oleg and Aristotelian final cause

oleg:

[Mike Egnor said]: "Quantum entanglement and the EPR paradox. Teleology is retrograde causation. The goal in the future is a cause of the past." 

[oleg said]: This is to vague to even be criticized. Maybe you should expound on it further. I will note, however, that there is no retrograde causation in quantum mechanics. The principle of causality (loosely speaking, the present does not affect the past) remains a cornerstone of physics. It survived the relativistic and quantum revolutions.

'Expound on it further', from the folks at mathpages:

Not withstanding the statistical nature of descriptions of events in terms of macrostates, the fact remains that the fundamental processes of nature – at least in classical physics - are temporally symmetrical, so our choice of a direction for causality is conventional. Indeed Laplace explicitly recognized this when he wrote about determinism within the Newtonian framework, claiming that if the present conditions were known completely and with perfect precision, then the entire history of the universe, both past and future, would be known. According to Laplace’s view, the concept of causality is not even applicable, at least not in the sense of something that flows from the past into the future. Instead, he envisaged a “block universe”, complete and whole for its entire history. He certainly would have denied thenecessity of restricting our notions of causality to what Aristotle called efficient causes, but it still seems to have been assumed that efficient causes are sufficient to give a complete and coherent account of physical processes.

However, beginning in the 20th century, scientists identified a variety of fundamental processes that seem to defy explanation if we restrict ourselves to just efficient causes. The best known of these processes are those involving quantum entanglement. The results of spacelike-separated measurements on entangled particles exhibit correlations that depend on what measurements are made. It can be shown that no explanation in terms of efficient causes is consistent with the empirical results of such measurements, but the results are quite easy to explain in terms of final causes, i.e., if we allow for the possibility that the emission of a quantum particle may be conditioned to some extent by the circumstances of its absorption. Thus the abandoned notion of “final causes” discussed by Aristotle may turn out to be useful after all. It seems appropriate that the word aitia is a palindrome, since, like the laws of physics, it doesn’t distinguish between the forward and backward directions.

Modern physics is best understood in the Aristotelian framework.  Materialists hate this, because they understand nothing of it, and materialism is a willfully ignorant philosophy.