"If There Is No God, Then We Don’t Know Anything." Arguing the Negative: John Loftus. From Loftus vs Randal Rauser, in their co-written book, "God or Godless?"

There are precursors of our own reasoning abilities found in animals. There is morality, consciousness, tool-making, learning, problem-solving, community, and communication. 1

At some point human beings could comprehend that an A(pple) is an A(pple) and not an O(range), so A=A and A≠O. 

They also comprehended something we must all do to stay alive.

1. If we want to stay alive then we must eat.
2. We want to stay alive.
3. Therefore we must eat.

The above is a logical argument known as modus ponens, which is one of the most basic rules of logic. I see no reason to think we need a God to know this. All we need is an information processor that computes the steps. And we have one: a brain. Evolution explains where that came from quite simply.

If this weren’t a rational universe, we wouldn’t have developed the logic that arises from observing it. A different universe would produce a different kind of logic—whatever that could possibly be—and our brains would then have evolved to compute that logic instead.

The brains of dogs, donkeys, and dolphins work to help them survive. The brains of chimps, chicks, and chipmunks help them survive. The brains of pigs, porcupines, and platypuses help them survive. If their brains had not evolved as they did, then they wouldn’t have survived. Why then is it different with human beings?

What Rauser would claim is not just that our brains are unreliable but that they are utterly and completely unreliable (apart from luck) to know the truth. That is, if naturalism is true, we should not trust them at all. I find it to be a nearly impossible argument to defend.

Our senses aren’t perfectly reliable, but they are very reliable. Our reasoning has many flaws, but it is reliable enough for telling the difference between better methods and worse ones. 

Our brains are computers that evolved to run various information processing routines. These then evolved to be in our brains because they were more successful at discovering the truth than random chance. But they aren’t perfectly successful. So we developed tools—new technologies—to improve the accuracy of our information processing, and those tools include language, math, logic, and the scientific method. These are like software patches that we run on our brains to correct the errors to which our brains are still biologically prone. 

But logic, math, and scientific method aren’t products of evolution. They’re products of intelligent human design. They are analogous to eyeglasses, microscopes, or telescopes, which we invented to see better; or axes, which we invented to cleave wood better; or wheels, which we invented to move things around better. We’ve also built our own computers that can perform every kind of logical reasoning there is, and we’ve even built computers that can learn how to reason logically on their own.

Our ability to learn any system of tricks and invent tools necessary to figure out how the universe works derives from our evolved capacity to use symbolic language and from our evolved capacity to solve problems and predict behaviors through hypothesis formation and testing. These are all of inestimable value to survival. They also entail the ability to do the same things in any domain of knowledge, not just in the directly useful domains of resource acquisition, threat avoidance, and social system management.

Christians have their own difficulties when justifying reason. Nominalists, following William of Ockham (1288–1348), argue that God does not have a nature, and as such, he does not have the property (or attribute) of reason. They argue that a full-blown concept of God is one in which he created reason; otherwise where did it come from? The alternative that he must obey the dictates of reason implies that reason itself is independent of God; and if that’s the case, we don’t need God to justify reason. So whence comes reason on Christian grounds?

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1 See Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Marc Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), his Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), and Donald R. Griffin Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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Rebuttal by Loftus: If a particular prehuman species saw a lethal poisonous plant and ate it, then that species died out in favor of a different species that didn’t eat it (or a subset within that same species). Whole species have become extinct because they did the wrong things. As a result, 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct. Evolution works this way, and it’s very wasteful. But since we’ve survived as a species, we know we have largely acquired true beliefs because we’re here! This is noncontroversial and obvious since evolution is a fact. Unfortunately, some members of the human species may conclude a poisonous plant is sacred. Will they survive?

How do Christians propose we know something if it isn’t useful to us and discovered by trial and error? The difficulties with the correspondence and coherence theories of truth are fatal, given that we don’t have access to the thing-in-itself, as Immanuel Kant successfully argued. We’re not talking in terms of ontology—about that which exists. Instead, we’re always talking in terms of epistemology, that is, how we can know it.

Pragmatism works, period. Adaptive beliefs are the ones that are useful for our survival. The rest of our beliefs, no matter how many of them we have, are either irrelevant to our survival or detrimental to it.

Finally, I think beliefs that are specifically religious are largely detrimental to our survival as a species in a world with weapons of mass destruction.

LINK TO BOOK.