Christianity; the World's Most Violently Persecuted Religion

[Angrboda]

There's little evidence the body was designed. Was it developed for this or that? A very circumscribed concept of teleology is accepted at times by biologists, but it's not clear that this kind of teleology is of the same kind as the traditional, agent-based form of teleology.

For my money, I think biological teleology is too front-loaded to be meaningful in that we, subjectively, identify features or characteristics of interest or value to us, and based on that valuation assert that this is what the feature or characteristic is for. A similar process can be observed in Natural Law, wherein ideology drives the outcome, rather than any impartial objective facts.

A second problem is that such things tend to ignore that biological structures may have multiple effects and therefore multiple purposes. Thus while sex can lead to reproduction, it can also lead to the forming of emotional bonds which create stable relationships. Perhaps Aquinas was a bit short-sighted in that, as while he obviously values consecrated heterosexual marriages, he doesn't seem to value the role that recreational sex plays in that process. This leads to the third problem wherein one engages in dichotomous thinking, that a structure or feature is meant for one specific thing, and once that one specific thing is recognized, all other effects or uses of that feature are deemed unimportant, or unnatural. But it doesn't follow that because something is good for some specific purpose, that it is only for that purpose. Religious natural law has justifications for such an inference, while secular natural law and biological teleology do not.