God is the best explanation for why we can trust our own minds, and naturalism completely undercuts itself
Here’s a form of a narrative you’ll hear increasingly commonly in the popular media and, often, scientific authorities. It goes something like this:
The first life forms began when the necessary organic materials came together and began to sustain themselves and reproduce. Over billions of years, these organisms adapted and evolved to survive in their ever-changing environment, eventually acquiring a greater size, the ability to swim, walk on land, feed on plants and other animals, and form social groups. The species with the traits that gave them the best chance for survival in their environment tended to live on, while those unfit for survival either acquired traits to help them survive (by random mutation and natural selection), or they died out and became extinct.
Eventually, hundreds of thousands of years ago, a group of primates struggling to survive in the African savanna developed various traits that helped them out big-time. Perhaps the most significant was increasingly complex brain activity, even intelligence. Some hominids became intelligent enough to manipulate their environment in ways no other species could. The resulting species was Homo sapiens–human beings. As time went by, these humans’ extraordinarily complex brains, always acquiring new advantages to aid survival, began to produce abstract thoughts, even spiritual inclinations. These collections of chemical compounds, amazingly, produced what we know as sentience.
These neural networks and collections of grey matter inside of us have evolved to help us survive, and now we can trust these as our rational minds. We can trust our minds to help us discover truths about the world via our senses, intuition, and the scientific method. We can even innately know certain truths, like the reality of the world around us. We can discover the source of our existence, and discern how we ought to live.
That’s the popular narrative of naturalism. It says that we are purely material. We come from simpler life forms over a long period of time, and our minds are entirely the product of matter, mutated and selected for by nature for optimal survival. Fittingly, by those same minds we have discovered the truth (say some) of naturalism.
As it’s been 160 years since Darwin first published his theory of evolution, not only has the science of biology advanced, but so has the philosophy behind it. Evolution has become for many not just a scientific theory, but a philosophical one. It’s invoked to explain every aspect of the human condition in purely material, impersonal terms. But philosophers, in exploring evolution from a naturalist perspective, have arrived at some unexpected, uncomfortable conclusions, many of which we’ve already discussed. Some have rejected it based on those conclusions.
One of those philosophers is Alvin Plantinga, and he is one of those who argued that naturalism is false. But he goes a step further–his conclusion is that naturalism is not only false, but self-defeating. He is probably the main voice behind what’s been called the “evolutionary argument against naturalism.” Now, I’m not smart enough to duplicate Plantinga’s argument in all its detail, but his argument is the inspiration for my post here. And if some form of Plantinga’s argument, like what I’ll present here, holds up, then the pure materialistic naturalism that permeates our culture today undermines in and of itself any basis for believing in it.
To start, it should be pointed out that there are two gaping holes in the narrative presented above. As mentioned, evolutionary theory says that our minds have adapted and evolved primarily to help us survive. So we should expect that whatever thoughts our minds produce are probably the thoughts that are most likely to help us survive and thrive in our environment. That should be what they’re optimized to do, right?
Survival does not always come from truth
According to naturalism, your mind is entirely a production of your brain, and your brain is simply a collection of organized cells made up of various acids (like DNA) and other chemical compounds, come together by random mutation and natural selection. Is that really something to be trusted? True, your brain is adapted to help you survive, but that doesn’t mean it’s adapted to help you discover truth. In fact, in some cases, believing something false may give you a better chance of survival than believing something true.
Let’s say you are in England at the time of the Black Plague. One day, news arrives that the first person in your village has contracted the plague and is deathly ill. Your next-door neighbor is terrified, because he believes (incorrectly) that the black boils on an infected person’s body are manifestations of demons, and that seeing them in person will automatically cause him to become demon-possessed and ill as well. So he flees the town and lives with relatives on a farm in the country, refuses to travel where any sick people might be, and keeps his hands and body vigorously clean, because he also believes an unclean body is ripe for demon possession.
Who is more likely to survive the plague? Your English neighbor believes something completely false, and yet he has a much better chance of surviving the plague than you or anyone else in the town. His brain is working exactly as the evolutionary process formed it to work–leading him to draw conclusions that optimize his chances for survival.
How naturalism undercuts itself
But if that’s the way our brains are–built to prioritize survival–then the answer to the question a few paragraphs above is clear. Should we trust our brains? Yes and no. Yes, we should trust them to help us survive. But no, we should not necessarily trust them to help us form true beliefs. The beliefs that help us survive might happen to be true, but there is no reason to believe with confidence they are. This is especially true for beliefs that can’t be verified by objective means, like philosophical or moral beliefs.
The naturalist should have no problem admitting this. Many atheistic evolutionists will give an explanation much like this for the existence of religion. They will say it had survival value for our ancestors, and so the evolutionary process tended to preserve religious cultures over others. They would say that people believed something that wasn’t true, but because it enhanced their survival value, their brains produced those beliefs, and they passed them down to their children.
This is a major problem for naturalism. If naturalism is true, we have no reason to believe that what our brains cause us to perceive reflects reality. Maybe knowledge of reality happens to be what helps you survive, or maybe not. You can’t know for sure, or even with any justifiable confidence–especially when it comes to philosophical beliefs. And this, of course, includes naturalism itself. If you perceive that God does not exist, you have no reason to believe that your perception of God’s nonexistence is reflective of truth and not just helpful for your survival at this time.
Also, beliefs aren’t really beliefs
And there’s a second major problem. If naturalism is true, and we are entirely material, then every thought we have, every decision we make, every belief we hold, is just the result of the movements and reactions of chemicals and electricity and other forces. All of this is caused by the behavior of particles at the atomic level. We are not really doing anything. What we perceive as thinking and believing is really just our brain reacting based on the behavior of its constituent atoms, which in turn react to whatever outside forces stimulate them. Every one of these reactions is a result of nothing more than the laws of physics. There is no personal agency or objective rationality going on.
So if naturalism is true, whatever beliefs we hold are not because of some higher level of reasoning. Our brains react to the laws of physics just like a ball bounces when it hits the ground. One brain reacts differently to another, just as one ball bounces higher than another. The person who believes naturalism is just a collection of chemicals, inside of whom is a brain that happens to be reacting in such a way to the forces of the universe to produce those beliefs. A belief in naturalism is no more rational than a belief in last-Thursdayism, just as a ball that bounces three feet when dropped from eye level is no more rational than a ball that bounces two feet.
So in light of all that, again, it compels the question: If naturalism is true, why should anyone trust their beliefs? Why should anyone believe that these collections of particles inside of us, as they react deterministically to their environment on behalf of their own self-preservation, reliably produce in us true beliefs about the underlying realities of existence?
The most “rational” item of all.A different narrative
There is another narrative that offers a better explanation. This narrative says that we are not mere products of the laws of chemistry and physics. We are designed by a Creator who wanted us to not merely survive like the animals, but to think and reason and connect on a spiritual level, so we could discover underlying truths about reality. As the Bible describes, we are made “in his image,” with rational minds like his, able to discover truth.
Because of this, we have good reason to believe that when our senses are properly functioning, what our senses perceive correspond to what is actually true. This isn’t just true for our physical senses, but our spiritual ones as well–like the conscience, our sense of moral truth. We have good reason to believe that when we reason, we are exercising true rationality, rather than just passively experiencing chemical reactions.
God’s explanatory power
Some might say, “What evidence do you have for this?” We’ve already seen several lines of evidence in the last few articles. This article isn’t so much about additional evidence for the existence of God. It is more about the explanatory power God’s existence has for our experience.
Science places a high value on explanatory power. A hypothesis that explains most of our observations while leaving a few unexplained is generally preferable to a hypothesis that explains a few of our observations but is inconsistent with the rest.
Would a loving Creator make imperfect creatures?
But some might object that we in fact don’t have very reliable senses. It’s possible for us to hallucinate, to mistake one thing for another, to be under a delusion, or even have our brain turn on us completely. Many of our characteristics could be perceived as design flaws. It could even be argued that we are not that well-equipped to discover truth, since so many disagree about philosophical truths. This unreliability makes sense if we came about by random, natural processes, but it seems not to fit the designer hypothesis very well.
But this misses the point. If naturalism is true, your brain is optimized to preserve itself–to help you survive. If a hallucination happens to be what helps you survive, then the brain is doing what the evolutionary process optimized it to do. If a delusion happens to be what helps you survive, and your brain produces the chemical reactions that manifest as belief in a delusion, then the brain is working “properly.” Contrarily, if a true belief happens to hinder your survival capabilities, and you hold that true belief, then your brain is not doing its “job.” For all we know, this whole reality we perceive could be a hallucination. And if it were, you would probably believe in the reality of the external world, because you likely would not survive if you truly believed you were hallucinating it. You would probably be inclined to engage in more dangerous behavior, or live passively for pleasure, or choose not to reproduce, knowing the hallucination could end at any moment. So your brain, to optimize its chances for survival, would probably instill in you a belief that the world was real. It would instill, in this case, a false belief. The naturalist must admit that he has no good reason for believing that he is not living a hallucination.
The theist, on the other hand, can say that even if our senses are imperfect, they are at least better than random and purposeless (which is basically what deterministic physics produces–effects with no actual purpose). If God wanted us to know the truth about reality, and made us able to do so, then we have good reason to believe we are mostly perceiving reality as it is. Given these facts, all evidence indicates that our senses are extremely reliable. At nearly every moment of every day, we perceive the environment around us as it actually is, and we perceive truth as it actually is. Although our senses and beliefs can sometimes deceive us, the overwhelming majority of them do not. And even where we disagree on what is true and what is not, we can be confident that using our God-given rationality is the correct and reliable way to get closer to truth in all matters of knowledge.
Additionally, Christian theism provides a good reason for why our senses and beliefs are imperfect and sometimes unreliable. Christianity teaches that God did indeed create humans very good, but humans chose to disobey God. That choice distorted our humanity and twisted our perception of the world. But God is loving enough not to leave us that way forever. By sending his Son, he provided a way for us to be made new and restored to the way he created us to be. Some may say that sounds pretty convenient, but it’s no less convenient than the notion that completely random, natural processes enabled us to discover supernatural truths.
The best explanation
Naturalism may provide a plausible explanation as to how we got here, if not a very good one. But it cannot explain our ability to reason and think rationally, and in fact it denies there is such a thing. Naturalism implies that we shouldn’t trust our own rationality to lead us to true beliefs, even about naturalism itself. Anyone who believes in naturalism shouldn’t believe in much of anything with confidence. The ultimate absurdity to which naturalism leads makes it a very poor explanation for our existence.
God also provides a plausible explanation of our origins, and it provides a plausible explanation for so much else we observe, including why we can trust our own rationality. This doesn’t prove theism is true, but it does make it the explanatorily superior explanation. Only if theism is true do we have good reason to trust our own minds to lead us to truth. Only if theism is true do we have good reason to know with confidence that even our most basic beliefs are true.
Questions for readers:
– The evolutionary argument against naturalism is a fairly new argument, and not one commonly used by Christian apologists. Have you heard it before?
– Do you think the argument accomplishes its goal in exposing a major flaw in naturalism? Would you use it to help attempt convince a skeptical friend of the doubtfulness of naturalism?
