Two years ago I asked this question: How Can We Know One Belief Selected for By Evolution is Superior to Another?
I illustrated the conundrum faced by the evolutionary materialist (EM) with this little back and forth:
Theist: You say there is no God.
EM: Yes.
Theist: Yet belief in God among many (if not most) humans persists.
EM: I cannot deny that.
Theist: How do you explain that?
EM: Religious belief is an evolutionary adaption.
Theist: But you say religious belief is false.
EM: That’s correct.
Theist: Let me get this straight. According to you, religious belief has at least two characteristics: (1) it is false; and (2) evolution selected for it.
EM [looking a little pale now, because he’s just figured out where this is going]: Correct.
Theist: You believe the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis [NDS] is true.
EM: Of course.
Theist: How do you know your belief in NDS is not another false belief that evolution has selected for?
EM: ___________________
Our materialist friends are invited to fill in the blank.
Today I was reading an essay by Alvin C. Plantinga in The Nature of Nature that bore on this topic, and I decided to go to Google to see if anyone had attempted to fill in the blank. And I found this by someone who posts as “Robin”:
Theist: How do you know your belief in NDS is not another false belief that evolution has selected for?
EM: Because I don’t have any belief in NDS; I understand through actual study of the data and parameters how it works and, in many cases, why it works the way it does.
Barry: Our materialist friends are invited to fill in the blank.
Done and done, wanker.
I thought this response was amusing (especially the smug “wanker” at the end), because Robin does not even understand the issue raised by my post, far less how to address it. Let me elucidate.
The Issue
I will let Dr. Plantinga set out the issue:
[Evolutionary materialist philosopher Patricia Churchland] insists that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; this means, she says, that its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately:
Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive . . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival [Churchland’s emphasis. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.
What Churchland means, I think, is that evolution is directly interested (so to speak) only in adaptive behavior (in a broad sense including physical functioning) not in true belief. Natural selection doesn’t care what you believe; it is interested only in how you behave. It selects for certain kinds of behavior: those that enhance fitness, which is a measure of the chances that one’s genes are widely represented in the next and subsequent generations. It doesn’t select for belief, except insofar as the latter is appropriately related to behavior . . . Churchland’s claim, I think, can perhaps be understood as a suggestion that the objective probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given [evolutionary] naturalism . . . is low.
Alvin C. Plantinga, Evolution Versus Naturalism, The Nature of Nature, 137
Now immediately the materialist might object that we are slicing this topic way too thinly, because while it is true that natural selection cares only about how we behave and not how we believe, our behavior necessarily follows from our beliefs. Therefore, natural selection indirectly selects for true belief. Not so. As Dr. Plantinga explains, adaptive behavior and true belief are not necessarily connected at all. He posits Paul, a prehistoric hominid who sees a hungry tiger. Fleeing is obviously the most adaptive behavior. But that behavior may be compelled by a large number of belief-desire pairs:
Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much in the way of true belief . . . Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it . . . or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly recurring illusion, and, hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a 1600 meter race, wants to win and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally a given bit of behavior. (WPF 225-26)
You might object that Paul is a loon and his beliefs are ludicrous and unlikely to happen. But that is exactly Plantinga’s point. Even ludicrous belief, if it produces survival enhancing behavior, will be selected for, and this reinforces the point that natural selection selects for behavior, not true belief.
Plantinga also makes a point similar to that in my original post: “Religious belief is nearly universal across the world; according to naturalists it is false, but nevertheless adaptive.”
So Robin misses the boat entirely when she dismisses the challenge of the original post with: “Because I don’t have any belief in NDS; I understand through actual study of the data and parameters how it works and, in many cases, why it works the way it does.”
Let’s examine her errors:
Error 1:
Robin asserts she does not have any “belief in NDS” (i.e., the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis). Nonsense. Of course you do, and it is absurd to suggest otherwise.
You obviously misunderstood the word “belief” in the context of the post. Wikipedia says this about “belief” in its article on epistemology:
In common speech, a statement of “belief” means that the speaker has faith (trust) that something will prove to be useful or successful— the speaker might “believe in” his favorite football team or “believe in” his dad. This is not the kind of belief addressed within epistemology. The kind dealt with simply means any cognitive content accepted as true whether or not there is sufficient proof or reason. For example, to believe that the sky is blue is to accept the proposition “The sky is blue” as true, even if one cannot see the sky. To believe is to accept as true.
In her comment Robin used “belief” in the “common speech” sense. Obviously, I was using the word in the epistemological sense of “to accept as true.” In that sense Robin obviously has a “belief” about the NDS. She accepts it as true.
Error 2:
Robin says “I understand through actual study of the data . . .”
Well, that’s the question isn’t it? The fact that you believe Darwinism is true (no matter how much you have studied) has no bearing on the question of whether your cognitive faculties are reliable in the first place. You are essentially saying, “My cognitive faculties give me confidence that the product of my cognitive faculties (i.e, belief in the truth of Darwinism) is true.” And that’s like saying, “You should believe I tell the truth because I am telling you that I always tell the truth.” So your argument begs the question.
Conclusion
Reductive materialist Darwinism is irrational, because it is self-referentially incoherent. It affirms at one and the same time two mutually exclusive propositions: (1) A belief in reductive materialist Darwinism is a true belief; and (2) There is no way to rule out whether in any given case reductive materialist Darwinism has selected for a false belief.
So, Robin, the next time you call someone a “wanker” after you think you have just defeated their argument, you might want to find a person smarter than you (that shouldn’t be hard) and check with them to make sure you understand the question, much less the answer to the question.