A characteristic of God that ever believer should admire is that He is a God of order, and above all things, reason in rather chaotic world. Not only has He ordered the natural world to commune with objective reasoning, He has placed the capability to reason in every human being. There is an axis at the center of nature and within the conscience of mankind that can't easily be explained away by those who oppose the idea of a divine order at the center of our reality. As C. S. Lewis observes, such “instances show that the fact which is in one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious.”[1] While C.S. Lewis is one of the greatest theological minds of our time, it doesn't take a seminary degree to understand the brevity of His argument. The capability to reason, or utilize our rational minds to come to logical conclusions, is a mere gift from God that can't easily be overlooked.
The capability to reason, or utilize our rational minds to come to logical conclusions, is a mere gift from God that can't easily be overlooked.
This serves as internal evidence for the existence of God and serves as a stark contrast to the reality brought forth by Naturalism. According to naturalism our capacity to reason is the result not of the purposeful creation of an essentially good and rational God, but rather of the purely naturalist process of Darwinian evolution. On this view our capacity to “reason” evolved over a long period of time. As Richard Dawkins explains: Natural Selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparent purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If [Natural Selection] can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker. In other words, our cognitive faculties gradually developed pursuant to the dictates of the laws of physics, implying that instances of “thinking” are occurrences that ultimately are likewise expressions of the laws of physics.[2]
In regard to how difficult it must be for naturalist to make sense of the world, and showcase meaning for life separate from God, the Darwinian Theory has impacted the scientific community in significant ways. he younger Darwin’s achievement was to offer a plausible and compelling explanation for how species evolve and to use this explanation to trace the history of life’s development. All existing creatures, he argued, descended from a small number of original or progenitor species. Darwin compared the history of life to a great tree, its trunk representing these few common ancestors and an extensive system of branches and twigs symbolizing the great variety of life that has evolved from them. This evolution, Darwin wrote, is due to two factors. The first factor, Darwin argued, is that each individual animal is marked by subtle differences that distinguish it from its parents. Darwin, who called these differences “variations,” understood their effect but not their cause; the idea of genetic mutation, and indeed the scientific study of genetics, would not arise fully until the early 20th century. The second factor, Darwin argued, is that although variations are random, some of them convey distinct advantages – superior camouflage, a heartier constitution or greater speed, for example – that better equip a creature to survive in its environment. A greater chance of survival allows for more opportunity to breed and pass on advantageous traits to a greater number of offspring. Over time, an advantage spreads throughout a species; in turn, the species is more likely to endure and reproduce. Thus, over the course of many generations, subtle changes occur and accumulate, eventually morphing into bigger changes and, possibly, even a new species.[3]
Darwinian thinking led to a great deal of tension amongst those within the Christian faith because it introduce the idea that life was truly meaningless and man had no God-given purpose within the world. Their birth was by mistake, or mere happenstance at best, and their death will be as insignificant as their birth. The idea of a benevolent God who cared for his creation was seemingly challenged by Darwin’s depiction of the natural world as a savage and cruel place – “red in tooth and claw,” as Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Lord Tennyson, wrote just a few years before On the Origin of Species was published. Darwin’s theory challenged the idea that the natural world existed in benevolent harmony.[4]
Their birth was by mistake, or mere happenstance at best, and their death will be as insignificant as their birth. The idea of a benevolent God who cared for his creation was seemingly challenged by Darwin’s depiction of the natural world as a savage and cruel place
Like many people today, Darwin had a difficult time reconciling that a good God would allow for such terrible things to happen in the world. However, what he failed to realized is that the ability to rationalize and struggle with his perception of evil in the world is not a result of evolutionary changes. The desire to stand for what we deem to be objectively right and objectively evil does not come from evolution, but from a soul and conscience within us that has been programmed to seek that which is good and higher than one's self. Much could be said about this account of the origin of our capacity to reason, but let us focus on just one subtle challenge: if human reason is the result of a blind (i.e., purposeless) and non-rational process, then the deliverance of human reason—our thoughts—cannot be the results of rational inference and are therefore not trustworthy. Interestingly, Charles Darwin himself shared this concern. He confided in a letter: “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 the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” This is a formidable problem for naturalism, because the door seems opened to our common experience of “thinking” (regarded as a rationally valid process) turning out to be an illusion. If this is so, then the naturalist faces the untenable situation of affirming a view that undercuts the trustworthiness of the reasoning process. In light of this realization, Alex Rosenberg’s claim that “the ‘thoughts’ in the brain can’t be about anything at all” so that our experience of thinking is an “illusion” is striking, to put it mildly. The Christian theist’s explanation of humans as created in the image of a good and rational God, however, has no trouble explaining the reliability of human reason. In this purposeful account we find a plausible explanation of the human capacity for valid reasoning. This is not to say, of course, that human beings are perfect reasoners; humans’ ability to draw valid inferences, rather, is a finite reflection of God, who is supremely rational.[5]
Sources
[1] Paul Gould, Travis Dickinson, and Keith Loftin, Stand Firm: Apologetics and the Brilliance
of the Gospel (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2018), 45.
[2] Paul Gould, Stand Firm: Apologetics and the Brilliance of the Gospel, 46
[3] Masci, David. 2009. “Darwin and His Theory of Evolution.” Pew Research Center’s
Religion & Public Life Project. Pew Research Center. February 4, 2009. https:// www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/02/04/darwin-and-his-theory-of-evolution/.
[4] Masci, David, Darwin and His Theory of Evolution.
[2] Paul Gould, Stand Firm: Apologetics and the Brilliance of the Gospel, 47
Bibliography
Paul Gould, Travis Dickinson, and Keith Loftin, Stand Firm: Apologetics and the Brilliance
of the Gospel (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2018)
Masci, David. 2009. “Darwin and His Theory of Evolution.” Pew Research Center’s
Religion & Public Life Project. Pew Research Center. February 4, 2009. https:// www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/02/04/darwin-and-his-theory-of-evolution/.
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