BIOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 413 



question which critics will not admit. Causes are "necessary and sufficient 

 conditions," not "reasons." "Reason for being" is a loose popular expression 

 developed in a background which was saturated with human purposiveness. 

 Neither looseness and ambiguousness of popular usage nor question- 

 begging presupposition of purposiveness can be admitted as proof of world 

 purposiveness. "To be caused" does not mean "to be purposed." 



Authority. Except for appeal to design, probably the most common argu- 

 ment is appeal to authority. Especially those who have tried to argue, and 

 seem to themselves to fail, appeal to authority, which sometimes seems 

 to be above argument. Authorities of many kinds are appealed to — eminent 

 men, the Bible, the Church, Jesus, God. This type of argument may be 

 illustrated by the appeal to the authority of God. "God, through revela- 

 tion, has said that the world has a purpose, and what God says is so." 



Critics are expected to cringe before this appeal to the authority of God 

 himself, yet in fact they seldom do. They rebut as follows: Is there a God? 

 One first has to prove that God exists before he can claim that God is an 

 authority. One of the commonest arguments for the existence of God is 

 the argument from world purposiveness: "The world has a purpose, there- 

 fore the world must have a purposer, namely, God." However, such an 

 argument presupposes that the world has a purpose, whereas the present 

 argument for world purposiveness presupposes the existence of God. Using 

 both of these arguments would be to commit the fallacy of "reasoning in a 

 circle." Thus, unless one can find some other proofs of God's existence or 

 can get his critic to grant it, he will be unable to prove his case. But even 

 granting that God exists, it does not follow that the world has a purpose, 

 because God might have created the world accidentally, or have created 

 the world as a result of mechanical necessity, or have created the world 

 in the past for a purpose which he has now forgotten. Furthermore, still 

 granting that God exists, does it follow that God is an authority? God 

 might exist without being a person, or without being actively interested 

 in the world (as Deists claim), or without being interested in acting au- 

 thoritatively. However, granting both God's existence and authoritative- 

 ness, did God ever say that the world has a purpose? All alleged reports 

 of God's speaking to persons in such a way that one might infer that the 

 world has a purpose are dubious. Someone has questioned every one of 

 them. Furthermore, all those who appeal, not to the writings of historical 

 revelators, but to their own experience in communion with God and of 

 his revelation directly to them that the w^orld does have a purpose have 

 been accused of self-hypnosis and self-deception. Also, evidence may be 

 presented for God's nonauthoritativeness. For example, there are contra- 

 dictions among contentions of different revelators and most revelators con- 

 tradict themselves sooner or later. Such contradictions prove that God was 

 not involved, because God is always consistent. 



Self-co?itradictio?i by mechanists. "Those who claim that nothing has a 



