If You Think Evolution Thought Of Thinking, Think Again

There is a popular argument that says that because man evolved, his thoughts do not guarantee truth, and that his inclinations to like or agree with an argument reflect what is best for his survival, on average, and that any argument’s agreement with truth is coincidental.

Which, as an argument, is self-refuting. As has been pointed out many times. Because if you believe the conclusion follows from the premises, and gives you a truth, you are saying it might not be a truth at all, but merely a comforting belief.

The situation is far worse than that. Because the idea that we cannot know truth applies to all arguments, and even all perception. Every sense might be false or incomplete, and only sufficiently aligned with reality at levels to guarantee survival, but without a guarantee of perfect fidelity. Which is another self-refuting argument. Because you need your senses to read and appreciate this argument.

Indeed, once you start down the knowledge-doubting path, no argument can be trusted. Even arguments which say we must be skeptics. No deductions of any kind can be known as true. The concept of deduction itself can’t be known as true.

This kind of “strict materialism”, as CS Lewis says in his Miracles (in the chapter “The Cardinal Difficult of Naturalism”), “refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms’ [ellipsis original].”

Thus a perfect adherence with neo-Darwinian evolution logically implies that neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory cannot be proved. Nothing can. Science is out the window as yet another comforting belief. No atoms, no science. And no proving evolution, as we’ll see.

Naturalism, say Lewis, “offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior; but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing of insight on which the value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.”

You might say that as evolution proceeds, senses become superior, which leads to greater perception, and thus arguments that come closer to truth because usefulness has increased. But as Lewis shows (and as echoed later by Alvin Plantinga), evolution, though it might account for superior abilities, is not enough to get to knowledge.

Inference itself is on trial: that is, the Naturalist has given an account of what we thought to be our inferences which suggests that they are not real insights at all. We, and he, want to be reassured. And the reassurance turns out to be one more inference (if useful, then true)—as if this inference were not, once we accept his evolutionary picture, under the same suspicion as all the rest. If the value of our reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning.

Perhaps this now makes sense to you. But what you might not have seen coming is that this works in reverse, too. Lewis continues (with my emphasis):

If—a proof that there are no proofs is nonsensical, so it a proof there are proofs. Reason is our starting point. There can be no question either of attacking or defending it. If by treating it as a mere phenomenon you put yourself outside it, there is then no way, except by begging the question, of getting inside again.

Reason is there. We think, we are. There is no escaping it.

The man Lewis quoted was JBS Haldane, the famous British mathematical biologist. To him is attributed the quip “I’d lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins,” about the similarity in genetic makeup between close relatives. If he said that, it was clearly a joke, because nobody ever reasons that way. And, as we’ve seen, biology cannot account for reason.

Haldane would agree. And in fact did agree. His quote comes from the essay “When I Am Dead” in his 1927 Possible Worlds:

But if death will probably be the end of me as a finite individual mind, that does not mean that it will be the end of me altogether. It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter.

For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter. But as regards my own very finite and imperfect mind, I can see, by studying the effects on it of drugs, alcohol, disease, and so on, that its limitations are largely at least due to my body.

Without that body it may perish altogether, but it seems to me quite as probable that it will lose its limitations and be merged into an infinite mind or something analogous to a mind which I have reason to suspect probably exists behind nature. How this might be accomplished I have no idea.

Me neither, Jack. Me neither.

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