The "Miracle" of Human Thought

How could we think unguided evolution is true? I intend that question that in a different sense than you might expect...

I'm re-reading C.S. Lewis's Miracles. He opens the book asking whether nature is a closed system, into which nothing external (like the supernatural) could ever break, and shows that human thought must itself be a breaking into the natural order of things. This is based on his definition of Nature, which is that which moves forward on the basis of cause and effect; and on a demonstration that valid human thought can never have that sort of cause and effect explanation.

If human thought is caused in the natural sense of the word, there is no reason to conclude that it is connected to anything external to itself, other than its physical cause. But if it is not connected to anything external, it cannot be "about" anything. Lewis reminds us that the more nearly we can connect a thought to a physical cause, the less we trust it to be true: "He only thought that because he had been drinking." "She only thought that because of the way her father treated her." "He only said that because he's a Republican."

So if it's all a closed cause-and-effect system, our thoughts can neither be true nor false about anything. They cannot even be true or false about whether the cause-and-effect course of Nature is unbreakable. So an unbreakable, closed, cause-and-effect system of Nature refutes itself: it could never produce a true thought that says that describes it as such.

That's a brief overview of a whole chapter; if my explanation is inadequate, I refer you to the book.

He adds an interesting evolutionary point on page 21. He has already asked how it could be that evolution could have raised up rationality from prior non-rational existence. Then:

"The Naturalist might say, 'Well, perhaps we cannot exactly see--not yet--how natural selection would turn sub-rational mental behaviour into inferences that reach truth. But we are certain that this in fact has happened. For natural selection is bound to preserve and increase useful behaviour. And we also find that our habits of inference are in fact useful. And if they are useful they must reach truth.'"

Lewis goes on to show how this begs the question: it uses reasoning to prove that reasoning has a valid historical beginning. But it actually cannot show how this can have happened under evolutionary processes.

This, in fact, seems to me to be the most basic of all refutations of the standard unguided evolutionary story. It refutes itself. It says that we are all the product of blind processes, random variations that have purely physical causes.* It explicitly denies that there could ever be any ontological lift above the physical, even in the human mind. But if our minds are purely physical, there is no reason to believe their products (our thoughts) can be more than physical. And physical events are never "true" or "false," they simply are.

In other words, if evolution were true, how (taking the word "how" in its most literal sense) could we think it so? How could we think anything at all?

A "breaking in" to the natural order seems required, if we are to put any stock in our own thoughts. This is very distasteful to the naturalist, who wants all to be in tidy order. Miracles, in particular, offend the sensibilities of many who want the world to be of one continuous, unbroken piece. But we already know that it isn't--because we have the ability to think rationally. (Lewis builds from this point to a defense of the philosophical possibility of miracles.)

I have a copy of Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves on hand to read next. Dennett is a leading evolutionist, who in this book supposedly answers the question of rationality that Lewis raises. It should be fascinating to find out if there's a good explanation out there among the evolutionary thinkers.

*Some evolutionists get impatient with Intelligent Design advocates' claim that evolution is all about blind chance; that natural selection is hardly a random contribution to the process. But Lewis gets it right: natural selection is "bound to preserve and increase useful behaviour." It is not bound to invent it. New morphological and behavioral inventions, according to all current evolutionary theory, come about through blind processes like random mutations, genetic drift, and so on. Natural selection steers evolutionary change, but chance is the engine that drives it.

Posted: Tue - May 31, 2005 at 10:50 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

The "Miracle" of Human Thought

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson