Evolution of Reason????

I have just read an essay by an atheist giving argument for the evolution of humanities ability to know truth without appealing to the existence of God. The writer puts forth that only those traits and thoughts that lend toward survival will continue and those thoughts which are harmful to survival and fail to line up with reality will not survive. Therefore, as the argument goes, we are evolving into something more true to our environment and our thoughts likewise will line up with truth.

So as to not misstate the author the following is two excerpts of his argument:

A creature that could not respond correctly to its environment, or that did so only imperfectly, would be at a significant survival disadvantage compared to one that could perceive more accurately. Therefore, it should be obvious that, all else being equal, evolution will always favor greater accuracy of sensory perception - both the ability to sense the environment with greater fidelity and the disposition to respond correctly to those sensory impressions.

Though it is not perfect, it is more than obvious that evolution will produce at least generally reliable mental tools for environmental perception, pattern recognition and abstract reasoning in any intelligent being. In light of this, the burden of proof is now on the presuppositionalists to explain why an evolutionary naturalist should not consider their own beliefs reliable.

If evolution is generating minds that think more and more truly then why do billions of people ascribe to religion and spiritual worship that atheists claim are illogical practices? If evolution is producing reasonable truth thinkers why are there so few atheists in this world? Are atheists claiming to be superior to the rest of the world? Atheism, despite the few popular books in the end caps at Barnes and Noble is not the wave of the future. Postmodernism is actually the current ebb and flow of the today’s world which does not ascribe to the knowablity of truth nor the supremacy of science and reason. Why is one more popular than the other if atheists are the more evolved humans? Most postmodern thinkers are very much into spiritualist thinking versus dogmatic reason. I’m not advocating postmodernism. I am only pointing out that it is fast becoming a cultural norm as modernism is quickly being transformed to postmodern thinking. Atheists are still behind the curve if we are truly looking at what is new and surviving as the most reliable human thought. So if evolution is producing true thinking as time marches on, why is culture moving away from science and reason to experience and spirituality?

If this explanation of evolutionary truth development were true then atheists would be the most ascribed to worldview instead of one of the least believed worldviews. It would appear that the argument for evolutionary establishment of truth in the human mind is actually self-defeating for atheists.

Author's Note: Please see comment exchanges to see that I was not understanding the nature of the argument I was addressing before I made this post. I am in dialog with those of the atheist worldview in the comments to learn more about what their position truly is so that I do not falsely represent it. I would delete this blog, but I would lose the comments and the lessons learned attached. So I invite my readers to read the comments for more on this topic.

Reason, Nature, and God

To continue on the theme of our cognitive ability to reason let us consider how it is impossible for nature to have produced reason. We use our reason in tandem with acquiring knowledge. Knowing something is distinct from what is known. Or as C.S. Lewis argues, “The knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” We can subdue natural emotions and physical responses by reason. A natural stimulus ought to cause a certain affect, but if we reason not to allow that affect the stimulus response can be subverted. While being a part of nature, we can still reason about nature and affect nature by reason, but nature cannot reason about itself. Nature is not rational. It has no intelligence. How can un-rational nature produce something rational like reason?

Either we accept that reason is not really reason at all and merely an instinctual non-rational response to stimulus of our environment of which we have no control or we realize that something outside of the natural world exist which is Rational and Reasonable who endowed us with the ability to reason. Hence, if you deny God’s existence, you also deny your ability to reason about the world in a rational way. You then lose your ability to rightly communicate knowledge for reason is not based on anything rational and is therefore irrational.

C. S. Lewis explains that, “It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t, all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own.”

Indubitably, the atheist will assert their reason and proclaim that since we have already come to the conclusion that it is impossible to argue against our ability to reason that some how evolution has transcended all logic and created in us the ability to reason about nature for it is unreasonable to believe otherwise. To that I would say that this would be a great miracle being attributed to a process of chance without being or rationality to bring it about. I think this would bring the skeptic to the unsupportable faith they accuse Christians of maintaining.

Maybe God’s existence is not so unreasonable after all. It would seem that without the Christian worldview the world lacks a standard on which to know anything for certain.

The Question of the Sufficiency of Reason

I’ve been considering the ramifications of thought processes concerning the existence of God. Skeptics ask for a reasonable logical system of evidence sufficient for proof of God’s existence from the theist who maintains He does indeed exist. Moreover, the skeptic ask that this be done using reason and evidence as a starting place without resorting to a presuppositional argument of starting at the place of the existence of the Christian God. I have been pondering the possibilities regarding this request.

How can I start at a place of reason? Has reason been proven to be a firm foundation on which to build? C.S. Lewis wrote, “If the value of our reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.” Doing so begs the question and gets you no where. Essentially we presuppose reasoning as a stable foundation for we cannot process thought without using reason. However, if we presuppose it as stable, where did it get its stability? We know it is not infallible: we have rules of logic to judge argument. We seem to have an intuitive idea of something being reasonable or unreasonable. Some try and operate outside of the rules of logic by claiming two contradictory things can be true at the same time, yet it is easy to show them the error of that thinking for eventually they will appeal to the same rules of logic they deny to prove their point, and, thus, disprove it.

So where does this take us? We have this reason we know exist and to a certain degree we trust reason as foundational, but yet it cannot be the standard for it is finite. It can only find stability in something infinite. If reason merely rest upon evolutionary development, reason could evolve into something entirely different than what we know today and yet in human history we do not see an increase in cognitive reasoning. If anything antiquity reasoned better than modernity or rather post-modernity. So we do not have any evidence of human reason excelling into the Nietzsche superman.

If we want to use reason as a starting place we cannot circumvent it having a foundation in the ultimate reason of God. Lewis writes, “For him [the theist] reason—the reason of God—is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her is derived. For him, the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine reason.” Thus the reason we can know anything at all is because our knowledge rest on the existence of God from where we receive the ability to reason for it is designed into our being. The ability to know cannot be divorced from the ontological point of reference of the existence of God. How can I then argue for God’s existence without first presupposing His existence so that the knowledge we discuss has a reasonable foundation on which to begin the dialog?

This does not mean that by presupposing His existence I avoid giving an answer rooted in reason, but that my answers flow from this starting point to circle back around to offer some stability for my presuppositional claim. Granted this very argument is in defense of the necessity of God’s existence, but it is not exhaustive of all knowledge on the subject.

Basically I am being asked to presuppose His non-existence and from that starting place of the supremacy of reason and knowledge prove He does exist. If my readers still maintain this request, I will need them to first establish to me a defense for the sufficiency of reason and knowledge as a starting place.

Science Has Become as God

Science has essentially taken the place of God in the western world. Culture esteems scientific knowledge as concrete, verifiable, and the ultimate method to truth. If one cannot prove a thing scientifically it is, most likely, untrue by default. People quickly forget the consistent fluctuation of scientific knowledge. One thing may be certain scientific knowledge for a generation only to be discarded and replaced by the newest scientific technology of the next generation. Science can only be as good as the human doing the experiments and theorizing, however, we act like it has surpassed human fallibility and entered the realm of consistent proof.

People appeal to science to dismiss the notion of the existence of God. Evolution, they claim, is responsible for everything in life. It’s the cause of the existence of complex matter, of even more complex life, of intricately configured genes and DNA. It’s responsible for our mental capacity, our feelings, our desires, our ability to love and to hate, to do good and to do evil. It has been given carte blanca to be responsible for anything science can’t explain, for everyone knows to attribute these things to anything supernatural would be extremely unscientific and barbaric.

Christians are blamed for relegating the unexplained to God and squelching scientific exploration. The truth is that the majority of great scientific contributions were brought forth by scientists who were devout Christians such as Blaise Pascal, Renee Descartes, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, and Francis Collins, to name a few. However, today it seems that secularist are relegating the unexplained to evolution and denying any possibility that there could be a supernatural explanation.

It would appear that science has been given too much credit and scientists too much power. Science ought to be an exploration into the world God created and not an endeavor to oust God from the equation in attempts to find naturalistic proofs at all costs.

If you start with the presupposition that there can be no Designer you will be blinded to any design before you. Likewise if there is first believed to be no supernatural world, scientist are limited to only naturalistic explanations and true knowledge is lost by this limitation.

If anyone dare put forth a theory of design they are forthwith regarded as an old fashioned Bible believer and their science is not taken seriously as science, because it is presumed to be faulty, simply because of the worldview which it suggest.

Science is inadequate to provide answers to the origin of life or the questions about purpose and spirituality. Science can only study the natural world around us and fails when it comes to the metaphysical world. Just because science cannot prove a metaphysical world (a spiritual world) does not mean it does not exist. It just means that science is limited to the natural. We make a grave error when we take a process of knowledge intended for exploration into the natural world and extrapolate it to deny the existence of a world it cannot explore. You cannot prove God through the scientific method. However, there are other ways to learn about Him. Science isn’t the end all measuring of reality as many have been led to believe.