When I lived in Belgium around 2006 or so, I had an atheist friend, a fellow philosopher who—like me—was very interested in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Both of us had read the major books available at the time including Stewart Guthrie's Faces in the Clouds (1993), Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (2001), and Justin Barrett's Why would anyone believe in God?.
The friend said that CSR had been very helpful to him because he now finally had a naturalistic explanation for all those strange and troublesome beliefs and feelings. That nagging sense that things happen for a reason, that an agent with a will and desire caused things to happen in his life, that people he loved who had died still existed somewhere… It was all a natural effect of the workings of his brain.
Now, he knew why he believed those things. This didn't change the fact that he had those seemings. But it did change his attitude toward them: any remnant push he might have felt to religion, and Christian theism in particular, was now firmly out of the way. It was just his brain doing it! His sense that God exists was not a calvinist sensus divinitatis but rather, nothing more than faces in the clouds: the overattribution of anthropomorphic agency.
One feature of his cognition that my friend found very troublesome was the inescapable feeling that things happen for a reason. He found it difficult to shake that belief. Teleological thinking is a feature of human cognition that cognitive scientists of religion have studied in depth. From an early age, humans cross-culturally have the tendency to attribute purpose when we consider objects and events in our lives. For example, children spontaneously attribute purposes to objects, including unfamiliar tools and body parts. Developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen designed a number of charming experiments that show young children will spontaneously look for a purpose for an unfamiliar tool (called “dax”, which really is a lemon squeezer) or for a reason for why the blue-footed booby's feet are so blue. She could even prompt children to say things like “Lions are to go in the zoo” when asked why lions exist.
We also see purposes in events. The literature on this is smaller than on folk teleology, but still compellingly indicates that even atheists spontaneously seek out reasons for why they fell ill, or lost their job (“It's the universe telling me…”, “It was just not meant to be"), or they conversely see the fortuitous meeting of their future partner on an airplane as “meant to be.”
This appeal to teleology is irresistible… Or is it?
According to Immanuel Kant, teleological thinking might be spurious but we can't help it. As he argues in his third Critique (1790), it's a regulative feature of our cognition. It helps us to think about biology and organisms and their structure. As I've argued in this co-authored paper, CSR provides a helpful perspective on Kant's ideas about teleology as regulative for cognition.
Kant's discussion is the mature culmination of many conceptual and scientific innovations: Newton's mechanics and its (at the time) poor fit with biology, and the skepticism toward anything like final causality among rationalist philosophers.
We can see a discussion in Spinoza's Ethics (appendix to Part I) about final causation:
… if a stone has fallen from a roof onto someone’s head and killed him, they will show, in the following way, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. for if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance (for often many circumstances do concur at once)? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? why was the man walking that way at that same time?
The observation here is that simple mechanistic causal explanations, particularly for things we deem significant, are unsatisfying in some way. It just doesn't seem enough that the man who was killed by the stone was unlucky, no there must be something more to it!
If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on—for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing? why was the man invited at just that time? And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i.e., the sanctuary of ignorance.
Here Spinoza's argument is that teleological thinking is a result of ignorance, and it's remarkable how well this idea has held up. Several studies on teleological thinking show that teleological thinking increases under the following circumstances:
People with Alzheimer's give more teleological explanations than age-matched neurotypical people. For instance, Alzheimer patients (but not other older adults) will prefer the explanation “rain is there to nurture life on earth” over a mechanistic alternative (“rain is there before water vapor condenses into droplets”)
People with PhDs in the sciences and even humanities reason less teleologically than people without PhDs. In general, more education means less teleological thinking.
When put under time pressure, people who normally accept mechanistic explanations (e.g., plate tectonics for why there are mountains) revert to increasingly accepting teleological explanations (e.g., mountains are there for climbing)
Authors of these studies commonly take the main finding to be that teleological reasoning persists or recurs, especially when mechanistic alternatives are unavailable. Teleological thinking is more “intuitive”, if you want to put it in dual-processing; they are type-1 processing whereas mechanistic explanations often belong to the realm of type-2 processing. While more intuitive, it is still the case that we can resist teleological thinking by embracing alternative explanations. Few adults who learn about plate tectonics, I think, would say that mountains are there to climb on.
There is another factor which Spinoza didn't take into account. Teleological thinking is not only the result of lack of education, culture and personal beliefs (independently) play a role too. For example, western adults (as in the US and Europe) think more teleologically than Chinese adults, a result that the researchers think is due to the high prevalence of atheism in China compared to the US, and Quecha adults think less teleologically about animals than US adults. Moreover, while natural scientists and humanities scholars think less teleologically, theistic belief as well as non-theistic “Gaia beliefs” predict teleological thinking.
Spinoza collapses ignorance and religious thinking under “the sanctuary of ignorance.” Be that as it may, at least in terms of experimental design we can discern two influences for teleological thinking:
unavailability of mechanistic alternatives
cultural and religious influence, with theism as a strong predictor of teleological thinking.
If that is true, then it does not seem that we're consigned to teleological thinking as regulative to our cognition. We can both actively resist it, or we can nurture it and lean into it.
Years after our discussion of CSR, my atheist friend and I were both on the job market. I didn't have a great time and went on the job market multiple times with only partial success (more postdoc positions). A few times, I was close to getting an offer, but circumstances conspired to make it fail. For instance, in one situation I was in the running for a lectureship at a Dutch university and I was a finalist, but another candidate had just won a huge grant, cinching the deal in their favor.
I thought “It's not meant to be. I'm just not meant to be a researcher/university professor.” And I was about to give up and try something alternative; I had some ill-formed plans of alternative careers and no guidance. I was in my mid-thirties and basically clueless about the non-academic job market. But then, more jobs and fellowships etc, came around and then I thought, “What if this is just all non-intentional? What if there is no higher power that's actively working against me?”
Though I was (and still am) a theist, that thought was tremendously liberating. Because if there was nobody working against me, then it might just be the next job I applied to I could get. There was no higher purpose or no rhyme or reason on whether I'd become an academic.
So, with that mindset, I sent off more applications, and as you can see, I'm still in academia (but have learned from my own shortcomings and help my current students to think of alt-ac plans and career paths). Sometimes teleological thinking can be useful. It can be structuring and regulative, and it can provide coherence in our life's story which otherwise seems like a brute series of causes of events. But sometimes trying to bracket our teleological tendencies can be liberating; to think that there's no intended way for you to be, no intended path to your life.
Very nice! It seems reasonable (until we are side-tracked by mind-body problems) to think that mechanistic and teleological explanations are available (in theory) for human action. Thus, sometimes (it seems) the same event might have both mechanistic and teleological explanations, i.e., when it is an action. It is plausible then that for any mechanistic explanation there is a teleological explanation in theory - a theorized ghost in the machine explanation.
Moreover it is plausible that the teleological explanation is informative even if it is descriptively inaccurate (that is, even if there is no planning going on by the agent). For example, suppose a scientist wanted to create a mechanistic cat - something that acted exactly like a cat and was indistinguishable from one. Were she successful in her endeavors, the mechanistic cat would have great predictive value whenever you to supposed that it thought and acted like a cat. That is its mechanistic purpose, after all. This could just as well happen by accident - in theory!
everything is in the hands of heaven except for the fear of heaven.