Aut Finis, Aut Nihil (purpose or nothings): Naturalism’s Dilemma
Naturalism has a problem it can’t talk its way out of. Not because the arguments against it are unanswerable, but because answering them requires tools naturalism claims don’t exist.
Here’s the dilemma in a phrase: aut finis, aut nihil. Purpose or nothing.
If naturalism is true, reality bottoms out in particles, fields, forces, and the laws governing their interactions. That’s it. No direction. No aim. No “toward.” Things don’t happen for reasons; they happen because prior physical states made them happen. The universe isn’t going anywhere. It’s just going.
This seems fine until you notice what you’re doing right now. You’re following an argument. You’re tracking whether the conclusion follows from the premises. You’re evaluating whether this account of naturalism is accurate, whether the dilemma is real, whether I’m reasoning well or poorly.
And that’s the problem.
Following an argument means your thinking is directed at something, namely truth. It has an end, a finis. You’re not just having neurons fire; you’re trying to get something right. The word “trying” is doing a lot of work there. So is “right.”
The naturalist now faces two options, and neither is comfortable.
The first option is to accept that reasoning really does aim at truth. Your cognitive processes aren’t just happening; they’re for something. But this is teleology, the very thing modern naturalism defined itself against. Final causes were supposed to be pre-scientific relics. Aristotle’s “that for the sake of which” was supposed to have been replaced by efficient causation all the way down.
If you let purpose back in at the level of thought, you’ve opened a door you can’t easily close. Why should mind be the one place in nature where “directed toward” is real? And if directedness is real in mind, what’s grounding it?
You’re borrowing from an account of reality that includes genuine ends, genuine norms, genuine ought-to-be’s. That’s not naturalism anymore. That’s naturalism plus something it can’t explain on its own terms.
The second option is to stay consistent. Reject teleology all the way through. Your “reasoning” is just what neural computation feels like from the inside. It’s not actually about anything. The appearance of directedness is an illusion, a useful fiction generated by evolutionary pressures that selected for survival, not truth. Your thoughts aren’t aimed at getting things right; they’re just the causal outputs of a biological machine.
But notice what this costs you.
If your reasoning isn’t really directed at truth, then your argument for naturalism isn’t either. You haven’t concluded that naturalism is true; you’ve just made mouth noises (or typed symbols) that were caused by prior physical states. The argument doesn’t land anywhere because there’s nowhere for arguments to land.
Aut nihil. Nothing.
This isn’t a puzzle you can split the difference on. “Emergent teleology” just names the problem; it doesn’t solve it. Either the directedness is real, in which case you need to explain how purpose exists in a purposeless universe, or it’s apparent, in which case your explanation is itself just an appearance with no truth-tracking behind it.
The naturalist might object that evolution explains why our reasoning tracks truth well enough. Beliefs that model reality accurately help organisms survive. True enough, as far as it goes. But “tracks truth well enough for survival” isn’t the same as “aims at truth.”
A thermostat “tracks” temperature well enough to regulate heating, but it’s not trying to get the temperature right. If that’s all human reasoning is, then we’re back to nihil. The evolutionary story explains why certain cognitive outputs correlate with environmental conditions. It doesn’t explain how those outputs could be about anything, how they could be attempts to reach a conclusion rather than just events that occur.
Here’s what I’m not saying: I’m not saying naturalists are stupid, or that they can’t reason well, or that their arguments are all bad. Many naturalists reason brilliantly. That’s precisely the point. They reason as though reasoning is real, as thoughconclusions can be warranted or unwarranted, as though some inferences are better than others. They operate with purpose while officially denying that purpose is fundamental.
That’s borrowed capital. The question is where they borrowed it from and whether they can pay it back on their own terms.
I don’t think they can.
Aut finis, aut nihil. If purpose is real, naturalism is incomplete at best. If purpose is illusory, naturalism is unspeakable, not false but meaningless, a conclusion no one actually reached because reaching conclusions isn’t something that happens in that kind of universe.
The naturalist is welcome to pick a horn. But sitting comfortably between them isn’t an option.