversation with Dr. Stephen Iacoboni, an award-winning cancer researcher and practitioner of medical oncology for forty years.
20th-century materialism treated living organisms as reducible machines governed strictly by Newtonian physics and simple genetic mechanics. But modern research shows organisms are not passive objects: “Organisms don’t act like inert objects responding to external forces impinged on them,” says Dr. Iacoboni. They are “active agents that figure out what’s going on in their conditions of existence and they figure out what to do about it in real time.”
Today, Iacoboni unpacks the dramatic shift in core argument from materialists over the last few decades as they’re forced to grapple with the reality of purpose in living things. He also has suggestions about how the ID research community should respond to this change going forward. “We are in large part fighting the last war,” he observes. “In other words, we are trying to refute the mechanistic consensus of the 20th century.”
This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation.
Dig Deeper
- Get a copy of Dr. Iacoboni’s book Telos: The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose.
- Don’t miss Part 1 of this conversation as Dr. Iacoboni explains why purpose got excluded from science with the rise of Darwinism: