Let us now consider a series of objections to the argument just stated. I begin with what I take to be simple misunderstandings, and proceed to what I regard as more subtle and substantive objections. I have included no objections that I have not actually met, and have tried to include all that I have met from anyone even remotely sympathetic with Objectivist principles. Inevitably, some readers will complain that I have included what they regard as clearly trivial, while ignoring the real, the conclusive, the obvious objection, namely.... But that sort of dissatisfaction is inherent in any disputation that is not a direct one-to-one exchange.

  (1) The competence of our minds is an axiom; any attempted disproof is absurd.
  (2) The competence of our minds is an axiom; any attempted proof is superfluous. 
  (3) The competence of our minds is an axiom; hence every mind however produced 
  must be competent.
  (4) Design does not imply competence. 
  (5) A mind accidentally produced can still be competent (The genetic fallacy). 
  (6) Our thoughts are caused, and therefore connected to reality. 
 
  (7) Natural Selection can produce, without a designer, results that look designed
   (Psychological Darwinism).
 
  (8) The origins of consciousness are more subtle than this argument allows for.
  (9) An unchosen belief is a contradiction in terms. 
(10) A child comes about as a result of its parents’ having intended it. 
(11) A design explanation of man’s mind fails to explain the designer’s mind. 
 
(12) Power and goodness
(13) Error and the God of truth
(14) Omniscience is a subjectivist concept (The primacy of existence)

Objection:
  There is really no difference between this argument and the old design argument. Writers like Paley [01] used to invite us to consider the eye of the mosquito and ask ourselves whether this marvelously intricate mechanism could have come about by accident. If not, then here we had design, and so a designer. But then Darwin showed us that Natural Selection, although it had no conscious goals, acted in a sense as if it did. Mosquitos have eyes that see efficiently, because the ones that didn’t have died out. Similarly, men have brains that work efficiently, because the ones that didn’t have died out.

Reply:
  I shall refer to the attempt to account for man’s reason in terms of Natural Selection as Psychological Darwinism (PD). It is perhaps both the most popular and the most complex of the objections confronting us, and it will occupy us for the next several sections of this paper.

The reader will please note that an attack on Psychological Darwinism is not an attack on the theory of Evolution, Darwinian or otherwise. One can be a Darwinist without being a Psychological Darwinist (PDist). The two authors of the theory of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, both repudiated the idea that Natural Selection could account for the emergence of minds capable of philosophy, although Wallace responded to this difficulty by postulating a designer, [02] while Darwin, as we have seen [03] responded by concluding that there are no minds capable of philosophy.

(07a) The Red Suspender Fallacy

I begin by inviting the reader to consider the Red Suspender Fallacy, so named from the old riddle, “Why to firemen wear red suspenders?” and its answer, “To hold their pants up.” What makes this a trick answer is that it answers the wrong question. If the question is taken to mean, “Why red suspenders, as opposed to no suspenders (and no belt) at all?” then the answer is to the point. But the hearer will normally understand the question to mean, “Why red suspenders, as opposed to, say, gray ones?” And this question has not been answered at all. The riddler has confused the question, “why some means?” with the question “why this means?”

Now the PDist considers the question, “Why do men have rational minds?” and answers it, “In order to survive.” It is true that this explains why men have some means of survival, but not why they have this means. It is a straightforward example of the Red Suspender Fallacy. For, just as we see many pairs of pants — the majority, in fact — all held up without the use of red suspenders, so we see many species — perhaps all but our own — surviving without the use of rational consciousness. [04]

Natural Selection accounts for adaptive physical behavior. Nature, in Darwinian terms, selects rabbits who run when the fox approaches. But the selection is independent of why the rabbit runs. It may run because it believes that the fox will kill it, or because it believes that the fox wants to play tag, or because it is an unconscious automaton physically programmed to do so. True belief, false belief, or no belief — all that matters for survival is the running. PDists ask, “Why do men have the ability to discover that nightshade berries are poisonous?” and answer, “In order to survive!” But if a belief that nightshade berries are the property of the elves, or a purely physically aversive reflex, would accomplish the same thing, then the PDist answer misses the point.

(07b) PDism Is Behavioristic

One reason why so many people find Evolution by Natural Selection an adequate account of the origins of man’s consciousness is that they have consciously accepted, or more often been influenced by, the behavioristic approach. For the behaviorist, thinking simply consists of a certain kind of physical behavior. Awareness of danger is deemed to be identical with avoidance behavior, so that if a monkey leaps for a tree when a tiger approaches, the suggestion the he may not be thinking about the tiger is meaningless. Thinking the tiger dangerous means (to the extent that it means anything) jumping out of the way. Fear and pain mean exhibiting avoidance reactions. Intelligence means exhibiting intelligent behavior, which in its turn may mean anything from stalking game skillfully to marking the right boxes on an I.Q. test. Now when I say that one of the fundamental principles of Objectivism is that man has a consciousness, a reason, a mind, I assume that it is understood that these words are not being used in a behavioristic sense. Dr. Branden is quite emphatic about what he means by consciousness.

  That mental processes are correlated with neural processes in the brain, in no way affects the status of consciousness as a unique and irreducible primary. It is a species of what philosophers term “the reductive fallacy” to assert that mental processes are “nothing but” neural processes — that, for example, the perception of an object is a collection of brain impulses, or that a thought is a certain pattern of brain activity. A perception and the neural processes that mediate it are not identical, nor are a thought and the brain activity that may accompany it. Such equation is flagrantly anti-empirical and logically absurd....
  Radical behaviorism is explicit reductive materialism; it holds that mind is a series of bodily responses, such as muscular and glandular reactions....
  ... Methodological behaviorists may wish to deny that they are reductive materialists. But then, as a minimum, their doctrine entails a belief in another, no more promising version of materialism: epiphenomenalism — the doctrine that consciousness is merely an incidental by-product of physical processes (as smoke is a by-product of a locomotive), and that conscious events have no causal efficacy, neither with regard to bodily events nor to other mental events, i.e., one’s; thoughts do not have the power to affect either one’s actions or one’s subsequent thoughts....
  The behaviorist has been conspicuously reluctant to enunciate the conclusions to which his theory leads. He has not, for instance, felt obliged to declare: “Since phenomena of consciousness are illusory or irrelevant to explanations of behavior, and since this includes my behavior, nothing that I may think, understand, or perceive (whatever these terms may mean) bears any causal relation to the things I do or the theories I advocate.”
  When a person puts forth a doctrine which amounts to the assertion either that he is not conscious or that it makes no difference to him (and should make no difference to others) whether he is conscious or not — the irresistible temptation is to agree with him. [05]

So speaks Dr. Branden [06], and there are several Objectivist texts that are explicitly anti-behaviorist. [07]

(07c) Adaptability and Economy

Some persons, considering the great variety of complex situations which men encounter, and the ingenuity which they sometimes use in dealing with them, deny that it would be possible, even in principle for any automaton to behave like that without accompanying and controlling conscious thought.

One critic [08] gives two reasons why Natural Selection should prefer reason over reflex: (1) reason is adaptable, and (2) reason is economical. On the first point he quotes:

“It is advantageous for behavior to be adaptable, to adjust to a wide variety of circumstances. What is inherited is ease of learning rather than fixed instinctive patterns.” [09]

Just so. But what does that have to do with reason versus reflex? It a litter of white mice is divided and half are raised in a cool environment and half in a warm, the former will be built to conserve body heat, with short, chunky bodies, short legs and tails, and long hair, while the latter will have long, slender bodies, long legs and tails, and short hair. “Flexible” genes causing the mouse to adapt its particular build to its environment are more advantageous than “rigid” genes for a particular build. But does the critic assume that adaptability implies rationality? Does he think the mice rationally choose the body structures that will best serve them? If he does, I refer him to analogous phenomena in plants. [10] If he replies by attributing rational choice to buttercups, I give up.

The critic goes on to say that Nature always takes the most economical course. He writes:

[The] argument that nature has no predisposition to favor reason over reflex in higher order animals ignores a fundamental law of evolutionary theory: Nature always takes the most economical course. If the only poisonous substance which confronted man were nightshade berries, then a simple aversive reflex to them might be sufficient to guard us against the danger. But man must also contend with a host of other substances, plus a host of other conditions, which are hazardous to his health.... An automaton might be able to operate under the ecological conditions which confront rational man, but such a being would be extremely inefficient from a biological point of view....

I suggest that this analysis confuses economy of manufacture with economy of explanation. The salmon, after years at sea, returns to its fresh-water birthplace to spawn and die. Marine biologists offer a complicated physical explanation of its behavior. [11] How much simpler and plausible to say that it returns because feelings of romantic tenderness and an awareness of approaching death make it homesick for the scenes of its childhood. Everyone knows what homesickness means. A hundred people will find this explanation perfectly intelligible for every one who can make head or tail of the biologists’ talk of hormone changes and oxygen concentrations.

It sounds like a simpler explanation, and is certainly a briefer explanation, to say that the mouse decides to grow long hair to keep warm, instead of talking about a physiological mechanism for adaptability. We all know what deciding is far better than we do what hormones are and how they work, and deciding is such a simple notion — one might almost call it a logical primary. Similarly with the principle of immunization. Once the body has repelled a mild attack of (say) smallpox, it is unlikely to succumb to a future attack. Someone might say that this is because the body now knows what to expect, and that it is now on guard, and that the smallpox germs have lost the tactical advantage of surprise. Can anyone offer an equally brief explanation, not in germs of consciousness?

But economy of manufacture is a different matter altogether. Here the simplicity is all on the other side. Some people note that consciousness is a logical primary, and slip into regarding it as a simple thing. Why should Nature go to all the trouble of building a complex automatic behavior pattern for survival, they ask, when it would be so much simpler just to give the organism a consciousness and let the consciousness perceive for itself what needs to be done, and decide to do it? If anyone really thinks that devising a consciousness is so easy, I propose a contest. I will construct a “sunflower” from non-living materials, which will turn to the sun for physical reasons, and my opponent will construct one, also from non-living materials, which will face the sun because of a conscious desire to do so. First one to complete his model wins. But perhaps my opponent urges the complexity of the problems facing mankind. Very well. Chess, though less complex than life, is too ramified to make complete analysis feasible. My physical chess-player against his conscious one, both constructed from non-living parts. If he think this an unfair contest, then let him state on what he does base his assertion that it is easier to devise a conscious than an unconscious organism that will cope with the world.

Adaptability and Economy

Objection:
  I really think you have missed the point of my remarks on economy. The point was simply that it is more efficient to have one all-purpose tool than a multitude of one-purpose tools.

An entity may jump away from a tiger by aversive reflex, or jump because of a judgement, based on observation, that tigers are carnivorous. It may avoid nightshade berries because of an aversive reflex, or because of a judgement, based on observation, that nightshade berries are poisonous. But note that, while acquiring the one reflex has nothing to do with acquiring the other, any animal equipped to reason that tigers are carnivorous is necessarily equipped to reason that nightshade berries are poisonous.

Suppose that a species is going to be confronted with a billion different kinds of situations. Developing, by Natural Selection, the right reflexes to deal automatically with all these situations is a process beyond the imagination in size and complexity. The long slow process of culling out failures that finally evolves the evolution of swallows that choose nesting sites inaccessible to squirrels, and the evolution of swallows that hide when a hawk is near, and the evolution of swallows that do not eat nightshade berries are all independent processes. Having the right set of reflexes for facing one kind of problem is not even a step toward having the right reflexes for the next. But an intelligent, rational mind is useful in any conceivable situation. Once it has evolved to meet one set of needs, it is available for all the others. It is the skeleton key that fits every lock — the sure path through the jungle of reflexes straight to the haven of survival.

Reply:
  I fail to see why you assume that, while reason is a skeleton key that fits every lock, a reflex is always a key for one lock only. Many species will modify their behavior to avoid a situation that gave them pain in the past, or seek out one that gave them pleasure. Even flatworms can be “trained” by electric shock to turn left when a light is flashed on. I assume that flatworms are not rational, and that they have no single specialist reflex to cope with this particular situation, simply a tendency, not based on reasoning, to do what worked last time. And this is a very general sort of trait, useful in many situations.

Economy and Final Cause

Objection:
  It is clear why man has survived by reason, rather than by reflex. It is because reason is a more economical tool of survival than reflex, and Natures always the most economical course.

Reply:
  Always? But there are millions of species on this planet, and at the highest estimate only a handful of these are rational. If reason is the most economical path to survival, then we must conclude that Nature, far from always practicing economy, is by habit a spendthrift, and that her use of economy in our case was strictly an aberration. (It surprises me to have to remind an evolutionist that Homo sapiens is not the only species in the universe.)

Objection:
  The comparison with lower animals is not really relevant. Of course a spider manages very nicely without reasoning, just on the basis of a thread-spinning apparatus and a web-spinning instinct (by which I mean a sequence of of reflexes) and a few other things. But what does a spider do? Spin a web, wait for a fly to be trapped, eat the fly (or tie it up and store it for future eating), and wait for the another fly. Another day, another fly. Another week, another web. What does a spider need a mind for? If it had one, it would go mad with boredom.

Reply:
  The PDist argues that the situations man faces are so varied and complex that nothing by a rational mind will suffice to deal with them. If we reply that other species manage to deal with their problems purely on the basis of reflex, he say that their problems are not nearly so complex as ours. And, despite, many amazing examples of animal behavior, he is, of course, quite right. It is unlikely that any chimpanzee in the wild ever has to deal with problems as convoluted as those with which a tax lawyer faces every working day. But surely this misses the point. Man’s mind is not, as the PDist would have it, a result of his complex environment. Rather, his complex environment is a result of his mind. Back in the days when our hypothetical pre-hominid ancestors were in the process of becoming rational beings, their environment must surely have resembled that of the modern wild chimpanzee far more than that of the modern civil engineer, or even that of the modern laboratory chimpanzee. If we need minds to cope with modern civilization, it is because our minds have created modern civilization.

The PDist undertakes to explain the beginning of human rationality by referring to needs that arose later. But this kind of explanation applies only to the work of an intelligent agent. A house built in July has a furnace because of the owner’s future needs, or rather because of the architect’s intelligent anticipation of the man’s future needs. To explain the origin of man’s mind in terms of man’s future needs is to assume that man’s mind was designed by an intelligent being who anticipated those needs. By advancing man’'s uniquely complex environment as the reason for man’s mind, the PDist has in fact conceded the point at issue. 

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue. Readers who prefer to ignore the links in the text and follow the notes on a separate page, may open a separate page with the references here.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet, especially here. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[01] William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature (London, 1802).

[02] See Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (Anchor, 1961); pp. 310–13.
  Alfred Russel Wallace, “Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,” Quarterly Review 1869 (Vol. 126); pages 359–94.
  Wallace, “Difficulties of Development as Applied to Man,” Popular Science Monthly 1876 (Vol. 10); page 65.
  Wallace, “Limits of Natural Selection in Man,” Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (London, 1895); page 204.

[03] Charles Darwin: See last footnote in “History of the Argument.” [James has a much longer discussion of Darwinism and six-day creation, which is reproduced here. He discusses the compatibility of Darwinism with Genesis here. These two discussions there are independent of his discussion of the existence of God, though the second contains some overlap with this one.]

[04] See N. Branden, PSE 30 [The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), page 30].

  See A. Rand, “Intro. to Obj. Epistemology” 5/10/3b, 6/1/10b, d [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 5, number 10 would be October 1966 and volume 6, number 1 would be January 1967. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume. I believe that the first citation should be 5/12 (December 1966)] & IOE 54, 97, 98 [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, the monograph published by The Objectivist, Inc., 1967, page 54; the Expanded Second edition published by New American Library in 1990, pages 62–64]
  [Dr. Branden, speaking for himself, and Miss Rand, speaking for Objectivism, both take the view that ours is the only species of rational animal. I shall follow their lead, although as far as I can see, none of my arguments will have to be scrapped if chimpanzees, dolphins, or Martians turn out to be rational.]

[05] PSE 7–12 [The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pages 7–12].

[06] Dr. Branden’s book, just cited, is an Objectivist text only when it quotes material from earlier speeches or writings that have received Miss Rand’s explicit endorsement. I suspect that the material quoted is from his Albion speech (see next footnote), and therefore qualifies as official, but I have not verified this.

[07] “Objectivist Calendar” 4/3/14aa. [March 1965]
  On Wednesday, March 10 [1965], Nathaniel Branden will deliver two lectures at Albion College in Albion, Michigan. In the afternoon, his subject will be: “The Role of Consciousness in Psychology — A Critique of Behaviorism.”

  A. Rand, “What Is Capitalism?" 4/11/51g [November 1965] and CUI 11. [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1946–1966), page 51]
  ... the collapse of science is all but complete.... In psychology, one may observe the attempt to study human behavior without reference to the fact that man is conscious.

  R. [Robert] Efron, “Biology Without Consciousness — and Its Consequences,” 7/2/12c-13e [February 1968] & PBM vol. 11 (1967) p. 16 [Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. II, no. 1, Autumn 1967, page 16. James’s “vol. 11” is a typographical error.]
  Some reductionist biologists adopt a different position. They hold that consciousness is identical to, that is, the same as, the physiological and physico-chemical actions of the brain.... This position is referred to as a “psycho-neural identity theory.”
  There are two implications of all psycho-neural theories which contradict the principle of reduction.

[08] Mr. Robert Crim writing in The Libertarian Review December 1975. [The quotation from Crim does not, in fact, occur in the December issue of Libertarian Review and I can find it in no other issue of that publication. A Google search turns up only one reference to Crim and LR, and that is in the August issue, a photocopy of which is available here. The remarks quoted and linked to Note #9 may be found in Crim’s “Brief Amicus Curiae in Support of Respondents,” 14-562, 14-571 in Supreme Court of the United States, October 2014 Term, Valeria Tanco et al., v. Bill Haslam, Governor of Tennessee, et al., in support of the Respondents, pages 29-30, and may be read here. The block quotation following the paragraph that begins “The critic goes on to say,” however, is not in that brief, and I have not been able to find it. It is not impossible that it comes from private correspondence.]

[09] Sherwood L. Washburn and David A. Hamburg, “The Study of Primate Behavior” in Primate Behavior: Field Studies of Monkeys and Apes, Irven Devore, ed. (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1965), pages 5-6.

[10] A.D. Bradshaw, “Evolutionary significance of phenotypic plasticity in plants,” Advances in Genetics, (1965) 13:105-55.

[11] N. Branden, “Does man possess instincts?” 1/10/43aa-ff. [October 1962, Intellectual Ammunition Department]
  An excellent example of the type of analysis that is replacing “explanation by instincts” may be found in Morgan and Stellar’s Physiological Psychology (McGraw-Hill, 1950, pp. 402-417). Discussing the migratory behavior of salmon, the authors write:

  Their place of birth and early growth is far up in the headwaters of streams. In their second year they migrate downstream to the ocean and there spend two or three years. After that they reenter the river, usually the one from which they came, and proceed up the river and its tributaries to its headwaters. There they spawn and die.... The question is how they do it.
  The first phase of migration is controlled by light. The salmon has some photosensitive receptors deep in its skin.... In the young salmon these receptors are first covered by a layer of pigment, but gradually the pigment is lost. Then, of course, the photosensitive receptors are stimulated and the fish reacts negatively, i.e. avoids light. Since the upper streams are shallow, this light-avoidance reaction eventually takes the salmon downstream to the deep ocean, where it gets away from a lot of light. Because the waters of the river emptying into the ocean are somewhat colder, contain somewhat more oxygen, and are less salty, the salmon tends to stay in the general region of the ocean in which the river runs.
  Eventually the salmon matures sexually and its gonads put out more sex hormones. These raise its activity and probably its general metabolism, which in turn leads it to choose the colder and more oxygenated water at the mouth of the river. Once the salmon gets back into the river, it has a strong tendency to swim against the current, a reaction known as a rheotropism. As the fish swims upstream and comes to each branch of the river, it chooses the one that is colder.... The salmon arrives eventually at one of the headwaters of the stream, usually the one that is coldest. There it lays its eggs and dies, thus closing one cycle and beginning another. Because of the factor of temperature in the route of migration upstream, it turns out that salmon tend to return to the same places in which they were born. Thus what may seem to be a mysterious instinct or phenomenal memory for their places of birth is really a matter of reaction to particular stimuli in their environment.