Early morning thoughts on a claim about God
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash
Some friends are visiting and I woke up early, thinking about the idea of no-God. I think it cannot be sustained. This is not to offer a proof of God...! But it is to say that the rational sense cannot prove itself. So join me in this thought experiment, won't you? Let us play on this jungle gym!
An idea comes to you that there is no God.
In your mind, you test this idea, and find it to be sound. However, if there is no God, then there is no mechanism to find truth in your mind.
Why?
You hold evolution to be true. Evolution is a mechanism by which the most suitable organism for an environment propagates itself more effectively than other organisms.
You believe your mind is something which has evolved. Therefore your mind is something that was subject to evolutionary pressure. Less suitable minds do not propagate as often as minds like yours.
So your mind is "good," because it has achieved a dominant position. But what does this dominance have to do with truth?
You could say that, by your judgment, it appears that the evolutionary pressure to which the mind was subject caused an evolution towards the ever-better recognition of actual truth.
So in this way, you admit that the mind does not necessarily have to be oriented towards truth, but that by a happy accident, it did end up evolving in the direction of "truth-finding" to increase its suitability for the environment.
And therefore, you say, it can make truth claims and even judge them.
But how firm is this foundation, really?
Here you are. You've come to believe the mind is reliable, because you believe that it evolved into a truth-finding device.
However, the theory of evolution does not allow for "the better" or "the worse" in the way we accept those terms. We would translate the better as meaning the more truthful, and the worse as moving in the direction of false statements. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, states that organisms succeed to the degree to which they are more suitable to the environment.
And environments always change. What was more suitable before, falls out of suitability eventually, and so the organisms in an environment must continue evolving to keep up.
So when you say "yes, I have a truth-finding instrument," evolution says "no, at best, you have an instrument honed for suitability to your environment. What it 'thinks,' leading to what you do, can only be oriented towards the more or less suitable."
When you say "this is true," and believe in your own rationality, the evolutionary theory (which you subscribe to) corrects the statement: "this is suitable."
Therefore, it is suitable to believe that there is no God. This environment must in some way select for that statement, since we see it is more and more popular today to say so. In this environment, we must suppose, using the predictive power of our "suitability-judging" instrument that statements like this must lead to actions which increase the rate of propagation of the organisms that make that statements and carry out those actions.
The atheist therefore, is responding to nature. Nature leads in this direction, and he or she follows with the "most suitable thought."
The only error in the program, is that he might mistake these thoughts as being "true" or "untrue," temporarily forgetting that they cannot be more than "suitable" or "unsuitable" to a given environment.
It is already interesting that he makes this error. From where comes this tendency to search for the highest truth conception? The atheist certainly feels that impulse within himself, otherwise he wouldn't make a bold statement about the existence or non-existence of a being we cannot see or touch.
By simple logic, you cannot disprove the existence of a thing which leaves no plainly visible trace. I can say "there is an invisible, all-powerful God," you cannot disprove it. You can only say you haven't experienced it with any sense. Perhaps it is hiding from you, or it can be felt in Italy and not in South Dakota. Perhaps it was visible briefly in 1833, but not right now.
So why make the claim that this thing doesn't exist?
It appears that the mind, wishes to make statements that become beautiful like mathematics is beautiful. Two is always two, across all epochs and solar systems. There, says the atheist, is the only beauty I can respect. And so his boldest thoughts reach for the mantle of beauty we give to mathematical truth.
But these statements are made by a mind made up of physical stuff, and therefore subject to the laws of evolution, which regards not truth but survivability as the only thing of value. And survivability implies constant adaptation to change. On what basis can this mind suppose that its statements can ever be "the real truth" when it is a thing of nature, which moves like all things of nature according to the inexorable law of evolution?
By his own rigorous logic, he is trapped. He either admits that his statements have no basis to be truth like mathematics is true...and thence are only constructs that temporarily may increase or decrease survivability, or, on the other hand, he insists that he did find "real" truth.
To admit that however, is to tacitly admit that there must be some other process than nature which made or influenced him. Because we would ask, "knowing all this, on what basis rests your claim that your statements are really true?"
If he won't admit a creator god, he'll have to invent one. For example, he could say "perhaps the evolutionary mechanism led to beings with brains of a requisite complexity such that those beings escaped the evolutionary mechanism. From this point, call it Stage 2, those beings discover and invent real truth through the thoughts of those brains which did indeed escape the evolutionary mechanism. I, as such a being, have made such a statement."
So his god, or "magic" is buried in the mystical moment when "stage 2" was achieved, somehow. Some wand was waved over some sleeping brain in the environment, and the owner of that brain has now "escaped" the relentless natural forces which raised him up and oppressed him by turn.
He could say other things. For example, he could throw mathematical truth under the bus, saying "there is no real or beautiful truth, not even in math. The idea of truth and beauty somehow combining is a quirk of the brain... it is a hit of dopamine received when neurons fire in a particular way. It is perhaps useful, but means nothing. So you cannot elevate statements about mathematics to a higher plane, and use this to denigrate my statements about the non-existence of a god. No...mathematics is true, but not special. Because there is no special truth, you have no basis to attack my claim of truth."
But if he does this, then all truth can be called special. As the villian in "The Incredibles" said: "when everyone is special, no one is."
So I say: it cannot be done. The rational faculty cannot prove itself. It may be a fine thing. It is clear from a look at our world today that we have used it to the utmost, and increased our comforts outrageously.
If the atheist gives up at this point, he can content himself with simply enjoying the world and not thinking about it anymore. Certainly he already got that advice from various comfortable people. I admire him for continuing the search for truth. I just think he's in a cul-de-sac.