The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Global Argument Continued 93
Dunkirk during those fateful days in 1940 was not due to a specific and
local divine action. Anyone who believes either that the coming-to-be of
human rationality or the weather at Dunkirk had purely natural causes
must believe this on philosophical, not scientific, grounds. In fact, the
case for this is rather stronger in the matter of the genesis of rationality,
for we know a lot about how the weather works, and we know that the
rain clouds at Dunkirk are the sort of thing that could have had purely
natural causes. We most assuredly do not know that rationality could
have arisen through natural causes—or, at any rate, we do not know
this unless we somehow know that everything in fact has purely natural
causes. This is because everyone who believes that human rationality
could have arisen from purely natural causes believes this solely on the
basis of the following argument: Everything has purely natural causes;
human beings are rational; hence, the rationality of human beings could
have arisen from purely natural causes because it did so arise in fact.
It could, I concede, be a discovery of evolutionary biology that the
genesis of rationality was not a sudden, local event, and such a discovery
would imply the falsity of the expanded free-will defense. But no such
discovery has been made. If someone, for some reason, put forward
the theory that extraterrestrial beings once visited the earth, and by
some prodigy of genetic engineering, raised some population of our
primate ancestors to rationality in a single generation—something like
this happened in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey—this theory could
not be refuted by any facts known to physical anthropology.
I am not going to have Atheist raise any scientific objections to this
story; I could have done that, of course. If I had, I should have had
Theist reply to them by saying what I have just said. And I don’t see
that an audience of really impartial agnostics would find any purely
scientific barriers to agreeing that, for all they knew, given that there
was a God, the rest of the story might be true. I want to reserve Atheist
for the office of raising philosophical rather than scientific objections
to the expanded free-will defense. (In the seventh lecture, the lecture
devoted to the suffering of animals, I will say more about the question
whether the expanded free-will defense faces scientific difficulties, and
I will discuss some philosophical questions that are closely related to
this question. These philosophical questions are ramifications of this
question: Why does the expanded free-will defense represent the genesis
of rationality as a sudden, miraculous event? My discussion of these
questions will arise naturally from certain considerations concerning the
suffering of animals.)