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The Meaning of Life

intelligible, comprehensible, meaningful to us. They represent the universe as meaningless, not because it is meaningless, but because scientific explana- tions are not designed to yield answers to investigations into the why and wherefore, into the meaning, purpose, or point of things. Scientific expla- nations (this argument continues) began, harmlessly enough, as partial and provisional explanations of the movement of material bodies, in particular the planets, within the general framework of the medieval world picture. Newton thought of the universe as a clock made, originally wound up, and occasionally set right by God. His laws of motion only revealed the ways in which the heavenly machinery worked. Explaining the movement of the planets by these laws was analogous to explaining the machinery of a watch. Such explanations showed how the thing worked, but not what it was for or why it existed. Just as the explanation of how a watch works can help our understanding of the watch only if, in addition, we assume that there is a watchmaker who has designed it for a purpose, made it, and wound it up, so the Newtonian explanation of the solar system helps our understanding of it only on the similar assumption that there is some divine artificer who has designed and made this heavenly clockwork for some purpose, has wound it up, and perhaps even occasionally sets it right, when it is out of order.

Socrates, in the “Phaedo,” complained that only explanations of a thing showing the good or purpose for which it existed could offer a real explana- tion of it. He rejected the kind of explanation we now call “causal” as no more than mentioning “that without which a cause could not be a cause,” that is, as merely a necessary condition, but not the real cause, the real explanation.4 In other words, Socrates held that all things can be explained in two different ways: either by mentioning merely a necessary condition, or by giving the real cause. The former is not an elucidation of the explicandum, not really a help in understanding it, in grasping its “why” and “wherefore.”

This Socratic view, however, is wrong. It is not the case that there are two kinds of explanation for everything, one partial, preliminary, and not really clarifying, the other full, final, and illuminating. The truth is that these two kinds of explanation are equally explanatory, equally illuminating, and equally full and final, but that they are appropriate for different kinds of explicanda.

When in an uninhabited forest we find what looks like houses, paved streets, temples, cooking utensils, and the like, it is no great risk to say that these things are the ruins of a deserted city, that is to say, of something man- made. In such a case, the appropriate explanation is teleological, that is, in terms of the purposes of the builders of that city. On the other hand, when a comet approaches the earth, it is similarly a safe bet that, unlike the city in the forest, it was not manufactured by intelligent creatures and that, therefore, a teleological explanation would be out of place, whereas a causal one is suitable.

It is easy to see that in some cases causal, and in others teleological, ex-

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