God's more than a watchmaker Edward Feser, in The Last Superstition (St Augustine's Press, £17.95), intends a "refutation of the New Atheism," chiefly by means of embracing the philosophy of Aristotle. The New Atheists group includes Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and, given their philosophical shortcomings, they can no doubt annoy a philosopher. The Fifth Way sketched by Thomas, mistakenly supposed to be the same as the Paley's Watch argument, concerns final causality. The argument goes like this: "We see that there are things that have no knowledge, such as physical bodies, but which act for the sake of an end. But things which have no knowledge do not have a tendency to an end unless they are directed by something that does have knowledge and understanding. An example is an arrow directed by an archer. Therefore there is some being with understanding which directs all things to their end, and this, we say, is God. Of course the scientific consensus is to ignore any such thing as final causality. To Aristotle it was obvious that a stone seeks the earth, not consciously, that's clear, but as an end to which it tends. Modern scientists, on the whole, presume that everything is explained by efficient causality - one billiard ball bumping into another. But as Feser points out, we take for granted that things are directed to an end result: strike a match and it produces flame, never ice or the smell of lilacs. Final causality is inherent in the properties of things. Try describing an organism and its parts without referring to functions, which is to say, final causes. How would you identify the heart or sexual organs of an unknown creature except by reference to their function? The point or "teleological element" of DNA is precisely what is interesting about it. That is why metaphors from computing are so popular in genetics, for computer programs have a point to them; they are teleological. But the predictable properties of chemical elements exemplify final causality too. In order to form water, oxygen must react with hydrogen. From the point of view of the water produced, the reaction of oxygen and hydrogen is the efficient cause. From the point of view of the elements" tendencies, the production of water is a final cause. "A description of the world in terms of its being a system of efficient causality is necessarily a system which involves tendencies, and therefore also a system which involves finality," as CFJ Martin explains in his own book Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations (Edinburgh, 1997). The Fifth Way supplies the point of the whole caboodle, the cosmos. There's no point to individual finality if there is not an ultimate point to the whole system, and this must be provided by an intelligence outside the system: the archer aiming the cosmic arrow.