It's been a while since the blog has had a new post. So I thought I would share something that Jack, one of the Reasons to Believe apologists overseas, passed on today. It's from a blog called Science 2.0, and is about how we think.
You can access the Science 2.0 post here:
It's a very interesting and thoughtful piece and my thanks to Nury Vittachi of Science 2.0 for posting it.
I find the following statement in particularly thought provoking:
This line of thought has led to some scientists claiming that "atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think," says Graham Lawton, an avowed atheist himself, writing in the New Scientist. "They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul." This shouldn't come as a surprise, since we are born believers, not atheists, scientists say. Humans are pattern-seekers from birth, with a belief in karma, or cosmic justice, as our default setting. "A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith," writes Pascal Boyer in Nature, the science journal, adding that people "are only aware of some of their religious ideas".
Reading this reminds me of what Ecclesiastes has to say about what God has done for humanity (emphasis added):
Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)
11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
The heart here being the centre of a person, not the organ pump, and it is intimately linked to our very being.
The New Atheists have tried to claim that atheism is the default position of the human mind, but this notion is at odds with what we know about the human mind from a very young age, as has been well documented in a plethora of research. Richard Dawkins believes that faith in God is a form of brain abnormality. However, research shows clearly that this is not the case.
Vittachi also notes the following naturalistic explanation for such human belief:
If a tendency to believe in the reality of an intangible network is so deeply wired into humanity, the implication is that it must have an evolutionary purpose. Social scientists have long believed that the emotional depth and complexity of the human mind means that mindful, self-aware people necessarily suffer from deep existential dread. Spiritual beliefs evolved over thousands of years as nature's way to help us balance this out and go on functioning.
Though on the surface this appears to be a reasonable explanation for the origin of belief in God, the "implication is that it must have an evolutionary purpose" is purely a naturalistic or materialistic reductionist belief. It presupposes that such a belief has a genetic basis. My background is in biology and not philosophy, but let me try to explain why I believe this materialistic reductionist explanation for the origin of religious belief becomes self refuting.
How so?
First off, much to the dismay of Richard Dawkins, no "god spot" has ever been found within the human brain and no genetic origin can be discerned for the origin of belief. On the contrary, research has shown that no "god spot" exists within the human brain (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120419091223.htm). Likewise Dawkins "meme" idea has lost all traction and has been relegated to a failed hypothesis.
Secondly, Alvin Plantinga has shown in Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, that evolution cannot select for truth, only survivability. Any number of false assumptions may lead to survivability just as a true assumption may lead to survivability. I won't go into the details, as I will not be doing Plantinga's argument the justice it deserves and it will make this blog post waaaayyyy to long. Bottom line, you can YouTube Plantinga himself and listen to him speak on this.
See, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwE_D9GUC0s
Sufficed to say, evolution's end, so to speak, is survivability and not truth. There is no reason therefore to trust the product of something that is the result of undirected chance, i.e. an accident. As Professor John Lennox has said in a number of his lectures, "if your computer was the product of chance, would you trust it?"
Darwin himself eloquently lamented about this very problem arising from his theory:
"But then 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. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
From Plantinga we encounter an additional problem regarding any evolutionary explanation for belief in God. If evolution puts such deeply held but false beliefs in our minds (let's remember here that evolution is being used to explain why I hold such deep belief in God), then how are we to trust our minds to reveal truth and sort out false ideas from true ones?
For the materialist, if evolution puts false ideas in our minds (again remember that the materialist is trying to account via evolutionary theory as to why I believe in God), then how are we to know what truth is, just as Darwin lamented. After all, I believe in the idea that ultimately I am a creation of God, and not the product of some random undirected process. If my conviction that ultimately I am a creation of God's doing is a false belief because, according to the materialist, my belief in God is a false notion planted there by evolution, how are we to discern which notions and beliefs in our minds are true, just as Darwin lamented. Can we trust which ones are false? How would we tell the difference?
At this point, the materialist should remember that some of these beliefs of human minds include the belief in evolution, the belief in naturalism, the belief in scientism, and the belief in materialism…
So there is simply no basis for belief in Vittachi's statement "...the fact that evolution would discard unhelpful beliefs and foster the growth of helpful ones."
And so any evolutionary argument for our universal belief in God falls down due to evolution's inability to arrive at truth and the fact that there is no genetic basis for discerning truth. Plantinga notes that if evolution is true, then naturalism is false.
It's not just Christians who point this problem out. Thomas Nagel in his now (in)famous book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, understands the power of Plantinga's argument.
Nagel is no lightweight when it comes to being either a philosopher or an atheist. As an intellectual, he puts Dawkins to shame. Nagel goes on to note in his book that the purely reductionist, materialistic NeoDarwinian worldview is hopelessly inadequate to account for mind, rationality and morality. Nagel finds the mind irreducible to mater in motion. He hopes for some teleological law to solve his dilemma, as he states that he doesn't like the alternative option, i.e. God. Needless to say, his book upset more than a few people in the materialistic camp.
To finish off this rather long post, I thought I would end on an amusing statement by Vittachi. He writes:
God, if he is around, may be amused to find that atheists might not exist.
Nice to see a sense of humour in a topic that often sees belligerent dialogue between both sides of the debate in the blog-a-sphere. My thanks to Nury Vittachi for writing it.
