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Teleology Quotes

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Teleology Quotes

“Everyone has different beliefs about life and death, Heaven and Hell. I'm not concerned with fire and brimstone. No, I imagine Hell is worse. Hell is crippling emotional pain and mental stress; a body fatigued from loss. Hell isn't experiencing your own death over and over, but the death of your loved ones. I wouldn't imagine God or Satan so shallow that they would make Hell only a sadistic nightmare of physical torture. If Hell exists, it is a place where we are broken emotionally by witnessing the death of those we love.”

PhilosophyLossHellDeath And DyingDeath Of A Loved OneTeleology
Author:Michael Palmero
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“It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.”

DestinyMemoryReactionaryTeleologyOrganic Logic
Book:The decline of the West
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“Just by looking at accelerating complexification of the Universe of which we are an integral part, we can conclude that we are not subjected to a random walk of evolution, nor are we subjected to a deterministic script of Nature, the truth lies somewhere in between – we are part of teleological evolution.”

UniverseNatureUniverse QuotesTeleologyAcceleratingTeleological EvolutionDeterministic ScriptRandom Walk
Book:The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution
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“There is in human nature a distinct drive to know, a distinguishable theoretical impulse or urge to understand. It is at work at every level of cognition, from the simplest impersonal judgment, like ‘it is hot’, to the most comprehensive mathematical or metaphysical system. But like other fundamental drives, the moral, for example, and the aesthetic, what it is seeking - what will ultimately satisfy it - is far from apparent at its lower levels and is defined only gradually in the course of a long advance. But that advance is not simply a matter of blind trial and error. Its direction is set by its end, which works as an immanent ideal within the process of thought. The pressure exerted by this ideal increases as intelligence rises in the scale. … As thought matures and realizes in fuller measure the end it is seeking, that end lays its movement under increasingly firm constraint. … The higher our altitude on the long ascent of intelligence, the better is our position to discern what lies at the summit. To be sure we never see this clearly. In no human activity do we ever fully know what we are about. We are aware of the end, or we could do nothing but wander aimlessly. We never see it clearly, so we are condemned to much groping.”

EndsReasonPurposeTeleology
Book:Reason & Analysis
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“According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide. For the teleologist an organism exists because it was made for the conditions in which it is found; for the Darwinian an organism exists because, out of many of its kind, it is the only one which has been able to persist in the conditions in which it is found. Teleology implies that the organs of every organism are perfect and cannot be improved; the Darwinian theory simply affirms that they work well enough to enable the organism to hold its own against such competitors as it has met with, but admits the possibility of indefinite improvement.”

PerfectPossibilityEvolutionImprovementCompetitorsScience Vs ReligionDarwinAnalogyCharles DarwinTeleologyDarwinianTeleologist
Book:Criticism on "The Origin of Species"
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“As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children ('as much as they can understand') there are lies-to-bosses ('as much as they need to know') lies-to-patients ('they won't worry about what they don't know') and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves. Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.' Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.”

InspirationalHumorScienceEducationKnowledgeTeacherPerceptionLibraryUniversitySurrealismAcademiaPastoral CareTeleologyLie To Children
Book:The Science of Discworld
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“Defendamo-nos de dizer que há leis na natureza. Existem apenas necessidades: não existe ninguém que comande ou obedeça, ninguém que infrinja. Quando souberdes que inexistem fins, sabereis igualmente que inexiste acaso; pois, unicamente sob um mundo de fins é que a palavra “acaso” toma sentido. Excusemo-nos de dizer que a morte é o contrário da vida. A vida não passa de uma variedade de morte e variedade mui rara. Defendemo-nos de acreditar que o mundo cria incessantemente o novo. Inexistem substâncias eternamente duráveis; a matéria é um engano semelhante ao deus dos eleatas. Quando acabaremos com nossos cuidados e nossas precauções? Quando deixaremos de ser obscurecidos por todas essas sombras de Deus? Quando teremos despojado dos atributos divinos a natureza? Quando teremos direito, nós homens, de nos tornarmos naturais, com a natureza pura, reencontrada, liberada?”

ReligiãoCiênciaPropósitoSentido Da VidaTeleologyTeleologia
Book:The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs
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“In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact. Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.”

SciencePurposeNewtonTheismIntelligent DesignAnthropocentrismFine TuningIsaac NewtonIdAnthropic PrincipleTeleology
Book:Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe
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“That which struck the present writer most forcibly on his first perusal of the 'Origin of Species' was the conviction that Teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin's hands. For the teleological argument runs thus: an organ or organism (A) is precisely fitted to perform a function or purpose (B); therefore it was specially constructed to perform that function.”

PurposeDesignFunctionConvictionOrigin Of SpeciesDarwinCharles DarwinTeleologyDeathblowTeleological Argument
Book:Criticism on "The Origin of Species"
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