Darwin's Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails

Nancy Pearcey April 23, 2015 3:02 AM | Permalink

A materialist philosophy reduces humans to machines -- complex robots determined by material forces. It denies the reality of free will, the power to make decisions. Yet all civilizations throughout history have recognized that humans are moral agents capable of making responsible choices. There is no society without some moral code. The testimony of universal human experience is that humans are personal beings capable of willing and choosing -- which means their origin must be a personal Being, not the blind forces of nature.

Even materialists often admit that, in practice, it is impossible for humans to live any other way. One philosopher jokes that if people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, "Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get."

An especially clear example is Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, "The impossibility of free will ... can be proved with complete certainty." Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. "To be honest, I can't really accept it myself," he says. "I can't really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?"

But if humans "can't really live with" the implications of a worldview, is it a reliable map to reality? Watch for phrases like this. Often they are clues that someone is trying to live out a worldview that does not fit the real world -- that he or she has bumped up against one of the intractable facts that point to the biblical God.

Darwinian Psychopaths

In What Science Offers the Humanities, Edward Slingerland, identifies himself as an unabashed materialist and reductionist. Slingerland argues that Darwinian materialism leads logically to the conclusion that humans are robots -- that our sense of having a will or self or consciousness is an illusion. Yet, he admits, it is an illusion we find impossible to shake. No one "can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free." We are "constitutionally incapable of experiencing ourselves and other conspecifics [humans] as robots."

One section in his book is even titled "We Are Robots Designed Not to Believe That We Are Robots."

How does Slingerland propose to resolve the contradiction between his "lived reality" and his deterministic philosophy? He does not even try. Instead he says "we need to pull off the trick of living with a dual consciousness, cultivating the ability to view human beings simultaneously under two descriptions: as physical systems and as persons." In other words, he explicitly recommends constructing a mental dichotomy. Philosophers sometimes picture the division using the image of two stories in a building: In the lower story, humans are "physical systems," in the upper story they are "persons."

Such compartmentalized thinking is what George Orwell famously called "doublethink," and it functions here as a philosophical coping mechanism. When a worldview fails to account for all of reality, what do adherents do? Do they say, "I guess my theory has been falsified; I'd better toss it out"? Most people do not give up that easily. Instead they suppress the things that their worldview cannot explain, walling them off into a conceptual area separate from reality -- an upper story of useful fictions. Wish fulfillment. Illusions.

A dual consciousness is a signal that contrary evidence from general revelation is being suppressed.

Slingerland acknowledges that his reductionist view of humans as essentially robots is contrary to ordinary experience. Gesturing toward his own daughter, Slingerland writes, "At an important and ineradicable level, the idea of my daughter as merely a complex robot carrying my genes into the next generation is both bizarre and repugnant to me." Such a reductionistic view "inspires in us a kind of emotional resistance and even revulsion."

Indeed, he writes, if you do not feel that revulsion, something is wrong with you:

There may well be individuals who lack this sense, and who can quite easily and thoroughly conceive of themselves and other people in purely instrumental, mechanistic terms, but we label such people "psychopaths," and quite rightly try to identify them and put them away somewhere to protect the rest of us.

What can we say when someone urges us to adopt a view of humanity that he himself admits is bizarre and repugnant? That ought to inspire revulsion? That would justify us in labeling people "psychopaths" and locking them up? There is a severe clash between what his Darwinian materialism is telling him and what his lived experience is telling him. Which one will he accept as true?

Double-Minded Secularists

Marvin Minsky of MIT is best known for his pithy phrase that the human brain is nothing but "a three-pound computer made of meat." Obviously, computers do not have the power of choice; the implication is that neither do humans. Surprisingly, however, Minsky then asks, "Does that mean we must embrace the modern scientific view and put aside the ancient myth of voluntary choice? No. We can't do that."

Why not? Minsky goes on: "No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will; that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm." We cannot "ever give it up. We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." False, that is, according to Minsky's materialist worldview.

This is an amazing case of Orwellian doublethink. Minsky says people are "forced to maintain" the conviction of free will, even when their own worldview tells them that "it's false."

When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine -- a "big bag of skin full of biomolecules" interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry. In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, "When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, ... see that they are machines."

Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: "That is not how I treat them.... I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis." Certainly if what counts as "rational" is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children is irrational. It has no basis

within Brooks's worldview. It sticks out of his box.

How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn't. Brooks ends by saying, "I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs." He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview.

Losing Total Truth

This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society -- ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children -- have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the upper story, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.

Tragically, over time those humane ideals will inevitably lose their hold. After all, we are made in God's image as logical beings; thus we tend to follow the logical consequences of our premises. It is psychologically impossible to accept concepts that we regard as fictions, no matter how useful. If someone like Brooks genuinely thinks his children are just mechanisms operating by whirring gears, that conviction will eventually erode the "unconditional love" he feels for them. If the leadership classes in a society genuinely think people are machines, that conviction will eventually erode political liberty.

Idols have practical consequences.

Of course, theologians debate the exact nature of human freedom. The Reformers, Luther and Calvin, emphasized that humans can do nothing to contribute to salvation. The liberating message of the Gospel is that we do not have to earn or work for salvation; that both justification and sanctification are by "hearing with faith" (Gal. 3:2, 5). But the Reformers did not mean that we

cannot choose whether to have ham or turkey on our sandwich for lunch.

By contrast, materialism holds that humans only think they are choosing ham or turkey. In reality their behavior is driven by natural forces such as neurons firing in the brain -- just like sodium reacting with chlorine. Biblical worldviews, Christian or Jewish, agree in rejecting this materialist conception of humans as mere robots or meat machines.

The Bible teaches that humans are fallen sinners, but the fall did not make us less than human. It did not make us machines. Our actions are not simply links in a closed chain of causally connected physical events. We have the capacity to be first causes, starting a new chain of cause and effect.

Editor's note: ENV is pleased to share this excerpt from Nancy Pearcey's new book, Finding Truth: Five Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes. A Fellow of Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, Pearcey is a professor and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University and editor-at-large of The Pearcey Report. She is author of the 2005 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and other books.

The neural circuits in our brain manage the beautifully coordinated and smoothly appropriate behavior of our body. They also produce the entrancing introspective illusion that thoughts really are about stuff in the world. This powerful illusion has been with humanity since language kicked in, as we’ll see. It is the source of at least two other profound myths: that we have purposes that give our actions and lives meaning and that there is a person “in there” steering the body, so to speak.
[A.Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide To Reality, Ch.9]

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“Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life.”
Richard Dawkins – quoted from “The God Delusion”

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“Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.”
- Steven Pinker

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“It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter”.
J. B. S. Haldane

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“One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.”
—C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry (aka the Argument from Reason)

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[The denial of consciousness] “is surely the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought.” [It shows] “that the power of human credulity is unlimited, that the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith, is truly unbounded.” [It reveals] “the deepest irrationality of the human mind.”
- Galen Strawson

The notion that evolution undermines any objective morality is widespread in academic circles. Darwin taught this in The Descent of Man, and many contemporary evolutionists agree. Last summer I attended a conference on “The Evolution of Morality and the Morality of Evolution” at Oxford University. One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Michael Ruse, one of the most prominent philosophers of science today. He famously wrote in a 1985 article co-authored with E. O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology: “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.” Ruse has reaffirmed this position many times since then.
At that Oxford conference I presented a paper about the history of evolutionary ethics, showing that many evolutionists from Darwin to the present have rejected objective morality in favor of evolutionary ethics. Indeed I became interested in studying the history of evolutionary ethics when I was working on my dissertation in the early 1990s on the reception of Darwinism by German socialists. While researching this theme, I noticed that many Darwinists, both scientists and other scholars, wanted to replace Christian ethics with some kind of evolutionary ethics. Some hoped to construct a whole system of morality on evolutionary theory. Others dismissed this as misguided. However, most—including Darwin himself—tried to explain the origins of morality through evolutionary processes.
Also, while I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the early 1990s, two prominent Christian intellectuals came to the university and gave talks about apologetics. They both argued that objective morality exists and provides strong evidence for the existence of God. During the question and answer session after their presentations, secularists in the audience challenged their claim that objective morality exists. The primary argument of the secularists was that morality had evolved through natural selection, so it did not have a theistic origin.
Richard Weikart

If we were built by a process which did not have us in mind but is merely tuned for survival, then, like it or not, there must be a Darwinian explanation for our thoughts and behavior. Put another way, one cannot claim that Darwinism made our brains but has no bearing on the brain's contents.