Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
47. Nature Acts for an End: Replies to the Objections and the Infinity of Mind
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[0:00] only had him for a year, then he got into his own project. He had, I don't know, how many you know, four or five assistants at least, and or scientists working with, and they would work you know on their own, just whatever they want to do. for. About two weeks, and they come together and talk about what they did, and then go back. So he must have been you know, started to be given that kind of freedom, you know,

[0:20] But I noticed that you know, when Einstein or people like that, when they talked about the natural world, just out of wonder, they want to call it natural philosophy rather than science, because science has been turned into this technical thing, you know. And it's interesting, you know, we we have the address there of Max Born. He went to England and he had to flee Germany because he was he was Jewish, I guess, you know.

[0:43] And of course, in Scotland, they still have the old way, you know. Natural science is still called natural philosophy, and he makes the point, of, remarking upon that, right? He said nothing great can be accomplished in science without the elementary wonder of the philosopher. But he's kind of remarking upon you know the the older use of the word, huh? Philosophy still has that kind of a tendency to something a little more for its own sake, you know, a natural science.

[1:10] And he was kind of emphasizing that, right? So he's noting the appropriateness of his emphasizing this aspect of science, right? You know, a place where they still use the old term.

[1:23] That goes on what you. were- I mean, you still have Newton, Newton's thing is called the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, not natural science, right? But eventually, you know, science didn't seem as elevated a word as philosophy, and so it became more of the technical aspect of it, right?

[1:41] But I'll see Einstein or somebody, you know, use that. They just talk about the natural world for its own sake. They'll tend to call it natural philosophy. So it's this, little bit of the original meaning there, right? Still attached to the words.

[2:00] You were saying the, uh, you know, liberal arts degree. That's what they say now. You know, what can you do? with it? Yeah, yeah. Can't get a job, with it? you know, Well, I told you my, yeah, I told you the thing about my father's engineer, right, educated, kind of the only educated man to be there, you know, in my father's company, right, The engineer from Minnesota.

[2:21] He interested in making money and so on. but anyway, he talked to to my brother Mark and myself and Richard and my brother Richard, you know, because you know there's a few people around there, right? And so you know, found we're all doing philosophy. He's always curious as to why we're doing philosophy, right? And my brother Richard, Mark, would tell me for its own sake, right? Well, it just couldn't it couldn't possibly be so, right?

[2:44] I mean, and so on, and he'd come back, and we'd still say, no, it's, for its own sake, it's. And just you know, to make any sense of all of them, right? And and and finally, he he he figured out what he was all about, right? He was. he he came to us, he says, "I figured out what it is, finally, he says, "It's brain food, isn't it?"

[3:04] Energy, you you you take it to get your you know your mind built up, then you go on do something with it, right? You know what I mean? Ah! You know, it's counterintuitive, right? It just just couldn't that couldn't possibly be what we're doing it for, right? Having something practical, I mean, you know, in the long run, if not in the short run, right? But first, in the long run, it's for its own sake, not in the short run.

[3:34] It can be used in that way, though. It's brain food to be used in a lot of areas. right Yeah, yeah, So you know Thales is supposed to according to Aristotle right? The story about Thales you know, according to Aristotle you know on oil presses or something, right, and making a fortune. Saying, "not, so, it's easy to do this. if you wanted to, you know, but we're not interested in making money, really.

[3:55] " I mean, some of you might say, you know, that Foster doesn't, you know, he isn't interested in money because he doesn't know how to make it.

[4:05] Doctor Numair would sometimes complain. He said that Thomas Aquinas in the advertising. He said they always have a tendency to emphasize trying to find it practical and why. Parents are concerned about that, yeah. Not students, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes.

[4:29] I remember, you know, when you know Christmas time back home, you know, when my brother Mark and I were out looking for some little thing from my my mother, you know, for Christmas, right? And we saw this one little shop that was kind of a nice little shop run by a Chinese lady, you know, and she was very friendly, you know, and she liked to talk to us.

[4:44] We were college kids and so on, you know. And when she, you know, asked what we for our major was, now you know, because we taught her philosophy, She said, it's so funny, you know, you know we're doing this, right? Obviously had no purpose what we're doing, right?

[5:05] I mean, she wasn't nasty, about it, I mean, she was just kind of genuine, you know. Amusement. They weren't, currently, you know, aiming at anything, you know. I mean, because I mean, it's practically not aiming at anything, right? That's what it seems to them, right? But I mean, you you'll find people will have the idea, you know, that if something is good, it's got to be good for something other than itself, right?

[5:31] In which case, nothing really is good, you know. But but I mean, they don't see that the consequence of what they're saying, right? But it's got to be good for something other than itself. Otherwise, it's not good, right? That's kind of like a you know kind of like a first principle.

[5:59] So you see that even in the church sometimes, you know, some bishops may think contemplative orders, you know, or something like that are kind of, you know, you know. Oh yeah. You know, that's that's that's that's you know. I always give the example there, you know, of Moses up on the mountain praying, you know, and they're fighting down the thing, and when his arms go down, then the battle starts to go against them.

[6:18] Yeah. But I heard that all the time before. I came here. What do you do? Wasting your life? Yeah, yeah. Look at the, I get that same thing that seeing news there, you know, and uh, they talk about the hermits there, right, you know. I like how people read that? The average practical American, right? This hermit, you know.

[7:06] So you've been weighing the arguments for and against whether end is a cause in the natural world, and which side seems to you to outweigh the other side. I kind of think that it's an end. Okay. Okay. But now, if you think it's stronger, the arguments in favor of saying that end is a cause in the natural world—that some things at least are for the sake of something, right?

[7:45] That what nature does at least sometimes is directed towards an end or a good, right? Then you have to come back and answer the arguments on the other side.

[8:00] Let's go back then to the three arguments against saying that nature makes things for the sake of something. Okay. Now the three arguments against each is a little different, and the first argument is saying it's impossible that nature acts for an end

[8:27] because action for an end requires a mind, but nature doesn't have a mind. Therefore, huh? Okay. Now it seems reasonable that action for an end requires a mind because the end is a strange kind of cause that the sitting, for example, which is the end of the chair. And that, for the sake of which the chair is made, so you can sit on it. The sitting doesn't take place until after the chair has been made.

[9:10] That seems rather strange that what doesn't exist can be responsible, right, for the existence or the coming into existence of something else. When that other thing comes into existence without the end, the so-called cause, existing at all, right? Okay.

[9:33] Well, it seems that sitting can be a cause of the chair coming into existence. It can be a cause of what the carpenter does, right? And even a cause, therefore, of the wood becoming a chair, only because the carpenter has it in mind, and he can see the order of what he's doing to that achieving of that end, right? And a sign of this is that the.

[10:00] Greek Philosophers like Socrates and Plato didn't start talking about end as a cause in the natural world until after Anaxagoras had introduced mind as a cause. Okay.

[10:20] Now, again, that nature doesn't have a mind. If you go back to our understanding of the mind as something unlimited, as we learned from Anaxagoras, and as we can see from examining our own mind, does anybody think that the tree has a mind?

[10:46] Or that even those insects, right, that do something apparently intelligent, but if you take them out of their accustomed way, they seem to be lost, huh? Like the insect I was describing that squeezes the head of its victim, right, and then drags it by the antenna, you know. Well, if it had a mind to figure out the importance of paralyzing rather than killing its victim, soon you could figure out after Fabre, the entomologist, has cut off the antenna, that there's a million and one other places on the body to drag your victim by.

[11:28] After all, I mean, you know, a little child, you know, I mean, they they'll drag their toy by what the foot or the arm or by the hair or anything, right? I mean, there are many places to draw it by, huh? Okay.

[11:45] So, is there a weakness in this argument, right? Well, I think that both premises are good, but the first premise you ought to distinguish more carefully, huh? And you could say that action for an end does require a mind, either in what is acting for an end or in its what cause, right? Okay.

[12:22] So, the stock example here for years is that of a thermostat, right? Does the thermostat do what it does for the sake of something? Yes. The thermostat is there for the sake of what? Keeping the temperature at a certain level, right? And maybe if it gets too cold, the thermostat will turn on the furnace, right? And when it gets up to a certain height, maybe it'll turn off the furnace, right?

[13:01] So you could say that the thermostat does what it does for some purpose, but the thermostat itself doesn't have a mind, but it's a what product of mind, huh? Okay.

[13:20] So in regard to the the major premise there, right? Action for an end requires a mind. I'd say yes, right? But either a mind in the thing that is immediately acting for an end, right? In the thing that is immediately doing something for the sake of something, or in its what cause, right? Or in its what mover, right? So you know when you're shooting at the enemy or aiming the arrow at the target, the arrow or the bullet is directed towards something, even though what the bullet or even the gun doesn't have a mind, right?

[14:02] But because it's being moved, right, by something that does have a mind, huh? Okay. You see, I'm trying to solve that, right? Okay. And notice when Aristotle in his inductive argument, when he pointed to all these things that the insects do, and it seems to be for some purpose, huh? It seems to be for some purpose that the the spider makes some of the threads sticky and some not sticky.

[14:39] Um. He didn't ask. He didn't try to say that the insects have a mind. He says so much does action for an end strike us in these that some people wonder whether they have a mind, right? But he leaves up in the open whether they do or do not have a mind, right? But the fact that they wonder whether they have a mind is a sign that they see action for an end.

[15:09] An action for an end suggests there must be some kind of mind here. But as far as seeing that nature is doing what it does for the sake of something, one doesn't have to know yet whether nature itself has a mind or whether it's in some way a product of mind. In fact, you wouldn't even ask does it have a mind or is it a product of mind until you first saw that what it was doing was in fact ordered to a what end, right?

[15:42] That it clearly was the sake of something. Do you see that? Okay. Now take a little another example that's a little different from the thermostat, huh? In some ways. Maybe closer to nature.

[16:06] One time in the summer, I was driving to a concert with my brother Marcus and another friend. We're driving down my hometown there, a street in my hometown, of, St. Paul, Minnesota. And all of a sudden, a little boy ran in front of the car. Okay, and I jammed on the brakes and. I don't know, who was more scared, than little boy or me? Wow. But I was glad I wasn't, you know, distracted or something, right?

[16:34] Yeah. Okay, so I didn't hit him. Okay. Now, would you say that I put on the brakes for the sake of something? Yeah. But do you think at that time I was thinking about it?

[16:50] Was I thinking, you know, a little boy is running from the car. If this car hurts, hits him, it will hurt him badly, right? How do you stop a car? Huh? When you put the brakes... If I had been thinking, he would have been hit, right? Okay. So I didn't act out of mind there. I acted out of, we might say, what? Habit. Yeah. Habit. Yeah. Now, the first thing you do when you teach somebody about a car, right?

[17:20] Huh? Is how to stop the thing. Huh. It might sound illogical to teach them how to stop the thing before you teach them how to make it go. But I assure you, that's the right order. My my mother-in-law, huh? Like my own mother, I never learned how to drive. Okay, in this older generation, there are mothers who never learned how to drive. So my mother-in-law was entirely dependent upon my father-in-law for, you know, being driven any distance.

[17:55] One day they're jumping into the car to go to the store or something, and she's sitting in there and suddenly realizes he's forgotten something in the house, right? So he jumps out of the car and runs back into the house. And he didn't quite put it into. Yeah. Well, the car takes off and my mother-in-law and she didn't know how to stop it and it goes right across the the street and into a little brick wall and there was the same fight with the neighbors after that.

[18:25] So as I said, the first thing you teach somebody is how to stop the thing, right? And maybe everybody should know that they don't know how to drive, but okay. So notice I acted for an end, not out of mind, but out of habit, right? Now sometimes we call habit a second what? Nature. Yeah. Yeah.

[18:49] So if I can act out of second nature without thinking, right? Then nature can act for an end, right? Without thinking, huh? Now maybe that habit I have of putting the brakes on when something comes in front of the car, that habit is result of what? Some mind, right? The person who first taught me how to drive and so on, right? And so that habit is a product of mind, a mind saw the importance of being able to stop the car and so on.

[19:29] So I acquired that habit, right? By mind, not by own, by the mind of my teacher, right? But when I actually stopped the car, I wasn't using my mind then. I was acting out of what habit, right?

[19:47] So that's a clear example, but it's very close to nature because we call it second nature, don't we? We have all kinds of habits where we do things without what thinking, huh? A lot of people drive to work, and they're not even aware of the fact. They're thinking about something else. They make all the right turns and everything. It's like they're programmed, right, for this sort of thing.

[20:11] Okay. So you reply to that argument, right? Okay. The weakness is not in saying that nature doesn't have a mind, right? Because that may be true? Or in saying that action for an end in some sense requires a mind, right? But not always in what is immediately doing something, right? So the thermostat, because it's been designed by a mind, right, acts for an end that that mind had in mind, and without itself having a mind.

[20:50] Okay. Now, again, perhaps there's a certain incaution or lack of caution in the way we speak of nature acting for an end, because maybe in the strict sense,

[21:09] that phrase "acting for an end" seems to imply that you have in mind an end and that you're acting for that end, right? Okay. Ah, sometimes you'd like to phrase even the question we're asking here, and say whether the action of nature is for the sake of something. Say. And that is not implying so much that nature necessarily has a mind, right? Say.

[21:49] You say something's acting for an end. You almost imply that it it sees the end that it's directing its actions towards that, right? When you say, you know, that the action of nature is for the sake of something, you're not implying necessarily that nature what has a mind and has in mind, is aiming, right, in the sense of the way a thing that had a mind would be aiming at, right?

[22:17] Okay. But nevertheless, what it does could be for the sake of an end, just as what the thermostat does is for the sake of a what end, right, huh? And when my brake light doesn't work or something, you know, or has gone out, a little red thing appears on my thing, right? That's for the sake of something that little light going on, right, to tell me that my brake light or my signal light or whatever it is is no longer what functioning, yeah.

[22:46] It's for the sake of something that light goes on, isn't it? Okay. And my computer is always telling me things I don't want to know,

[22:55] and and even telling what to do sometimes, which I'd rather not know, I'm annoyed at. Um. But the point is, those things are for the sake of something, right?

[23:09] So perhaps that phrase "acting for an end" is is almost too strong, right? To describe what a thermostat does, and maybe even what nature does, right? Although you could maybe understand it in a way that would be objectionable, right? But the man who's attacking it is thinking that phrase almost means what?

[23:32] Thinking about the end. Yeah, yeah. So sometimes, as I say, I phrase it that way: whether what nature does is for the sake of something,

[23:44] just like we can say, you know, that that a knife is for the sake of something, or a ballpoint pen is for the sake of something. Huh? I wouldn't tend to say that the ballpoint pen acts for an end. Would you? Say. Ah, I'm acting for an end when I use the ballpoint pen. Yeah. But even apart from me, you can say the ballpoint pen is for the sake of writing, huh?

[24:12] And the same way the word "organon, organ" in Greek, where we get the word, it means tool, right? So when you speak of the living body as an organic body, a body composed of tools, right? We're saying, well, the eyes for the sake of seeing, and the ears for the sake of hearing.

[24:35] Okay. And and how we got to have parts that are for the sake of something is a further question, right? But you don't ask that question until you realize that they are for the sake of something.

[24:49] I just happen to use my eyes for for seeing, huh? You know, like the caveman may have found a stone there in the thing, so which I can use this to bash somebody's head, or I can use this to, you know, hit up the the corn or something and make it into a paste or something, huh? Or crack the shell the nut or something with it, right?

[25:14] Okay. Just happen to find a piece of rock there. The rock wasn't made for the sake of doing that, was it? No, no, it doesn't seem so. I just, you know, came into this world and found these eyes here, and I started. Well, I think I'll use these to see.

[25:36] No, no, they seem to to clearly to have been made for the sake of seeing. See? Now, who knew they were for the sake of seeing and designed them so that they would be suitable for seeing? That's another question, right? That's a question you ask only after you see that they are obviously for the sake of seeing, and they are designed for the sake of seeing. You see that?

[26:00] Okay. Like some of the animals, like I've seen monkeys take rocks and crack nuts. Now it seems like they're cracking it so they can eat it. Hmm. What you're saying, some way they're acting for? Much closer to it, yeah, yeah, because they know in some way, but they don't fully understand what an end is. At least they could, you know, do many other ends than they do, right?

[26:29] Okay. Hear about the psychologist? He he trained, kind of chimpanzee, one of these things to get on a bus and put the money in and sit down with a newspaper. Because people are looking at this, you know, new customer and the thing and so on, and he's got newspaper and everything. He put his money. And not too sure about him, but you know, I mean, he's done everything he should do.

[26:58] But all of a sudden, he takes his paper and he tumbles it up into a ball. Then they're going to get really suspicious of him.

[27:06] Okay. Now, another way of of of not overstating the question, right? Is to say, is to ask it in the form of whether the operation of nature, right, is directed towards some end, right? Okay. And then you leave up in the open, right? The question of what is directing it towards an end? Is it directing itself towards the end, or has it been directed by another towards an end?

[27:49] Aristotle is doing that question up in the open when he when he gives the five arguments that we saw for saying that nature's acting for an end.

[28:02] The fact that nature is producing the good almost all the time shows that it is directed towards the good. The fact that it produces the good in animals and plants by going through an ordered number of steps from a definite seed, right, such as to result in that, shows that in fact it is directed towards the good. It's not just happening to produce the good. That's what Aristotle was showing, right?

[28:28] But he doesn't investigate before it's time to investigate it whether it's directing itself towards that or not, and that's clear from the inductive argument when he says, "So much do they see that what the insects do is for the sake of something that people wonder whether they have a mind, right? " Aristotle, no way is reasoning from their having a mind. He's reasoning from the fact that what they're doing is obviously for the sake of something.

[28:58] And then they'll eventually arise. Well, do they have a mind to figure this out? Well, maybe Fabre's experiments, right, that I mentioned, would indicate that they don't have a mind. They don't have this unlimited thing. Then they must be a product of mind. Okay, they're designed by something that has a mind, or they're directed by something that has a mind.

[29:21] Okay, you see the way we answered then the first objection, right? The first objection was trying to say it's impossible for nature to act for an end.

[29:33] Now the second argument Is arguing that nature, in fact, is not acting for it. And the second argument is based again upon a good statement that the end and the good are the same. And even the other side, Aristotle's side, Aristotle himself, when he talks. about end. He sees that end and good are the same, basically. Maybe in a secondary way, the means are good, but they're good because they lead to the end.

[30:12] Now the second argument is saying, okay, end and good are the same, but nature produces something bad, like the defective baby, or there's an earthquake that destroys things and so on, right? Or a tidal wave, or a hurricane, whatever it might be, right? So

[30:33] nature, in fact, is not producing the good. So how can you see it's acting for an end, but the end and the good are the same, and nature producing something bad?

[30:42] Now, what's the defect in that argument? Well, first of all, you have to point out that the bad is rarely what produced by nature, huh? So take just the example of the defective baby. Most babies born are not defective, huh? If there's a string of bad babies, it's because something has interfered with nature, like the the Nomide babies and that sort of thing, okay? So the defective baby, of course, of nature is the rare one,

[31:24] and even in the defective baby, most of the organs have not come out defective, have they? So if it's an essential organ, it can be very serious, obviously. But even there, it's not that most are bad, right? Most are good, right? If you can remedy that bad one, then the the little one will survive, right? Now, once you see that, then you go back to what is more known.

[31:54] We know that human art acts for an end, and therefore for something good, huh? But does the cook ever burn the meat? Yeah, yeah. If he did it most of the time, of course we'd fire him, right? But even the best of cooks, they what? Sometimes burn the meat. They get distracted or something, okay? Or sometimes they put too much seasoning in there. For years, I was the joke about it.

[32:35] Made some soup and I put too much pepper in, and nobody could could eat the soup. Remember the time that Daddy did come back and again and again.

[32:46] But even you know, I've been in you know expensive restaurants, right, where the food happened to get seasoned a little too much, you see. So even you know, in a high class restaurant, the cook sometimes what? Makes a mistake, right? Does the does the pianist or the violinist or whatever it might be sometimes hit the wrong note? Yeah, yeah. Now, are you going to say that that's reason therefore to say that the cook is not aiming at an end or a good as he fails sometimes?

[33:26] So it's not really a good argument then to say that nature is not acting for an end when it only fails sometimes, huh? You might say even more so in the case of nature because if we accept, as we did in our discussion, the first argument that maybe nature doesn't have a mind, right?

[33:49] While the artist, so he does, the cook does have a mind, right? Well, then nature cannot take into account extenuating circumstances, if you would say, right?

[34:02] Now, when you cook a a roast or something of this sort or a big ham or something like that, and often they give you directions on the package, and they say, oh, where it is, fifteen or twenty minutes per pound, right? Then usually our ovens may differ,

[34:22] and so you discover, if you're cook to some extent, that ovens do vary, right? And you've got to check it before the time that the directions would say it's got to go to, right? And that's my been my experience that it tends to get overcooked, you know, than following the directions exactly, right? But I got a mind to take into account the fact that maybe my oven is, you know, stronger than other ovens or whatever, right?

[34:56] So you'd say a fortiori, right? Nature, which according to the first argument doesn't have a mind, right, cannot take into account the fact that mother took thalidomide or something else, right? Okay. Do you see that? Or mother's on drugs or whatever it might be. See, if nature, not having that infinite mind, cannot compensate if it's possible for those things, huh? So if art, which or the artist who has a mind, sometimes fails, and yet that doesn't mean it's not acting for an end, well, the same thing could be said then the fact that nature fails sometimes,

[35:40] huh? And furthermore, you could say that the fact that nature sometimes fails is really more a sign that it's acting for an end than that it's not, because failure. Means you don't achieve what you're what trying to achieve.

[36:04] Did I fail to teach you people German in this course? No, no. Did I teach you any German? No. But failure means more than I didn't do something, right? It meant I didn't achieve what I was trying to do. I wasn't trying to teach you any German, right? See, now I might have failed to teach you any philosophy. I don't know.

[36:31] Then you speak of failure, right? Because I was trying to teach you some philosophy, but you can't accuse me of failing to teach you German. So the fact that nature sometimes fails—in fact, we speak of heart failure or what it may be—you know, failure of an organ. Um, suddenly, you know, a person is born without an arm or something, you know, or missing something that they should have.

[36:56] The fact that nature fails sometimes is a sign that it is acting for an end, just the reverse of what the argument is is claiming, huh?

[37:12] Okay. You see how we answer the second argument then? Okay. Now the third argument is a different kind of argument, again from the first two. It's not arguing like the first one directly that it's impossible for nature to be acting for an end. It's not arguing like the second argument that in fact it is not acting for an end, right? The third argument is saying that it's unnecessary to bring in this fourth kind of cause.

[37:46] That the first three kinds of cause—matter, form, and mover—are enough to explain what you find in the natural world. And if they are enough, then you can invoke what? Principle of. fewness Principle of fewness, huh? Or simplicity, they call it sometimes, huh? Which, as Einstein has rightly pointed out, is the fundamental principle of natural science and natural philosophy, from the Greeks to his own work and beyond.

[38:18] It's a fundamental principle for Newton. If you look at the rules that guide him in thinking, that's the fundamental one. The fundamental one for Galileo, for Kepler, and for Heisenberg, huh? For Einstein, huh? Well, we saw Aristotle using it in several places, huh? In our readings, huh?

[38:40] So the question now is: Are matter, form, and mover enough to explain the good in nature? And the way they tried to explain this was started by Empedocles. We saw some of the fragments of Empedocles. It pertains to his thinking, but Aristotle gives us a fuller account than we can get from just the fragments. In

[39:16] Empedocles, if you recall, love and hate, right, were the movers, but they were a mindless love, right, a mindless hate. So love brings together things in a mindless way. Hate separates them. Love brings them together again, and so on. Now, you'd expect that most of the time, this mindless love would bring things together in some crazy combination, and those fragments were describing some of those crazy combinations.

[39:48] huh Well, And if he says, "though but this keeps on happening again and again."And again, and eventually it happens to bring them together in a what good way, right? Not that it was directed towards that good one, right? Not that it intended that one, but it just what happened, right? Okay. That might be one in a million, it might be one in a billion, it might be one in a billion billion, but eventually it happens, huh?

[40:25] Okay. So you have that in a more sophisticated form in modern sciences sometimes, huh? Nature's trying all kinds of things, huh? And of course there is some evidence, huh, that mathematical chance has something to do with the good in nature. And two common examples are one is the huge number of seeds being produced, right, by plants that are blown hither thither, kind of at random, right? But there's so many of them that what some manage to land in a place where they can grow into the original plant, huh?

[41:16] That's why you never get rid of dandelions, etc., right? Never get rid of poison ivy, and so on, right? Even these undesired plants, they survive even though man is trying to root them out in some cases.

[41:34] And then other examples that I suppose seems to be random mutations, right, huh? And most of these mutations don't lead to something that's better adapted to the environment, but maybe one of them is, right? Okay. And of course this is a problem that they have with medicines now, huh? That they get a medicine that kills off some particular germ, and but that there are random mutations going on that germ, and eventually there's some strain that's resistant to that drug, huh?

[42:16] Well, all the ones that are not resistant, they all get killed off, and that's most of them. But that resistant strain multiplies, and now it's like, and the Bible says the second state of man is worse, right? The demons come back in, okay? And now we don't have anything to fight it, huh? We got to try to figure out something to, let's say, you know, kill off this new strain, huh?

[42:39] So that's why they say you know they shouldn't be happy-go-lucky, you know, as far as giving you know medicine all the time when a person maybe doesn't require it, right, huh? Because you speed up this elimination and the development of strains that can survive in this hostile environment that man has produced with his medicines, huh?

[43:07] Now, the main thing to consider now is mathematical chance enough, right, to explain the good in nature. That's really the question. Now, when I approach this, sometimes I

[43:26] first of all point out a distinction, and that is that mathematical chance could be right a means used to achieve an end. Okay. Now, let me just write down the word.

[43:53] Mathematical chance can be a means of achieving an end. So the hunter, right, he wants to bring the bird down, and so he has a shell in his gun that maybe got fifteen pellets in it. Huh? Now he doesn't want to hit the bird fifteen times because he won't be able to find the bird afterwards, right? Plus he'd have dental problems trying to eat the bird, huh?

[44:29] Okay. So what does he want to do with fifteen shells? Huh? Well, he's not a perfectly good shot, and the gun is not a perfectly adapted instrument, right? And his eyes are not perfect, and the bird is flying, and so on, right? But the fifteen shells gives him a spread, right? Such that he's not too bad a shot, and so on. He's more likely to what bring that bird down, right?

[44:56] One of the fifteen, right, or two of the fifteen will hit the bird, right? Okay. If you just had one pellet in there, you most likely miss. Okay. So that's an example example now of where the man is trying to achieve an end, which is to bring down the bird, right? And he's using in a way mathematical chance, right, as a means of achieving that end. Okay.

[45:28] Now the same thing is true in the war. let's say, huh? You know, like in the Second World War, there when you had the Japanese snipers up in the trees there, or might be in a bush or something, right? So when that branch moves or that bush moves, what do you do? And out he falls, right? Huh? Okay.

[45:52] Most of your bullets have missed the man, right? So what are you doing? You're giving a certain spread of bullets there, right? Huh? Such that if he's behind the bush, it probably hit him. It hit one of those bullets, right? And you need to do that because you don't know exactly where, when the bush moves, or the branch, exactly where the man is. So you're not really wasting bullets, huh?

[46:19] But you're using mathematical chance as a means, right? Now notice this is not pure mathematical chance, huh? Because you're aiming the gun, or you're aiming the Tommy gun, right, at the bird or at the bush or something, right? Okay. But, and again, the bullets are such that they will bring down the bird or bring down the sniper if they hit them, right? Okay. But you're using mathematical chance here as a means of achieving your end, huh?

[46:54] Okay. Now take another military example there, huh? Suppose you get information that the enemy's ammunition dump is in that wooded area there, concealed in that wooded area over there. So we're going to go over there and we're going to pepper that area, right? And that will increase our chances of hitting the ammunition dump, right? Now if we pepper with fifteen or twenty little bombs, I want to call them that, but smaller than a bomb, right?

[47:21] Now if one hits the ammunition dump, the whole thing's going to go, and they're without ammunition to fight us. So again, I'm using mathematical chance as a means of achieving my end, huh? By not just peppering any area, you know. I even suspect that they've got it concealed, you know, in the wooded area, right? And I'm dropping my things on that area, right? And that just helps achieve that end.

[47:47] Now all these examples are taken from human art, right? But what they show is that mathematical chance can be a means of achieving an end. So the mere fact that there may be some evidence, like in the protection of seeds, right, that nature is achieving the good by what? Mathematical chance, right? That doesn't prove that nature is not what? Yeah. See, it could be using mathematical chance, right, as a means of achieving its end, okay?

[48:26] Notice it's not pure chance because the tree is not just throwing up any kind of things in the air, right? It's throwing up seeds, almost all of which will reproduce that plant if they land on the right soil, okay? Now, if you want to deny that nature is acting for an end, huh? That's doing what it's doing for an end, huh? You obviously will have to think of mathematical chance now not as a means of achieving an end.

[49:06] Because then you'd be admitting what you're denying, right? Okay. So, as opposed to being a means of achieving an end, you've got to have what we could call pure mathematical chance, right? Okay.

[49:26] Pure mean by pure but wholly undirected, right? Okay. Or. Another way, in opposition to the idea of the means here, where mathematical chance becomes, as it were, not a a means but the means but the chief cause, you might say, of the good being achieved, huh? Um. So in other words, we're not denying, huh, that there may be some truth in saying that nature does achieve the good by what mathematical chance, right?

[50:20] Okay. But we're saying that this is not a pure mathematical chance, right? This is not the main thing, right? This is at best a means, huh? But they're saying, no, this is the main cause, right? This is pure. Now you got to be careful with the word chance there, right? When Aristotle is reasoning that nature does not produce the good by chance, huh? He's thinking of chance in the way he's defined it before, right?

[50:53] Where chance is an accidental cause of what happens rarely as a result of an action done for an end, okay? But they're speaking here of mathematical chance, which is actually a what ratio, okay?

[51:16] So if I have a coin here and I flip the coin, what are the chances of me getting heads there before the Super Bowl game, huh?

[51:28] Yeah, one in two, right? Okay. If I'm flipping the die, what's the chance of getting a six? One and six. Yeah. Okay. So that's what we mean—a ratio, one to two, one to six, something that sort, right? Okay. I'm not talking about an accidental cause as defined before, right? Okay. Now if you're talking about pure mathematical chance, wholly undirected, right? What are the chances for good, and what are the chances for bad?

[52:06] You say the good is to the bad as one to two or one to six, or what is it? It's almost one to infinity. Yeah. Yeah.

[52:29] I'm taking two numbers. What's their sum? Well, if you use pure mathematical chance, how many answers would be right? One. Yeah. And how many would be wrong? The rest. Yeah. It's an infinity, right?

[52:50] So the chances of the bad to the good is infinity to one, right? Now, even if you take my simple example there of the leg of a chair, if the leg of the chair gets broken, huh, and we want to replace that leg, and so we take a piece of wood down to the wood shop, and at random we cut a length. How many lengths would be the right one for that chair?

[53:25] Just one length that is really neither too long nor too short, huh? But if it's one inch longer, or two inch longer, or half an inch longer, or half an inch shorter, or there's infinity, the continuous, divisible forever. So it's actually infinity of wrong lengths and a what? Only one for the right.

[53:47] And that's a very simple thing compared to an eye or an ear or something like that, huh? There are all kinds of things that have to be exactly right, huh, for the eye to what? Function right, huh? Okay.

[54:05] So if nature is acting out of pure mathematical chance, in no way is directed towards the good, the chances that we think upon the good are almost what? Infinity to one. It should be extremely rare, right? And even if you hit upon that good thing, you're living in a world where the odds are still against you, right? Infinity to one for the survival. You see? So it's wholly unbelievable, really, there to think that pure mathematical chance, that is in no way directed, could explain the good almost all the time in nature, because that's what the odds are.

[54:53] And if you hit that one out infinity, you know, you still face the future, right? And so the mathematical physicist, when he talks about pure mathematical chance in the laws of thermodynamics, second law, I guess, he talks about energy going from a what? Organized state to a disorganized state, huh? As if that would be the go naturally from order to disorder, huh?

[55:22] And so you take the simple example, you know, of someone's desk during the course of a semester where it gets more and more what? Messy. Not because they're trying to mess up the desk, but not trying to order either, right? but just hither and dither, things get all misplaced, huh, And you see in the library sometimes, you know, sign, don't return the books. The library staff return the books.

[55:46] Well, apparently we just, you know, there's a hole. They put in, right? But if you put books like that, this way happens to be a hole. The whole collection is going to go from what? Order to what Disorder, right? Okay.

[56:01] No, so that army went into battle, right? Using pure mathematical chance, as opposed to this directed one where I saw the bush move, right? So there might be a jack in there, and I'm just going to spray the bush, right? But pure mathematical chance and going into battle like this, you know,

[56:20] I call 360 degrees. That's that's pure chance, right? An army going into battle that way would be more apt to eliminate what itself than the enemy, right? See? I say now, get up in the airplane, right? Every minute, drop a bomb. Not throw a yard, just drop a bomb every minute. Where he's apt to hit us, right? As the enemy, right? Huh? I say, mean. So pure mathematical chance is not enough to explain the good in nature.

[56:51] Far from it. And therefore, you cannot invoke the principle of what Fewness, right? Because the principle of fewness doesn't say fewer causes are better. Period. It says fewer causes are better if they are enough. Okay. And so remarkable that Aristotle did praise Empedocles in one way with respect to Anaxagoras, huh? In terms of his explaining how things keep on coming to be in nature with a limited multitude of causes, right?

[57:27] why Anaxagoras took an infinity of them, right? Yet he didn't go along with Anaxagoras as to the sufficiency of the first three kinds of causes, huh? So he can't say, you know, fewer period is better, right? But he saw that these few were not what enough. Okay.

[57:51] Now there's a second thing that's kind of amusing about this argument, and that is if you go back to the original statement of the principle of fewness by Aristotle himself, or by even Sir Isaac Newton, right? The reason for the principle of fewness is that nature acts for an end. And Sir Isaac Newton says, huh? More are in vain when less will serve. Serves no purpose, right?

[58:19] To use more than you need, right? So that's the original reason for the principle of simplicity or fewness: is that nature acts for an end.

[58:33] Do you see that? So it's kind of amusing that they try to use the principle of fewness to deny that nature acts for an end, when the principle of fewness is based upon nature acting for an end.

[58:50] I don't give that as the main objection to their argument. Because I suppose they come back and say, well, okay, that was the original reason given for it, but we accept it because it's worked so often, right? You know, it's led to. You know, they could probably come back and say that, right? But nevertheless, it's kind of amusing to see that they're basing themselves on something that was originally based on the thing they're denying.

[59:14] But the main objection has to be that what these three, even by mathematical chance, are not enough to explain the good in nature, and basically because the odds for the good under pure mathematical chance are like one two, what infinity, huh?

[59:44] So you see the reply now to the three main objections that I've read anyway. to nature acting for an end. Isn't it when people say that all the good things came about by chance? Aren't they also thinking of? the Accidental—that is, the things that are good—it's just an accident. It just happened

[1:00:10] to the the eye. Just happened to start to be able to see. Isn't that also using the Aristotle sense of chance? You have to, you know, see exactly what the guy has in mind when he says that, you know. Because in the strict sense, luck or chance, really, they're defined by end or purpose. You see, luck or chance is defined as an accidental cause of what happens rarely, right?

[1:00:43] As a result of an action done for an end. Okay. Now, if it's done for an end by by man, then we call it luck or fortune, huh? As well as chance, huh?

[1:00:58] But if it's done by nature, right? And something happens other than what the animal is trying to do, right? Then we say it's by chance, huh? Okay. The stock example is that the mother cat, or whatever it is, has lost her cubs, and she's chasing some animal for her what dinner, right? And that animal happens to run by where her little cubs are lost, and so she finds her cubs, right?

[1:01:27] Okay. So it's something that happens rarely, as a result of an action done for an end, hunting for dinner, right, or chasing an animal for dinner.

[1:01:38] Okay. So in that sense, you know, luck or chance really presupposes there's something like nature or man acting for a what an end, huh? Gotta be careful that say.

[1:01:52] But if you but if you're denying any end in nature at all, they