Evolutionary explanation of values

I have often wondered about evolutionary psychology and its implications for the existence of values endorsed by the Christian faith.  My concern is that much of neuroscience and psychology have shown that values most likely don't exist, and are just evolutionary mechanisms that helped ancient humans survive.

Take beauty and love, for instance.  Many studies over the past few years have indicated that the neurotransmitter dopamine is both implicated in perceptions of beauty/love and in learning/memorizing novel stimuli.  One could conclude from such data that beauty and love are simply evolutionary mechanisms that prompt people to memorize and familiarize themselves with novel environments and situations.  That's certainly the attitude taken by this New York Times article, here.  The idea would explain the old aphorism 'variety is the spice of life', making sense of why we humans often find things "beautiful" (or just interesting at all, really) only when they seem original and unique, and we have such disdain for what we think are clichés.  It would also explain the intuition that beauty and love are 'outside' of us - the intuition is essentially telling us that our current environment/stimuli (which IS technically outside of us) is unprecedented, and ought to be memorized and focused upon for survival purposes.

Is the above interpretation warranted by the data, or is there still reason to believe in values as immaterial entities?  If it isn't a threat, then why would God create a world where we can grow 'numb' to things which are intrinsically lovely or beautiful once we are familiar with them?  Furthermore, why would God make this numbing process evolutionarily beneficial? (it doesn't seem to be a result of the Fall, since the numbing mechanism probably evolved before humanity came around).  Please reply as you are able.

Response:  All our perceptions of anything are mediated by our brains and neuroscientists can paint a fascinating picture of the mechanisms involved.  Since our brains, like the rest of our bodies, have evolved it is also possible to tell an evolutionary story “explaining” any aspect of brain behaviour.  (These are known as “Evolutionary Just-so Stories” and are taken with a massive pinch of salt by experts – but they can be fun and sometime illuminating. Naïve journalists and their readers lap them up).

But this of course has nothing to do with whether the entities we think we perceive exist or not.  Most people who say “values don’t exist” will certainly agree that the sun (say) exists. But neuroscience has a fascinating story of how we perceive the sun and the sun certainly impacts on our hormones and chemistry and there are obvious evolutionary advantages in being able to perceive the sun.

Whether you believe that the fundamental basis of the universe is a Loving Ultimate Creator or meaningless matter/energy is a philosophical decision and no conceivable scientific experiment could settle the question.  It’s certainly a problem for atheists to account for the existence of objective moral truths – and they mostly seem to be committed to the conclusion that “torturing babies for fun is wrong” is simply a matter of opinion.  But we cannot force them to accept the deep Love at the heart of the universe – we have to hope and pray that they see it.

Who created God?

I just recently became aware of John’s writing and I’ve been thrilled to find that my university library has a great deal of his books. 

The root of my question has to deal with what seems to always come up me when I talk with non-believing friends. More often than not, I seem to find myself attempting to fight the Dawkins’ “Who created God (because it’s more complex)?” argument or something similar.

I’ve been reading and viewing a great amount in regards to this question, and obviously, I don’t believe in a created God. But, when one digs deeper on this issue, you’re forced to ask a variety of other questions.

For example, do you view God as timeless sans creation? And if so, how do you address the timeless functionality of the mind of God? It trips me up because I constantly apply the finite terms of our existence and imagine God counting down “3,2,1” before the moment of creation. 

Or do you view God as existing in one or more dimensions of time? The further questions I would then have is how do you respond to arguments like “Why did God not created the world sooner?” and “how does he then have no beginning?” 

I would greatly appreciate some guidance in best answering these questions. In the end, I suppose I’ll never be able to fully understand God’s transcendence, but I hope for quick responses to basic questions like these.

Response: We address this “Who created God” nonsense in Questions of Truth

From a philosophical PoV God is “The Ultimate Creator”. By definition no-one/nothing created the Ultimate Creator.  From a philosophical PoV asking “Who created God” is a nonsense.

Dawkins’ “argument” about complexity is just completely fallacious – it’s even hard to formulate in a way that is not obviously wrong.  It also confuses simplicity of form with simplicity of function (Anthony Kenny uses the illustration of the cut-throat razor vs the electric razor: the former is simpler in form but can perform many more functions than the latter).

It is very hard for us to envisage a mind except in time, and we cannot expect to see things through a God’s eye view. But sometimes even great human “creators” seem to get a complete idea of their creation in more or less a single moment (Mozart is said to have composed a Clarinet Trio while playing billiards for example, and whether or not this particular story is true it is clearly logically possible for a creator do conceive of a work of art in an instant).

IF there is anything corresponding to “time” in God’s experience pre-creation we cannot possibly expect to know about it.  And the idea of “creating the world sooner” makes no sense. God created the world at t=0.

PS  FWIW the one respect in which I suspect that Atheism may be logically incoherent and not simply a big mistake is that I’m far from convinced that it is possible to have a contingent necessary entity.  If it is true that “everything that exists and for which is logically possible to have one or more causes, has one or more causes” then it’s hard to see how the Universe can exist without God.