Faith Well Grounded

In another thread , an argument for an intelligent creator was questioned.

Let's see if I have the argument straight: a type of biological complexity (human intelligence) is the only known cause of manufactured complexity, therefore a supernatural intelligent agency must be responsible for biological complexity. It's a non sequitur, as I'd like to think Newton would agree.

I answered:

Wow. That was pretty cool. I have this nagging feeling that I’ve seen it before and answered it, but it’s still cool every time I see it.
No. The idea is that where an effect is known, a sufficient cause is needed. Time and chance are not sufficient causes. Now, as cool as yours was, I have a cool one too.

Darwin wrote: “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 any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Life and Letters 1:315-16).

Mull that one over. For now, I’ll stop there because we’ve already covered this, and I’d like to stay close to our topic at hand. In fairness, I’ll post this topic in its own post so we can give it more attention.

This is that post.

“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 any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" (Life and Letters 1:315-16).

Isn’t that cool? What he said was, if I’m right then I can’t trust that I’m right, because there is no sufficient cause for the rationality that I’ve used to propose where my rationality came from. I wouldn’t trust anything a monkey told me, because I don’t trust the rational processes of a monkey. And, if I can attribute my rationality to that monkey, then what makes me think that I can trust my rationality?

And, it gets even better! What happens when we attribute the cause of that monkey’s intellect to something less trustworthy than a monkey? And then attribute that intellect to something less trustworthy? And so forth, until we are forced to attribute ours, the monkeys and every other intellect that has or will exist to the blind, mindless, non-rational forces of chance and natural selection?

Who survives?

“The fittest.”

Who is the fittest?

“Those that survive.”

You mean the most trustworthy intellect, right?

“No, I mean those that survive. It may be the least trustworthy intellect because intellect may have impeded mating, or gathering food, or whatever for whatever reason. Those that survive survive, and natural selection has no grading criteria outside of whether a creature is more suitable to mate.”

But if there is no grading criteria that would enable us to trust our brain, then how can we trust our brain?

“Good question. Because we can test its judgments against reality.”

But don’t we use our intellect to judge our intellect’s interpretation of reality? And if we have no basis to absolutely trust that intellect, then do we have a basis to trust its judgments, or even the reality that we think we are judging against?

“Hmmm. Well, do you have a better solution?”

Only that the rational must come from the rational, or we can’t trust that it is rational at all. If natural selection is right, then it has produced the uncomfortable situation that we can’t believe what tells us that it is right.

In neoDarwinian evolution, we have a scientific theory that introduces the necessity that we can't actually trust that the scientific process is trustworthy.

Disconcerting, to say the least...

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