Yes.
But, I do not see how this constitutes reason. Instinctual stimuli-response. Reason is a meaningless term with respect to survival advantage.
How does your comment counter the argument in this article?
Reason provides greater survival advantage than stimulus response, as proven by human adaptability. How reason came about is a different question. Human intelligence is one of the least well understood aspects of life, with no scientific or philosophical consensus on major issues like consciousness, free will and epistemology.
But none of it is relevant to theology. Consider this, if you were provided with a coherent and convincing theory of human reason based in the matter of the brain would you stop believing in God?
I’m not sure what you mean. I didn’t define reason in my response. What I said was: Reason, as used in the original article, is a perfectly valid survival characteristic, in that humans who are unable to reason would not be likely to procreate. Those individuals who were capable of reason would be more likely to survive long enough to pass their reasoning ability on to their descendants. Those individuals with a greater ability to reason would be even more likely than those with a weaker ability to survive and even thrive, and the greater capacity for reason would become desirable and even consciously selected-for (as a consequence of being able to reason), and thus over successive generations greater and greater ability to reason would develop.
Going backwards in time, as the ability to reason is more primitive, the survival advantage remains, until you reach that point at which you have that first spark that some had but others didn’t. The hominid who could think, however ponderously, his way through trapping an animal, or reaching that nearly-inaccessible fruit or beehive, had the advantage over his duller associates who couldn’t. Going even further back, the boundaries of what constitutes actual reason get blurry, but the precursors would still provide a survival advantage; the proto-cetaceans that envision working together to herd a school of fish into a tight ball to make it easier to eat. And so on.
My point being that the ability to reason would pretty much *have* to be reliable going all the way back through the evolution of animal life. If animals couldn’t reliably reason their way through situations, they wouldn’t be as likely to survive. We can trust our mind, as a product of evolution, because survival is a driver of evolution. Our ability to reason is the result of all of our ancestors successfully and reliably trusting to their reasoning in solving problems that their survival depended on. Reason didn’t appear fully-formed in modern humans; it is the result of many factors developing over millions of generations of life, and the elimination of faulty results and dead-end developments along the way.
Oh, and to top it all off, if the mind were designed, why are there people with mental defects or disorders? A “designed” product implies that there is a design. So why are there people with mental disorders? There are, even today, plenty of people incapable of reason (just look at the Democrat party), so there quite demonstrably are people out there whose minds aren’t trustable, which is what you’d expect if the ability to reason arose out of a long process of evolution with all kinds of mistakes and variations along the way.
Reason is a massive survival advantage. Because it let’s you understand that what is true today is true again tomorrow. It let’s you notice that the area around that tree flooded during the rain so it’s probably not a good place to shelter from the next rain storm. It let’s you understand that the berries on that bush made you puke so you probably shouldn’t eat them anymore. It’s what let’s you not be my cats when the wife is out of town hurrying into the bedroom in the morning expecting to find her even though she didn’t go into the bedroom last night. It allows you to process the past to predict the future and plan accordingly.