“Whatever features of our brain enable (some of) us to do mathematics must have been
present long before we had any mathematics. Those crucial features, therefore,
must have evolved to fulfil some other purpose.”
This sort of statement is incredibly common among evolutionary psychologists and biologists, but “some other [undefined] purpose”
is pretty much the best they have to offer the world. The gaping holes in their
theoretical framework are orders of magnitude larger than the frame itself,
calling their entire dubious intellectual structure into question.
Next to No Information
As Dr. Hallpike points out, assertions like “Our human abilities and traits are very specific adaptations to the
problems of pre-historic life on the savannah in East Africa” fail to deal with
the fact that we have next to no information at all about life on the African savannah
or anything else pre-historic. By definition such things occurred prior to history. The one
thing we absolutely CANNOT be about them is “specific”. Thus the psychologist’s
house of cards is built entirely on conjecture. He is trying desperately to
deduce known from unknown, reversing all accepted scientific procedure.
As an anthropologist and a Christian, Hallpike gets this:
“It cannot be sufficiently emphasized, therefore, that our profound ignorance about early humans is quite incompatible with any informed discussion of possible adaptations.”
“… is quite incompatible with” is awfully
polite, but that’s the sort of thing one comes to expect from a Canadian Brit.
Perhaps … Perhaps …
But if Dr. Hallpike is correct, then statements like this one by Jordan Peterson in 12 Rules for Life have much less to them than Peterson is
inclined to concede:
“Perhaps primordial Eve had more reasons to attend to serpents than Adam. Maybe they were more likely, for example, to prey on her tree-dwelling infants. Perhaps it is for this reason that Eve’s daughters are more protective, self-conscious, fearful and nervous, to this day (even, and especially, in the most egalitarian of modern human societies).”
By “much less” I mean to say “nothing at all”.
I point this out because only Hallpike seems to be crying foul about verbal excesses like those in which Peterson indulges regularly. (Technically, so are the feminists, horrified that the bestselling psychologist appears to be degrading women, but their objections are more political than scientific.)
Break Out the Popcorn
The Christian sits back in amusement.
There is nothing in any of this flapping-about from the various great
intelligences on the evolutionary side of the table to even remotely challenge
his convictions.
From a scriptural standpoint, it is not inconceivable that an unfallen Adam had the greatest mathematical potential of any human in history. Why
wouldn’t he? His mind was created directly by God. His capacity for abstract thought, though undisciplined by training or experience, was uncontaminated by false premises of any kind, on top of which he had
direct access to Eternal Truth. By way of contrast, every thinker since Adam has wandered around in a
sin-induced fog of erroneous suppositions and deliberate lies while battling a
belligerent and contrary self-will.
Sines, cosines and cotangents were probably not a regular occupation for our first ancestor, but were we able to introduce
them to him today in his unfallen state, he would undoubtedly excel at algebra,
calculus or anything else he put his mind to in short order. That potential was
all built in by God from day one (okay, technically Day Six).
For the believer, Devlin’s mystified “some other purpose” is more likely to provoke chortling than concern. It is precisely
what a literal reading of Genesis leads him to anticipate.
Snakes and Trees
Likewise Peterson’s snakes chasing Eve and her progeny up into the pre-historic trees. If we Christians happen to observe that
women have a greater tendency than men to be fearful, it is only because the
word of God has already given us good reason to consider that possibility. If they are more protective of their infants, it is not in the least inconsistent with the role God has assigned them and the teaching of both
Old and New Testaments about the godly outworking of motherhood. No snake story need be conjured up to account for these things.
Dr. Hallpike falls somewhere between a
literal view of Genesis and outright fantasy, accepting certain assumptions
common to evolutionary theorists but sufficiently sensible and Christian to
recognize their glaring deficiencies and insist they be dealt with honestly,
and that the evolutionary side say no more than that for which it can produce a
modicum of actual evidence. As a result, he demolishes evolutionary psychology
and several other pseudo-scientific constructions in a single volume. Hallpike’s
case is considerably more powerful because he cannot be dismissed as a mere “cartoon
creationist”.
Do We Need God to be Good? is only available
in electronic form currently, but then Christian kids heading off to the Belly of the Beast university all possess a Kindle or other reading device anyway.
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