“With me, 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. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind?”

Charles Darwin (Letter to William Graham, 3 July 1881)


Traditionally, the opposition between science and religion has been framed in terms of evolution versus theism. Darwin, it was claimed, had made the need for God as the most powerful available explanation of the causes of life on earth appear at best fanciful, at worst obsolete.


In fact, such is the acclaim of this one-time aspiring ordinand, who famously bore an uncanny resemblance to a monkey (as cruelly satirised in a contemporary edition of Punch magazine), that veneration of him today is laced with positively religious reverence: at a recent conference, one of Britain's most respected modern novelists, Ian McEwan, claimed that “Yes, we do think God is an old man in the sky with a beard, and his name is Charles Darwin.”


Nevertheless, a rather elegant philosophical argument has emerged in recent years to which I would be most interested in people's responses. It is not all that difficult but still remains - so far as I know - to be conclusively refuted. If it convinces, then the opposition between evolution and theism is a false one; the conflict would rather be between science and naturalism.



Let's begin with the now obligatory reference to Professor Dawkins' recent book. You may recall that towards the end he expresses some concern that since we humans have evolved without any non-naturalistic causes supervening, it is not guaranteed that our take on reality is at all accurate.


Natural selection does not concern itself (if you'll forgive the ironically anthropomorphic words that creep into these sorts of discussions) with necessarily reliable or accurate true beliefs about the world. Rather, it relies first and foremost on whether the creature which is subject to it bears an attribute which has adaptive value. 


Although there is debate over this point (see especially Jerry Fodor's piece in Naturalism Defeated?), it seems persuasive to argue that natural selection will sometimes favour species members who hold false beliefs which increase their survival chances over members who hold true ones. Thus a classic naturalistic explanation of religious belief holds that the consoling power of a (false) conviction in immortality engendered stronger psychological dispositions against (say) threats of a raid from inconsiderate cavemen across the valley.


But if this is the case, then the probability that unguided evolution results in our having thinking equipment which happens to generate true beliefs about the world, including our belief that non-theistic evolution is true, is either low or inscrutable.


By contrast, the theist (whether she is Jewish, Christian or Islamic) can argue that given the belief that human beings bear the image of a God who is the source of rationality itself, it is reasonable to suggest that we are equipped with the cognitive faculties necessary to reach true and reliable beliefs about the world, including the belief that the theory of evolution is true.


Too neat do we think? Perhaps. But it has got many naturalist philosophers desperately scrambling to refute it at every turn, and not always convincingly either. The argument can be found in CS Lewis, but it is Alvin Plantinga, philosophy professor at Notre Dame University, who was responsible for putting the argument on such a firm footing. Indeed, his work, along with that of William Alston and Richard Swinburne, has led to what is being dubbed as the “Resurrection of Theism” in faculties across the Anglo-American world. For the worried views of an atheist philosopher on this phenomenon, see for instance the article in Philo magazine by Quentin Smith.