Q&A: Assumptions for Proofs
Assumptions for Proofs
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: can a person who is an agnostic—that is, someone who raises the possibility of not believing in God—ever really believe in anything? After all, on the atheist side he presumably assumes that his understandings developed in an evolutionary way.
So even if we assume that evolution did a wonderful job, and all of his assumptions about the *familiar* world (the one actually around us here on our beautiful planet Earth) are correct, it sounds completely bizarre that evolution could develop assumptions about *unfamiliar* worlds, or about far-reaching views like: “Is the world eternal?” Or whether we assume that entities of the kind familiar to us are self-caused or not, or whether the laws of nature in the other galaxies are identical, or whether weak or strong emergentism could be a reasonable explanation or not.
It sounds completely bizarre and unfounded that evolution would develop any understanding in matters like these, no? If so, that does not necessarily mean he has to believe in God. But insofar as he thinks he can express some opinion in these discussions (and usually they are completely in that mode), that is a sign that he implicitly believes in an entity that coordinated between his understanding and the understanding of reality as a whole. And the best explanation for that is God, or some intentional being.
Answer
I’m not sure I understood the question. If evolution developed in us tools of thought and cognition that work well here, there is no reason that applying them to other realities would not also yield good results. If the eyes were trained to see zebras well, there is no reason they would not also see rocks well. Science, too, does not necessarily assume that the laws of nature are universal. That is just the default assumption unless proven otherwise.