The “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism” Is Bad Logic
When I was a Christian, I thought that the "evolutionary argument against naturalism" (EAAN) was one of the most convincing arguments for Christianity over an evolutionary-naturalist worldview. I particularly liked the clear way the argument was presented by C. S. Lewis (as opposed to the complicated philosophical approach of Alvin Plantinga).
The argument is pretty simple:
- If all of the thoughts in my head are the result of random physical/chemical processes going on in my skull, why should I regard any of them as corresponding to reality in any way?
Why should two atoms colliding produce reliable cognition? And if one believes that we are the product of evolution, why should we believe that evolution would have led us to have perceptions that correspond to reality? and why would evolution lead us to have systems of logic that correspond to reality? Thus, upon the evolutionary-naturalist position, there appears to be no reason to trust our own minds, whereas Christianity rescues science and reason from the depths of despair and nihilism by explaining that we can trust our sense perceptions and logical faculties precisely because we were designed by God in order to be able to rightly interpret reality and reason properly.
The evolutionary-naturalist answer is also pretty simple:
- Natural selection would simply weed out any specimen that emerged with sensory or logical faculties that were too inconsistent with reality, so we would expect that the species that do survive and thrive would have sensory and cognitive faculties that are relatively reliable.
I first encountered an argument similar to this in Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, when he was arguing against the idea of polylogism, the notion that different races or classes might have developed different systems of logic. What was a mere comment made in passing by Mises in his magnum opus thoroughly refutes the volumes written by Plantinga on the EAAN.
Suppose, for instance, that a specimen were to develop a rudimentary eye that allowed it to see shadows of things moving around it. It could then detect and avoid predators or detect and consume prey with its new ability. This is precisely why that trait gets passed on. That new trait has a utility that allows the specimen to live longer and reproduce more than other members of its species who can’t detect things using rudimentary vision. If the specimen had, instead, developed a hallucinatory vision faculty that didn’t correspond to reality, then its newfound sight would not have had any utility that would have prompted its selection via the evolutionary process of natural selection. If it saw shadows moving where there was nothing, there would have been no evolutionary pressure to preserve that trait. In fact, the false perception would likely cause it to behave in ways that would have made survival less likely.
Suppose that an early predecessor of humans developed a sense of logic but their natural system of logic rejected any sort of inductive reasoning so that the specimen just refused to believe in anything like the uniformity of nature. As a child, it would step off of steps and ledges and just fall...but it would never realize, "Oh, this is the way things work. This is what happens when you step off into the air —you fall!" So, it continued to step off of things unsupported, repeatedly falling, until one day it came across a cliff and ended up falling to its death. Its failure to sufficiently reason in a way that reflected reality led to its untimely death, so it never got the chance to reproduce and the newfound trait was not passed on. Do you see, now? Evolution would select for systems of logic that correspond to reality!
But, what’s more is that we find that logic actually begins to break down precisely at the points that we’d expect it to break down if evolutionary-naturalism were true! There are quantum particles and quantum phenomena that are so small that we can’t see them directly. For survival purposes, we only interact with subatomic particles in the aggregate. We are so much larger than an atom or a photon that we simply never interact with an individual atom or photon. We only interact with such things in the aggregate, in the form of the billions of photons that illuminate this room or the billions of atoms that make up the tree in the back yard. So our perceptive faculties are tailored towards understanding the aggregated forms that these things take at a macro scale. We had no reason to develop any ability to understand them at a micro level and, when we do turn to quantum physics, our sensory perceptions and logical systems both break down. We see things by way of the light reflecting off of it. If we want to look at something in a dark room, we shine a light on it. But when we try to look at protons and electrons, they’re so small that bouncing photons (particles of light) off of them pushes them away from the position they were in. We can never know where exactly a proton or electron is because the act of trying to look at it will change its location! And we see quantum "particles" acting as both a particle and a wave in things like the Double Slit Experiment. And our system of logic can’t understand what is going on here because quantum phenomena defy logic — and they defy logic because our system of logic only applies to mundane macro phenomena.
And we also see logic break down when we try to understand what came before the Big Bang? The Big Bang marks the emergence of space-time, the beginning. We can’t help but think in temporal terms of "before" and "after," but the categories don’t even apply and the question is probably utterly meaningless. We just cannot ever understand the beginning and what "preceded" it. How could something happen without a cause? But, also, how could it have a cause if there was nothing before it?
So quantum and metaphysical reality are beyond the grasp of our perceptive and logical faculties precisely because the ability to understand such things played no historical role in our survival as a species.
Why humans can’t adequately perceive or logically understand quantum phenomena is harder to explain within a Christian worldview. If we are created in the image of God and designed by Him in order to perceive and understand the world accurately, then perception and logic should never start to break down but it does!
We also have the phenomena of mirages and optical illusions, where our senses “play tricks on us.” Our sensory and cognitive faculties are very often mistaken about reality. Why would God design our vision in a way that often plays tricks on us? And humans very frequently arrive at different logical conclusions, so that we have so many competing philosophies, religions, and and worldviews. When problem solving, we very often use logic only to arrive at the wrong solution and end up having to “go back to the drawing board.” So, why is it that God would design our cognitive faculties in such a way that we’d frequently reach the wrong conclusion and often be deeply mistaken about the nature of reality?
Upon the evolutionary-naturalist worldview, it makes sense that our faculties would be largely reliable but also not perfectly so. The evolutionary process didn’t “design” us so that we could understand reality but so that we could understand reality good enough to survive long enough to reproduce. So the demiurgic creator god —not a divine being or all-powerful person but rather a blind natural process — gravitates towards the good enough rather than the perfect.
Our sensory and perceptive faculties as well as our cognitive faculties only need to be relatively reliable in order for natural selection to choose them. There is actually no merit in the “evolutionary argument against naturalism” because it fails to even understand the most basic concept in evolutionary theory. If evolution via natural selection is true, then we would expect our senses and our minds to be relatively reliable on the one hand but not infallible. In other words, if evolutionary-naturalism were true, we’d expect to find ourselves in a world that looks precisely like the one in which we do find ourselves.
