Is God Deceiving Us? Evolution and Sound Decision-Making

Alvin Plantinga asks how we can have confidence in our conclusions if we reach them via a brain that is hardwired not for truth, but for survival purposes.

However, if our brains are not hardwired for truth, then what are they hardwired for? Are they hardwired for deception?

Humans are notoriously susceptible to both optical illusions and hypnosis.

If Plantinga is willing to admit that our brains are not hardwired for truth, then what is he acknowledging about the feasibility of a designer? Were our brains purposely set in motion to be deceived?

What is the best explanation? Would a benevolent god really have hardwired our brains for survival but not truth -- deception but not reality?

The god of the Bible may want our attention, our loyalty, our love, and our devotion, but such a god does not want us to perceive it clearly, if Christian and other theistic claims are to be accepted.

This would imply that any such god is either indifferent or malevolent.

If human beings are not wired for sound decision-making, then who could blame Adam or Eve for their transgresion in the Genesis story? Who could blame Lot's wife for looking back at the burning city? If human beings were intentionally wired for deception, then we are really the victims of the divine, if the apologists' claims are to be accepted.

A God who does not want human beings to see the truth is the inevitable result of this line of reasoning, and clearly possesses unacceptable consequences for many commonly-held religious beliefs.

Under this scenario, the Biblical god would be every bit as guilty of deception as Satan himself.

Strange Thoughts and More Like Them

The inner workings of the brain are something I can only contemplate given my severely limited knowledge.

It must be like some kind of machine.

I heard someone speculate once that there must be programs which can "crash" the brain, just as there as programs which can "crash" a computer.

I wonder what such a program would be like?

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There is an image which keeps re-appearing to me again and again, in several guises:

The lego constructions I used to build when I was very young: the elaborate manipulation of the bricks, followed swiftly by near inevitable destruction or implosion.

Numerous colonies of bacteria in a plate, consuming agar, reproducing themselves into oblivion.

A panel from the comic "Peanuts" when Linus spends a long time carefully molding a soap replica of a Navy clipper, only to see his creation obliterated by his sister Lucy.

Things arisen, things consumed, things destroyed.

And this visage repeats over, and over, and over.

What do I make of it?

I think that is a question for all of us.