C. STEPHEN EVANS
The attempt to show that there is a “natural” knowledge of God’s existence—that is, a knowledge of God that does not presuppose any special religious authority or revelation—is usually termed “natural theology.” Natural theology has often been pursued through arguments or “proofs.” Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophers have given arguments for and against the existence of God, and such arguments continue to be presented.1
Natural theology understood in this way, as an attempt to develop arguments for God’s existence, poses a puzzle. Arguments for God’s existence are frequently criticized and declared to be conclusively refuted, yet the arguments continue to be presented. Some people, including well-trained, well-educated philosophers, find the arguments convincing. Many others, equally well-trained and well-educated, find them to be without merit. The arguments never seem to convince the critics. However, the refutations never seem to silence the proponents, who continue to refine and develop the arguments.
There are of course many possible ways to explain this impasse. I shall defend the claim that the reason the debate continues has to do with the nature of the arguments themselves. Many of the classical arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, are grounded in what I shall call “natural signs” that point to God’s reality. These theistic arguments derive their force and enjoy whatever plausibility they possess from the signs that lie at their core. The nature of a sign, as I shall develop the notion, is to be a “pointer,” something that directs our attention to some reality or fact and makes knowledge of that reality or fact possible. It is the fact that the arguments focus our attention on signs that explains the continuing appeal of the arguments. These signs for God are “natural signs” because the awareness of them and tendency to see them as pointing to God are hardwired into human nature.
However, these signs, like signs in general, do not necessarily point in a conclusive or compelling fashion. Signs must be read, and some are harder to read than others or, one might say, easier to interpret in alternative ways, even if the possible interpretations are not all equally plausible. The natural signs that point to God’s reality are like those signs that can be interpreted in more than one way and are thus sometimes misread. They point to God but do not do so in a coercive manner. To function properly as pointers, they must be interpreted properly. For this reason, the theistic arguments, which attempt to articulate these signs and develop them into inferential arguments, fail to be conclusive proofs that compel assent from everyone. However, I shall try to show that the arguments’ weaknesses do not necessarily undermine the value of the signs the arguments embody. Even if an argument developed from a sign fails as an argument, the sign may still point to God’s reality and make knowledge of God possible for those who have the will and ability to read the sign properly. Seeing the theistic arguments as articulations of natural signs therefore helps us understand both the appeal of the arguments as well as their lack of conclusiveness.
It also helps us resolve a lively current dispute in the philosophy of religion: the argument between the evidentialists and so-called Reformed epistemologists. Evidentialists, as the name implies, maintain that any knowledge we have about God must be based on evidence, a view that until recently was taken for granted by most defenders and critics of religious belief.2 Reformed epistemologists, such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, maintain that belief in God may be “properly basic,” not the result of any kind of inference.3 Seeing the theistic arguments as articulations of natural signs helps to show how both camps may be correct in some of their main contentions.
The Reformed epistemologists are right to argue that the knowledge of God does not have to be based on formal arguments, since a natural sign is something that can direct an individual to the reality of which it is a sign without any process of inference. However, the evidentialists are right to insist that the knowledge of God, at least in standard cases, is based on what may be called evidence. For one thing, it is possible to become aware of the mediating role of the sign and to use the sign as the basis for an inferential argument. On the view I shall defend, the main theistic arguments are arguments of just this kind. However, even when the sign is not functioning as the basis for an inferential argument, it may still be regarded as evidence in the sense that it is something that makes a certain truth more evident to someone.
This claim is not as contrary to Reformed epistemology as it might seem, since the Reformed epistemologists, while denying that belief in God is based on evidence, do claim that there is a ground for the belief. I hope to adjudicate the dispute between evidentialists and Reformed epistemologists by paying careful attention to the notion of evidence. This will help us understand in what senses a “ground” may be regarded as evidence and that such “grounds” may legitimately be understood as natural signs.
After developing my case for natural signs as the basis for reasonable belief in God, I shall then try to look at the issues from the viewpoint of contemporary cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, which increasingly support the claim that a tendency towards religious belief is something that has been hardwired into human nature by evolution. This raises an important question: Does this kind of scientific explanation for natural religious beliefs undermine the idea of natural signs for God or support it?
Suppose that it is true that God exists, and that God is the kind of being that Christians, Jews, and Muslims have traditionally believed in. Roughly, we can take this as meaning that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, and completely good personal being who is responsible for the existence of everything in the universe. Furthermore, let us assume, as do these great religions, that God created humans for a purpose involving a special relation to himself and that God cares about humans and wants them to fulfill this purpose, a fulfillment that would involve eternal happiness for humans.
If all this were the case, what kind of knowledge of God would we expect God to make possible for humans? One thing we might expect is that the knowledge of God would be widely available. If we assume that God cares about all humans and that all of them are intended by God to enjoy a relation with God, then it would seem reasonable to believe that God would make it possible at least for many humans to come to know his existence, since one can hardly enjoy a special relation with a being that one does not know exists. I shall call this the “Wide Accessibility Principle.”4
The Wide Accessibility Principle can plausibly be combined with a certain egalitarian picture of how God relates to human beings. If there is a God who loves all humans and desires a relation with them, we would not expect, for example, God to restrict the knowledge of God to philosophers capable of understanding extremely abstract and complicated arguments, just as we would not expect God to limit the knowledge of himself to one sex, or one race, or one nation. Similarly, if there is knowledge of God at all, we would not expect that knowledge to be limited to highly intelligent or highly educated people.
If God exists, what else besides the Wide Accessibility Principle would we expect to be true of knowledge of God? It is plausible to think that the knowledge of God would not only be widely available but also easily resistible. I shall call this the “Easy Resistibility Principle.” According to this principle, though the knowledge of God is widely available, it is not forced on humans. Those who do not wish to love and serve God find it is possible to reject the idea that there is a God. The plausibility of this principle stems from the assumption that God wants the relation humans are to enjoy with him to be one in which they love and serve him freely and joyfully. Since God is all-powerful and all-knowing, one can easily imagine that people who do not love God would nevertheless, if his reality were too obvious, come to the conclusion that it would be foolish and irrational to oppose God and God’s purposes, however grudgingly the conclusion might be held.
One might think that the Wide Accessibility Principle and the Easy Resistibility Principle are in contradiction, but this is not so. They do embody different divine purposes, and we can imagine that there might be tension between them in some cases, such that God cannot fully realize one purpose without compromising the other. However, we have no a priori reason to think that it would be impossible for God to make it possible for many (or even all) humans to know about him, and yet simultaneously make it possible for those who do not wish to serve him lovingly and freely not to know about his reality.
The two principles I have here explained are memorably described by Pascal:
If He had willed to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, He could have done so by revealing Himself to them so manifestly that they could not have doubted of the truth of His essence . . . It was not then right that He should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of convincing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in so hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who should sincerely seek Him. He has willed to make Himself quite recognizable by those; and thus, willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart and hidden from those who flee from Him with all their heart, He so regulates the knowledge of Himself that he has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.5
If Pascal is right, then we would expect both the Wide Accessibility Principle and the Easy Resistibility to hold, and thus that God would make knowledge of himself widely available for those who wish to have it, but that God would not force such knowledge on those who do not wish to know God. Those who wish not to know God should be able to explain away or discount any evidence God presents for his reality. I believe that the notion of a natural sign will meet these Pascalian constraints on the knowledge of God. Such signs are widely available pointers, or clues that point to God’s reality, but they point in such a way that allows those who do not wish to believe in God to reinterpret or dismiss the sign.
To develop my thesis that there are natural signs that point to God’s reality and that these signs lie at the core of many of the classical theistic arguments, I must first try to explain in some detail what I mean by a natural sign. My inspiration for the term comes from Thomas Reid; my concept is in several respects inspired by Reid’s work and overlaps significantly with his concept.6
Reid’s notion of a natural sign is developed and used mainly as part of his account of perception.7 He defended a direct realist account of perception and refuted the representational theories of perception characteristic of many of the early modern philosophers who were his predecessors. This representational account of perception holds that humans are not directly aware of mind-independent physical objects but only of mental entities, commonly called “ideas” in the eighteenth century, that (for some of these philosophers) represent physical objects or allow us to infer their existence. This type of representational account of perception, which Reid characteristically calls “the Way of Ideas” or “the Ideal philosophy,” inevitably leads, on Reid’s view, either to idealism or skepticism. Reid thinks that the philosophies of George Berkeley and David Hume make this clear. That result is unsurprising, since it is hard to see how humans can gain knowledge of extramental realities if we are only directly aware of mental realities. Neither reason nor experience allows us to bridge the chasm between our minds and the external world that looms if representationalism is true.
Much of the dispute between Reid and the defenders of the “Way of Ideas” turns on the nature and function of sensations.8 Philosophers such as John Locke, who think of perception as rooted in sensations, typically see those special sensory ideas as immediate objects of awareness that give us an indirect connection to extramental entities. In the case of ideas of primary qualities, for example, Locke sees these ideas as resembling or mirroring external entities. Such a relation between ideas and physical things allows the ideas to represent them to us or else serves as the basis for an inference to such extramental entities.
Reid’s account of sensations is entirely different. Reid learned from Berkeley that sensations (and mental ideas in general) do not resemble the physical objects they are supposed to represent. For Reid, sensations are not the primary objects of perceptual awareness but are “natural signs” that make perceptual awareness possible. Sensations are not (usually) the objects of perception but the means whereby we perceive real objects. Sensations are not linked to perceptions conceptually, and thus it is not a necessary truth that we perceive the world by way of sensations. Nevertheless, our actual constitutions are such that it is causally necessary for us to have sensations to perceive the world.
How is it that we perceive objects by way of sensations? Reid says it is not by way of inference; the transition from sensation to perception is immediate, at least in a psychological sense. Nor is it by any relation of “resemblance” or “mirroring” between the sensation and the object perceived. Rather the sensation is a sign of what is perceived, either a natural sign or an artificial sign. The key idea is that sensations are not normally themselves the objects of perception but the means whereby we perceive other things. We do not normally perceive sensations but perceive by way of sensations. Of course, it is possible to make sensations themselves the objects of conscious awareness, and for some special purposes we do this. For example, suppose one is being examined by an ophthalmologist who wants to determine whether a person’s eyesight is working properly. In such a case, one peers at a chart and is asked about one’s sensations. In this situation one might focus on the visual sensations themselves (are they clear and sharp, or fuzzy?) rather than what one normally sees by way of the sensation.
Two things are required for the sensation to be a natural sign. First, there must be a real causal connection between the thing and the sensation.9 Second, the sensation must play a key role in producing the conception and belief, which are the constituents of perception. Sensations give rise to perceptions in two different ways, corresponding to a distinction Reid draws between original and acquired perceptions. In original perception, we are hardwired to take a particular type of sensation as a sign of a particular type of object that is perceived. With respect to original perceptions, “Nature hath established a real connection between the signs and the things signified; and nature hath also taught us the interpretation of the signs.”10 One of Reid’s favorite examples is the way that the sensation of touching a solid object produces the perception of a body having the quality of hardness.11 Reid believes that we would never gain perceptual knowledge of the external world without such original perceptions, and he argues that the process that moves us from sensation as a sign to the perception of an object in original perception is irresistible. Even philosophers like Hume who profess to doubt the connections (as Reid interprets Hume) confess that in daily life they are unable to do so.
In acquired perceptions, sensations also serve as natural signs of the objects perceived, but in this case the principles that govern the link between sensation and object perceived are more general in nature; there is no hardwired link between a particular type of sensation and a particular type of perception.12 Rather, the links are grounded in more general principles of our constitution, involving experience and reflection. For example, since cloves of garlic regularly are conjoined with a distinctive smell, the one we call “garlicky,” after experiencing garlic cloves on several occasions (especially while cutting them up), I learn to recognize a garlicky smell as the smell of garlic. Once I learn this connection, however, the movement from sensation to perception is just as immediate as it is in the case of an original perception; no inference is necessary to perceive a clove of garlic is present by way of its smell.
It is clear that acquired perceptions presuppose original perceptions, since I can only learn by experience that a particular sensation is conjoined with a particular object if I am able to know that the object is present.13 Acquired perceptions remain natural in the sense that they are the product of principles of our constitution. But their partial dependence on experience and learning means they are subject to improvement, correction, and variability in a way that our original perceptions are not. For instance, when certain auditory sensations suggest the direction of an object, this is an acquired perception. Such acquired perceptions, unlike original perceptions, are resistible. As I gain more experience and reflect on that experience, I may come to believe that the perception of direction by sound is unreliable in certain circumstances (e.g., an echo chamber). For Reid, perception in general is not infallible; the justification provided to our perceptions by the sensations that “suggest” them is always prima facie. However, acquired perceptions are subject to defeat in ways that are not the case for original perceptions.14
Sensations are far from the only natural signs in Reid. Perceived objects can themselves serve as natural signs for other perceptions, both original and acquired perceptions. Our ability to recognize other persons as conscious beings and to communicate with them depends on natural signs. Perceptual recognition of “the thoughts, purposes, and dispositions of the mind” are made possible originally by way of perceptions of “the features of the face, the modulation of the voice, and the motion and attitude of the body.”15 These natural signs of human mental states constitute a “natural language of mankind,” without which communication in general, including the use of artificial signs such as those employed in human language, would be impossible. The signs in these cases are not the perceptions but the actual physical states perceived. Although these perceived facial and bodily characteristics give rise to original perceptions, they do not seem to be irresistible, since we learn by experience that people can simulate these signs to deceive others. Our disposition to rely on them in general is very strong, but that disposition, like our disposition to believe in the testimony of others, is one that can be strengthened, modified, and even blocked on some occasions by experience.16
To summarize, a natural sign for Reid is something, either mental (such as a sensation) or physical (such as a perceived facial gesture), that has a causal connection (in the “loose” sense of causality) “upstream” with what the sign signifies and also plays a causal role (again in the loose sense) “downstream” in generating a characteristic judgment. According to Reid, some of the natural signs that produce original perceptions are irresistible because we are hardwired to move from the particular sign to a particular type of perceptual judgment. In other cases, the natural signs, both for original perceptions and especially for acquired perceptions, are resistible because the resulting judgments can be strengthened, modified, or overridden by experience. When a sign is functioning as a sign, one’s conscious attention is not focused on the sign but on what it signifies (even though it is possible, and occasionally appropriate, to turn one’s attention to the sign itself).
So how does the concept of natural signs, which I employ to examine theistic arguments, compare to Reid’s concept? There are many fundamental similarities between theistic natural signs—namely, natural signs that point to God—and Reidian natural signs. The most important similarity is that both understand a sign as something that brings an object to our awareness and produces a belief in that object’s reality. Natural signs of God are the means whereby a person becomes aware of God. As is the case for Reidian natural signs, theistic natural signs should be linked upstream to what the sign signifies and downstream to a conception of what is signified as well as a belief in the reality of what is signified. In other words, a natural sign for God ought to be connected both to God and to a human disposition to conceive of God and believe in God’s reality.
Let us look first at the link between the sign and God. If God exists, then God is the creator and sustainer of every finite reality, so the idea of a causal link between God and the sign is unproblematic. However, just because God is the creator of everything finite does not mean that such a causal connection is sufficient. Presumably, natural signs for God will be distinctive in some way; if everything is a natural sign for God, then there will be no natural signs in any distinctive sense. What is needed, I think, is the idea that God not only causes the sign’s existence but also that God creates the sign to be a sign. The function of the sign needs to be part of the reason why the sign exists, and this function must be anchored in God’s creative intentions.
What about the other link, the connection “downstream” to the belief or judgment about God? Here, theistic signs, much like Reidian signs, must empower us to form judgments that what the sign signifies, in this case God, really exists. Again, this must be understood not merely as a casual relation but as a functional one. For Reid, our tendency to form certain judgments because of signs is part of our “design plan,” so to speak. If there are theistic signs, they also must not only characteristically give rise to beliefs about God; doing so must be part of their intended function.
What are the natural signs for God? In Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, I focus on the signs embedded in some of the classical arguments for God’s existence: our sense of wonder that there is a universe in the cosmological argument, our sense that nature and human life are purposeful and not meaningless in the argument from design, and our sense that we are morally accountable beings bound by obligations that are not of human making, as well as our sense that human beings have a special kind of value or dignity as persons made in the image of God in the argument from morality. (The last case is a particularly clear example of a “natural sign” since it points to real likenesses between God and humans.) Besides these, there are other important natural signs, particularly a global sense of gratitude that we often feel for our lives as a whole. In this essay, I do not have space to develop any of these at length. Instead I want to focus on the question as to whether such claims fit or do not fit with contemporary scientific accounts of the origins of religious beliefs.
Interestingly, the claim that there is a causal link between certain characteristic human experiences and belief in God is now strongly supported by contemporary cognitive scientists. Contrary to earlier social scientific theories about religious belief, contemporary scientists are prone to think that humans are hardwired to be religious; belief in God or gods is the result of the operation of a cognitive faculty. For example, Pascal Boyer, the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, affirms that “the content and organization of religious ideas depend, in important ways, on noncultural properties of the human mind-brain.”17 Many scientists agree with Boyer.18 Of course most of these scientists are atheists, and they believe this hardwired link is an evolutionary accident; the tendency to believe in God is a byproduct of a cognitive mechanism evolved for other purposes. I will shortly discuss whether our tendency to believe in God being the result of evolution invalidates the belief. Regardless of how its evolutionary status is interpreted, contemporary scientists agree with theologians that there is a natural tendency to believe in God, the kind of disposition theologians such as John Calvin traditionally called the Sensus Divinitatis, or sense of divinity.
How strong must the connection be between a theistic natural sign and the belief that the sign gives rise to? We have seen that for Reid some natural signs are irresistible in their operations, while others may be strengthened or inhibited by other experiences and beliefs. Theistic natural signs are more like the second type of Reidian natural signs. On the one hand, to be a natural sign at all there must be some inbuilt propensity, when the sign is encountered, to form the relevant judgment. If such theistic natural signs exist, then we would expect belief in God to be widespread, found in reasonably young children and across many cultures, and we would expect those beliefs to be typically occasioned by similar experiences. This is exactly what contemporary cognitive scientists affirm. This expectation is consistent with the “Wide Accessibility Principle.”
However, the propensity to believe in God, though strong, is far from irresistible. There is every reason to think that the beliefs originating from theistic natural signs are subject to modification (strengthening, weakening, or even being blocked) by experience and other beliefs like Reidian natural signs. However, theistic natural signs may be even more subject to disturbances in their operations than Reidian natural signs. The reason has to do with the “Easy Resistibility Principle.” Since God wishes humans to relate to him freely and lovingly, and since an irresistible awareness of God’s reality would make this difficult, there is good reason to think that those who might be motivated to disbelieve in God would be able to inhibit the operation of the natural disposition to form a belief in God when one encounters a theistic natural sign. Besides this kind of motivated disbelief, there is also the possibility that the disposition will fail to produce belief in God in some people simply because the individuals have been taught (by parents or teachers or other figures) that there is no God; thus they will ignore or override the disposition. Clearly, the existence of many atheists in the contemporary world supports the claim that the natural tendency to believe in God is resistible.
As I noted above, the cognitive scientists who believe that we humans are hardwired to believe in God think this hardwiring came about through an evolutionary process. Most of these scientists are atheists who think that evolution itself is an unguided process, and they certainly don’t believe that God designed the process to make humans believe in him. Rather, they think the tendency to believe in God is an unintended byproduct of other factors in our nature that had survival value. Is their view of the matter correct? Does the fact that the tendency to believe in God came about through a Darwinian process imply that these beliefs are unreliable? To consider this question, I shall first take a particular natural sign as my example: our sense that the universe is purposive. This example should be particularly favorable to the atheist since it is often claimed that evolutionary theory shows us that the apparent design we see in nature is merely apparent.
Is the apparent purposeful order we see in nature an illusion? Nothing in the scientific theory of evolution requires one to think so. The evolutionary process itself depends on the laws of nature; the mechanisms that make the evolutionary process work depend, for example, on the existence of stable reproductive mechanisms, which in turn depend on the laws of physics and chemistry. Far from showing that the order in nature is illusory, evolution actually shows that the order we experience on the surface of things, so to speak, depends on a still deeper, hidden order.
Atheists, rather than taking the laws of nature for granted as a brute fact, ought to reflect more on the fact that the natural world seems “fine-tuned” to produce a world with beauty and value. It seems to us that many of the laws of nature and the values of the constants that are part of those laws could have been very different, yet they have values precisely within the narrow range that make living organisms and their complex systems possible. This fine-tuning is itself a powerful argument for God’s existence.19 It may not be a natural sign according to my definition because the evidence is not widely available to those without a scientific education. Nevertheless, it suggests that it is a mistake to consider evolutionary theory a defeater for the claim that the natural world contains purposive order. If anything, it shows that the order we experience in nature is part of the deep structure of nature.
If our experience of the world as purposive is a natural sign for God, it does not depend on an argument or inference to function any more than our sensations of green grass require an argument to generate a reasonable belief in green grass. For the experience to function as a natural sign, the only thing required is that the order and purposiveness we perceive truly be present and that it be something God created to introduce us to his reality. That can surely be the case even if God chose to actualize that order through an evolutionary process.
Atheists often seem to think that evolution and God are rival, mutually exclusive hypotheses about the origins of the natural world. Sometimes it is because they think theistic and natural explanations are rivals. What can be explained scientifically, they say, needs no religious explanation. However, this fails to grasp the relationship between God and the natural world by conceiving of God as one additional cause within that natural world. If God exists at all, God is not an entity within the natural world but the creator of that natural world, with all of its causal processes. If God exists, God is the reason for the natural world and for the causal processes of the natural world. In principle, therefore, a natural explanation can never preclude a theistic explanation.
The atheist might respond by claiming to identify characteristics of an evolutionary explanation that are incompatible with divine causation. A number of features of evolution could be cited to justify this claim. One is simply that evolution requires the death and suffering of vast numbers of sentient creatures. Surely, the atheist might claim, a loving God would not employ such a process to create a world. Such an objection seems initially plausible, but on reflection that plausibility vanishes. First, that the natural world includes a great quantity of suffering on the part of sentient creatures has always been evident. This is not something that Darwinian evolution brought to our attention. This is of course one of the features of the world that gives rise to the problem of evil, an issue discussed from ancient philosophy onwards. I grant that this is a problem that a theistic view of the world must confront, but dealing with the problem of evil adequately would require another paper (or book perhaps), and I will not try to answer the problem in a paragraph or footnote. All I wish to say at this point is that the theory of evolution does not really make the problem any worse. There are many responses to the problem of evil. If those responses are adequate, then nothing in the theory of evolution is going to change the situation. If the responses are not adequate, then the theists’ cause is lost without bringing evolution into the picture. Either way, the theory of evolution does not appreciably change the plausibility of theism.
It is worth noting that any speculations as to what process God would use to create the world are just that: speculations. We have no reliable way of testing our intuitions about such matters, since we have no experience with world creation. It is also worth noting that there are possible reasons why a good God might prefer a long and slow process of creation, even one that involves pain and suffering.20
There are of course other reasons an atheist or agnostic might give to support the claim that theism and evolution are incompatible. For example, it is sometimes claimed that because evolutionary theory posits that the process by which plants and animals have evolved is one that involves random genetic mutations, the process cannot be one that is designed. Surely, they might say, a process that depends on random mutations cannot be guided, and so God cannot have used an evolutionary means to achieve his ends.
However, this argument fails because it depends on an equivocation in what is meant by “random.” When scientists claim that genetic mutations are random, they do not mean that they are uncaused, or even that they are unpredictable from the point of view of biochemistry, but only that the mutations do not happen in response to the adaptational needs of the organism.21 It is entirely possible for a natural process to include randomness in that sense, even though the whole natural order is itself created and sustained by God. Thus the sense of “randomness” required for evolutionary theory does not imply that the evolutionary process must be unguided.
My argument that it is entirely possible for a natural sign for God to have come about through an evolutionary process can be made still sharper by considering one additional natural sign for God: our sense of moral obligation. Most humans agree that we are morally obligated to act in certain ways. Other things being equal, people ought to tell the truth to each other, keep their promises, and be grateful to those who have shown great kindness. Practically everyone agrees that it is wrong for one person to inflict pain on another simply because the person inflicting pain enjoys it, and I have never met anyone who agreed with the claim that it would be morally permissible to breed human children as a food source. Decent people know such things through conscience. Many people, religious and otherwise, feel morally accountable for their actions, but religious people have a natural explanation of this: we feel accountable because we are accountable to God. Moral obligations are God’s laws, and that is why they apply to all people and why they take precedence over humanly generated obligations.
Of course, many atheists agree that there are objective moral obligations but reject the idea that they point to God. However, a problem emerges at this point for the atheist who wants to view the products of evolution as totally unguided. Our tendency to believe in moral obligations seems, like the tendency to believe in God, something that is hardwired into us by evolution. However, in a much-discussed and cited article, Sharon Street has argued that a Darwinian account of the origins of our moral beliefs undermines the credibility of those beliefs themselves as objectively true claims.22 We have no reason to think that the beliefs about moral obligations the unguided evolutionary process has instilled in us are objectively true, for an unguided evolutionary process cares only about survival and sexual reproduction. There is no good reason to think that those characteristics that make survival and reproduction more likely will correlate with true beliefs about moral goodness.
This situation puts pressure on the atheist to give up belief in objective morality altogether, undermining the claim that we can have such a morality without God. So an atheist who wants to hold on to the objective truth of morality should reject the claim that an evolutionary account of our cognitive abilities necessarily undermines faith in the ability of those faculties to give us true beliefs. The parallel with hardwired religious beliefs is clear. If the atheist holds that the moral beliefs that evolution provides track with moral realities, then it is not clear why the fact that some religious beliefs have an evolutionary basis gives us a reason to doubt them. The fact that our tendency to believe in God has an evolutionary explanation by itself gives us no reason to think this tendency produces an illusion. For that matter, from an evolutionary perspective, all our cognitive faculties must have a biological explanation. However, unless someone wants to embrace total skepticism regarding the reliability of our cognitive faculties, the mere fact that a cognitive mechanism has an evolutionary explanation gives no reason to doubt that this mechanism is conducive to truth.
The parallel between moral beliefs and religious beliefs is especially interesting because it reveals a possible connection between the two types of beliefs. Why do philosophers like Sharon Street think that evolution “debunks” moral knowledge and gives us a reason to doubt that there is genuine moral knowledge? I submit it is not simply because our capacity to develop moral beliefs is thought to be the result of an evolutionary process. Rather, it is because those moral convictions are believed to have resulted from an evolutionary process that is unguided. Nature is seen as essentially “matter in motion” (as physicists in the past might have described things) without final causes. When nature is seen as lacking purpose in this way, it is hard to see why evolution should have produced true moral beliefs in us since it seems unlikely such beliefs would have much in the way of survival value (or so Street argues). It is not Darwinian evolution per se that creates the problem but the combination of Darwinian evolution and a naturalistic view of the universe. It is not Darwinian evolution that creates the problem with objective morality but Darwinian evolution that assumes a naturalistic universe.
If, however, we think of evolution as the process by which God created humans and gave them the qualities they need to know God and relate to him, then the situation is entirely different. As the creator of the entire natural order, God controls the entire process, including the process of evolution. There is no unguided evolution and thus no reason to think that the moral and religious beliefs we are hardwired to hold are unreliable. One implication of this is that evolutionary theory as a scientific account of how humans came to be provides no evidence for the unreliability of our “natural” moral and religious beliefs. It is only when evolutionary theory is incorporated into a naturalistic metaphysical view that it seems to rule out God. But to appeal to evolutionary theory interpreted naturalistically to rule out theism is a classic instance of begging the question. Of course, if we start by assuming that God does not exist and that evolution is unguided, we will have reason to doubt our natural religious beliefs. However, doing so says no more than that it is possible to give evolutionary theory a naturalistic interpretation. The fact that it is possible to give a naturalistic interpretation of evolutionary theory in no way shows that evolutionary theory provides any evidence for naturalism. For as the example of religious scientists clearly shows, it is equally possible to give evolutionary theory a theistic interpretation.
We began by arguing that there are natural signs that give human beings a tendency to believe in God. The particular example that I explored is purposiveness. Our experience indicates an orderly world in which that order produces value. Humans have a natural tendency to see an orderly process with a good outcome as “no accident.” Should we trust that tendency?
If either the order or the value were an illusion, then the trust might be misplaced. However, the order in the natural world is certainly not an illusion. Rather, as science has progressed, we have discovered that the “surface order” we observe in nature is the result of a deeper, more profound order.
What about the value produced by that order? I see no reason to assume that the value we seem to observe in nature is illusory. Of course, someone who is an atheist might accept moral nihilism or some antirealist account of value. If there are no objective values, then any apparent objective value we see in nature will be illusory. However, the atheist who rejects moral nihilism and continues to believe in objective value cannot take this route. Such a person will affirm that there is value in nature and that our beliefs about value have some degree of reliability. It is hard to see how such a person would know that we have misplaced the value produced by orderly processes. Yet this person continues to trust that our natural response to value is in order. Such a trust seems to presuppose that it is not an accident that our moral beliefs track with moral truths. But that seems to imply that there is indeed purposiveness in the natural order, for our moral faculties themselves are evidence of purposiveness. Morality may itself be a natural sign for God; many people naturally see the moral law as one that rests on a transcendent lawgiver. However, besides being a natural sign in its own right, morality also supports our belief that the purposiveness we experience in nature is not illusory.
Of course, none of this “proves” the existence of God. I have already admitted that natural signs for God can be reinterpreted, explained away, and denied. Even Thomas Reid’s perceptual natural signs can be doubted by skeptics or idealists who deny we have any knowledge of an external world. It is easier still to be a skeptic about theistic natural signs. However, this is what we should expect if the “Easy Resistibility Principle” is true. The natural signs that point to God are still there, and for many their force can be felt. They are indeed “widely available.” No proof of their validity can be given, but I have argued that Darwinian evolutionary theory, shorn of naturalistic metaphysics, provides no reason to doubt the validity of the signs either. Those who know how to read them and are willing to do so may find they point to a reality that transcends the natural world.
1. This essay grew out of various lectures delivered at various places when I was writing my book Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), as well as lectures given subsequent to the publication of the book. It is thus partly a condensation of some of the main points of the book, and parts of the essay overlap with material contained in different chapters of the book. This material is reused by permission of Oxford University Press.
2. The most eminent evidentialist in contemporary philosophy of religion is Richard Swinburne. For his views on the justification of beliefs, see his Epistemic Justification (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001).
3. See Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 16–91.
4. See my Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, 12–17, for a fuller account of this principle, as well as the “Easy Resistibility Principle” discussed in the next paragraph.
5. Blaise Pascal, Pensees (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 118 (§430).
6. Reid himself probably took the term “sign” from George Berkeley, who employed it in his New Theory of Vision (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910) to explain the perception of distance by sight. There Berkeley develops a distinction between types of signs that seems close to Reid’s distinction between natural and artificial signs. See, e.g., 144.79–80. What follows in this section of this essay is taken with some modifications from Natural Signs and Knowledge of God, 28–34.
7. For good accounts of Reid’s account of perception, see James van Cleve, “Reid’s Theory of Perception,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, ed. Terence Cuneo and Rene van Woudenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 101–33.
8. For a clear account of Reid’s view of sensations and perception, see Todd Buras, “The Function of Sensations in Reid,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 47, no. 3 (2009): 329–53. Much of what I have to say about Reid on sensations and their role in perception is taken from Buras’s work.
9. A qualification is required here. Reid has a technical and idiosyncratic view of causation. In his technical sense the object perceived is not the cause of the sensation. However, in the loose and “ordinary” sense of causation employed by people generally there is a causal connection.
10. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. Derek R. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 190.
11. Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, 54–58.
12. This paragraph and the one that follows are indebted to an email received from Todd Buras, which contained a particularly clear explanation of the distinction between original and acquired perception.
13. Reid makes this explicit in Inquiry, 191.
14. For Reid’s discussion of the way experience and reflection give rise to acquired perceptions, see Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Derek R. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 234–41. For Reid’s explanation of how it is that we make mistakes in perception, see 241–52.
15. Reid, Inquiry, 59.
16. For Reid’s view of testimony, see C. A. J. Coady, “Reid on Testimony,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid, 180–203.
17. Pascal Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3.
18. See, e.g., Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2004); S. E. Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004). This is just a fraction of the new books that have appeared in this area, and does not include the large number of articles that have appeared in scholarly journals.
19. For a good presentation of the fine-tuning argument for God, see Robin Collins, “A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument,” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 47–75.
20. For a number of thoughtful suggestions as to why this might be the case, see Michael J. Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
21. For a good discussion of this point see Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 11–12.
22. Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value,” Philosophical Studies 127 (2006), 109–66.