Atheism’s “Bug”: Why Evolved Reason Can’t Delete Evolved Meaning
A Companion to “You Didn’t Choose to Be Born”
TL;DR: The naturalist trusts evolution to explain their reason. But if evolution selected for survival rather than truth, they can’t trust that reasoning either. When they use evolved reason to dismiss evolved meaning-seeking, they’re being arbitrary. Both came from the same process. You can’t selectively trust one product of natural selection while pathologizing another without a principled distinction. And there isn’t one. The naturalist worldview requires living in permanent contradiction between what you think and what you are.
In the previous essay, we established that if you trust survival selection for your cognitive faculties, you must consistently apply that logic to the ultimate offer of survival: God.
You Didn’t Choose to Be Born - and That’s the Point
TL;DR: You didn’t choose to exist. That’s not an argument against God, it’s proof that life is gift, not accident. And if you trust survival selection for everything else in your worldview, consistency demands you apply it here too. The only choice that defines eternity is whether you accept the offer that justifies your existence.
But the skeptic has a deeper problem. Evolution didn’t just give us instincts for food and reproduction. It gave us something far stranger: a desperate, unyielding need for meaning. We are purpose-seeking animals. We build cathedrals, write poetry, and sacrifice our lives for ideas. We crave telos.
And this is where the naturalist worldview collapses into a war with itself.
The Civil War of Naturalism
If you are a consistent naturalist, you must hold two claims about your own mind:
Your Evolved Reason: Your rational mind is a product of evolution, shaped by natural selection for survival advantage, not truth-tracking.
Your Evolved Need: This same evolutionary process gave you an intuitive, psychological, and seemingly universal need for objective meaning, purpose, and moral reality.
Here’s the problem: You use your evolved reason to look at the universe and conclude, “There is no objective meaning. That’s an illusion.”
But wait. If evolution selected for survival, not truth, why do you trust this reasoning? You’re using one product of evolution (abstract reasoning) to declare another product of evolution (meaning-seeking) unreliable.
Why is reason trustworthy but meaning-seeking isn’t? Both came from the same process.
The Escape Route That Fails
The naturalist’s typical move: “Evolution gave us meaning-seeking as a useful fiction for group survival. But we also developed reason and the scientific method, which do track truth because they have external validation. So I trust the tool that works, science, over the tool that produces contradictory outputs, religious intuition.”
This sounds sophisticated, but it doesn’t escape the trap. Here’s why:
First, the scientific method is still implemented by survival-selected brains. If your cognitive faculties evolved for survival rather than truth, then every conclusion you reach, including your confidence in science itself, is suspect. You’re trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
The naturalist Alvin Plantinga devastated this position: if naturalism and evolution are both true, you have no reason to trust your belief-forming faculties, including the beliefs “naturalism is true” and “evolution is true.” The whole system undercuts itself.
Second, what’s the principled distinction? Both reason and meaning-seeking are:
Universal across cultures
Emerge reliably in development
Deeply intuitive and hard to suppress
Products of the same evolutionary process
You can’t say “I trust the universal intuition that 2+2=4 and that other minds exist, but I dismiss the universal intuition that purpose and morality are real” without explaining why one gets epistemic privilege and the other doesn’t.
The naturalist who says “the scientific method has external validation” is still using their evolved reason to evaluate what counts as “validation.” They haven’t escaped the circle.
Why This Isn’t Like Other Desires
The naturalist might object: “We have lots of desires that don’t correspond to reality. We desire immortality but we die. We desire perfect justice but it doesn’t happen. Why can’t meaning-seeking be another adaptive illusion?”
Because there’s a category difference.
Those other desires are for particular states of affairs that may or may not obtain. The desire for meaning is different. It’s not a desire for a state of affairs but a fundamental cognitive framework through which we interpret all experience.
You can’t function without it. Try to eliminate meaning from your life. You’ll fail. You’ll sneak it back in through the back door, ascribing purpose to your work, meaning to your relationships, and moral weight to your choices. Even the atheist activist acts as though convincing people of atheism matters, as though truth-telling is a good, as though human flourishing has value.
This isn’t a desire you can acknowledge and then set aside like “I wish I could fly.” It’s the operating system. And when you declare the operating system is lying to you while continuing to run on it, you’re not being brave. You’re being incoherent.
The Real Asymmetry
Here’s what the naturalist has to believe:
Evolution produced reason, and I trust it to tell me truth about the world (at least when filtered through scientific method). Evolution produced meaning-seeking, but this is a false positive, an adaptive fiction.
But on what basis do you make this distinction? You might say: “Reason produces consistent results when we check it against reality. Meaning-seeking produces contradictory outputs across cultures.”
Really? Reason produces contradictory philosophical systems, competing scientific theories, and wildly different moral frameworks when applied to complex questions. And meaning-seeking produces remarkable cross-cultural convergence: nearly universal belief in objective moral truth, purpose, and transcendent reality.
The naturalist is being selective. They trust reason because they’ve decided to trust reason. But that’s circular.
And worse: the very act of reasoning about whether to trust reason or meaning-seeking presupposes that your faculties are truth-tracking. But if naturalism and evolution are both true, you have no grounds for that presupposition.
The Unlivable Worldview
Even if the naturalist could construct a logical defense (and I don’t think they can), they still face an existential problem: their worldview is unlivable.
You cannot live as though meaning doesn’t exist. You cannot raise children, pursue careers, form relationships, or advocate for justice without acting as though purpose and value are real.
The naturalist will protest: “We can have subjective meaning. I create my own purpose.”
But that’s not what your psychology demands. When you mourn injustice, you’re not mourning a violation of your personal preferences. You’re responding to something you perceive as genuinely wrong. When you sacrifice for your children, you’re not doing it because you’ve arbitrarily decided they matter. You’re acting on the deep conviction that they do matter, objectively.
The “subjective meaning” dodge is a promissory note the naturalist can never cash. They live in permanent performative contradiction, denying with their intellect what they affirm with every choice.
What About Non-Theistic Alternatives?
At this point, the sophisticated skeptic pivots: “Fine. You’ve shown naturalism has problems. But that doesn’t get you to Christianity. What about Buddhism? It takes meaning-seeking seriously, provides a coherent framework, and doesn’t require God.”
This objection actually concedes the main point. By appealing to Buddhism, you’ve already abandoned naturalism. You’ve admitted that pure materialism fails and that we need a metaphysical framework that takes consciousness, meaning, and transcendence seriously.
That’s significant progress. But Buddhism doesn’t escape the core epistemic problem.
The Same Evolutionary Trap:
If you’re a Buddhist who accepts evolution (and many Western Buddhists do), you face the identical problem. You use your evolved reason to conclude that evolved reason is unreliable and trapped in illusion (maya/avidya). Then you trust different evolved faculties, meditative insights and enlightenment experiences, that came from the same survival-selected brain.
Why trust one set of evolved intuitions over another? The Buddhist who says “meditative insight transcends ordinary reason” is still using their survival-selected brain to evaluate what counts as transcendence. You haven’t escaped the circle. You’ve just moved it to a different room.
No Foundation for Why Reason Works:
Buddhism acknowledges that our faculties are limited and caught in illusion, requiring transcendence. But it provides no explanation for why reason functions reliably even within those limits.
Why does logic work consistently? Why is mathematics universally applicable? Why is the universe rationally ordered and mathematically structured? Why do our minds have any traction on reality at all?
Christianity answers this: rational Creator, rational creation, humans made in His image. The universe is intelligible because it was designed to be understood by minds designed to understand it.
Buddhism treats this as brute fact. The reliability of reason within its domain is just... there. No explanation. This is a significant explanatory gap.
The Specificity Problem:
Which Buddhism? Theravada claims there is no eternal self. Mahayana claims Buddha-nature is eternal. Pure Land Buddhism is functionally theistic. Zen Buddhism is radically non-theistic. Tibetan Buddhism incorporates elaborate metaphysics with multiple realms and deities.
These systems make contradictory metaphysical claims about the ultimate nature of reality, the self, and liberation. The “coherence” collapses when you ask which version is actually true. They can’t all be right.
The Buddhist response, “different skillful means for different people,” is intellectually unsatisfying. If these are claims about the nature of reality, truth matters. Either there is an eternal self or there isn’t. Either consciousness persists after death in some form or it doesn’t.
The Verification Problem:
Christianity makes historical claims subject to investigation. Did Jesus rise from the dead? We can examine eyewitness testimony, the transformation of the disciples, the empty tomb, the explosion of the early church. These are historical questions with historical evidence.
Buddhism rests primarily on private meditative experiences that cannot be externally validated. How do you know your enlightenment experience corresponds to reality rather than being an interesting neurological state? The Buddhist might say, “The proof is in the transformation and the cessation of suffering.”
But that’s pragmatic, not epistemic. Lots of things reduce suffering (antidepressants, therapy, meaningful work) without thereby being true about ultimate reality. Usefulness is not the same as truth.
The Common Ground:
I respect Buddhism as a serious philosophical system that recognizes materialism’s bankruptcy. If you’re a Buddhist, we agree that naturalism fails and that reality includes transcendent dimensions. That’s common ground.
But when evaluating which worldview best explains consciousness, rationality, moral realism, the fine-tuning of physics, the reliability of reason, and provides historical verification, Christianity has distinct advantages.
The question isn’t just “which framework helps me cope with suffering?” The question is “which framework is true?”
The Coherent Answer
The Christian worldview doesn’t have this civil war.
Your need for meaning exists because meaning itself exists. Your reason functions reliably (within limits) because you’re made in the image of a rational God who designed both your mind and the universe to be mutually intelligible. Your moral intuitions track reality because morality is grounded in God’s character.
In Christianity, your deepest instincts and your highest logic are not at war. They are complementary witnesses pointing to the same truth.
This isn’t just psychological comfort. It’s explanatory power. Christianity provides a coherent foundation for the very faculties naturalism must either dismiss or trust arbitrarily.
The naturalist says: “I trust my reason because evolution produced it, but evolution selects for survival not truth, so actually I can’t trust my reason, but I’m going to anyway, and also my intuition that meaning is real must be dismissed because it’s just an evolutionary adaptation, unlike my reasoning which I’m trusting despite it also being just an evolutionary adaptation.”
The Christian says: “I trust my reason and my meaning-seeking because both were designed by a rational, purposeful Creator who made me to know truth and seek Him. My faculties are generally reliable because they were built for this.”
One worldview is coherent. The other is a house divided against itself.
The Bottom Line
You cannot use evolved reason to dismiss evolved meaning-seeking without sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.
Either trust both or trust neither.
If you trust neither, you’ve embraced radical skepticism and can’t function.
If you trust both, you have overwhelming convergent evidence pointing to the Christian God: philosophical arguments, historical evidence for the resurrection, the explanatory power of theism for consciousness, morality, meaning, rationality, and the fine-tuning of the universe.
Your evolved brain is screaming that purpose is real. Your evolved reason can investigate whether that intuition corresponds to reality.
The rational conclusion isn’t to call your brain a liar. It’s to recognize that the lock and the key were made by the same Locksmith.
Soli Deo Gloria
oddXian.com | Faith that thinks. Reason that worships.