I got an email from a reader arguing that rational thought could be an evolutionary development, which came about because it enabled species to survive more successfully. While I've always had difficulty imaging the short-term survival advantage of sentience, I thought I'd consider the idea of evolution giving rise to rational thought in more detail. I developed this in response to his email, but I thought it might be useful as its own post.
I'm not sure I can accept the proposition that a non-rational universe gives rise to rational creatures. I'm not sure I understand how that could be possible.
Naturalism proceeds from the assumption that natural processes are all that exist, essentially that everything that happens proceeds according to cause and effect. I can accept this with respect to animals. When a dog learns a lesson, such as "don't go on the couch," he does so because some sort of negative reinforcement indicates that something bad will happen if he goes on the couch. He doesn't understand the reasoning behind this rule, only the cause and effect. He may avoid couches altogether, because he is unable to make a logical connection, only a cause and effect relation between being on the couch and pain.
When we consider things rationally, we assume that we are operating outside the bounds of cause and effect. We must be, because we make claims about what is true, not simply about what we're thinking -- the theory of naturalism itself makes claims about truth. If we were not operating outside the bounds of cause and effect, our thoughts could still be useful, but they could make no claim to being true, being non-rational effects of physical processes. The dog's association of couch and pain is useful, but it is not true that couches cause pain or that pain will always follow being on the couch. We are able to make the logical leap that the dog cannot. The "understanding" we see in creatures that are not sentient is useful, but not rational. It is an "understanding" born of trial and error and has utility, but it has no real relationship to truth.
On the other hand, humans use reason to draw a conclusion that must be true, regardless of observation; we can draw a conclusion about truth that we have not yet observed, or in some cases may not be able to observe. For example, we can use physics equations to anticipate what we will see when we carry out an experiment. This sort of thought, rational thought following logical implication, is of a different kind than the way animals are able to think.
I can't accept that rational thought is a byproduct of a non-rational universe. It's like a painting giving birth to a real person: the painting simply does not contain anything which could give rise to such a byproduct. A universe of cause and effect cannot give rise to rational thought because rational thought operates outside of cause and effect, and must do so to be what it is. If our minds operated exclusively inside the universe, if thought was exclusively the output of non-rational physical inputs, then it would be enslaved by the non-rational inputs that generated it. Thought cannot rise above what feeds it, any more than a stream can rise above its source. Non-rational inputs can generate random outputs in some cases, so the output need not be exactly the same every time, but non-rational inputs cannot generate an output which can act freely to defy what generated it. In any configuration I can imagine, thought would still be the effect of a non-rational cause, and must therefore be non-rational itself.
As far as I can conceive, in order for thought to be unconstrained by the cause and effect relationship which we observe everywhere else in nature (a requirement for it to be capable of discerning truth), the rational mind must contain a component which does not exist within the physical universe. Each consciousness must have an element which is not a part of the physical universe, but rather utilizes the physical component of the human brain to manifest in the physical world. C.S. Lewis describes this relationship as a voice coming through a speaker: if the speaker is damaged, the quality of the transmission will be reduced; but there must be a person speaking on the other end, or else the voice would not come through at all. It is this element, unconstrained by cause and effect because it does not exist in the physical world, which allows us to use reason and act outside the otherwise universal reach of cause and effect. If there were not a component which was exempted from the laws of cause and effect, we would be cursed to think only what we must due to the physical state of the atoms which compose our brains.
That, at any rate, is what I think on the subject. I should note that all of this draws heavily from the C.S. Lewis book Miracles, in which a much smarter man than I makes the case in a more logically sound way, though I hope my version is a bit easier to understand. I highly recommend that book if this topic is of interest to you.
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Often, the terms logical and rational are defined as synonyms. In a philosophy class on logic, for purposes of conversation, we found it useful to differentiate.
ReplyDeleteLogical = conforming to reason/working through reality one reasonable and irrefutable step at a time, irrefutable being the difficult part.
Rational = sane responses, not necessarily logical, but there is "a means to an end" ir a "cause and effect."
In that sense, the dog learning to stay off the counch through negative reinforcement has made a rational connection between getting on the couch and punishment that follows.
Now, if the dog were to realize that damaging the couch is the reason behind the punishment, and he reasons that laying on a blanket on the couch is okay, then tests his hypothesis by dong just that, then he has behaved not just rationally, but logically as well.
My cats have figured this logic out - they are not allowed on my leather couch. If I am on the couch, they can lay on me, or if there is a blanket on the couch, they can lay on that, but not on the leather.
Now, how does a naturalist explain my cats' ability to reason that out as a random occurence? Obviously, my cats' behavior is the result of intelligent design, because the odds of random chance giving them this ability seems bad fiction at best, and a deceptive farce at worst. Atheism, like any religion, requires faith. Rather than a deity, naturalists put faith in random occurences.
Rationaliy