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The argument from science (a.k.a. the argument from intelligibility) isn’t that this or that scientific experiment proves God’s existence, but that science itself isn’t possible without God. Here’s how the argument works, and an answer to the most common objection.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi, and welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So I want to talk about a big idea. I’m calling this, tentatively, How Science Proves God’s Existence, but the argument I’m going to make in this episode is really that reason itself relies on God’s existence. And now that is a big argument, but I’m going to focus particularly on science, and then draw the parallels out from there. And the reason I want to start with science is because oftentimes there’s this idea that science and religion are opposing forces, and you’ve got to really choose one or the other. This often comes up in debates about creationism as opposed to evolution, and there’s a lot that could be said in this regard. By all means, I’m not saying that all religious claims are compatible with all scientific claims, that’s not my argument at all. But I am going to argue that faith and reason belong together, and become incoherent when you separate them.
And more specifically, I’m going to make a twofold argument. Number one, if theism is true, there’s an adequate reason to believe in science. And again, we can make that even bigger. There’s an adequate reason to believe in reason. And number two, if theism is false, if God doesn’t exist, in other words, then there’s no adequate reason to believe in science. There’s no adequate reason to believe in reason. And another way of framing that would be to say, if science is trustworthy, then God must exist. So, you might be saying, “How in the world can you defend those ideas?” Well, let’s first notice that the first two claims I made, if those are true, then the third one, if science is trustworthy God must exist, follows logically.
So the first claim, if theism is true, there’s an adequate reason to believe in science. So a way of formulating that would be something like what John Paul II says in the Encyclical Fides Et Ratio, which the entire thing as the name implies, is about faith and reason. He begins by saying, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth, in a word, to know himself. So that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” So it’s really simple, I think, that if there is a creator God who’s all powerful, all good, and designed us to know, love and serve him, then part of that knowing, loving and serving him involves this capacity to know the truth. So it makes sense that we would have ways of understanding the world around us. Makes sense that we’d have ways of understanding things through reason. That faith and reason are both these God-given gifts, and for the same purpose, to understand God and creation better, and to understand ourselves better.
So whether you agree or disagree with the existence of God, the point here is just if God exists, then it makes sense why we have reason, all of that follows. And if we have reason, then we can have science, et cetera. On the flip side, if God doesn’t exist, this is the second claim, then there’s no adequate reason to believe in science. Now, this is going to be the, I think more provocative claim. Hopefully it’s just very clear that the first claim is almost self-evidently true. If you believe in an all good, all-loving divine intelligence, then the idea that he created intelligence capable of knowing and loving him follows logically. But the second one, well, if there isn’t such a divine intelligence, if there is no God, there’s no creator, there’s no intelligence behind the existence of the universe, well why does that mean we can’t have reason? Why does it mean we can’t have science?
And there’s a lot of different ways of framing this argument. I want to explore a couple of them, a few really, from Chesterton, and then from Bishop Robert Barron, but he’s quoting Benedict XVI. And then I’m going to quote Benedict directly, and then I’m going to look actually at an atheist philosopher named John Gray, who’s going to make a very similar argument. So Chesterton, he puts the argument like this. He says, “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” I want to pause on that line, because that’s going to be a really critical idea. Reason, for me to make sense of the world around me, requires that I have the belief that the thoughts I have have some kind of connection to external reality, and they have a connection such that I can know the external world.
And if you know anything about the history of philosophy, that is a very controversial idea. Because you have this whole school of idealism, we’ve got all these schools of thought that would actually deny like, oh no, we don’t really know the outside world at all. We only know our thoughts. Well, if that’s the case, we can’t really speak of reason in any meaningful sense. That I can’t do science, I can’t do anything like that because I’m only involved in my own head. And so Chesterton’s argument that it is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts of any relation to reality at all says if you’re merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, why should anything go right? Even observation and deduction, why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They’re both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.
That is, if you think that the world around you is the result of random chaos, you believe that human beings are evolved as a result of unguided evolution, then it does seem to follow that you’ve got no reason to trust either of two things, either one, the knowability of the world around you, or two, your ability to know things as a knower. And we’ll get back to those two ideas because those are going to be both very important. And so Chesterton concludes the young skeptic says, “I have a right to think for myself,” but the old skeptic, the complete skeptic says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.” A lot of what we’re seeing right now in new atheism and its offshoots are these young skeptics. I mean, it’s these people who’ve said, aha, are these religious claims really true? I’ve got reason to doubt them, I want to think for myself. And fair enough.
But they’re not being critical about their own critical faculties. They’re not being skeptical about their own skepticism. And when you apply the same methodology to atheism, the same methodology even to reason that you apply to faith, you can tear down that house of cards very quickly. And that’s the crux of the argument. If that isn’t clear, if it’s not clear what Chesterton’s talking about there, I’m going to give a couple other angles. Like I said, this is Bishop Baron, then Father Baron, in his book Catholicism, and he is quoting then Father Joseph Ratzinger, or paraphrasing him. Because in 1968, while he was still a young theology professor, Joseph Ratzinger, who goes on to become Benedict XVI, argues that finite being, as we experience it, is marked through and through by intelligibility.
That is to say, by a formal structure that makes it understandable to an inquiry in mind. This is a crucial point, I’ve already alluded to it once, but it works like this. For any logical endeavor, whether you’re talking science, philosophy, theology, just getting to know the world around you, whatever you want to talk about, any of things to work, math even. Two things have to be true. Number one, the universe must be knowable. And number two, we must be capable of knowing, and specifically of knowing the universe. It’s like this, if I’ve got a book, two things have to be true. One, the book has to be legible. It has to be something where the author has communicated in a coherent, reasonable fashion. And two, I have to be able to read, otherwise it can find no meaning in those things. So it’s not good enough.
And you could imagine a world in which we had minds capable of knowing, but the universe was entirely invisible to us. That’s not the word we find, right? We have a universe, we can see taste, touch, smell, investigate, and so the universe presents itself as knowable. Now, there may very well be things we don’t know. Dark matter, ultraviolet light, we can’t see, whatever you want to talk about. You can talk about knowing that there are unknowable things, that’s totally consistent with this idea that there’s still something knowable about the universe. Being presents itself as knowable. In the same way that I might read a book and the author has not made it clear, maybe intentionally not made it clear why so-and-so acted the way they did. It’s intentionally a little bit mysterious. That’s fine. That’s different than a non-book. The difference between having a book and not having a book involves is this something legible? Is this something coherent? Is this something readable?
And so an author who just produces a book that has no words, just as empty pages, or they’re not letters, they’re just scribbles, that sort of thing. You don’t really have a book there in any meaningful sense. There’s no communication of ideas at all. That’s the first thing need, legibility. The second thing you need is literacy. Now, literacy here, I mean this metaphorically, because it isn’t just the ability to read things, it’s the ability to see things, smell things, taste things, touch things, and know things, most importantly. That our senses work, and our minds are capable of taking all that sensory data, informing a coherent picture of the world around it. Those are the two things we need. The book of the universe, the book of the world needs to be capable of being read, and I need to be capable of reading.
Those two things are independent. You could have one and not the other, but you need both of them for science to work. We’re going to go back to this point because this is really important, but I want continue Baron’s summary of young Joseph Ratzinger. He says, “In point of fact all of the sciences, physics, chemistry, psychology, astronomy, biology and so forth, rest on the assumption that at all levels, microscopic and macroscopic, being can be known.” Now, he does not mean here to deny that there may be elements of being that we don’t know. You can have the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, you can have quantum physics, where weird things happen and we don’t know why. That’s fine. That’s consistent. Just like you can have a book where you don’t get every twist and turn, and maybe you’re not meant to get every twist and turn. But you can still, there’s a difference between not fully understanding something you’re reading and not being able to read it at all.
So we can read being at the very small and very large level and everything in between in a surprising way. Now this is surprising at the microscopic and macroscopic level for a reason we’re going to get back to. That you could imagine from an evolutionary level saying, well, it makes sense that we’ve been evolved so that we’re able to read one another. It’s a lot more of a stretch to say, as a result of mere blind evolution, we’re able to read the cosmos, we’re able to read microbial life in this really sophisticated way that our caveman forebearers never were able to. That you’d have to say basically that ability, the ability to do microscopic and macroscopic research and understanding of science, is just a happy accident. Because you can’t really say there’s some sort of survival of the fittest benefit, that in antiquity, in the earliest stages of human life was bestowed by being able to understand the meaning of the cosmos, because it’s a ridiculous argument, right?
When you’re fighting to stay alive as a caveman or whatever, you don’t need that kind of knowledge. And yet we find we have that kind of knowledge or the ability to have that kind of knowledge. So being at every level, microscopic, macroscopic, everything in between is knowable. And this is something that great philosophers and thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian have remarked on for eons. Pythagoras points this out. The scholastics say all being is knowable. This is a basic principle of great thinkers, that you can know things about the world, because if you can’t know things about the world, there’s no point in being a thinker. And so young Joseph Ratzinger argues that the only satisfying explanation for this universal objective intelligibility is a great intelligence who has thought the universe into being.
And he makes a linguistic argument. Even words like recognition. It’s recognition, cognition being like knowledge. We are thinking again something that’s already been thought, that we’re not inventing, meaning we’re discovering meaning. That’s the idea of recognition. And he also quotes Einstein, that in the laws of nature, a mind so superior’s revealed that in comparison, our minds are as something worthless. That if you understand things like, take for instance, gravity. It works in a set way. There’s no reason why it works In a set way that we can discern. And yet if it didn’t, we couldn’t be having this conversation. We wouldn’t be living. And so for the universe to exist, you cannot say here survival of the fittest, because that doesn’t explain why the universe holds together. Now, this is a point I’ll probably unpack a little more later on. Survival of the fittest works at the biological level once you have a living organisms.
But the existence of living organisms isn’t explained by survival of the fittest, the existence of a stable universe with universal constants, things like the weak and strong force, and electromagnetism, and these things that work in a very stable, very predictable way. All of this universal fine-tuning, we can talk about, oh, what are the odds that would happen? But you take all of those things, and Ratzinger says those look like intelligence. Now this often gets mislabeled as just intelligent design, but he’s actually making a different point. That there’s no reason to expect in a merely chaotic world either that those things would be true or that they would be knowable. And that’s just the one area. Remember, that’s just the book of the universe. There’s also how are we as knowers able to know? Well, that only makes sense if we’ve been known and loved into existence, if a divine intelligence has created our intelligence. Because if we’re just random chaos, it doesn’t make sense that random chaos understands the big picture or the small picture, any picture at all.
Ultimately the satisfying explanation is found in the Gospel of John, that in the beginning was the word, the divine logos, the structure pattern of the entire universe. And that the universe is not dumbly there, but is rather intelligently there, imbued by a creative mind with intelligible structure. Now again, the point here is significant, because intelligibility is different than intelligence in the way we sometimes use it. You can think a book is a bad book. You can think of play as a stupid play, but you still think it’s a play. You still think it’s a book. You still think somebody wrote it, somebody had a meaning they were trying to express. Maybe a great meaning and maybe a stupid meaning. You may like it, you may hate it. That is not at all a question. The question is, does this bear the marks of intelligibility, meaning can I make sense of it? That’s the question.
So again, that is Baron’s summary of Ratzinger’s argument. Well, I guess my summary of Baron’s summary of Ratzinger’s argument. But I want give Benedict XVI his own chance to explain his thought. This is towards the end of his time as Pope. He says, “Reason should be more open, that it should indeed perceive these facts, but also realize that they’re not enough to explain all of reality, they’re insufficient. Our reason is broader, and can also see that our reason is not basically something irrational, a product of rationality. But that reason, creative reason precedes everything, and we are truly the reflection of creative reason.” So another way of framing this would be to say, where does reason come from? Does it come from sheer accident or does it come from creative reason? That is a reason, a divine, uncreated reason creates our human reason. If a divine uncreated reason creates my human reason, makes sense, I can understand why I have reason. If random chaos creates my human reason, it’s not clear why I have reason. And significantly, it’s not clear why I can trust my reason.
We’re going to explore this point in a little bit more, but can I trust my own reason? Can I trust my own thoughts? Can I trust my own vision of the world at all? And if not, what does that mean? So Benedict goes on to say, “We were thought of and desired. There is an idea that preceded me, a feeling that preceded me, and that I must discover, that I must follow, because it will last give meaning to my life.” This seems to me to be the first point, to discover that my being is truly reasonable. It was thought of, it has meaning. And my important mission is to discover this meaning, to live it, and thereby contribute a new element to the great cosmic harmony conceived of by the creator. Now, that is a beautiful point that we’re not going to cover much, but the idea is if my being is the result of creative divine reason, I have a purpose, I have a meaning.
In the same way that a painter who chooses to paint you into the little corner paints you there for a reason, right? There’s some purpose you’re serving in completing the whole mosaic. And you may say, oh, “I’m a small little part of the painting,” very well. You’re intended to be there because things are a little incomplete without you. That is a particular vision of humanity and it’s really edifying, it’s a beautiful one. That doesn’t make it automatically true, but it does mean that if Ratzinger’s right about the argument from reason, the argument from intelligibility, then one of the consequences of that is that my life has purpose. And a purpose I don’t impose on it myself, but when I instead discover, one given to it, hopefully that makes sense.
I want to break the argument down. For science, philosophy, any real knowledge should be true, two things must be true. I’ve already covered this before the reading example. Number one, that the outside world, and the universe more broadly, must be knowable. And number two, I must have a mind capable of knowing true things. And the argument here is it neither of these things are adequately explained in atheism. The standard response is that you can explain this away through evolution. The argument goes something like this: natural selection favors creatures who understand the world around them more than creatures that don’t. As you can imagine, two animals, and one of them is unaware of where it is. It’s in a total stupor, it’s in a total state of unreality, and the other one is keenly aware of everything and everyone around it.
That second animal will outperform the first one until the first animal doesn’t exist anymore. It won’t have offspring, or it’ll be killed off, that species dives out. Species two, the self-aware one lives on. That’s the evolutionary argument in its simplest form. Now, there’s a couple things to note about it. First that only explains the second point. The first point that the outside world must be knowable. That is certainly convenient, that is certainly required for the evolutionary argument to work. But evolution doesn’t explain why the universe is knowable. You could imagine a universe in which no amount of genetic mutation ever makes you capable of seeing the universe, in the same way that there’s no creature in the universe that sees dark matter. And everything could be that, where you can’t perceive it, you can’t know it at all.
So it only deals with the second of the two arguments. Remember the first one, the outside world must be knowable. Second one, I must have a mind capable of knowing true things. Evolution might be an adequate explanation for the second one, why I have a mind capable of knowing true things, but there’s a problem. And so here I want to introduce John Gray. He’s an atheist. He’s a philosopher at the London School of Economics. He is a very pessimistic philosopher in the philosophical sense of pessimism, but also in every sense of pessimism. And he has a book called Straw Dogs. Now, Straw Dogs is a reference to Daoism, which is that heaven and earth treats everything as straw dogs. Now, straw dogs in Chinese culture is like a ceremonial dog, and then after you’re done that you burn it. So it’s savored for a while and then it’s just disregarded.
And so in the Tao Te Ching there’s this reference to heaven and earth treating everything as straw dogs, and the sage treating other people as straw dogs, like they’re worthwhile while they’re worthwhile. But that’s it. And so the subtitle of book is Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. So as you can tell, hopefully even from that title, Gray’s going to argue that a lot of the modern liberal, in both senses of liberal, both the philosophical sense of liberal and the political sense, that the modern liberal vision is that there’s human rights. That there’s human purpose, that things are constantly improving, there’s this myth of progress, there’s all these things. And he’s going to say all of this is ridiculous. There’s no scientific basis for any of this. And all of this is just a holdover from Christianity. That if you really want to be consistent as an atheist, you have to reject all this stuff as just made up. We are just one among many animals and none of this follows.
Fascinating, very dark vision of the world. But I particularly want to draw out what he says about this idea that evolution is going to make us capable of knowing true things about the world. He points out that there’s no reason to believe that is a very naive vision of the world. So here’s his argument. He says, “Modern humanism is a 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. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre Darwinian era that humans are different from all other animals.” So again, I don’t agree with him in his vision of humans being the same as all other animals, but if Darwin’s right, if atheism is right, then it does follow logically.
Now again, I want to be clear here. I’m not arguing against Darwinian evolution as such, but Darwin’s theory of natural selection apart from any vision of God. You can totally have a vision of natural selection that coexists with divine governance, leading the process, giving meaning to it, and ensuring that it goes in the right direction. But you cut God out of the picture and just have natural selection and it’s not going to lead you to, aha, this is how we all know the truth. No one looks at any other species and says, “Oh yeah, yeah, those animals totally understand what the universe is about.” They’re able to know the world around them. No, not in a deeper meaningful sense. And so the idea on a merely evolutionary level that we are going to end up differently does seem to be an irrational belief.
It seems to be an irrational, almost religious claim, he would say explicitly a religious claim. And one that is a hold over from Christianity. From, again, remember the young skeptic who says, “I can think for myself,” and the old skeptic who realizes, no, my skepticism actually destroys my ability to reason. Like skepticism and reason can’t both be true. So Gray goes on, and he talks about the theory of memes. Now, memes is, nowadays we think of it as just funny images that you send, but it comes from Richard Dawkins. The idea of thinking about ideas almost like organisms that spread, and survive, thrive, and they operate very similarly to how organisms operate. You’ve got bacteria, or you’ve got an animal, and it’s trying to reproduce, and get everywhere, and take over, and there’s a sort of survival of the fittest. And Dawkins’ argument is, well, this is also true with ideas, with beliefs about the world, vision about the world, all of these things are themselves, you can almost imagine them as sort of non-living organisms.
“Memes,” Gray says, “are clusters of ideas and beliefs which are supposed to compete with one another. In much the same way that genes do. In the life of the mind as in biological evolution, there is a kind of natural selection of memes whereby the fittest memes survive. Unfortunately, memes are not genes. There’s no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations and evolution. In any case, only someone miraculously innocent of history could believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of truth. Certainly, ideas compete with one another, but the winners are normally those with power and human folly on their side.” And he gives the example, “If the final solution,” the Nazis’ genocide, “had been carried to a conclusion, would that have demonstrated the inferiority of Hebrew memes?”
In other words, imagine a world which the Nazis totally eradicate the Jews. Does that mean they’ve won the argument, they had the better position? No, of course not. And so we can’t really say, again from a merely evolutionary perspective, that an idea spreading means that it’s true. This is an important point, like you’ve got a spread of misinformation, disinformation, and it is a really naive vision of the world that goes against all the available evidence to suggest left unchecked, the truth is just going to win out in the marketplace of ideas. There are plenty of arguments to the contrary, but this is really a hallmark of a lot of liberal thought. That we just need more conversation, we need more dialogue, because if everybody’s got an equal share, then the truth is going to win out, just through this natural evolutionary process. And Gray’s point is what are you basing that belief on? It seems to be purely irrational. Because so often in history there are these examples where the bad guys seem to win, and bad ideas survive and good ideas don’t. Or historical fiction becomes so popular that it supplants the truth.
I’ll give you an example. This idea that Christopher Columbus was the first guy who thought the world was round, this is ridiculous. And it’s really the 19th century, as they’re trying to paint the Middle Ages as dark ages, as this time of total ignorance, that this is invented. It’s invented by some French authors, it’s spread by Washington Irving. It’s clearly a false meme, because we’ve known about the world being round since the time of Christ. The Greeks are talking about this stuff. It’s taken for granted for most of certainly Christian history, and even before. So given that, you might say, okay, well that was a clear, there was a vision of the world and a vision of history that then gets crowded out with this falsehood that endures for hundreds of years. Again, 19th century is when this false version of history promotes this idea, Columbus is the first guy who realize the world is round. And you will still find even otherwise credible people parroting in this false belief.
So again, to go back to Gray’s argument, on what basis do we say truth is just going to win out? Now may be wondering what does this have to do with evolution and evolution being a clear source of where we get truth? Because he’s going to say, if this is all true mimetically, that bad ideas sometimes win out over good ideas, they spread further and better, that points to the fact that you can’t just say, “We know true things because true things are adapted for natural selection.” That from a natural selection perspective, bad ideas, misinformation, disinformation, falsehood, those things often spread much quicker, and seemingly have better results than actually knowing the truth about reality. So this is of first of his arguments.
He then says, “Darwinian theory tells us that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction. More often it is a disadvantage.” His second argument here, we’ll say, deception is common among primates and birds. He gives the example of ravens who pretend to hide food while actually storing it elsewhere. And that evolutionary psychologists have shown that deceit is pervasive in animal communication. This is in all sorts of areas. Look at the hummingbird moth, it is a moth that looks like a bird, that looks like a bee. By its existence, it’s meant to deceive you by how it looks, is meant to deceive predators. So we can say certainly deceiving others, there’s a clear evolutionary advantage to it. Well, Gray says, “Self-deception may help you to deceive others.”
Again, we’re not talking about morally, we’re talking about animals and survival of the fittest. And he suggests being able to deceive others is going to be enhanced by the ability to deceive yourself. And he gives the example of a lover who promises eternal fidelity, who is totally convinced that he means his promise. So imagine you’re a woman choosing between two potential mates, husbands, whatever, survival of the fittest. One of them says, “I’m a shallow guy. I like you now mostly for your looks, and later if you gain weight, or lose your looks, or get older, I’m probably going to lose interest and go on to someone else.” And the second guy, who is totally convinced, he’s just as shallow as the first one, but he’s so totally deluded himself into saying, “No, I love you for who you are. I’ll be with you forever. Come high or low.” Now, the second guy is going to have a very clear advantage in the dating mating market than the first guy.
His self-deception, his ability to deceive you, because he can deceive himself, is serving a clear evolutionary advantage. He’s more likely to marry, more likely to reproduce, more likely to have his genes survive another generation. Where the guy who’s honest and clear-eyed about his own shortcomings as just a shallow guy, he’s unlikely to reproduce, he’s unlikely to spread his genes to another generation, because women are more likely to say, “I don’t want that guy. I want someone who will be here to help raise my children.” That’s the idea. That deceiving others serves an evolutionary advantage. Deceiving yourself serves an evolutionary advantage as well. And natural selection is all about how things that serve an evolutionary advantage are favored, not things that are true. Now, there are a lot of other context, we can talk about this.
For instance, the placebo effect. That if I can lie to myself, or if I’m lied to by others, and believe a certain medicine is helping me, actually my body gets tricked into getting better. So there’s all of these areas where we already know that we can’t say there’s an evolutionary advantage to truth. Truth might be morally superior, but it’s not evolutionarily superior. Self-delusion has manifold benefits, and I think anyone who actually understands the science here would point to that, and would agree with that. So we can’t say evolution explains how we can have a true vision of the world around us, because evolution points to several areas that we know about where we have a false vision of the world around us. Or where it would be advantageous for us to have a false vision of the world around us.
And here’s the kicker, if we know that and believe we’re just the result of unguided evolution, we cannot reasonably say, “But the rest of our beliefs are all true.” How would we know that? Because our failing reason tells us so? Because our reason that we’ve already learned is a liar tells us so? On what basis do we come to that conclusion? Okay, going back to Gray, he says, “If all this is so, then the view that clusters of false beliefs, these inferior memes, will tend to be winnowed out by natural selection, must be mistaken. Truth has no systematic evolutionary advantage over error, quite to the contrary, evolution will select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious, so as not to betray by the subtle signs of self-knowledge, the deception being practiced.”
In other words, from a merely evolutionary perspective, we would expect to find creatures who are at least somewhat self deceived so that they can be better at deceiving others. And he quotes another author, Trivers, that evolution favors useful error. And, Trivers says, “The conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.” There’s just no reason to believe from a purely evolutionary level that our vision of the world is accurate. Including our vision of evolution, including our vision of atheism, including our vision of fill in the blank. That, oh, well my reason tells me God doesn’t exist, but my reason also tells me my reason can’t be trusted. Okay, that’s a major prop.
And so, Gray, and this is actually a different section, but I think it’s worth pointing out here. Gray also says, “The authority of science comes from the power it gives humans over their environment.” That’s a critical point, that if you look at the scientific revolution, if you look at all of the last couple hundreds of years, it has been the eradication of the belief that we need to focus on contemplative knowledge, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and instead favor useful knowledge. Francis Bacon’s famous line, that knowledge is power. That is a total shift in thought. The medievals were all about knowing things for the sake of knowing them. So you want to know about God, you want to know about the angelic hierarchy. Does that serve your daily purpose to know the different ranks of angels? Doesn’t matter.
The best things in life are worth knowing for their own sake. They’re not the means to an end of something else. That the modern vision of knowledge, I need to know science so I can build a better iPhone. I need to know science so I can build a better nuke. Those kind of things, that idea is a total shift. And critically, Gray says, undermines this idea that through science we’re just going to know more and more about truth, because we’re no longer in the truth business, we’re in the power business. That science succeeds if it gives us more power, more control over the world around us. And so inconvenient truths are not going to be favored, again, think about the survival of the fittest framework he’s using here.
And he said, “Sure, now and then science can cut loose from our practical needs and serve the pursuit of truth. But to think that it can ever embody that quest is pre-scientific. It is to detach science from human needs and make it something that is not natural, but transcendental. To think of science as a search for truth is to renew a mystical faith. The faith of Plato and Augustine, that truth rules the world, that truth is divine.” And by all means, that’s true. This is actually why we’re really cool with reason, because we believe that truth rules the world, that truth is divine. But if you reject that view, and instead say knowledge is power, well then you can’t say as a result of all of this power acquisition, we’re going to naturally result in the world having truer visions of reality. It doesn’t follow logically at all. You will still be in a situation where useful error is advantageous, where it’s you’re going to succeed if you can self deceive.
And there’s actually all sorts of examples of this. One of the funniest studies that I’ve seen on the dating market is that they surveyed men and found that they were likely to rate a girl as interested in them based on how interested in them they were. In other words, a guy meets a girl he finds very attractive, he’s more likely to think she’s flirting with him, more likely to think she’s attracted to him if he’s into her. This is self-deception, it does not correspond to reality at all. She’s, if anything, probably less likely be interested in him, she’s got more alternatives. But it serves an evolutionary benefit, because now he’s got more confidence. And the confidence she might find attractive, but the confidence is actually built on total self-delusion that he thought she was already into him.
So you can imagine a whole world where there’s this useful error. That these delusional beliefs we have serve an evolutionary benefit. And you can’t just say science somehow explains this away, or evolution somehow explains this away, because neither evolution nor science is designed to. So let’s bring it all back. Remember the claims were for science, philosophy, any real knowledge to take place, two things must be true. First, that the outside world, meaning the universe must be knowable. Second, I must have a mind capable of knowing things. And as we’ve seen, atheistic visions, including evolution, and the blind adherence of science, and everything else doesn’t really explain either why the universe is knowable, or why I have a mind capable of knowing true things.
Now, Gray would reply to this in saying you don’t have a mind capable of knowing true things. You have a mind capable of knowing some true things, but you can’t know which ones. Maybe it’s a lot, maybe it’s not very many. You don’t even have a way of assessing that. You know only that there are a lot of things that you not only don’t know, but are encouraged by science, by evolution not to know. So earlier I said if theism is true, there’s an adequate reason to believe in science. I want to expand that now, and say if theism is true, there’s an adequate reason to believe in reason itself. And that if theism is false, if God doesn’t exist, then there’s not an adequate reason to believe in science, and there’s not an adequate reason to trust our reason.
So again, this is a simple enough, I think, straightforward argument that if the universe is intelligible, if science works, if science is true, if science is able to study the world and make true and accurate predictions about it, that is only true because the universe is intelligible, and we have mind capable of knowing, which are only explicable ultimately on a theistic worldview. They’re only explicable ultimately if there is some kind of divine intelligence that governs the entire world, because a merely chaotic process doesn’t get you intelligibility in the universe, or intelligibility in the human mind. Hopefully that’s clear. Hopefully that all makes sense. What I like about it is that it’s not arguing this or that of the latest scientific endeavor. It’s really a simple argument that, well can you know things? How do you know things, because of mere evolution? If it’s mere evolution, you don’t have a reason to believe that the things are accurate, or reflect the world around you, or visions of the external reality in any meaningful sense.
And you have even less reason to believe that external reality reveals itself to knowers the way that we find that it does. But if God exists, then it makes total sense that he would create a world that is both knowable and populated by knowers. Populated by people who are intellectual seekers, that are searchers for the truth. Because that’s the kind of creature that he wants to create, because the searcher for the truth is ultimately a pilgrim hungry for God. I hope that makes sense. I personally really like that argument. I know some people really hate it. I think it’s a really fascinating one. Feel free to comment in the comments below what you think of it. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless.
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