Telos E-Book

Stephen Iacoboni

• Herausgeber: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

Discover the Science of Purpose   Atheistic scientists have lied about humanity's intelligent design for centuries, and their lies have decayed our culture into the social dystopia continually ripening before our eyes. Life and death have purpose, and we belong to all of it, which the ancient Greeks understood as Telos, meaning "the end as it was intended."   Join Dr. Stephen Iacoboni, award-winning cancer specialist, as he recounts his impassioned search to discover humanity's true origin and purpose. Not only does he address in plain, straightforward language how modern science points inextricably to God's hand on earth, but he also - reviews the history of western science and philosophy,  - challenges misguided theories from academic titans such as Aristotle, Newton, and Darwin, - addresses complex questions regarding the human soul, - equips the nonscientist with a confident understanding of how science validates faith, and - helps readers reclaim a profound sense of individual purpose and meaning.   The time has come to resurrect ancient biblical truth and restore it to its rightful place. It will be a battle royale for the hearts and minds of our civilization, but the treasure is our spiritual inheritance—the greatest gift we will ever receive.  

Leseprobe

In his new book Telos, cancer physician Stephen Iacoboni writes a very accessible account of why purpose (Telos) lies at the heart of life and all of nature. He takes his readers on a journey through the history of philosophy and science from Aristotle to Darwin to Einstein and beyond. In so doing, he narrates how the recognition of purpose in nature was lost and why it must now be regained. And he shares his own journey from seeing his own life as devoid of purpose to realizing that he had a purpose given to him by God. His embrace of the classical Aristotelian perspective leads him to see Telos as more embedded in nature than even many proponents of intelligent design, but his insights will be well appreciated by anyone who has honestly explored the evidence of design seen throughout life. Highly recommended!

Stephen C. Meyer, PhD; Director, Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute, and author of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind behind the Universe

Working directly with Dr. Iacoboni in the emerging field of integrative oncology, I have seen firsthand his ability to think creatively in all academic arenas, including the need for drastic changes in the rigid paradigms that have crippled progress in medical research. In Telos, he illustrates his devotion to cancer care as well as his understanding of God’s action in the natural world. His utterly unique insights demonstrate how to reconcile God with modern science as he methodically dispenses with the mythology of scientific atheism that is so harmful to our society. Readers of Telos will find truly astonishing revelations necessary to understanding how to reconcile twenty-first-century science with our Creator.

Thomas Incledon, PhD; Chief Scientific Officer, Causenta Wellness & Cancer Care Center

When I met Dr. Iacoboni, I was in a severe health crisis. I needed a doctor who could think outside the normal paradigms. He came up with a truly innovative plan to work synergistically with the routine chemotherapy treatments. Now I’m almost three years cancer free, married, and just had my first child. Dr. Iacoboni’s revolutionary insights in cancer medicine reflect his unique ability to penetrate the other great mysteries of science. The epiphanies he shares in Telos are equal to his mastery of cancer medicine. Readers of Telos will be greatly rewarded by learning what he has discovered, just as I will be forever indebted to him for helping me on my pathway to health.

Carson Martin, Saluda, South Carolina

In Telos: The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose, oncologist Stephen Iacoboni, having been misled by his mentors, redeems himself by taking the reader on a philosophical and scientific tour of history. In it he demolishes the lie of Neo-Darwinism and, with it, atheistic materialism and demonstrates the truth of purpose in life. Originally motivated by his desire to be the quintessential physician, a practitioner of not only the science but also the art of medicine, Dr. Iacoboni, in his own inimitable way, brings about “the resurrection of a timeless yet forgotten worldview, one that reunites faith and science.” Telos, which is also an ancient Greek term meaning “the end as it was intended,” is a must-read for those who wonder how we got ourselves into such a pickle. Was life all due to Telos or not? Dr. Iacoboni answers that it was!

Howard Glicksman, MD; author of the Evolution News 81-part series “The Designed Body”

I am “Mary” in chapter 25 of Telos. Dr. Iacoboni provided therapy for my cancer that went beyond the boundaries of the current chemotherapy paradigms. I was failing under the conventional protocols. His keen insights and willingness to treat the whole patient literally saved my life. So when he says in Telos that we need to rewrite the paradigms of science, I can tell you that he knows what he’s talking about. If he didn’t, I wouldn’t be alive to write this.

Mary E. Anderson, Parachute, Colorado

Biologists dread the notion of organization, which is, as Aristotle put it, the telos that gives unity to variety. Comparing the nature of organisms to such things as automated machines and ship building, Aristotle described how they fundamentally differ: that which lives must build and maintain itself from the inside out, so to speak, and for this there is a need for something that goes far beyond mere matter-in-motion. Now Dr. Stephen Iacoboni has presented a compelling argument for why telos should be front and center in our studies of living things. In his book Telos, he does this by taking us from Aristotle to that great mathematical biologist of the twentieth century, Robert Rosen, who discovered that final causation is the very kernel of the logic and mathematics of the nature of organisms. Kudos to Dr. Iacoboni for writing this far-seeing, much-needed book.

Rick Sternberg, Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute

Dr. Iacoboni’s book, Telos, is a powerful account of his journey through the maze of philosophical discourse, his personal struggle to help the terminally ill by understanding the human soul, and his continuing spiritual renaissance. Building upon his previous book, The Undying Soul, Dr. Iacoboni shares his many decades of experience as an oncologist. In a logical and methodical fashion, he also tackles the most profound questions of life as he quotes and deconstructs many of the most influential characters in the history of man and how they have played a role in today’s struggling society. While articulating the purpose of life in Telos, Dr. Iacoboni addresses nearly every issue and argument for intelligent design and provides a path of faith and hope for other physicians to follow. I believe this book should be in the library of every serious student of science and medicine today.

Donald W. Schultz, Boeing Technical Principal, retired aerospace engineer

In an era when physicists are discussing super-determinism and testing evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe, this book that describes how life has a predetermined purpose—Telos by oncologist Dr. Stephen Iacoboni—comes as a complement and is greatly refreshing. Iacoboni explains how random DNA mutations, occurring at nano levels, are unable to cause a better “evolved” species—the premise of Darwinian speciation. However, in contrast, such mutations are fundamental for causing the chaos of cancer. This contradiction in paradigms, coming from a cancer physician, makes this literary work even more compelling. If you are interested in a scientific-literary work that is down-to-earth, humorous, with a unique artistic flair that provides evidence for the design and purpose of life, this is a book you must read!

Dr. R. S. Gunasekera, MS, PhD, DIDV; Professor of Biochemistry and Biological Sciences, School of Science, Technology & Health, Biola University

BroadStreet Publishing® Group, LLC

Savage, Minnesota, USA

BroadStreetPublishing.com

Telos: The Scientific Basis for a Life of Purpose

Copyright © 2022 Stephen Iacoboni

978-1-4245-6396-8 (softcover)

978-1-4245-6397-5 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB). Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org.

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Cover and interior by Garborg Design Works | garborgdesign.com

Printed in the United States of America

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I dedicate this book to my lifelong soulmate, wife, and partner, Mary Rees Iacoboni. She is not a philosopher. She has a greater gift: true faith. And I thank her for being patient with me as I rediscovered my own faith.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Ron Klimp

Preface

Introduction: To Be or Not to Be

PART I: Modern Science and Its Manipulations

1 A Day in the Life of Telos

2 The Primal Truth

3 Whence Genesis

4 The Reigning Paradigm

5 Aristotle: The Causation Declaration

6 Long before Einstein

7 What Descartes Said

8 What Newton Did

9 What Darwin Decided

10 Darwin vs. Newton Darwin

11 Watson and Crick: The Cold War Armistice

12 Monod: “The Ancient Covenant Is in Pieces”

13 Carl Woese: A New Biology for a New Century

14 Franklin Harold: Skeptics and Mystics vs. Matter and Energy

15 Robert Rosen: Once in a Thousand Years

PART II: Modern Science Recaptured

16 Darwin Redirected

17 The Original Origin

18 How Organisms Evolve: The Preliminaries

19 The Magic of Molecules

20 Alphabet Soup

21 Structure vs. Function

22 Emergence: The Genesis of Life

23 Telos in Action

24 The Arrival of the Fittest

25 The Predetermined Design of Emergence

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Endnotes

Foreword

My introduction to Dr. Iacoboni came by way of a radio interview a number of years ago in which the show’s host asked him about the origin of his first book and, in reality, the origin of his faith. I was immediately impressed by his intelligence and clarity of thought and by how God had used his experience of treating multiple cancer patients from all walks of life. I was intrigued most of all by his observation that people of faith lived and died differently, which ultimately brought him to a place of faith, believing that the only explanation for the difference he saw in these patients was the existence of something beyond the physical: the undying soul.

He put these observations and conclusion in a book by the same title, The Undying Soul.1 I read that book and immediately contacted Dr. Iacoboni to begin a conversation about speaking to a group of over a hundred chaplains at an annual conference that I was responsible for planning. Chaplains are ordained pastors who obtain special training and are willing to leave the structured walls of the church to serve those in crisis on the battlefields of life. Some of the people chaplains serve are in the military, while many others are in hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, various workplaces, and other arenas of life’s real challenges. These men and women deal with people in crisis all day every day. They need reminders that the torch of faith they carry into the darkness of the battle makes all the difference in the world. Dr. Iacoboni brought a professional and authoritative witness to this crucial fact. He lived in the life-and-death world of the deadliest cancers and personified a hope and optimism that was more than medical. He shared and reinforced from a position of clinical observation that faith in a spiritual reality above and beyond the physical made all the difference in dealing with the physical and emotional challenges of this broken world. Fortunately, Dr. Iacoboni agreed to come to the conference and speak.

After three days of interacting with our chaplains’ group and visiting in our home, he and I learned that we shared a common curiosity about making sense of the connection between the world we see and the unseen truths that explain it. We continued to interact for a time via email. In the meantime, he moved to another job, and I retired from mine. Our connection faded. It was a significant pleasure to hear again more recently that he had written another book and wanted me to read the manuscript and offer an endorsement. I was both flattered and impressed with the important subject of this new book, Telos.

Dr. Iacoboni reveals utterly unique insights into the mystery of intelligent design theory that I’ve not seen anywhere else. For example, he points out the simple fact that Darwin’s famous “discovery” of “natural selection” was an act of intentionality. And that intentionality is at the core of all intelligent design theory.

Dr. Iacoboni again draws brilliantly on his own extensive professional life experiences in this book, just as he did in The Undying Soul. In the process, the reader is drawn into the vividness of our vibrant living world as Dr. Iacoboni clearly demonstrates that the living world around us abounds with undeniable purpose—purpose that can only come from a divine source. Reading Telos will give you invaluable insight into the complexities, beauty, and grandeur of the world God has created.

I have been intrigued since my college days with the discussions attempting to reconcile the biblical account of creation and the contemporary theories of evolution that seem to erase the Creator from the process. A growing consensus among thinkers seems to be that evolution by way of random mutation and survival of the fittest cannot (with any number of millions of years) explain the complexity and interactivity of the systems and life forms that make up the world we know today. Only by the assumption of an intelligent designer can we explain the complexity of a watch found on a beach or the ability of a bat to capture its supper with sonar. The new thought that Dr. Iacoboni supplies (or discovers and develops what Aristotle already suggested) is that the intelligent designer did not have to insert a new form upon each stage of the development of the cosmos but that the ultimate purpose and end result was existing in the beginning and draws (like the force of gravity or magnetism) each particle into its complex whole and purpose. This force, he argues, was given a name in ancient Greek literature: Telos, or end.

We now know that each living cell contains within itself a complex set of instructions, which we call DNA, that dictate how the cell will divide and replicate to become an entire organism, be it a tree, a toad, or a human being. Did the entire universe begin with a single particle or mass that had within it a plan or design for all the complexity and harmony we experience today?

Though I am not a scientist or as broadly educated as Dr. Iacoboni, I suspect that his contribution to the discussion of intelligent design will be significant. I hope that he and others will continue to investigate and discuss issues of origin in order to help us all continue to live meaningfully in the intersection of the physical and spiritual realities of today. This book helps move that thought process toward its own Telos or end/purpose/design.

Rev. Ron KlimpBS, MDiv, Board Certified ChaplainRetired Director of Chaplains, Christian Reformed Church of North America

Telos

From ancient Greek, meaning “the End as it was Intended”

Preface

In 2007, world-renowned atheist philosopher Antony Flew changed his life-long worldview. He was finally convinced by the facts of modern science of the undeniable truth as described in his paradigm-shattering book, There Is a God.

Even so, the famed professor opined that there was yet one missing piece essential to the puzzle that, if discovered, must cast away any and all doubt of God’s existence: “The existence of conditions favorable to life still does not explain how life itself originated. Life was able to survive only because of favorable conditions on our planet. But there is no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities.”2

No law of nature, that is, until now.

Introduction

To Be or Not to Be

One day while I went outdoorsWalking upon a woodSaw I much more to hope forThan any poor man should.

The stealthy lynx,The furtive harePlayed back and forthIn survival’s dare.

The termite, beetle,and cricket stillLay claim to the thicketagainst its will.

A cardinal’s wingThe ferret’s playThe world at onceIn a single day.

Tree’s leaves reach forwardto touch the skyThe chipmunk runsfrom the owl’s cry.

This wondrous tapestry,to whom consign?It’s endless display?…His design!

In late December 1976, on a cold, gray, windswept wintry day on the plains of eastern Colorado, a young man went for a walk in a snowstorm. Healthy, upper-middle-class, and educated, he was a second-year medical student at one of the top universities in the world. And he was an orphan. His widowed mother had recently died a slow, painful death from breast cancer. Hard as that was, on this gray day, his despair was of another sort. Spiritual. Philosophical. An orphan of faith. For decades he had taken to heart what he had been taught in college, a vigorous study of the so-called hard sciences, that dismissed and disdained the religion he had been born into. The void that was left in him, that drove him out into this bleak landscape, was a quotation he remembered from one of the most preeminent intellects of the twentieth century, mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote in 1904:

Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his hopes, his fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental co- location of atoms…destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system; the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.3

Upon matriculation to medical school, the young man had tried to dismiss those decades-old words in the light of humanity’s emergence after the two great wars. But now, to his deep chagrin, he discovered that Russell’s message of despair had been preserved and enunciated anew. In medical school he was required to read the words of one of the greatest life-scientists in the world, Jacques Monod. This aspiring young doctor was gripped with the realization that the iconic Monod had declared, in complete harmony with Russell, that “Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream; and in doing so, wake to his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. Now does he at last realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, indifferent to his hopes.”4

As the snow flurries swirled around him on that nondescript landscape, where land and sky merged into a blurry colorless translucency, he quickened his pace, trying to shed the restlessness imposed by the lingering storm that forced his week-long shut-in during Christmas break. He was numb to the penetrating cold because he was already half frozen by the coldness in his heart. He was a true believer and a deep thinker. And all he could think about was Russell and Monod’s admonition, a message amplified by the task of carving up corpses in a cadaver lab: humans are just the result of random physical events taking place on some backwater planet at the edge of an insignificant galaxy. Or simply put: man has no ultimate purpose in life. We don’t really belong here. We are accidents, freaks of nature. As Jacques Monod said, we are gypsies on “the boundary of an alien world.” We are unintended, unnecessary, unimportant.

But that’s not how this young man was raised. He was brought up in perhaps the most optimistic and prosperous time and place in all of human history. Our American fathers were victorious in the greatest war in history. There was unbridled economic prosperity. America’s sons and daughters stood ready to lead the world in a new era of hope and justice. Freedom afforded by the Declaration of Independence, justice guaranteed by the US Constitution, and purpose derived from a loving Creator who had made all this possible. And yet, all those hopes and dreams had now, somehow, vanished. All because of these decrees by the reigning intellectual elites. So why bother? Maybe he should just keep walking. On into the storm. Who would care? The streets were empty. No one else wanted to be out. There was nothing to stop him. No life purpose anyway.

Just then he came upon a shed alongside the road. His physical instincts overruled his overwrought psyche. He ducked through an open door. Once inside, he began to shiver uncontrollably, a response that put the foolishness of his actions into stark relief. He had acted out his melancholy to the point of sheer desperation. Now what? Why was there no answer? All he wanted was to know that his life had true meaning, real purpose. The words of a familiar tune by Supertramp again came to mind. In their 1979 popular tune “The Logical Song,” the singer describes the angst he feels when, alone at night and able to ponder, he finds that he can’t even answer the most basic question of all. In desperation, he pleads with someone wiser:

Please tell me who I am…Who I amWho I am5

Overwhelmed, he wept. Uncontrollably wept. Until a good part of the sadness gripping him was spent. When it was over, he just wondered: Why? How? How had the purpose-filled life he once cherished disappeared? What really was going on here?

Something deep inside told him, Don’t give up, Stephen. You will find a way, an answer. He knew, just knew, that he had to find an answer, not just for himself, but also for those he was to care for as a future oncologist. When cancer killed his mother at age forty-seven, he tried to intellectualize the event. And he vowed to become a cancer specialist to avenge her death by vanquishing that evil scourge. But he also knew, just knew, that his patients would want an answer to the most fundamental question, the same answer he was looking for. How could he be a complete caregiver to terminally ill cancer patients if he could not answer life’s most basic question?

And now, at long last, some forty years later, I believe I have found that answer.

That’s what this book is about. The answer is purpose! I have written Telos to show you in vivid detail and to prove beyond any shred of doubt that purpose itself is not simply real but also that purpose dwells at the ground of your very being and guides your every action.

Pastor Rick Warren became world famous with his best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life. Therein he explains to a confused world what no other creature but man could doubt: the purposefulness of life. And the immense reception to Pastor Warren’s message made one thing above all quite clear: we all yearn for purpose. Somehow, we have lost access to this most basic aspect of life itself.

Warren’s approach is theological, explaining purpose via revelation as given to us in the Holy Bible. My approach is different. In Telos, I discuss nothing already addressed by Pastor Warren. I am not a theologian. I am a scientist and a cancer doctor. What I have uncovered could change everything you may have thought you knew about the relationship between faith, purpose, and modern science. Because what I intend to prove to you is that the reigning paradigm in modern science and its obligatory requirement to abandon faith is totally wrong. Fatally flawed.

Every day in my medical practice, I am able to speak to my patients, not just about chemotherapy and CAT scans, but also about the true meaning and purpose of life. There has been no greater blessing bestowed upon me as a physician than the love and gratitude they give me in response to these conversations. Of course, I don’t give them the tutorial that is this book. But I do pass along the main idea, to understand that life and death have purpose and that we all belong to both. I had a hint of this even while I was discouraged by reading Monod and Russell. The words of a true twentieth-century sage gave me a ray of hope: “We have shattered the myth where human intelligence is a fluke in the midst of boundless stupidity. For if the behavior of an organism is intelligible only in relation to its environment, intelligent behavior implies an intelligent environment.”6

So I will teach you things you most likely have never heard of. It will be fun learning indeed. But far more importantly, it just might save your life. And possibly your soul.

I want the world to know what I didn’t know in 1976. I want the young and old to walk with joy in the storm. No more should any of us needlessly cry tears of sadness alone in a shed during the grayness of winter or alone anywhere, grasping for the meaning that we all want and need to survive.

Intent and Mission

I will say this now and many more times in the pages ahead: your life, my life, all life, has purpose, was created by purpose, and objective science proves this to be true. You may already know emotionally about the purpose in your life. But in our modern techno-science world, emotion may not be enough. The lessons of this book are written to defend your oh-so-precious spiritual birth right of purpose from the hegemony of misguided modern science—the so-called received wisdom that permeates and contaminates the academia of today. It’s nihilist propaganda that I, and every other science student of the past sixty years, has been subjected to by their mentors. There is a word for their oppressive position: dogma. And it’s dogma vacant of supporting facts.

You’ll find that Telos is not another bland narrative of science and philosophy, though I will delve into both. Rather, Telos is a journey where we will chisel away at the shackles of pseudo-intellectual enslavement that has kept all of us from the self-fulfillment and purposeful wonder that God has offered to us all. Herein I offer to you nothing less than a twenty-first century spiritual emancipation proclamation, combined with a call for a new age of enlightened vision and self-awareness. And I promise to make this fun and entertaining along the way, taking you to places and persons you may never have encountered before. Together we will climb breathtaking vistas as well as plumb the darker crevasses of misguided modern philosophy. I’m sure you’ll find Telos both challenging and exhilarating. And in the end, I hope it will leave you with a deep, burning insight into the unfathomable wonder and beauty of our world. A world of ubiquitous, breathtaking, exhilarating purpose.

PART I

Modern Science and Its Manipulations

1

A Day in the Life of Telos

I met a man of humble meansWho lived alone, contented.He gave away most all he owned,An act he never resented.

I asked him why he lived this wayWhen once he owned such treasure.He said there was now just one thingIn this world which gave him pleasure.

What could that be, I asked,Which replaced all that was material?He looked at me and with a sigh repliedAre you acquainted with the ethereal?

Most men look for many things,They hope will offer meaningBut oftentimes they look right pastWhat in nature is most revealing.

To know at last that purposeWhich God has given meis all that really matters…For it is that which set me free!

It’s just an hour before dawn. A whitetail doe has been waiting throughout the dark moonless night for just enough light in which to feed. In that pitch darkness the cougar who has been on her trail also cannot see. A dim grayness lights the meadow as the doe ventures forth, driven by hunger. She knows that it’s safe for just a short time to munch on the fresh sprouts that await her in the clearing before the light of day makes her an easy target. Hunger dwells within her, but hunger competes with the caution imposed by situational awareness. Both drives are inherent: to feed and thereby be able to nourish her newborn fawn that lies waiting in the thicket from which she emerges—this indwelling purpose, along with the instinct to wait until night’s end before acting, to improve her chances of survival as well as her offspring’s.

What’s innate is inherent, and what’s inherent is indwelling: innate = inherent = indwelling. What’s true of this in the animal world is also true of each of us. We have something indwelling us, something that is a fundamental part of our nature. Like gravity, it’s invisible, but it’s just as real as anything else in our entire experience. It’s just there. But unlike gravity, it is not external. It comes from within.

From the beginning of time, all men and women recognized the presence of this indwelling, innate force, motivating them to proceed with purpose in their most essential daily activities. In the natural world, uncontaminated by misguided pseudoscience, that motivation persists unhindered for all to readily observe. It’s like every beat of your heart, like the love of life within your heart, like the self-awareness that guides your every waking moment, like the consciousness of your very soul.

And you do not exist without it.

These may seem like bold pronouncements. In fact, they are simple truths, essential to each of us, however lost or tainted they have become over the past century—an era of “rationalist” thinking imposed upon us by the nefarious ambitions of the pseudo-intellectual scientific elites. We will closely examine those ideas in the chapters ahead. It’s not so much that the science itself is wrong, but rather, these elites extrapolated science into the spiritual realm where it has no place. This extrapolation was done in order to make claims of total truth, in order to replace the timeless truths I will bring out in this book.

Inherent Purpose

First, though, let’s look at more evidence of “inherent” too often dismissed as just a “given.”

A female Nile crocodile has not eaten for weeks. She has spent all of her time incubating her eggs. When readying to lay these eggs more than a month ago, she dug out a nest in the moist soil, carefully choosing just the right spot on the edge of the grove with enough moisture, shade, and heat to nurture her preborn. Although her brain is the size of an almond, this feat of nesting is so complex that even the most experienced herpetologists are at pains to emulate it. She could not eat all this time because to leave the nest would expose her eggs to easy predation from nearby monitor lizards.

All the while, inside those very eggs, a gooey, gemish of yolk and egg white is miraculously proceeding with steadfast purpose through a series of exquisitely orchestrated formative chemical reactions. What on earth is the guiding force that causes these molecular interactions, largely inexplicable by modern science, to unfailingly result in their miraculous transformation into fully formed baby crocs? Even the eggshell itself is semi-porous, allowing just enough water and oxygen to seep in to sustain the life of the croc embryo, all the while maintaining an invisible antibacterial barrier to prevent infection. How amazing is that! And these hatchlings, too, are imbedded with purpose, knowing exactly when and how to poke through that marvelous eggshell and say hello to the momma croc.

Now at last the eggs are hatching as the tiny baby crocs climb out of their shells. Momma croc gently picks them up in her large mouth and walks them down to the water’s edge, slowly releasing them under a shaded bank where they can be protected. These same jaws that crunch through the ribcage of unlucky wildebeests now fondle and caress her newborn as she completes her motherly duties.

All of this is inherent within her: the natural urge to both reproduce and then protect her young. And her innate purpose is to ensure the ongoing survival of her lineage, an indwelling drive even more powerful than her own personal survival instinct. This purpose caused her to put aside her own needs and undertake the arduous tasks of breeding, nesting, and fasting so that, in the end, she would produce vibrant offspring.

Because quite simply, that’s just what purpose is: the drive to fulfill a desired end.

You see, Telos, like all other forces of attraction, is invisible. What you see is the effect, not the invisible cause. You may see raindrops falling (or your black coffee getting spilled on the pretty white carpet), but you don’t see what causes them to fall—gravity. It’s the very same thing with Telos, which is that force of nature that generates purpose. What you actually see are the purposeful actions of creatures driven by that force.

So that is exactly the definition of Telos: the indwelling-innate-inherent force of nature that motivates all living things to act with purpose. Let’s look at a few more examples.

It’s October in the Pacific Northwest. And that means that salmon are returning to rivers all along the western United States, from northern California to Alaska. These astounding fish with brains the size of a peanut have successfully navigated across the wide Pacific and back again to the river of their origin, a journey of about eight thousand miles. How do they navigate so far and so precisely? Modern science has no idea. You may carve up that tiny salmon brain a hundred different ways and still come away with no clue. While the great edifice of contemporary science remains stupefied, we together will learn just what force of nature performs this spectacular feat.

Here’s what I can tell you at this early juncture: Inherent within them is a knowledge of navigation no scientist can explain. Yet they are purpose-driven to fulfill their indwelling urge to spawn, thereby completing their life’s innate purpose.

Let’s stay with primitive, cold-blooded, tiny-brained creatures just once more.

A hungry tiger shark is on the prowl along the coast of an uncharted South Sea island. While it has two eyes, they are primitive at best. How can it accurately see prey through the ocean’s blurriness and translucence? It can’t. Of course, it has to feed. And to do that, it has to catch prey. But most fish in the ocean are faster than the shark, so what must it do to survive? Well, it has to find prey already in distress so they are easily caught. But how? The shark can’t see very well, and it’s not very fast. But the shark has a sensory organ like no other creature on earth. Running along both sides of its head and neck is a linear vibratory sensor called the Ampullae of Lorenzini. It’s a rather complex jelly-filled motion receptor that detects the slightest erratic movement in the water from a hundred feet away. So when you see footage of sharks seemingly swimming lazily along, it’s because they are waiting for a cue from this vibration sense organ. When the alarm goes off, they rush to the scene of the impaired target and easily gobble up a meal.

How did sharks acquire this fantastic, almost space-age, tractor beam? No other creature has it. And sharks are so primitive that they have barely changed in two hundred million years, essentially since the age of dinosaurs. There really is no scientific answer to this question—that is, until now.

Along with millions of other natural marvels, modern science just lumps all of them into a worldview that denies they are marvels at all. They are “nothing but” inevitable outcomes dictated by the survival of the fittest, shaped by millions of years of unguided accidents. Recall again those ominous words of the acclaimed genius Bertrand Russell that had such a profoundly negative impact on me when I was young and impressionable. He wrote that we and everything else in the universe are products of “causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving.” In other words, these causes acted mindlessly with no purpose because these causes have no mind and so no ability to act with purpose. But does that make sense? I just described creatures that are motivated by causes with very clear “prevision.” Including, apparently, acting with a gift of prophecy.

Consider: As I’m writing this, it’s mid-July, and in a wooded area deep in the Ozark mountains, acorns are just now falling from the oak trees. Most years, the chipmunks don’t bother storing nuts for winter until late August. But this year something is quite different. It looks like battle stations out there as the chipmunks stockpile their winter feed earlier and with more intensity than ever. Do they know something we don’t? Is there going to be a long, tough winter later this year? These chipmunks seem to think so, which is why they are gathering that which is necessary to survive the tough times ahead. Dwelling within them is the prescience of what the coming seasons will bring. No scientist can explain how these mere rodents can know what the distant winter weather will be like. But innately, they do know, and they respond to this inexplicable knowledge and proceed fastidiously. Their purpose is obvious: stock up for what lies ahead or starve to death. They don’t want to end up with nothing in the root cellar once the land is laid barren with snow.

In that same forest, insects without a central nervous system—that is, without a brain as we know it—are busy constructing an intricate dwelling in which to house their highly organized community of occupants: bees, termites, and ants. It remains yet another of the greatest mysteries of science that such humble, “brainless” creatures can independently organize their large populaces into such cohesive colonies and construct such elaborate housing for their food stores and young.

Y’know, bees don’t make honey just so that humans and bears can have a tasty treat now and then. Like the chipmunks, they somehow know that the abundance of summer won’t last, so they, too, store food for the darker days ahead. This awareness is inherent within them, an indwelling aspect of their nature. It is an essential part of their very being. Thus, they lay their eggs in the octagonal wax segments of the hive so that the baby bees (the larvae) have something to eat as they incubate their way toward beehood.

But how do they know this? Bees and ants don’t have traces of “information bits” somewhere in their nonexistent brains. For that matter, neither do crocodiles or salmon or even mammals such as chipmunks and whitetail deer. No scientist has ever found anything like that in any brain or nerve ending in any creature, despite looking exhaustively for decades, not even inside the human brain, such as the one inside your head that’s allowing you to read this book right now.

The Source?

So where, oh where, is all this lifesaving, oh-so-purposeful information coming from? No scientist knows.

Go ahead. Get a boat. A big one if you like. And sail without a compass or GPS system or sextant from Seattle to Tokyo and back again. It’s a big wide ocean. You’d have no chance of making the trip. But every mini-pea-brained salmon-fry does it with ease. What does this tell you? It tells me that something essential is missing from the paradigm of modern science. Something big. And that’s exactly what we will be exploring in the chapters ahead.

What I will demonstrate is that the causes imposed on nature really do have prevision, something Russell and most modern scientists remain blind to. In fact, anticipation and prevision surround and abound in the natural world. Living creatures exercise purpose in survival and reproduction so that in the end there will be plenty to dine on and new members to take their place in the ceaseless parade of seasons. The purpose that drives them is inherent within them. It is innate and indwelling, and it’s just like the purpose that is inside of you—an integral, inseparable part of your very nature. It’s that invisible but immediately apparent knowable force that causes you to act with purpose. It’s an intrinsic, inseparable element of your very existence. Like gravity, which is always there to hold you to the ground. There is nothing external that puts gravity into effect. The force of gravity just is. Period.

Now, if you think that gravity is caused by the attraction of one mass upon another, famed theoretical physicist Albert Einstein would say you were wrong. He completely rewrote Isaac Newton’s explanation of gravity. Even if you believed Newton, the question would still arise, “What is it in matter that causes the force of attraction?” No one knows. It’s just there.

Just like your heart. You don’t will your heart to beat. There is nothing external that makes it beat. It just does. It beats as it must because it is in you. It’s a part of you. Of every second of every minute of every day, beginning seven months before you were even born, your heart has been beating, pumping blood throughout your body. Why does it do this? No scientist can tell you. It just does. And your physical life depends on it. Without your heart doing this work, you would die.

Just as the whitetail doe would not survive without the innate ability to proceed with caution.

Just as the crocodile’s lineage would cease without its indwelling ability to breed.

Just as the chipmunks would surely perish in the dead of winter without their inherent urge to stash acorns.

I recently watched a video of a newborn giraffe that was on its feet and suckling its mother within ten minutes of being born. That drive to get up, start suckling, and stay on its feet is innate. It all comes from within. Mommy giraffe did not have to do any prompting.

Scientists call this instinct. But where does instinct come from? Just blind chance? Fortunate luck? No scientist can explain it. The label “instinct” is just a dismissive way of describing the innate/inherent/indwelling marvels I’ve already presented. Scientists offer no deeper explanation than to say that instinct just happens to be there so that lucky sharks and lucky giraffes and lucky bees and salmon and deer and chipmunks and crocodiles can survive. “Luck” is the total extent of their explanation. Luck is the alleged mechanism that randomly endows these purpose-driven creatures with the instinctive knowledge necessary to survive in the wild. We can easily see that all creatures have the exquisitely designed anatomy and skillful abilities required to survive the treacherous struggle for survival in the wild. Is all of this really the result of just plain luck? Does that scientific explanation tell you anything meaningful at all? Of course not. It’s purely circular logic. It’s like saying, “Big is more than small because it’s larger.”