ANOTHER FATAL FLAW OF NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION

Both naturalism and the theory of evolution maintain that, through natural selection, we have evolved a brain that has conferred upon us many survival advantages by enabling us to accurately perceive and to rationally think about our world.

However, there are other forms of our neurological wiring that the naturalist dismisses as irrational, although perhaps adaptive. Theologian and pastor, Timothy Keller, has written about this inconsistency:

·       Evolutionists say that if God makes sense to us, it is not because he is really there, it’s only because that [irrational] belief helped us survive and so we are hard wired for it. However, if we can’t trust our belief-forming faculties to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including evolutionary science? If our cognitive faculties only tell us what we need to survive, not what is true, why trust them about anything at all?

·       What is not fair is to do what so many evolutionary scientists are doing now. They are applying the scalpel of their skepticism to what our minds tell us about God but not to what our minds are telling us about evolutionary science itself. (The Reason for God, Dutton, 2008, 137-38)

The evolutionist claims that both rationality and irrationality (for example, the belief in God) have enabled us to successful adapt. Keller points to the fact that the evolutionist is not applying his scalpel evenly. If our brains and their beliefs have enabled us to successfully navigate this world and even to understand more abstract things, why not also apply this to our intuition or belief in God? According to the evolutionist, this form of irrationality had once conferred a survival advantage, but how could irrationality – seeing the world through a distorted lens – do so? Perhaps then, their own theories are irrational, serving only a temporary purpose?

Besides, the evolutionist takes his scalpel to many other ideas or intuitions that do not fit into their naturalistic worldview. C.S. Lewis reflects on this tendency in regards to love and music:

·       You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. (141)

According to Lewis, a naturalistic meaningless universe does not accord with our intuitions about it. It is these intuitions that take us beyond what is evolutionarily “rational” and infuse life with meaning and fullness. Are these hot-wired intuitions feeding us a distorted message? Does evolution “win” by tricking us? Are our brains filled with evolutionary distortions? If so, won’t these “distortions” intrude into all other areas of life? And won’t such “irrational” thoughts distort the rational?

Today, based upon the naturalistic worldview, many deny the existence of freewill. In a materialistic world governed entirely by the laws of science, there is just no room or basis for freewill. Instead, although adaptive, believing that we have freewill is just another necessary prank of evolution.

However, we have the intuitive perception that we are freely, at least to some degree, making freewill decisions. Are we mistaken? If so, because these intuitions are so basic, if we doubt our freewill, what then can we not doubt? Should we not also doubt that perhaps we are an individual person rather than part of a corporate consciousness? Should we not also doubt that a physical world exists and that our thoughts and perceptions are all just imaginary?

Consequently, if we are to doubt our freewill, love, the fullness of vision we receive from music, and the existence of God, perhaps we must doubt everything else. But perhaps we should also doubt doubt itself.

Perhaps, instead, these beliefs are not only “necessary,” but they are also an accurate reflection of reality. And to doubt them is also to doubt everything else that we believe in.

This same problem exists in the area of morality. Naturalism instructs us that there are no objective moral laws. Instead, morality is just something that we create, even if largely based on our biochemical intuitions.

Instead, we intuit that when we violate our conscience, we violate objective moral laws, which exist beyond our biochemistry, and deserve punishment. We sense that something or Someone greater than us is condemning us, and that we need to confess our wrongdoing. This sense is so powerful, that when we don’t confess, we find ourselves forced to justify our misbehaviors. We are not able to simply say “who cares!” and walk away. Instead, the sense that we have done something wrong is so vivid and compelling that we have to address it in some way.

Does this sense grant us an accurate picture of reality? According to the naturalist, it might be necessary, but it is also irrational, since there is no Judge, no objective means of judgment, and no ultimate punishment.

The naturalistic worldview forces them to regard these various intuitions as necessary but also as irrational. But how can so many irrational beliefs have survival value? And won’t they permeate into what is “rational,” undermining our entire existence? And if these intuitions are irrational, perhaps also the naturalistic worldview?

OUR BELIEFS CAN KILL US

One extreme example of this is ISIS. Many join, and many will not escape alive. However, our beliefs can kill more subtly. What we think about ourselves can kill us.

Many years ago, after taking LSD, I lost the awareness that I was a human who could die. I could easily have jumped out of a window, thinking I could fly.

However, we can lose awareness of who we are, with deadly consequences, without taking LSD. 

In a vain attempt to dismiss the existence of God, many have opted for materialism - the belief that only a physical reality exists. However this belief entails other beliefs - that everything is determined by the laws of science. Consequently, everything is predetermined by these laws. As a result, they are convinced that freewill is only an illusion.

Some even relish this belief. If they do not have freewill, then they couldn't have acted otherwise, and they cannot be held accountable for their behavior.

Although this might serve to mitigate feelings of shame an guilt, it also carries unintended lethal baggage. For one thing, they have also relinquished their right to hold others accountable. Along with this, they have sacrificed vital concepts like justice, retribution, honor, dignity, courage, meaning, and any purpose for their lives.

But do these sacrifices kill? They will definitely kill relationships. What are you going to tell your wife, when she accuses you for pushing her? Are you going to apologize? You cannot honestly apologize, if you believe that you couldn't have done otherwise. But how then can there be reconciliation with your wife?

Nor can you require your children to apologize. After all, they too couldn't have behaved otherwise.

You can instead decide:

• I will apologize and will require my children to apologize even though we couldn't have done otherwise.

However, to apologize contradicts your worldview. It admits that your worldview fails to address the needs of your life. It is therefore dysfunctional and should be exchanged for a worldview that reflects reality and serves as a guide for life.

The denial of freewill and accountability kills in other ways. It tells criminals that they are not responsible for their rapes and murders. It even tells them that they lack the freewill to improve. 

Perhaps, even worse, it teaches them cynicism. It tells them that they do not deserve punishment, because their crimes had been pre-programmed into them.

If so, they will wonder why they are being punished if they couldn't have acted otherwise. They will see that your system of justice is just hypocrisy. Such an awareness will not inspire change and personal responsibility.

Instead, we need to be nourished with a coherent rationale for responsible living. Without this, I fear that our society cannot long endure. And why should we even care if we cannot do otherwise?

Should we deprive such people of the vote, a vote that is no more than a chemical-electrical reaction! And when deprived, should we take their complaint seriously?

This is not a flippant remark but a reality. To deny freewill is to deny that we are responsible and moral agents. It is also to seriously degrade humanity. If this human machine fails to respond in socially acceptable ways, why not simply deposit us in the city dump with the rest of the garbage!

DOES PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINE MORALITY?

In “Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality” (2015), psychiatrist and essayist Theodore Dalrymple has written that it does:

·       Theodore Dalrymple explains why human self-understanding has not been bettered by the false promises of the different schools of psychological thought. Most psychological explanations of human behavior are not only ludicrously inadequate oversimplifications, argues Dalrymple, they are socially harmful in that they allow those who believe in them to evade personal responsibility for their actions and to put the blame on a multitude of scapegoats: on their childhood, their genes, their neurochemistry, even on evolutionary pressures.

Psychology not only regards us as a product of social and genetic causation, but it also communicates a materialistic worldview in which our values have no objective basis. Instead, we are told that our values are relative to the material causes that have produced us.

With these materialistic assumptions in place, we are doomed to see ourselves as nothing more than materials and the result of material causes. How degrading!

Dalrymple reveals that:

·       The fashionable schools of psychoanalysis, behaviorism, modern neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology all prevent the kind of honest self-examination that is necessary to the formation of human character. Instead, they promote self-obsession without self-examination, and the gross overuse of medicines that affect the mind.

How does clinical psych cause self-obsession? Simple – it claims that you have the resources within yourself to change. You just have to learn how to unlock these resources. One way is to believe in yourself by building your self-esteem, and this requires a lot of self-obsession and self-reconstruction.

Why? Life is difficult. We need hope to get out of bed in the morning. Without God, hope inevitably centers on the self, and this will cause us to obsess on whether or not we can bear the weight of this hope. This turns out to be a costly hope.

In contrast, Jesus taught:

·       Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

Consequently, I no longer have anything to prove to myself. This is because I am no longer the source of my hope. A great relief!

HIGH SELF-ESTEEM vs. LOW SELF-ESTEEM

 

I met an experimental psychologist on the train to Princeton. We eventually touched on the question of what humans need to thrive.

Of course, everyone has a different take on the subject. Some propose that we need high self-esteem, while others propose the opposite – a low self-esteem. I know that this sounds strange, so let me try to explain the rationale of the latter group.

The proponents of a low self-esteem do not call it “low self-esteem,” but that’s what it is. It involves the denial of freewill and moral accountability. They believe that we are just a sophisticated biochemical machine. As such, all of our thinking and deciding is pre-determined by the laws of chemistry and biology. Consequently, everything that we think has already been determined by physical forces. Therefore, there exists absolutely no basis for free choice or even thinking.

How can such a view of humanity be desirable? Isn’t it demeaning to think that we are nothing more than a wet machine, a mere result of chemical-electrical reactions? Psychologist James Hillman warns against adopting a deterministic view of ourselves:

·       “We dull our lives by the way we conceive then…By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents.” (“The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,” Random House, 6)

Why then would some psychologists promote such a demeaning self-image? In the short run, it does relieve shame and guilt. How? Well, if the client is convinced that he couldn’t have acted in a way contrary to his biological programming, then there is no real basis for shame and guilt. These feelings are reduced to inappropriate reactions and can be ignored.

An atheist friend had confided that he adopted this self-identity at an early age, and this enabled him to reject these very bothersome feelings. Also, if we believe that we couldn’t have acted otherwise, this view enables us to dismiss feelings of regret and other burdensome feelings. It reduces life to this attitude, “I am just along for the ride. What will be, will be.”

Well, what’s the matter with this comfortable ride? Much! First of all, it contradicts our experience and perceptions that we do have freewill and could have behaved otherwise. To doubt something as basic as our experience of making free choices, is also to doubt all of our perceptions about self. It is also to fail to make sense of this world, where we see that freewill is a relative thing. Some have less freewill than others – the heroin addict and the comatose. However, from the perspective of the above materialistic denial of all freewill, there is no way that we can say that some are more free than others.

For another thing, if we cannot act otherwise, then punishment is no longer justified. Why not? There is no longer any basis for guilt and culpability.

Lastly, if we cannot make changes, why try? Why attempt to learn, improve our job performance, or confront relational problems? Why not take the easy way out – denial and avoidance of anything uncomfortable? In short, this self-concept represents a tragic denial of reality.

High Self-Esteem (HSE): Well, if this form of low self-esteem is a dead end, does this mean that we should aim towards inflating our self-esteem, believing, “I can do it.”

This is the “normal” and more common strategy. HSE gives us a confidence and enables us to get out of bed in the morning and to proactively face life. This strategy had enabled me to face threats. I told myself that nothing could stop me and that I could endure anything that life would throw at me, and it worked, at least until I faced some threats that were bigger than me.

Western society had made HSE into a cult, claiming that it could heal all of our hurts and failures. However, this faith hasn’t been able to withstand scrutiny.  Psychologist Roy Baumeister has extensively researched the relationship between high self-esteem and performance:

• For three decades, I and many other psychologists viewed self-esteem as our profession’s Holy Grail: a psychological trait that would soothe most of individuals’ and society’s woes. We thought that high self-esteem would impart not only success, health, happiness, and prosperity to the people who possessed it, but also stronger marriages, higher employment, and greater educational attainment in the communities that supported it.

• Recently, though, several close analyses of the accumulated research have shaken many psychologists’ faith in self-esteem. My colleagues and I were commissioned to conduct one of these studies by the American Psychological Society, an organization devoted to psychological research. These studies show not only that self-esteem fails to accomplish what we had hoped, but also that it can backfire and contribute to some of the very problems it was thought to thwart. Social sector organizations should therefore reconsider whether they want to dedicate their scarce resources to cultivating self-esteem. In my view, there are other traits, like self-control, that hold much more promise.

• There are now ample data on our population showing that, if anything, Americans tend to overrate and overvalue ourselves. In plain terms, the average American thinks he’s above average. Even the categories of people about whom our society is most concerned do not show any broad deficiency in self esteem. African Americans, for example, routinely score higher on self-esteem measures than do European-Americans.

HSE also represents a flight from reality into what feels good for the time being. However, how can it be a source of problems? In order to manage our lives effectively, we must first understand our lives and their long-term needs. However, HSE represents a rejection of understanding and reality in favor of short-term comfortable feelings.

For one thing, building HSE is always comparative. It is not enough to improve our performance. Instead, HSE requires that we see ourselves as superior. I had taken a test that I feared I had bombed. However, I delighted to find out that I had been given an “A,” until I found that most of the class had received an “A+.” Consequently, this need for HSE brings us into harmful competition with others.

HSE is also a refusal to engage the truth about ourselves. It refuses to look at our painful aspects. As a result, HSE increasingly cannot take criticism and needful self-examination.

HSE spells death to relationships where humility and forgiveness are key. Those afflicted with HSE are increasingly unable to apologize, because they see no need to apologize. Why not? They are assured that it is the other person’s fault.

HSE is seldom grateful for their partner. Why not? They are convinced that they deserve better. As I have learned to confront some ugly truths about myself, the more grateful I became for my wife who would love and tolerate me. However, before I couldn’t and wouldn’t see this. It was just too demeaning.

Both of these options are reality denying. They serve as a comforting addiction, but we find that we need increasingly high doses of this HSE drug. The richest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller had been asked, “How much more money do you need to be happy?” His answer – “Always a little bit more.”

Is there a third reality-affirming alternative? As Jesus had taught, our normal response is denial:

·       And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

We avoid discomfort and run from the painful truths about ourselves. Is there anything that can break this cycle to enable us to live in the truth and yet not be crushed by it?

We need confidence and hope. However, I have found that Christ has provided for my needs. How? He has loved, assured, and forgiven me to the extent that I can now face my failings confidently and healingIy. Consequently, I no longer need to lie to myself and rely on HSE. I now have Him to rely upon.

And this self-image is ennobling. There is no greater privilege than to know that I am serving the source of all life, truth, and love.

My psychologist acquaintance was listening. I pray that this will become a seed that will germinate.

Taking this case a step further – If psychologists and other professionals are really concerned about human thriving, they have a responsibility to consider Christ, the ultimate among change-Agents.