The Battle Over Life's Ultimate Explanation
Which comes first in living beings?
Ability to maintain and reproduce structure
Goal-directed, purposive behavior
This priority relationship determines your entire worldview about life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.
"Teleonomic principle operates only in living matter"
"Universal teleonomic principle governs entire cosmos"
For millennia, humans lived under an ancient alliance with nature where everything had purpose and meaning. Natural phenomena were explained by the same principles as human conscious activity. This created existential comfort by making the universe comprehensible and morally meaningful - but at the cost of objective truth.
Humans desperately want to be necessary rather than contingent. Evolution initially seemed to confirm our centrality as the "natural heir" of cosmic development. But the reality is stark: we are compatible with physical laws but not deducible from them. We are no more "inevitable" than any particular configuration of atoms.
Only one theory preserves scientific objectivity while explaining life's apparent purposiveness:
Purpose emerges from purposeless processes - no initial teleonomic principle required!
ALL non-scientific worldviews make the same fundamental error: they assume an initial teleonomic principle that explains invariance and guides evolution. This violates the postulate of objectivity and leads to various forms of animist projection - attributing purpose, consciousness, or design to nature itself.
The only scientifically valid approach recognizes that apparent purpose emerges from purposeless processes through variation and selection operating on replicative structures.
The physical laws of the universe are completely adequate to explain human existence. No additional principles, forces, or purposes are needed.
Nothing in those same laws requires human existence. We could have never existed without violating any principle of physics.
"No one will find fault with a universal theory for not affirming and foreseeing the existence of this particular configuration of atoms [in a pebble]; it is enough for us that this actual object, unique and real, be compatible with the theory. This object, according to the theory, is under no obligation to exist; but it has the right to."
That is enough for us as concerns the pebble, but not as concerns ourselves.
From Plato to Hegel, all major systems assumed humans represent the culmination or goal of cosmic development. We were the universe becoming conscious of itself.
Humans as the crown of creation, made in God's image, central to divine purpose. Our existence validates the entire cosmic plan.
Human consciousness as the inevitable product of dialectical evolution. History has direction, and we are its destined endpoint.
Evolution as progressive advance toward higher consciousness. We represent the universe's inevitable self-awareness.
Like "the person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel strange and a little unreal." Our existence is not a vindication of cosmic purpose but an astronomical improbability that happened to occur.
We live "on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to [our] music, just as indifferent to [our] hopes as it is to [our] suffering or [our] crimes." The universe owes us nothing and expects nothing from us.
"Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty."
If we are merely sufficient but not necessary, then all meaning, purpose, and value must come from human choice rather than cosmic validation. This is simultaneously terrifying (no external guarantee of significance) and liberating (we are the authors of our own meaning).
"The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose."