The function of death

Much of modern science falls under the natural philosophy of systemics.
That is to say it is not actually science in the classical sense.
Science is a tool for categorizing things. For discovering how they work.
Systemics is an attempt to collect these ideas into working systems.

The study of ecosystems or evolutionary paths may be considered systemics, even if it is sold as classical science.

Life systems, which would include many modern biological studies, falls into this category. Each individual aspect of biology is studying and pieced together to map a whole, functional system.
Each functional aspect is studied in detail, and the relation and function in tandem with those systems (again) is mapped.
Through this kind of thinking we are able to see all the various, myriad interactions between biological systems such as reproduction, the digestive process, cellular development, the immune system, and so on and so forth.
One are given a great deal of attention is the reproductive system. The functions and interaction of this system with others is extremely well mapped. We know how it effects the entire biology. We know what it is for.
This interest only makes sense. We want to understand our personal genesis.
What does not make sense, on the surface, is how death is rejected as part of this system.
Obviously death is important. Obviously death has profound effect on the individual in question, and on those who know them. But death is seen only as the end of the system, and is not credited with any function. Why is that?
I don't think the materialists who crowd the halls of the academe mean to suggest this is an open system (life). That death is somehow a release from this system. Nor do I even need to 'go there', myself.
No. I get the impression there is something that makes those very materialists (ie naturalists) extremely nervous about assigning a natural function to death.
Why would that be?
The simplified answer is that if death has a natural function within the system beyond the immediate (ie providing food for a predator/scavenger or fertilizer for plants), it has some very uncomfortable implications for the wider world view of these folks.
How so?
Let's envision for a second that death is the mechanism by which genetics improve upon themselves. That a process known as 'natural selection' and 'mutation' results in real improvements in the organisms undergoing this process. We might call this process 'evolution'. In such a process/system we may consider ourselves 'more evolved' (ie superior in design/function) to a more primitive (much older) example of our species. This is, of course, the stance of modern 'science' (ie systemics).
So, in order for this system to work/function properly one generation must end and another begin. They will overlap, mix and spread the desirable traits. The mechanism to determine these traits being the environment itself. The algorithm of life simply adapts and thrives. A perfect piece of self improving, self propagation code.
Improving to what end?
Well, this is where the materialist wants the conversation to end. They will simply posit 'stuff happens'. They will accuse you of 'promiscuous teleology' or seeing a correlation as a connection. They will shrug away the concept that this self improving, self propagating code simply is (just so) and continues with no direction or function beyond those apparent.
But that's the problem isn't it? The 'self improvement' IS apparent.
Progress and improvement seems to be the result of evolution. Evolution is linear, or progressive - not circular and reductive.
That is to say the 'system' of inanimate matter is not linear, but recursive. Sand becomes rock, breaks into stone and becomes sand. The water cycle. Chemical bonding. So on and so forth.
Life is different. It improves.
To what end?
That is the forbidden question.
It is, of course, a 'why' question.
Comrade professor and the commissars of the academe do NOT like 'why'.
Presumably because it could be applied to their bloated tenures and ever continuing 'education'.
'Why death' is a naughty one indeed.
What does it show us? 
A very big 'boo boo' in the grand theory of 'shit happens' (ie the implicitly nihilistic materialist mindset of the academe and elites).
Apparently -if death is assigned a proper biological function - life has some sort of meaning, even on the physical level.
Apparently whatever the source of the information found in our genetic code, it has a goal that can be achieved by applying the genetic algorithm, itself full of CONTINGENCY, to the problem of conscious existence. By applying time and using nature itself as a mould or limiter.
Apparently this little code of proteins has the ability to transfer some essential, central functionality FORWARD in time to some end purpose.
Apparently, and so far, we can tell at least one of these functions is consciousness itself. The ability to ask 'why should this be'.
Well then!
Why should this be?

“When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.”

"“When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius"

This is a brief review of an excellent polemic work I finished about a week ago.
Late last year I was given the heads up by a blogger friend, Dr Michael Egnor, on an excellent book by philosopher and sometimes apologist Edward Feser. The work  is called " The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism",  and I had tried in vain to get it on my book list. I waited patiently to no avail. I read reviews and several synops, but it never showed. Eventually, sick of my griping about it and no doubt sick of listening to my philosophical rants about Platonic and Augustinian ideas, my wife decided to change the channel and order it in from Amazon. 
What a treat!
It had been years since I rummaged through my inherited volumes of Aristotle and Aquinas (dad was a history/philosophy major/prof)...and I must admit the idea of picking up these HUGE works again was intimidating. Sitting on shelf in what is supposed to be a dining room they loom like Cathedrals next to the comparatively  teeny-tiny shack-like paperbacks by Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Locke and many other 'moderns'. Like comic books next to collection of Wells, Kipling, or Poe, the moderns seem much more accessible, but at the same time obviously less well thought out - even simply judged just by sheer volume of language.
Big ideas take big, long, explanations... and big long times to read. 
Feser came to the rescue. Here is a young, fresh, new take on the arguments that gave us logic and reason - before a few 'enlightened' minds repackaged them clumsily and tied them in ribbons of fallacy and self refutation. 
Feser is what is commonly known as an Aristotelian-Thomistic thinker (A-T henceforth). His logic and reason are OLD school. Like a breath of fresh air, he argues for the objective and common sense approach to science and reality. His purpose is purpose.
Perhaps it would be better to say he is counter-non-purposefulness.
He denies the trendy-hipster nihilism of today's scientific and philosophical elites with a real American flair. 
This wonderfully written work is not for the lazy minded or uninitiated in the works of the philosophical masters, You need a little background - but not much, as Feser does a great job of countering his own arguments, just as Aristotle and Aquinas did. He lists objections and demolishes them with military precision.
Some of the oh-so-hip ideas treated to a damn good tomahawk strike are eliminative materialism, Darwinism (social and dogma), Paleyism (intelligent design), the 'landscape', 'evolutionary psychology' and 'theory of the mind', positivism/scientism, and of course the academic elitism that promotes such pseudo-scientific nonsense as holy writ.  These concepts are shown as lunacy, fallacies, based on fallacy, or just sometimes banal and irrelevant. 
He discusses and dissects the popular arguments of men like Richard Dawkins, Michael Dennet, and Peter Singer. But he also takes on serious academics of the 'Enlightenment' . Hume, Kant, Locke, Descartes, and company. Feser exposes the real motive behind the movement and the costs and effects of that reductive trend.
Naturalism is not spared a very sceptical look, either.  
This is no 'flat earth' type argument or work. Quite the contrary.
Feser seeks to open the mind and expose modern dogma for what it is: Vapid and unguided self refutation in the name of nothingness and randomness; arrogant and very, very silly.
I could not agree on his central premise any more.

We do not, however, agree on every point.
There was some notable team sports-like 'partisanship' that seems to infect every polemic work written in the United States for the last 30 or so years and lumps unrelated issues together to impress a target audiend. Constant references to an extinct 'liberalism' (the American word for 'secular progressive' or collectivism), comparisons between pot smoking and immorality (I am reminded of the Sesame Street segment 'Wich one of these things does not belong here? Which one of these things is not the same') but that can be forgiven considering the charged historical context in which it was written and the very nature  of this work; which is obviously polemic.
Another note of disagreement is the treatment that scholastics like Feser give the animal world. While I completely agree that humans are exceptional beings and that we hold a very special place and purpose in the order of things - I cannot agree that animals have no ability to reason.
Less? Sure.
Different? Definitely.
But I would not concede they do not reason at all. I have far too much personal experience with many types of critters to buy into that line. In all honesty I think the 'right' and 'left' both tell themselves this and include it in their stance with equal measure (ie man is superior to the lowly beast, or man is just another lowly beast) in order to justify the large scale industrial nastiness committed on them as a justifiable comfort or indulgence. I think we, as a people, tend to sleep better at night when we, in our utterly consumerist/materialist society,  imagine the animals we treat so cruelly to stock our meat aisles with cheap cuts as incapable of sorrow and pain and as soulless, or in the case of many scholastics like Feser as lesser souls more or less mortal, single use souls.
Again, the times we live in.
I prefer the guilt and shame of knowing the objective truth: Animals have a different purpose and final causality, but they TOO are God's creatures. They too transcend. I tend to think like the Hebrews of old along these lines.
All that noted, this book is a great work. Not just good, but great. The arguments against a strictly material approach to reality are flawless and inescapable; AND it actually makes you WANT to pick up those massive dusty volumes of the A-T and scholastics in order to get into them.
Over-all I would give his work a 4.5/5. Top notch stuff.
Feser ends his work with the title of this blog-post. He sums up his argument for function, purpose, cause and effect with a brilliant observation by the Eastern Master Confucius.

“When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.”
 And with that the finger is raised to new Atheism, who's faithful clergy clearly do not even notice the moon being presented to them. 

Personal note: Thanks for the tip, Mike. Hardcover has been ordered to sit next to my David Berlinsky collection and confuse my children for years to come;  and the "Summa"  and "Causes" dusted off and 'ready to rock'.  The wife will enjoy the change of venue, I am sure :P

Top down physics

For centuries theology and philosophy have explored purpose and design in nature.
In our efforts to understand the order and patterns we see in the universe, we have long wondered if that elusive fourth dimension may be the medium in which the 'plan' is revealed.
Could the beginning and the end be the same? Could the present and even the past be changed by the need for an outcome in the future? Teleology. A top down system.
In this fascinating piece from Rueters via FOXNEWS a team of particle physicists think they may have found the medium for just such a phenomenon:"the discovery of sub-atomic particles apparently traveling faster than light could force a major rethink of theories on the makeup of the cosmos if independently confirmed."
Faster than light? My goodness. That sounds almost SUPER natural!

We learn more, "Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain's Manchester University, told Reuters the results if confirmed would mean it would be possible in theory to "send information into the past." Send information? A very specific idea. He also notes that time travel, while 'possible', would still be a long way off.
If this is so, and this research is confirmed, could this be the natural medium through which Form is transmitted to nature from an 'outside' source?
I have a feeling that whatever the answer may be, it will be elusive and not very cooperative at all.
Still while many are exited, none are convinced.
""It is premature to comment on this," Professor Stephen Hawking, the world's most well-known physicist, told Reuters. "Further experiments and clarifications are needed."
Prof Hawking is healthy in his scepticism.
But what a wonder if proven!
A total RETHINK.