Does Reason Require God- Page 3

Now, of course, on this account religion is a completely false belief.  But that’s not the point – it’s useful, it increased the chances of survival for those who held it.  I am not suggesting that natural selection will not sometimes, even most of the time, improve the chances of those who reason to the truth over those who do not – just that sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t.  The point is that this version of natural selection gives us no anchor in truth.  Reasoning to truth is not, as they are fond of saying in my business, the driver for natural selection: utility is. 

But if our beliefs about things are driven not by whether they’re true, but by whether they are useful, how can we reliably know anything about anything?  How, for example, can we rely on a brain to tell us, say, that the atheistic version of evolution is true or that religion is no more than a natural phenomenon, when its only interested is pitiless self-interest?

This was Darwin’s worry – and it’s a justifiable one.  Now I believe that the worry evaporates as we turn to the theist’s account.  Before I do that I want to consider the second question, which is this: why does the sequence of steps occurring in our mind when it is in the process of reasoning have anything to do with the sequence of steps of physical cause leading to physical effect occurring in our brains (which, as I just mentioned, is the only sequence which the atheist can admit into his world)?  What does seeing the answer to a problem have to do with seeing a light come on in a room?

Let’s take an example: that old chestnut of the argument from suffering against the existence of God. Major premise: a God who is both all-good and all-powerful would not permit suffering in the world.  Minor premise: there is suffering in the world.  Conclusion: a God who is both all-good and all-powerful doesn’t exist.

And I just want you to notice one thing: what is it that the critic of Christianity is presupposing here?  Our sense of justice and moral indignance?  Perhaps, and where such a sense may have its origins is itself a fascinating question which others are better equipped to tackle.  No, at the most basic level, the critic is appealing to our mind’s ability to reason its way from major premise to minor premise to conclusion.