An evolutionary argument against Naturalism

In our continuing dialogue about science and faith, I’ve made the point that science seeks to explain the “how” questions, while philosophy and religion seeks to answer the “why” questions.

Last time we looked at the difference between actual science and a philosophy embraced by antitheists called scientism. 

We theists need to recognize that antitheists are not making their argument from pure science but from a naturalist philosophy.  This is why we should be wary when someone says science or the laws of nature explains everything.  As the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who worked primarily in logic, said:

“The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.”

Today, I want us to consider an interesting dilemma. And that dilemma is, if we embrace the Neo-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins we must then wonder if we can know truth at all. Let me explain.

The New Atheists, like Dawkins, believe in what could be called Philosophical Evolutionary Naturalism:

“The natural world is all of existence and humans came about by accident through the blind workings of matter.”

But this creates a dilemma for evolutionary naturalists, as philosopher, Alvin Plantinga points out:

“If Dawkins is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of human cognitive faculties and therefore inevitably to doubt the validity of any belief that they produce—including Dawkins’s own atheism.” (emphasis added)

John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, also makes this point clear by way of analogy:

“For example, if you knew your computer was the result of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn’t use it or trust it for a moment!”

Before you object and say this is overstating the case, consider that even Charles Darwin saw this problem, as he stated in his Letter to William Graham (July 3, 1881):

“With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

Atheist philosopher and neuroscientist, Sam Harris, takes it a step further in his book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values:

“Our logical, mathematical, and physical intuitions have not been designed by natural selection to track truth.” (p.66)

John Gray said this in his book, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals:

“The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals. Darwinian theory tells us that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction….
Truth has no systematical advantage over error.” (p.20, 26-27)

But if our brain is just the result of mindless unguided processes, why should we trust anything we’re thinking about at all? As Lennox points out, this is a critically important argument. Darwin saw it, C.S. Lewis saw it, and it’s beginning to move into the center of the whole debate.

This is the dilemma that atheist philosopher, John Gray, identifies with regard to natural selection and knowing truth:

“Modern humanism is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin’s theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.” (emphasis added)

You can watch Lennox making these arguments in a lecture here.

If this argument is new to you, you can watch this clip by InspiringPhilosophy:

For Alvin Plantinga’s more detailed lecture by the same title, go here.

To summarize the video clip on the evolutionary naturalist’s dilemma, if evolutionary naturalism is true, everything the brain does is for survival.  But just because our knowledge works in practical measures that doesn’t make it true of what reality is. There’s no necessary equivocation between what is useful and what is true. Some things can be useful while not being true. Our “knowledge” could be analogous to Ptolemaic astronomy, simply a useful model to help us navigate the world, but not a true description of reality.

If you believe naturalism is true then you also have to believe you believe naturalism is true because your brain has decided this belief is beneficial for survival. But, as Alvin Plantinga identifies, philosophical naturalism falls into a self-defeating circle.

Atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel, is very critical of this Neo-Darwinist reductionism. In his book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012),  he said:

“Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn’t take any of our convictions seriously including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism itself depends.”

If naturalism is true, then all human knowledge would be geared toward surviving, and there’s no reason to assume that would entail truth. Thus, philosophical naturalism has a serious problem rooted in its own implications. Again, as Plantinga points out, we have reason to doubt that our cognitive faculties (memory, perception, beliefs, how we know things, insights, logical truths, induction, etc.) are in fact reliable.

According to this Neo-Darwinist philosophy, truth is unobtainable, in fact, meaningless to speak of. If reason is not grounded in reason, but physical blind processes, then reason itself is lost. But, thankfully, theists and idealists would not suffer the same implications since the mind is not reducible to physical processes.

But, then again, if it is reducible, are we really even thinking about it?