2015 was a year of a number of tragedies both personally (I lost people I love dearly, and people I know suffered tragedy) and globally. How do we understand the meaning of these events, if there is meaning to them? This is part 1 of a few reflections on the question of pain and suffering to end off 2015.

What about Evolution?

In Part 1, I argued the fact that we have categories called ‘evil’ and ‘suffering’. Each act as pointers to God: we wouldn’t have absolute and objective categories called ‘evil’ and ‘suffering’ without an absolute standard (God Himself). The atheist response to this argument is such that, as a species, we got our values and ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ from our evolutionary development. Our moral compass developed in our brain circuitry over hundreds of thousands of years based on what was best for our tribe and our family, and what helped us survive in a particular environment with the goal of passing on our genes, etc. There are detailed reasons why this explanation doesn’t work. For now, a few quick thoughts.

First, we have morals that are contrary to evolutionary development as human beings. Loving our enemies, for instance, makes little sense from a purely naturalistic point of view, as does secretly giving to charities, and a host of other selfless acts. Second, and more interesting, if evolutionary theory is true, then, as many philosopher’s have pointed out, we can’t actually trust any of our convictions around what is ‘evil’ and what is ‘suffering’. Why? Because we only hold these ideas as remnants from past generations and what they were forced to believe in order to survive and flourish at any given moment, not because they are necessarily ‘right’ or ‘true’. Charles Darwin admitted this himself, in a haunting confession, saying that he couldn’t trust his own conclusions about the world because he couldn’t trust the way he came to those conclusions. He says:

“Within 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 are any convictions in such a mind?”[1]

The answer, if naturalistic evolution were true, would be a resounding no. We couldn’t trust these convictions. So then, just because a person says something is ‘evil’ doesn’t make it true; it may just be a misfiring of their cognitive faculties. Were the actions of that child abuser, that political leader, or that murderer ‘wrong’? Who is to say really? My convictions may just be saying that for the sake of my own survival, being driven by my selfish gene.

Furthermore, and even more fascinating, is this (and we are about to go deeper down the rabbit hole, so hold on): if all reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection itself? To suggest that the only reason our belief-forming faculties help us form ideas about the world – for the purpose of survival and to give comfort – is to suggest that there is no actual truth to these beliefs at all. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga agrees, and concludes that “[it] is improbable, given naturalism and evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It is improbable that they provide us with…true beliefs over false.” [2] The problem, of course, is that the same distrust has to include all beliefs, including all conclusions of evolutionary theory and Darwinism itself.

The same cognitive faculties that we can’t trust in regard to our thoughts about ‘God’, ‘evil’ or ‘right and wrong’ are the same ones that cause us to conclude that evolution is true, so we can’t trust those convictions either. In other words, if evolutionary theory is right, we can’t actually trust evolutionary theory! “Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason [i.e. to prove evolution] even as it destroys it.”[3]

---

[1] Charles Darwin to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (1897; repr., Boston: Elibron, 2005), 1:285.

[2] Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, xiv.

[3] Ibid.