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Naturalism vs Evolution?

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Does evolution undermine naturalism?
Yes, Plantinga's argument is right 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
No, the argument is crap 100%  100%  [ 9 ]
I don't know 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Total votes : 9

Awesomelyglorious
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05 Sep 2008, 11:13 am

Orwell wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Hmm... I have read a detailed rebuttal of it, and a number of thinkers have regarded it as worthy of a detailed rebuttal. I can accept that it was intellectual crap, however, justification of that position seems like something worth having. What do you disagree with? He makes an argument and promotes some defenses for his argument, so.... there should be something you can point out.

OK, fine, In discussion of truth and whether evolutionarily developed humans will find the truth, he pulls numbers out of his ass. He tries to argue that two beliefs are incompatible with each other without really demonstrating a decent understanding of either of them, and he disagrees with both the beliefs anyways and has probably never given them serious consideration. He states explicitly that the two views in combination could well be true, but are incompatible. That's just outright stupidity. His assumptions about the likelihood of true vs false beliefs promoting adaptive behavior are patently absurd. He quotes scientists terribly out of context to attempt to lend support to his beliefs.

There's more, but I lose interest in this type of thing.

I agree, the numbers are crap, especially given that few beliefs are so purely true/false. So many are gradations of truth and so on. As well, his actual point, while not entirely wrong, is overstated. Modern psychology recognizes that the mind is flawed, and ties this back to the evolutionary creation of the mind, but it does not say that a false mind prevents all true belief finding.



twoshots
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05 Sep 2008, 5:12 pm

It would certainly be interesting to try to find the numbers for the probability of an animal's beliefs being true or false. Y'knowm given the fact that we would need to conduct such an investigation a posteriori...


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carturo222
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06 Sep 2008, 2:27 pm

LostInEmulation wrote:
I do not agree with the maths. They fail to take into account that beliefs are constantly synchronized with reality. Let's take one I had quite a long time: "the busses of the line 250 are always at least 5 minutes too late." Well, I once encountered one being a few minutes too early and not waiting :x Belief falsified.


Exactly the point I was about to make. We have continuous confirmation of which beliefs are true and which aren't.