Mention teleology in scientific circles and you’ll usually get a skeptical response. Purpose in the way the world is evolving? Patterns certainly—but purpose? No.
Science has gotten along famously over the past few centuries without the need to worry about whether or what a particular process in nature is ‘for’–or to what ‘end’ the entire cosmos is moving (besides heat death).
I’m distinguishing here between the modern ‘argument from design’, which is sometimes referred to (wrongly in my opinion) as teleology, and the classical teleology that we inherited from the Ancient Greeks: embedded within the classic four causes Aristotle listed as essential to natural philosophy: the Material cause, the Efficient cause (both still crucial to science), and also the Formal cause, and the Final cause, both of which modern science has essentially dismissed as irrelevant and best relegated to the debates of philosophers.
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