But you’re not really thinking about any of this, are you? You say I’m just stomping my feet and whining, but that’s the pot calling the kettle black. Unlike you, I quoted from Aristotle and Feser and laid out their arguments at length so the reader can confirm that my criticisms are relevant. You didn’t do that in response to my article because you’re more interested in strawmanning, trolling, and resenting any criticism of what I presume is your sacred theology. You don’t come close to engaging with my criticisms in this article.
Teleology is the explanandum in biology, not the explanans. That’s why Darwin replaced Aristotle, and it’s why Feser’s Thomism is archaic. And no, contrary to your conservative prejudices, appealing to natural norms to justify bigotry against those who are sexually or otherwise abnormal is just to commit the naturalistic fallacy and to indulge in social Darwinism. Biological norms or functions aren’t deeply normative. The goods in question are illusory, not absolute. That’s what Darwin discovered.
No, I don’t just presume that what science says goes in philosophy. What I say is that science has demolished the naïve case for the cognitive sufficiency of human intuition (otherwise known as “anthropocentrism”). Science, then, is quite at odds with Thomism because Thomists beg the question by assuming anthropocentrism. Why should the rest of the universe be limited by our intuitions unless theism were true, and God wanted us to easily understand everything?
Lots of science is counterintuitive because scientists bypass the narrowness of such biases with their institutional methods. Science doesn’t contradict itself. What there are, of course, are competing models, and an incomplete patchwork of models with lots of gaps to be filled and thus with lots of unknowns. Science deals with probabilities, not with necessary truths. Thus, science differs from childlike Thomistic ontotheology that amounts to foot-stomping to protect our intuitions and our fragile egos.
I agree that metaphysical narratives should be added to scientific models to enable us to fully understand the world. But those narratives are more like myths than rational explanations. They brand our cultures and our personal experience. They’re largely matters of taste, and they can become old-fashioned.
