Evolution Can't Explain Minds
The case for a top down conception of experience
When I was a teenager in the 00s, the church I grew up in had book stands full of books about the apparent failures of evolution. New Atheism and Richard Dawkins in particular had popularised the idea that evolution made religion untenable, and the evangelical church responded by, for the most part, clinging to a literalist view of the bible and offering intelligent design as a reason to reject evolution, claiming things like irreducible complexity meant a designer must be responsible for the remarkable features of life.
As a cynical teenager with no dog in either fight at the time it seemed to me fairly obvious that the religious case was motivated, and that its use of science was a misuse of science based on a combination of insecurity and simple refusal to demote the bible’s account of creation beneath any evidence that might arise. Considering creationists essentially see the creation and fall narrative as a scientific account, they were and are peculiarly unwilling to actually treat it as a scientific theory subject to evidence and investigation, making their defences easy pickings for the polemics of the new atheists; the books were mostly terrible, the debates were a waste of time, and the repeated claim that atheists believe in evolution for motivated reasons was blindly ironic.
But the problem with these debates, and indeed the reason why it seems superficially to be a slam dunk for atheism, is that they remain squarely in the realm of science. If a Christian wants to criticise evolution for reasons of its apparent scientific flaws, then we are just having a debate about science, and as much as certain Christians like to offer the claim that evolution is an ideological metanarrative rather than scientific theory, science has an obstinately un-ideological aspect, and evidence is evidence.
So it is that in many of the now nostalgia inducing creation vs evolution debates of the 00s, the debate was over God vs evolution as competing scientific theories that explain things like the complexity and function of life, the operation of cells and organs and the remarkable organisation of living organisms. Scientifically, the process of natural selection has an obvious advantage precisely because it is a process, while intelligent design provides an explanation without an actual explanation, silent on process and simply placing God at the beginning in a way that looks rather like the God of enlightenment deism, like Voltaire’s clockmaker designing all the cogs then setting them into motion, the designer incognito in the blueprint. To the evolutionist, since a theory is provided that explains why and how we have the complexity of life we have, such a theory becomes redundant, since the question that theism claimed to answer, that of why there is the complexity and organisation of life that we find, has been answered.
