Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science

by Edward Feser

Having made this distinction, Dembski goes on explicitly to acknowledge that just as “the art of shipbuilding is not in the wood that constitutes the ship” and “the art of making statues is not in the stone out of which statues are made,” “so too, the theory of intelligent design contends that the art of building life is not in the physical stuff that constitutes life but requires a designer” (p. 133, emphasis added). In other words, according to Dembski, living things are for ID theory to be modeled on ships and statues, the products of techne or “art,” whose characteristic “information” is not “internal” to them but must be “imposed” from “outside.” But that entails that they have only accidental rather than substantial forms, and only extrinsic rather than intrinsic teleology. And as we saw in chapter 1, reconceiving of natural objects (living or otherwise) in these terms is precisely how the mechanistic world picture departed from the Aristotelian philosophy of nature.