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| Detroit Institute of Arts |
There are so many intractable problems within the noetic framework of atheism that I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony; that is, I know what to do, I just don'r know where to begin. Here's one such problem.
On the theistic idea of a rational God the emergence of creaturely rationality makes sense. But evolution without God is interested in survival, not truth. Theistic philosopher Paul Copan writes: "We may form many false survival-enhancing beliefs such as “humans are morally responsible” or “humans have dignity and rights”— a phenomenon that naturalists commonly acknowledge." (Copan, Ethics Needs God, Debating Christian Theism, p. 90)
Now watch this. Here are four brilliant atheists who affirm what I just wrote. I say again - these are well-known, scholarly atheists who agree. So if you disagree here, take it up with them.
“Boiled down to its essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding , fleeing, fighting, and reproducing … Truth , whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”
- Pioneering neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland (in Ib.)
"Truth is un-Darwinian."
- Massively famous (well-deserved) philosopher Richard Rorty (in Ib.)
"Morality is a “corporate” illusion that has been “fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.” That is, “we think it has an objective status.”"
- Well-known anti-Dawkins atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse
“Man is a moral (altruistic) being, not because he intuits the rightness of loving his neighbor, or because he responds to some noble ideal, but because his behavior is comprised of tendencies which natural selection has favoured.”
- Famous philosopher-ethicist James Rachels
Copan logically follows with this question: “Why trust our minds, whose thoughts are the result of mindless molecules affecting other mindless molecules?” (Ib.) How odd for the atheistic, on the basis of his own noetic framework, to argue for the truth of anything, much less atheism. And how irrational for any Dawkins-type atheist to refer to herself as "bright."
On theism's noetic framework the above atheistic dillemma non-occurs. Copan writes:
"If a trustworthy God has created our noetic structure (not to mention an ordered, biofriendly universe that our minds can study and understand), then we have all the more reason for generally trusting these faculties or capacities rather than constantly doubting their reliability— even if, here and there, we may get things wrong. Indeed, we have been designed to trust our faculties (moral, rational, perceptual ..." (91)
For more see Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.
