Thales of Miletus (624-547 B.C.) is widely regarded as the "first" philosopher for his insights into the workings of nature. While people of his time understood the natural world through mythology, Thales invested in a critical style of thinking. Through mathematical calculation, he accurately predicted a solar eclipse that occurred in 585 B.C. His famous statement that "everything is water" was one of the earliest attempts to account for the physical aspects of a changing world.

By today's standards "everything is water" seems too simplistic, but in his time it represented an important step away from mythological constructions of reality. In the ancient world of Thales, one can count a number of philosophers who were equally significant to the development of science. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) not only wrote on ethics, rhetoric and poetics, he also composed studies of biology and physics. His concept of "causality" attempted to introduce a material understanding of reality into the philosophical conversations of his generation and generations that were to follow.

After the ancients and philosophers of late antiquity, we can turn to medieval philosophy for additional instances of the relationship between science and philosophy. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) was deeply interested in the nature of reality and its theological implications. His logical proofs for the existence of God share a great deal with the concept of "intelligent design," especially the idea of teleology. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), the father of modern philosophy, was a "natural scientist" and mathematician who made great advances in "analytical geometry." Like other modern philosophers from the 17th century onward, Descartes' interests included physics and physiology. During the 18th century, for instance, what we understand as "science" today was pre-figured as "natural philosophy" and leading Enlightenment philosophers, including Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), taught courses on natural phenomena. Not exactly science by our standards, these courses rested largely on ideas from metaphysics and ordinary observation. With the birth of modern science and the availability of better technology, "natural philosophy" underwent a series of continued transformations — many initiated by Sir Isaac Newton's "The Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy," published in 1729. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were influenced by this work and viewed it as an opportunity to redefine philosophy's purpose. In fact, Immanuel Kant accepted Newton's laws, but came to view our understanding of those laws as predicated on subjective experience.

Today, "the philosophy of science" is a thriving field. Many important philosophers over the centuries have made valuable contributions to the development of science. In many ways, science has important connections to "natural philosophy." This history that I have sketched leads inevitably to the status of ID as a scientific theory and the largely philosophical claims of ID as it pertains to the origin of life. Since biologists seem to have rejected ID on scientific grounds, perhaps the conversation about the origin of life should take place within the wider spaces of religion, philosophy or natural philosophy.

How does life as we know it begin? Isn't this the question that gives rise to the "alternative perspective" underpinning ID? Philosophers have asked this question, too. What does philosophy have to do with the issue? Everything, it seems, if one wishes to challenge or validate claims in a logical way. If evolution cannot, as ID claims, account for the genesis of life, then what other ways of thinking critically do we have? Evolutionary biology states that an answer has not yet been found. ID asserts that evolutionary biology has reached an impasse on the question of the beginning of life. In this debate, ID seems to point beyond the scientific paradigm for a "scientific" answer. In claiming that small complex organisms are irreducible to less complex smaller organisms, ID invites two possibilities.
The first is that none have been found yet, which is science's response.

The second is that none are possible "in nature" and therefore they (simple-complex organisms) must have been fabricated by something outside the natural order. The latter poses an interesting metaphysical problem that Aristotle identified as the "uncaused cause." Or, how do you go from nothing to something?
In philosophy and religion there are numerous examples that ask the question of origins. Myths from African and Native American cultures tell of "maker" gods that fashion clay or mud into living things. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic account portrays God not as a maker but as a creator; that is, God brings creation forward from nothing (ex nihilo), which resonates with ID. In all these accounts something outside the natural order designs life, which is contrary to science that holds that all phenomena will have a natural cause — not an "uncaused cause."

While an overwhelming number of scientists conclude that ID fails the science test, the question of origins may still have a place in discussions of philosophy, religion and myth. Furthermore, thousands of years of human questioning and pursuit of the origins of life do not rise or fall on the merits of ID. Philosophy, religion and myth have not provided scientifically sound accounts of creation.

interesting!