Episode Transcript
FAS2427
Welcome to Faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
You know, atheists routinely put themselves as the champions of reason and science, and they view evolutionary theory as a triumph of both reason and science. And often they believe that evolution helps them to explain the features of the world that would otherwise be inexplicable. As Richard Dawkins put it in one of his books, I think Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Now, it's interesting that on the other side of the picture, one of the professors that I certainly enjoy listening to his talks, a mathematician, Dr. John Lennox, often raises the question, look, if you really believe in evolution, which is the result of random blind mutations, how can you trust your reason? How can you actually trust that your brain actually works and is reasonable? Why shouldn't it just be generating random thoughts? And this is a very, very interesting question. And recently I read an interesting article on this on the Creation Ministries website.
That's the creation.com website. It was titled Monkey Minds How Evolution Undercuts Reason and Science.
And it was written by Keaton Haley. And so if you Google that, if you go to creation.com and you probably entered in the name Keaton, K E A T O N Halle H A double L E Y Monkey Minds.
And I said the full title is Monkey Minds How Evolution Undercuts Reason and Science. I would really recommend reading the article. As I said, I was quite impressed with this article and so I'm going to read some of it.
This person goes on to say, ironically, however, evolution cannot possibly bear this burden of explaining reason and science because if evolution were true, it would undermine our confidence in human rationality. And so the person goes on to explain that Christianity, of course, is based on a creator, God, that we were created in the image of God and therefore in the likeness of God with a mind, with a super intelligent mind. Well, God was created in a super intelligent mind.
And we have been created with that intelligence so that we can have a relationship with God primarily, but also so we can understand and relate and appreciate the beautiful creation that God has made for us. And so one of the things that the author points out is that human beings are equipped with the ability to learn and reason. And we all intuitively know that we can grasp logical laws and relationships, hence the laws of physics and chemistry we've discovered.
We can sense our surroundings, we can remember the past, and we can reflect on ourselves through introspection. So one of the things is, if random processes are responsible for the origin of the mind, how did these very rational Things arrive because the Bible, as I said earlier, insists that God created our minds and bodies for a purpose. We're made in his image.
And of course the Bible explains that there was a fall that originally man was perfect in that he didn't know evil, but he made some choices and believed some lies. And this introduced sin and began disobeying, went against the laws that governed the harmony of the universe. And so by disrupting those laws of harmony, this led to disharmony, or what we call sin and problem and evil and the resulting consequences of pain.
But on the other hand, and so we have this wonderful explanation that explains these things, explains the minds, explains the origin of evil and so forth that are in the Bible. On the other hand, if atheism is correct, humans would be the byproduct of blind forces. This author writes they had no intention to produce rational creatures.
And it's interesting that the evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett writes the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled over aeons by the forsytenness process of evolution and natural selection. But really, that's what he says. But really, if our minds were not designed, why would we trust them? If happenstance evolutionary world, we would not expect our minds to guide us into truth.
And this is a very important point. And the great Christian apologist C.S. lewis recognises, and he writes, the evolutionary myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended byproduct of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.
The content of this myth of evolution thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of irrational, of the irrational, how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about evolution? And this is a very important logical point. And the mathematician John Lennox also builds on this point.
And it's a very, very powerful point really, that we have no basis for rationality if we believe the evolutionary theory. Now, of course, evolutionists want to find some arguments against this, but it's interesting. Many evolutionists of course acknowledge that evolution would predispose us to false beliefs, and yet they only seem to trade on this insight.
The author of this article writes, when it is convenient for them, when they are trying to dismiss ideas that they don't like, such as Christianity, for example, Darwin himself, when he experienced a lingering conviction that a designer was necessary to explain the world, he brushed aside his own thoughts in this way. He wrote with me, the horrid Doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there were any convictions in such a mind? So this again raises this.
Very interesting. So even Darwin had these doubts. So it's interesting.
Evolutionists, when we look at this, ought to doubt every belief at which they arrive at through reason, including all scientific knowledge and even evolution itself. So really, if processes are derived from just random mutations from lower animals. Yeah, why should we believe anything? It's raises.
Of course, they claim that natural selection is to the rescue and they often cite, well, monkeys that recognise that lions were dangerous and moved away, as opposed to monkeys that thought that lions were just little playful kittens and ended up getting eaten. The ones that saw them as dangerous would survive. But the thing is, when we break this down, if we go to a bacteria, bacterias can survive quite well without having to have some sort of logical mind.
So it's interesting that fitness for the environment fits natural selection, but this has nothing to do with the mind and reason really. And the arguments that are developed by the author in this article are quite, quite deep and outside the scope of this programme. That's why I encourage you to go to the creation.com
website and have a look at the article by Keaton Haley called Monkey Minds. But when we go on to this, there many the author goes on to write, many leading evolutionists themselves recognise that natural selection isn't aimed at truth. All right, okay, so there's a couple of aspects of this and I'll just deal with this one in this particular talk.
Now, admit that our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth, and that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction. Now this is a very important philosophical point to note and so I'll just read again. It's very important to recognise that natural selection isn't aimed at truth.
Our brains were shaped for fitness according to evolutionary theory, not for truth, and that an interest in truth is not needed for survival or reproduction. And this is very interesting because truth has no systemic or systematic, rather evolutionary advantage over error. In fact, the problem is worse.
If our minds evolved, false beliefs would tend to predominate because as a Christian philosopher, Agnes Meningi points out, for any given topic it can be shown that there are vastly more systems of false beliefs than systems of true beliefs that produce the same behaviour. So this is it. There's lots of error out there, but often only One area of truth.
And so therefore we can see that error, if you boil this down, favours evolution, or evolution rather favours error. And so again we find from this, from this philosophical argument very, very powerful evidence that our minds must have been created. Another problem that the evolutionists have, of course is that when we look at the composition of our bodies, you know, they're made up of atoms, that atoms are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and so reason cannot be grounded in these material things.
The problem though is due to several obstacles for our material and there's a couple of things and one is that our material bodies, such as our brains, are constantly changing. Cells are being replaced with new bits of matter, so that in an evolutionary world it's hard to see why the same person would be present throughout an act of reasoning, enduring all the way from the premises of evolution. So also our brains would consist of, our brains would consist of diverse parts having distinct thoughts.
So what would unite them together to create one conscious individual? Thirdly, all of our actions would simply be the results of atoms obeying the laws of physics determined by prior physical states, with no place for a genuine agent to deliberate or have goals or draw references, inferences. And so we can see that brings us down the path that we must be pre programmed. So this means that we don't have actual reasoning, we're just reacting.
If naturalistic were true, and therefore you could say that the things we do are just automatic, no person is actually in control. And of course actually JBS Hal Dean realised that this was self refuting really. If years ago, if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in, in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
So you've got, if you go down this evolutionary pathway, you've got no basis for reason, you've got no basis for creativity, individuality and of course free will. Instead your defence would be if you do something wrong, the atoms made me do it. It becomes really crazy because we know that we do in fact reason in a generally reliable way.
The evolutionary worldview must not be correct and this is very, very important. Evolution lacks the resources that enabled us to trust in our own rational faculties. But Christianity succeeds where evolution fails.
According to the Bible, we are more, and this is just quoting from, pardon me, the end of the article. According to the Bible, we are more than just matter, more than just spin offs of blind evolutionary processes. We have immaterial souls which play an essential role in our capacity for reason.
We have minds and we were created by God, a God of reason, in his very image and likeness. God gave us the minds of men, not monkeys. And that is why reason and science are possible.
And we know, of course, that the Christian faith really underpinned scientific developments. Early on, you've been listening to faith and science and remember, if you want to re listen to these programmes, just Google 3ABN Australia.org.au and click on the radio button and look at the programmes there. I'm Dr.
John Ashton, have a great day.
