Burt asked:

My instructor at Montana Tech made a comment about how no one can figure out what the first cause
was, he said it could not be God because first we have no reason to believe God exists. Also if God
exists what was his cause. This brings us to psychology, the reason it does is I just learned about
ethology, the theory that Nature is instinctive. So if this is true (which has caused controversy in
psychology) then maybe the first cause was instinctive and then went on to bring causes from
different effects. For example, the universe was created by itself by pure instinct. This could also help
psychology in effect that an animal is first instinctive and then it depends on the stimulus that
happens after the first instinctive act(s) and learns and then all acts are behaviour.

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I have puzzled over this question. It looks like a joke, a send-up. There is an obvious objection to the
theory that says the first cause caused itself 'by instinct'. If the instinct is what gave the vital push that
brought the universe into being, how did the instinct come to be? An animal's instincts are 'in' the
animal, it gets its instincts from its genes, it is born with them. Or is your thought that the 'pure instinct'
that set of the chain of causes and effects is different from biological instincts in that it doesn't have to
be 'in' anything?

Then I remembered my motto, which I tell all my philosophy students:

Be prepared to consider the possibility that you mightbe wrong.
There is no such thing as a foolish question.

I might be wrong. I might be missing something. So what I am going to do is this. I am going to
assume that I havemissed something, and see where that takes us.

The first clue would be to look at what instincts are contrasted with. Say we observe apparently
purposeful behaviour, the kind of thing that if human beings did it, they would be planning out their
actions, deciding what to do first, and so on. For example, birds building a nest. My old philosophy
teacher, Ruby, had a favourite example, the Bearded Tit. I don't know whether Bearded Tits are found
outside the UK. But apparently they are extremely fine architects and builders when it comes to nest
making. Bearded Tits are a problem for the 'instinct' theory of nest building because they don't just go
through the same procedure every time. They go about their work with resourcefulness and
'intelligence'.

Well, maybe, maybe not. Right now, I don't want to get involved with that argument.

The point is that if you say something was done by instinct you are admitting it was purposeful, but
also denying that there was any conscious sense of purpose. So, if the universe was created by
instinct, then there was 'purpose' in its creation but there was no intelligent being whose purpose it
was. Philosophers have a technical term for explanation which relies on the notion of purpose. They
call it teleologicalexplanation (from the Greek telos). A causal explanation talks about the conditions
that made a thing come to be, a teleological explanation talks about the purpose or end that the
thing's coming to be serves.

Now I have to get on my pulpit. One of the greatest educational scandals of modern times concerns
the way Christian fundamentalists in the US have succeeded in forcing schools to teach so-called
'creation theory' alongside Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Many of the young
people in the US looking at these pages will have been taught in schools that both 'theories' are fully
consistent with the evidence. In a way that's true. God couldhave made the world 5,000 years ago to
lookas though it had existed for billions of years, together with a fossil record that lookedas if it was
evidence of evolution. All that is logically possible.So what do we conclude from that? If the fact that
something is logically possible made it a candidate for belief, then it would be perfectly rational for me
to believe that Monica Lewinski is really Leonardo diCaprio in drag. I'm sure there's someone,
somewhere who believes that.

Science is concerned with the best explanation.No one is claiming that the theory of evolution could
not possibly be false. It is simply the best - by far - of all the available explanations.

Some years ago, I had occasion to review two books by an American professor of philosophy, Errol
E. Harris. Harris proposes a third alternative in-between creationism and Darwinian evolution which
sounds a lot like your 'instinct' theory. Actually, the theory is not his, but is based on Hegel. According
to Hegel, the universe is fundamentally teleologicalin character. In Harris' words, evolution as Darwin
described it could not possibly have taken place without a 'nisus towards wholeness and integration'.
But the source of that 'nisus' doesn't have to be the traditional God, the Creator. It is simply the
metaphysical fact that what is ultimately realis purpose.

- I'm afraid I was rather rude about Harris' objections to orthodox Darwinism in my review. But I am
prepared to accept that I might have been wrong. It could be argued that Hegelian 'natural
philosophy' holds out the only hope for an answer to the question, 'Why is there anything at all, rather
than nothing?' But who says there has to be an answer? I don't think you or I really understand that
question.

Geoffrey Klempner