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.
Frequently morality presses on us to act against our evident self-interest. It urges us not to tell lies even when they benefit us and to help people even when they are strangers to us. In a later chapter, I address how evolutionists seek to account for morality in Darwinian terms. Here let me say something that most of them would agree with: there is much inventive speculation but no good evolutionary explanation for these basic human capacities.
Do you see now why the arrogance of Darwinists like Dennett and Dawkins is entirely misplaced? These fellows seem to think they are armed with some master theory that provides a full explanation for the universe, and for our place in it. Yet their cherished evolutionary theory cannot account for the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, or the origin of human rationality and morality. Any theory that cannot account for these landmark stages can hardly claim to have solved the problem of origins, either of life or of the universe. It can take credit only for elucidating some transitions along the way. Evolu- tion seems right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.
True, one day science may provide us with better answers. I am not making a “God of the Gaps” argument that says because science cannot explain this, therefore God did it. But neither do I want to succumb to the “atheism of the gaps” that holds that even where there is no explanation, we should be confident that a natural explanation is forthcoming. Yes,science has made huge strides in explaining some things but in other areas science has not markedly advanced since the days of the Babylonians. Our best bet is to go with what we know so far and draw conclusions based on that. As of now, evolution is a useful theory but one that falls well short of accounting for the kind of life we have in the world.
