Or, Is materialism an optical illusion?

(Apologies for the delay in my blog posts on Creation and Evolution – my netbook was stolen when thieves broke into my house recently, which has set back some of my writing and blogging.)

In this post, I’m going to compare a Christian worldview and a materialistic worldview, and ask the question “how can we know that what we believe is true?” I think this will help show why there is no neutral position, and how we all depend on faith-based presuppositions.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself… It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.”

– “The Suicide of Thought”, Orthodoxy by G K Chesterton

A materialist worldview – one that argues, usually on supposedly scientific grounds, that the material world is all that exists, and so there is no spiritual or transcendent reality – depends on the assumption that evolution would produce minds capable of reasoning correctly. But if the thoughts in our brains are no more than the movement of atoms, why should they have any more significant than the movement of wind through trees, as C S Lewis argued?

On the one hand, I think materialism doesn’t have anything like the empirical certainty that some atheists claim. On the other hand, I think G K Chesterton and C S Lewis overstate their case slightly. There seem to me various reasons why the materialist could reasonably think that his or her thoughts are actually true.

One possible reason is survival value. There is clearly a survival benefit to having reliable senses and reasoning abilities. If a dinosaur is about to eat you, and your senses tell you it’s a teddy bear, then you’ll be first in line when natural selection starts picking players for Team Extinction.

But what if believing something untrue can bring survival benefits? If this were the case, then we wouldn’t be able to trust our senses. It’s easy to imagine possible situations in which this could be the case – if you believe there are imaginary monsters in the forest, this might make you less likely to go blundering around in there into the path of a real tiger.

Religion is often explained by evolutionary psychology in terms of benefits like increased social cohesion and so on, which could confer an evolutionary advantage, whether or not those beliefs are true.

Similarly, our perceptions and reasoning might be distorted as a side-effect of otherwise beneficial genetic or behavioural traits. This is a possible explanation for optical illusions. Our brains are so well-adapted to spotting patterns, which is generally very useful, we often see patterns even when they aren’t there.

Could naturalism, the belief that everything can be explained in natural terms, be like an optical illusion? Our ability to spot patterns in nature is fine as far as it goes, but insisting that this must always be possible might be a similar delusion. How would we know?

From a purely naturalistic view of evolution, there is no guarantee that our beliefs are true or reflect reality. It’s possible that we can form true beliefs, just not certain. This isn’t a problem if naturalists are prepared to admit the fallibility of their beliefs, and admit that they make this leap of faith in trusting their own reasoning. But naturalism is often presented as being certain on “neutral” scientific and empirical grounds, which isn’t the case, even on naturalism’s own terms.

How does this compare to the Christian worldview? The Christian view of humanity is that we were created in the image of the God who created and who sustains the universe. He has given us minds capable of discovering truth and discerning the order of his creation, “Thinking God’s thoughts after him”, as the early scientist Kepler is reputed to have put it. The claim that we can have reliable knowledge of the world around us is consistent with the Christian worldview.

But before those of us who are Christians get too self-confident, Christianity also teaches that sin distorts our ability to know the truth, just as sin damages and disrupts every area of life. So while the Christian worldview gives us reason to believe that our senses are generally reliable, we can’t count on them being infallible.

Does this mean that Christianity suffers the same problem as materialism, likewise offering no basis for certainty? In both cases, we need to recognise that we are fallible; our perceptions and our reasoning can both be mistaken, and this should bring a certain humility to all of us. But while our senses are not completely reliable, I think it’s reasonable to have faith that they are sufficiently reliable for us to believe that if we’re careful and meticulous, we can detect and correct some of our mistakes and make genuine progress towards the truth. This involves trust, however – reason needs faith.

Reason teaches us is that our reason alone can’t teach us everything. The most reasonable conclusion to come to, given how partial and fallible our knowledge is, is that we need to look for help from outside ourselves for knowledge. We routinely look to books or teachers or scientists (and maybe also artists or philosophers or theologians) for answers to things outside our own abilities to know and to investigate. When we accept their knowledge and insight, we are putting our faith in them; we see this as both sensible and rational.

But faith is only as rational as the object of your faith is reliable. This is where I think Christianity gives a greater basis for certainty concerning truth about life and reality. Christianity teaches that there is a God who there and who speaks to us. He reveals truth and helps us overcome the effects of sin by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the Christian faith, we can have knowledge of the truth because God reveals truth to us.

In the materialistic worldview, there’s no necessary reason why anyone or anything should have true or reliable knowledge – there is no outside perspective to rescue us from our mire of uncertainty.

But this raises the problem of how do we know whether God has revealed himself to us, and if he has, what is God’s revelation? Other religions, such as Islam, also claim to be God’s revelation to us – how do we know which, if any, are genuine?

Well, we need to use our perceptions of the world and our reason to try and discern which is true – faith needs reason! This might seem circular – where do we begin? But that’s the point – it’s possible to distinguish reason and faith, but when it comes to forming our beliefs, it isn’t possible to completely separate them out. The wheels on the epistemological bus go round and round, and in doing so move us forward towards the truth.

To summarise, I believe we gain knowledge by reason and faith working together to receive true revelation (i.e. knowledge from outside of ourselves). All three elements – reason, faith and revelation – are necessary for knowledge.

The Christian worldview gives a basis on which we can believe our reason is truthful though fallible, a basis on which our faith can be justified yet self-correcting, and a basis on which we can receive revelation with confidence that God speaks truth. A materialistic worldview gives only a shaky basis for believing our reason is reliable or our faith is justified, and no basis at all for any kind of revelation.

To look at the evidence for and against each worldview is beyond the scope of this particular blog post, though I hope to touch on some of the issues in following blog posts. But even if materialism is true, we could not be certain of it, whereas if Christianity is true, we can have confidence in God’s revelation to us.