Greentree Community Church

I’ve been arguing all along from a variety of phenomena that belief in God is a much more tenable position than that of atheism.  We spoke about how many things in our world have non-utilitarian value as it relates to the driving force of evolution—survival, things like music, art, beauty, love, and morality.  But isn’t there a better explanation than, ‘God?’  Of course, when it comes to such non-utilitarian value like religion, art, and beauty, evolutionists argue that these are simply the results of hard-wired brain chemistry, traits which helped our ancestors be less selfish and work together more often, leading to higher tribal survival rates.  However, I don’t think this position is tenable.

It seems evident to me that Darwinism oversteps its boundaries here by claiming to know too much.  Dawkins himself admits that since we are the product of natural selection, we can’t completely trust our own senses because evolution is interested only in preserving adaptive behavior, not true belief.  Thus evolution can only be trusted to give us cognitive faculties that help us live on, not to provide ones that give us an accurate and true picture of the world around us.  Patricia Churchland says this, “The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive.  Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing the world is advantageous so long as it…enhances the organism’s chances for survival.  Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.”  Even Darwin was plagued by this issue.  To a friend he confided, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” 

So, if there is no God, just the blind forces of natural selection, then it’s not only our beliefs about God we can’t trust, it’s our beliefs about everything, including evolutionary science.  In this system we would simply have no reason to trust what any of our faculties tell us for fear that they may simply be hard-wired neurochemistry that evolved there to help us survive.  If what my brain tells me about God is just chemical reactions then the same applies to what their brain tells them about the world.  Alvin Plantinga provides a scathing critique:  “People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion…the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God…It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.” 

The best way to explain the kind of universe we have (and the belief that we can know something true about it) is by belief in a personal creator God who imbues us with a mind where we can reasonably trust our faculties and also assume that there are realities corresponding to our desires.  If we did not believe in God, we would expect NONE of these things to be the case.  In addition, consider that every person on planet earth has a moral framework or orientation.  (As proof, consider:  Isn’t there some person, somewhere in the world who is doing something that you disagree with?)  Evolution cannot explain this human phenomenon because it would be purely anti-survival to put great care and self-sacrifice into the welfare of others.  Dawkins himself admits the problem, “[To be nice] is a misfiring, even a perversion of the Darwinian take.  Human super niceness is a perversion of Darwinism because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection.  Well, if that’s a perversion, it’s the kind of perversion we need to encourage and spread.”  Notice at the end, that Dawkins leaps to an ethical claim of what we “need to encourage and spread.”  This is a bald-faced faith claim, and there’s no way around it.  Augustine said we must believe something in order to know anything.  Thus, no matter what we do, we simply cannot extricate ourselves from a world in which we MUST make and live by faith. It’s almost as if the world were ‘designed’ that way!

If you buy any parts of my arguments so far, then you may get to this point and say, ok, maybe there is a God but so what?  What does that really mean to me?  If that’s you, then you’ll want to follow on to the next topic as I address Jesus, specifically as I attempt to historically PROVE that he rose from the dead.  If that is true, we move onto wholly new ground with very personal implications.[1]

[1]  Many of the thoughts of this entry have been taken or adapted from Tim Keller, The Reason for God.