Triple Peanut Teleology

1. A Perfectly-timed Triple Peanut - Miracle or Statistical Inevitability?

The other night, I was eating some peanuts as a late night snack. They were the kind that comes in the shell, and I was enjoying the process of popping them open one by one as I worked on the computer. I have frequent sleep issues and that night I was starting to worry that my brain wanted to pull an all-nighter, when I realized the little bag of peanuts was empty except for the last one. I got it out, popped it open, and lo and behold it was a triple peanut. Not especially uncommon, but the only one in that bag.

For reasons that are more or less impossible to explain but some of you will immediately understand, the fact that the very last peanut in the bag was a triple peanut, and the only triple peanut in the bag, meant that I wouldn't have insomnia that night. It was that mysterious and elusive sense of conclusion my brain demands to feel before it will sleep, unexpectedly encountered in peanut form. One thought immediately came into my mind: "Thanks, God." The incident had very much the feeling of a little favor you do for someone that you love, a little thing that yet means a lot because it's something only someone who truly understands the recipient would know to give them.

This is one of the uncountable number of incidents, big and small, pebbles and boulders, that provide anchors for my faith in God. Sometimes it's not the big dramatic things, it's the times when something you need is provided in such a random but chronologically charitable way that you know it's not an accident. 
 Now, at this point, your average internet atheist is raising an eyebrow or possibly even formulating a response hee* fancies clever, that involves the flying spaghetti monster and/or invisible unicorns. 

(*- he and only he, if you don't get it see iff)

You fool, he will explain, the peanut was at the bottom because having three nuts inside made it heavier than the other peanuts, and it gradually shifted to the bottom during packing or transit. Since triple peanuts are less common than the other types, and given the variety of sorting and packing machinery out there, there is some reasonable chance that only one would be in the bag, and a very high chance that it would then end up at the bottom. That's why, he will summarize, there was just one triple peanut at the end, and not because of some kind of divine intervention. If he's had some schooling he may invoke Occam's Razor* to suggest this is a much simpler explanation than "coming up with a deity," as if you are the first to propose God exists and are boldly attempting to shoehorn Him into the universe.

(*- With some historical irony, as Saint William of Occam/Ockham would consider this an invalid application of the principle -which he did not call a "razor" but frequently used, so that later it became identified with him- and would himself certainly not be on the atheist side of this kind of argument.)

There are various possible arguments in response to this attempt to explain away the event, for example recalling the fact that when I got down to the last several peanuts I could easily have grabbed that one at any time, or that it's not so much that there was one triple peanut as the fact that it came at exactly the right time to negate my insomnia, or that I bought the peanuts rather randomly that night and hadn't done so in a very long time, so however you look at it, it was a pretty exceptional event, and in the context of a world where we already believe there are no pure coincidences, I could argue that the evidence suggests this wasn't one.

But all that would be missing the point, because 1) likelihood isn't a good argument regarding something that already happened*, and 2) it fails to recognize the deeper difference is one of teleology.


(*- This is why scientists laugh when people invoke the "tornado through a junkyard" analogies popularly used by Christians to cite the improbability of evolution occurring. For most scientists, evolution is taken totally for granted as what did in fact happen and continues to happen, so discussing its improbability is irrelevant as far as they are concerned. It's like arguing the odds are against your tire being popped by a particular piece of metal on the interstate as you are getting the spare out of the trunk. Also in reality the odds of a tornado assembling a [whatever the version you heard is] from a random junkyard are incomputable, as Spock might say. I imagine it was originally meant just as a picturesque analogy of something extremely unlikely, and either way is not suitable for an actual debate or serious discussion about probabilities)

2. Teleology and Causes

Teleology is not a word you hear every day, but it's one of those helpful terms that captures an important and profound concept, so it's helpful to know it. Put simply, teleology is what people are invoking when they ask "why did this happen to me?" It is the "why" that is furthest from "how"; a question about the significance or role events play in the bigger picture. It is also a question of faith: one cannot ask "why did this happen" in the teleological sense without believing there is a(n Extrinsic -I won't really go into that here) Purpose that transcends the meaning you yourself might assign to it, which directly implies the existence of God in some form.

When asking Why in general, one is asking for the cause of something. Invoking Aristotle, we can say there are 4 types of causes. The 2 most relevant for our discussion today are the Efficient Cause and Final Cause.

I was not the efficient cause of this helpful image; thank you to whomever was.

The Efficient Cause would include things like the Laws of Physics, and is typically the only cause a modern materialist would recognize. This is a "why" that draws near to a "how." For example, one sometimes encounters questions like "why do things always fall down?" where the answer might be "because of gravity."

A Christian would (typically, and hopefully) have no problem with this answer, because gravity is indeed an observable part of Creation. Yet recognizing the presence and activity of God, we recognize there are answers on another level as well. So the stereotypically mocked answer of "because God made it fall," is actually no less correct an answer than gravity, the difference is in which kind or level of Cause is being invoked.

But while various debates rage in the Church regarding the extent to which God is the efficient cause, most Christians could certainly agree God is the agent of the Final Cause, (The telos, from whence "teleology"). Why the rock fell is, in light of the Final Cause, connected to the question of why the rock exists in the first place. For Christians, this question has an answer, though one to which our limited knowledge does not extend. "There is a reason for everything," we believe, because the God of scripture is a reasonable God. Even when He is doing things in the Old Testament that distress His own prophets, I can't think of a scriptural example when He does not also explain why the thing is happening; every specific action of God we see in Scripture has a Purpose.

So we believe that the Efficient Cause of the rock falling is gravity, and the Final Cause is known to God as part of His hidden will. Even without going into questions of to what extent God's sovereignty controls what occurs, I think more or less all Christians would agree, and could agree that scripture observably teaches, that a rock does not ever fall for reasons that escape God.

For the atheist/materialist, there is no Final Cause. In fact, there cannot be, or else God. In the words of an atheist on Reddit (Yes random, but he put it well and succinctly): "Final causes are an incoherent concept, and if we accept them, them we accept teleology, and if we accept teleology, then we accept either an infinite regress or a first cause. Not sure how [one] avoids deism with that." (Here deism means admitting the universe implies an initiator God of some kind without going into what that God's attributes might be, so nowhere near Christianity but taking the first step towards Romans 1 and making atheism untenable in the process)

Some subsequent commenters brought up some objections to his claim that final causes are incoherent, and he retorted that purposes are not inherent but must be assigned by a mind. Since he denied God, he considered this a rebuttal (no mind to do it, except humans), but for us it's the other way around; God possesses a mind external to the universe, therefore its purpose can be assigned by Him. The argument requires the assumption of no God to be evidence against God. (This is yet another demonstration of how atheist arguments are ultimately always circular: No God, because No God)

Now to return to my blessing in peanut form, the important thing here is that the atheist's "rebuttal" and my claim are actually distinct; he is trying to impossibly attack my final cause with an efficient cause, like claiming a car does not exist to be driven but because a factory built it. This is an extremely common mistake atheists fall into, and Christians tend to feel instinctively that something is wrong about the argument but aren't sure how to articulate it. (I hope this post is helpful along those lines)


In fact, I can agree with everything my hypothetical antagonist says regarding how I ended up with that particular peanut at that particular time, because I acknowledge both efficient cause and final cause. He is forced to deny the possibility of the final cause, or else God. (Yet, poor soul, he will probably insist that my "religious" mind is the narrow and shackled one.) In any case, the efficient cause is doubtless similar to what he has described. I'm not suggesting there was a flash of glorious light and the peanut was created ex nihilo in the bottom of the bag. God can do that if He wants, and there are mountains of evidence even beyond scriptural accounts (which by faith are enough) that miracles do happen. So sometimes the efficient cause is a testimony to God as well, since it's inexplicable. I think of miraculous healings, for example. In those situations, skeptics will simply speak from their standpoint of unbelief and say they're sure there must be a natural explanation. (Of course... because if there isn't, even once, then God. Do you begin to see where the burden of proof lies now? I believe this is one reason Paul can say they are "without excuse." All roads lead to admitting God's existence except the one whose primary objective is not to lead there. That is called "willing unbelief")

So, although I don't see any evidence for divine intervention in the efficient cause of my peanut blessing, my faith can still be strengthened. How? In that the final cause in this context was the rectification of my insomnia on a particular night, and because none of the humans involved in the process of the peanut reaching me had the knowledge to extrinsically cause this, and it goes without saying that a peanut cannot seriously be argued to have the intrinsic cause of insomnia prevention, therefore God is the only possible agent. An event occurred in which the means were ordinary but conspired to produce a result which could have only been from God. Distinguishing between Causes allows us to articulate more clearly how this can be the case.

I have found that Christians often fight to attribute the efficient cause to Divine intervention when the case is sometimes a little shaky, opening themselves to sometimes (not always) valid criticism from skeptics who demonstrate persuasively the natural means by which the event could have occurred, and feel confirmed in their unbelief. I think that's because the Christians in those situations know, deeply, that something is of God, and want to demonstrate that, but aren't familiar with this tool for seeing that the supernatural element is still there, but is better expressed in terms of teleology.

Teleology is the basis of the Intelligent Design argument,
often introduced rhetorically via the Watchmaker analogy

3. Practical Applications of Final Cause/Teleology for Christians

Some of you may find your eyes glazing over when things turn philosophical, some may not even have made it this far. But I want to point out a few extremely important and relevant issues which stem from this concept.

1. Final Cause means There is a God, and vice versa

One can't logically derive our Triune God, that knowledge comes from the special revelation of scripture. But that the existence of a Final Cause necessitates Divinity in some reasonable and personal-ish form, as I mentioned above, even atheists recognize. They will respond rhetorically various ways to the accusation that they say people have no Purpose, recognizing that sounds bad, but in general they would challenge the very concept of Purpose, because to really admit Purpose is to admit God. (That's one of the various reasons there have never been all that many real atheists... the concept of Purpose is too obviously valid and real for normal people to seriously pretend it doesn't exist)

The flip side, that the existence of God allows a Final Cause, should be encouraging to us as believers. We don't get to know what it is, we may see things we don't understand, but we know that God is, and that He is good. If we see evil and suffering, we should recall that other sentient beings besides God exist and may possibly have played a role in the mess we see every time we take a look at the news. (Yes, this leads directly to arguments about sovereignty... and they are good and necessary arguments to have. It's a worthy topic to ponder and wrestle with, and as long as we're doing so in the love of Christ and not to divide up His body the Church into rival camps, God is glorified in our pursuit of understanding regarding Him. That He is beyond our understanding doesn't mean we can't seek to know Him better.)

2. Christians need to bear in mind that many people avoid Teleological thinking

Christians understand the language of Purpose and we very frequently invoke it and think in terms of teleology, even in the negative sense: after a major disaster, Christian often wonder why God allowed it to happen. "What good purpose could there possibly be in this," we ask ourselves conflictedly, and atheists ask mockingly, suggesting the answer is, "there isn't, because there is no God and nothing has a Purpose." They're attacking the very concept of a Final Cause. (As stated above, they have to, because otherwise, God)

In many cultures and subcultures, teleological concerns are simply perceived as less compelling than pragmatic ones. The ultimate purpose behind things happening is seen as unknowable, so the focus is on dealing with things as they come and their ramifications. In that context, Christians trying to get a conversation about God going through discussing the ultimate purpose behind this or that may not get far. Many people simply aren't interested in thinking teleologically, as subtly demonstrated by the fact that popular media often portrays it happening in conversations between people getting high ("Dude, like, what's it all mean?"), or Eastern-type advice from a guru figure ("Find your Purpose deep within yourself"), or negatively, as those unwelcome thoughts which come on sleepless nights ("What legacy will I leave behind?"). Rarely is it ever portrayed as a necessary aspect of life for ordinary people to consider and factor into their plans and actions. When a scriptural worldview is not actively maintained, that attitude can unconsciously creep into the Church as well.

3. Remembering Teleology prompts us to live according to our Purpose

If there is a Final Cause for all events in our lives, how much more is there a Purpose for each of us? And that purpose is not a trick question on the exam of existence, which we must figure out or be condemned to a fruitless life and God's displeasure, but neither is it a pleasant unspecific thought which can encourage us but carries no responsibility. Scripture does not teach us to be either anxious or agnostic about our purpose. You have one, and it's both a responsibility and a joy, but not a trap.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism famously asks "What is the Chief End of Man?"
The answer is "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." 

One way of glorifying God in this life (not to mention obeying Him) is to actively seek to live in a way that reflects the Great Commission of Christ, the instructions He left the incipient Church, a command which we have inherited. That means, in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, making disciples, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey everything He commanded (which necessarily includes the Great Commission itself).

Believers, then, must think about what responsibility they have regarding this mission. No one outside of the Church can do it; the task was given to us. For many of you, that task may not be packing up and moving to another country and/or culture (Though maybe it is; it was for me), but it must be said, that also doesn't mean living each week considering that you've done your Christian duty by sacrificing a couple hours to attend church. If we have a Purpose, it comes from God. God is real, and that has real implications for your life; faith is attempting to live according to that fact, not merely intellectual assent to it.

If you believe that this God from whom springs forth your purpose for existing is real, you will live that out. Not living it out doesn't necessarily mean you don't believe, but it might mean that, or merely that you are being disobedient and should repent. And as James wrote, that's a dead sort of faith anyway; why should you remain in a situation of arguing that you have faith despite no obvious evidence of living it out? Show your faith by how you live it out. You'll find joy shows up in the process.