We ‘posit a biological realm’ in the abstract — by excluding or bracketing out precisely those characteristics and attributes of organisms which aren’t reducible to physical interactions, and then layering them back on top purportedly through the mechanism of natural selection. This is described as ‘neo-darwinian materialism’.
The origins of this go back to the separation of primary and secondary attributes in the early modern period, which in turn gives rise to the objective/subjective division, augmented by the Cartesian division of mind and matter. It’s important to see the role of abstraction in this — but it’s also hard to see, because it’s assumed. It becomes the perspective that the question is seen through. Here, I’m trying to focus on the perspective itself.
One consequences of this is to deny agency: in this worldview, organisms are reduced to objects that execute ‘programs’ in order to achieve objectives. They are no longer agents engaged in pursuit of aims.
Curiously, if ’ volition’ is understood to be ‘conscious volition’, then the only real volition that remains is that of human agents — although even that is called into doubt by determinism. The ascendancy of physicalism can’t be regarded as complete unless we too come to be regarded as machines or robots — something which finds its most pithy expression in eliminativism. This is why Hans Jonas argues that the ontology of the modern world is basically one of death: the universe comprises purposeless matter, in which life appears as an anomaly that has to be explained or accounted for.
The argument is that Aristotelian teleology was eliminated from phyics, because of the superseded idea of the ‘natural place’ that even stones would return to. But that the outright rejection of the very idea of telos, or goal-directed behaviour, is untenable in biology, because organisms are undeniably purpose-driven, on every level, even the cellular level. The argument is not that organisms exercise conscious volition but a rudimentary form of intentional behaviour, even if this is as simple as growing towards nutrients and away from hazards. Thus it was necessary to coin the neologism ‘teleonomy’ but really that was just to restore something that ought not to have been eliminated in the first place.
Look at these two passages by Talbott from the essay again:
The physicist wants laws that are as universal as possible, true of all situations and therefore unable to tell us much about any particular situation — laws, in other words, that are true regardless of meaning and context… Such abstraction shows up in the strong urge toward the mathematization of physical laws.
All of the appeals to ‘grounding’ and physics as ‘an alternative to chaos’ are borne of the wish to subsume everything under physical law, to make them truly universal. Really, it’s a fairly transparent effort to attribute to ‘the laws of physics’ what previously were regarded as ‘divine law’. We see the geneaology of this idea from early modern science, where Newton conceives the laws he discovers as ‘God’s handiwork’. Except that in the meanwhile, God has become a ghost in his own machine.
Talbott again:
In biology a changing context does not interfere with some causal truth we are trying to see; contextual transformation is itself the truth we are after… Every creature lives by virtue of the dynamic, pattern-shifting play of a governing context, which extends into an open-ended environment. The organism gives expression, at every level of its being, to the unbounded because of reason — the tapestry of meaning.
The physicalist construction relies on the rejection of the ‘because of reason’ in favour of antecedent physical causation. This is why the Aristotelian conception of final cause - the reason why something is done — can’t meaningfully be eliminated from biology.
Mine is not an ‘intelligent design’ argument in disguise. It’s simply pointing to a fact that should be obvious, which is that organic life is purposeful in its own terms.
Presumably you composed your reply for a purpose - to make a case, to point something out. If there is no case to be made, nothing to be pointed out, then indeed it would be pointless to say something.