The Problem of Evil - Common Sense Atheism

The Sufferings of Beasts 129
In a similar way, I’d have a hard time believing a paleontologist who
told me that at some point in the history of life there was an organism
with eyes comparable to those of present-day birds and mammals, and
that, a mere million years earlier, the ancestors of that organism had
no visual apparatus at all, not even photosensitive spots. If I may judge
by some unguarded remarks I’ve heard, I think that some adherents of
philosophical naturalism are a bit uneasy about the time span in which
the gulf between non-rationality and rationality was bridged—but,
unlike us theists, they have no alternative to supposing that the gulf was
bridged by purely natural mechanisms within this time span, and, in
one way or another, they have made their peace with it.
This, however, is not my primary reason for ascribing a miraculous
origin to human rationality in the expanded free-will defense. (For one
thing, although it seems to me very hard to see how human rationality
could have had a purely natural origin, I cannot say that it is evident that
it did not. The world, and particularly the biological world, is a thing
of enormous complexity, and it is very dangerous to reach conclusions
aboutitonthebasisofaprioriargument.WhenIthinkaboutit,Ihave
to say that for all I know rationality had a purely natural origin. And I
think I could expect—I think Theist could expect—that an audience of
neutral agnostics would agree with me on this point. If, therefore, there
were something to be gained by including in the expanded free-will
defense the proposition that rationality had a natural origin, there would
be no barrier to doing so.) My primary reason is that the plausibility of
the story would be greatly reduced if it did not represent the genesis of
rationality as a sudden, sharp event. If the story represented the genesis
of rationality as a long, vague event, an event comprising thousands
of generations, this would open the way for Atheist to raise all sorts
of awkward questions about the plausibility of the story. Here was my
description of the miraculous raising of humanity to rationality:
... there was a time when every ancestor of modern human beings
who was then alive was a member of [a] tiny, geographically tightly
knit group of primates. ... God took the members of this breeding
group and miraculously raised them to rationality. That is, he gave them
the gifts of language, abstract thought, and disinterested love—and, of
course, the gift of free will.
The story goes on to tell how these newly human primates abused the
gift of free will and, as it were, laid violent hands on the Creation and
attempted to turn it to their own purposes. But suppose I, or Theist, had