Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker admits there is no explanation. In How the Mind Works, he writes, “Virtually nothing is known about the functioning microcircuitry of the brain…. The existence of subjective first-person experience is not explainable by science.” So baffling is the problem that Daniel Dennett has “solved” it by declaring consciousness to be a cognitive illusion.
Finally, evolution cannot explain human rationality or morality. This was a point first made by Alfred Russel Wallace, who proposed simultaneously with Darwin a theory of evolution by natural selection. Here I don’t want to be misunderstood. Evolution can account for how brain size got larger and conferred survival benefits on creatures with larger brains. But rationality is something more than this. Rationality is the power to perceive something as true.
We can include in rationality the unique human capacity for language, which is the ability to formulate and articulate ideas that comprehend the world around us. People in the most primitive cultures developed language as a means of rationality, while cats cannot utter a single sentence. Evolution provides an explanation for how creatures develop traits that are useful to their survival. As Steven Pinker puts it, “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth.”
So where did we humans get this other capacity to figure out not only what helps our genes to make it into the next generation, but also to understand what is going on in the world? To put it another way, what is the survival value of truth itself? Philosopher Michael Ruse, a noted Darwinist, confesses that “no one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this.”
Humans have not only a rational but also a moral capacity. In his Descent of Man, Darwin admitted that “of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is the most important.” Morality speaks to us in a different voice: not what we do but what we ought to do.
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