Each of these "causes" was a different sense of the Greek word aition, which Aristotle thought was ambiguous and needed to be clarified. English cause, however, is not so unclear, and its use here can unfortunately lead to confusion. Only one of the four "causes" (the efficient cause) approximates the concept expressed by the English word cause. It has been suggested that an English word of parallel ambiguity is the verb "make". Thus the Greek "x is the aition of y" can be rendered in English "x makes a y". In the case of material cause, we could say "wood makes up a table" or in the case of a car, we could say "steel and rubber make up a car"
Saint Thomas Aquinas also refers to the four causes in his writings about the existence of God. "If there be no first cause among efficient causes, then there will be no ultimate, nor intermediate cause...Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God." (Excerpt from Summa Theologica Third Article: Whether God exists?)
The formal cause according to which a statue is made is the idea existing in the first place as exemplar in the mind of the sculptor, and in the second place as intrinsic, determining cause, embodied in the matter. Formal cause could only refer to the essential quality of causation. A deeper contemplation reveals a formal cause as the ever existing truth of capacity. Thus, the capacity of the human genome to accompany the existence of a human being presumes that the capacity to be a human being pre-exists the human being. That pre-existence consists of the essential capacity of the specific genome to co-exist with the human in a very significant and specific way. The dog genome does not cause a human though elements of dog genome may coexist with the human genome.
A more simple example of the formal cause is the blueprint or plan that one has before making or causing a human made object to exist. Plato would say that a perfect circle exists, or the form of a perfect circle exists and that all other circles are an imperfect copy of the formal cause.
The efficient cause is the agent which brings something about. For example, in the case of a statue, it is the person chiseling away, and the act of chiseling, that causes the statue. This answers the question, how does it happen? It is the sort of answer we usually expect when we ask about cause; the thing which happened to bring about certain results.
Over time, many rejected the idea of a final cause, or the study of the good, because of there was too much disagreement. Niccolò Machiavelli focused mainly on the material causes, and rejected the search for final causes as too difficult for most people. Although science has historically focused mostly on material causes, there has been some discussion and exploration of final causes in a scientific context, especially when studying systems at a macroscopic level.
The laws of thermodynamics can be interpreted as a final cause, and this perspective is useful for explaining the spontaneous origin of new levels in a hierarchy. Ecologist Robert Ulanowicz argues that positive feedback in ecosystems can have effects which appear at a local level to be the result of a final cause.
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