Science and Atheism Don't Mix
"...with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy." ~Charles Darwin
"If you thought that your computer was the end product of mindless, unguided processes, would you trust it?" ~John Lennox
For 16 years I drove a 1999 Ford Escort that my boss referred to as the Flintstone-mobile because it didn't have any of the extras - no automatic windows, no CD player, no automatic locks, just the basics. In 2014 I decided it was finally time to join the 21st century and upgrade to a Toyota Prius. Now imagine I'm at the dealership and I ask the salesman to tell me about the Prius, and the conversation goes like this:
Salesman: "Oh, this 2012 blue Prius is incredible. It's all-natural."
Me: "What on earth does that mean?!"
Salesman: "It's never been designed, programmed or constructed by anyone. One of our guys was out hiking with his family and they came across this all-natural beauty that is the result of mindless, unguided processes. Nature put this baby together!"
Me: "Are you telling me that there is no intelligence, no thought, no mind behind this mechanism that I'm supposed to trust with my life as I barrel down the highway at 65 mph, day in and day out for the next 15 years?"
Salesman: "That's right! Pretty neat, huh?"
Of course no one in their right mind would trust a vehicle that was the result of mindless, unguided processes. And if our brains were the result of mindless, unguided, natural processes we would have no reason to trust them either. But this poses a tremendous problem for atheism.
Just as designing a safe vehicle requires intelligence and a reliable mind, so also does coming to any scientific conclusions. All science depends on the assumptions that human observations are reliable and that human reasoning is sound. But if the brains we rely on are merely the product of unintelligent, haphazard, physical and chemical reactions, we cannot really trust anything we think we know.
Confidence in our science does not render God unnecessary or obsolete; it actually makes Darwinian evolution and atheism obsolete. For if there is no intelligence behind the formation of our brains, and our brains are the mechanisms that we rely upon to do science, then we have no reason to believe our scientific conclusions. To do so would be like relying on a computer or a vehicle that was formed solely by nature. It is entirely untrustworthy.
Do you see the problem? Charles Darwin may not have been right about the origin of species, but he was certainly right about one thing: If our brains developed on their own from the minds of lower animals, which themselves emerged from spontaneous reactions of inanimate chemical matter, we have absolutely no reason to trust our thoughts, our convictions, or our reasoning, including any reasoning that might lead us to conclude there is no God.
