Naturalism vs Evolution?

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Does evolution undermine naturalism?

http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/004/11.37.html

Read the link and then respond.

Yeah, complete bull. Even from a Christian standpoint, complete bull. And it displays an astonishing inability to comprehend views other than his own.

Could you be more specific?

there is nothing about evolution that would require a god.

but then there is nothing about life that would require a god either

I could, but it was a long article and I don't regard at worthy of a detailed rebuttal. It was intellectual crap, and I pretty much feel like leaving it at that.

if you put all your stock in the word God then yeah I guess not.. but first define God, and also decide whether this world would need to be believed in before it was created.. My answere is yes..

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 don't think that the argument stands up, mainly because of his use of the word "belief", particularly "true belief", as if you could hold "false" beliefs. A belief is a belief. Someone else might disagree with it, all the physical evidence might be against it, but it is still a belief, and god is one of them, neither true or false, just a belief.

I also think that he is wrong to think that human beliefs could have no effect on evolution, powerful ones, entirely within a materialistic world-view.

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Last edited by ouinon on 05 Sep 2008, 9:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's too much relativism for me. While some beliefs cannot be proven or disproven, and some beliefs are values (which are not strictly right or wrong), there obviously are beliefs that are both false and dangerous. Nazism, for example.

Dangerous perhaps, if acted on, but false? What is "false" about someone's belief? It exists. It is real. It has meaning for them.

How do you measure the "truth" of a belief? Some would appear to some people to be obviously incorrect, but the strongest measure of beliefs is surely that of survival. Of effect.

I found his article so full of embittered, resentful, and snide non-sequiturs and unsupported remarks and conclusions, at least one to every paragraph, though, that like Orwell I couldn't take it very seriously.

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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 Belief falsified.

Also, there are not many not-interlinked beliefs in your mind, are there?

The updated belief "You can't even relie on the 250 being late" would conflict with "administration knows what they do" if I held it.

Sorry, but if someone tells me they believe that Mars has chocolate rivers and is populated by unicorns and dragons, I will dismiss that belief as false.

Values, of course, are not usually disprovable - for example, do we need a government program to address a particular problem, or is that best left to individuals and the market? That is a question of preferences. People may make cases for or against such programs, based partly on verifiable facts, but also based on values, aspirations, and other choices that cannot be describe as objectively right or wrong.

On the other hand, the belief that the government need not take action on crime because crime has not occurred for the past 4 years can be rejected because it is predicated on facts that can be shown to be false. Put another way - if a doctor believes it is best to remove part of your body and put you through chemotherapy to save you from cancer, do you want that belief to be examined in terms of the factual question of whether you actually have cancer? Or is that belief just another belief, equal to all others, regardless of whether that lump is a malignant cancer or just a harmless cyst or lump of fat?

But I agree with him that it is easier to handle the apparently arbitrary selection of beliefs by history, by evolutionary pressures, if one believes in god, as I do for a year now, because my human neurophysiology, having developed sophisticated "fluid intelligence" over millenia, has a tendency to seek out meaning and pattern, ascribe cause and agency, and I experience this tendency as a "need" which is, I have discovered, only satisfied by believing in god.

Re: "true" and "false" beliefs: I often think that there is an unfortunate double meaning to the word belief, in that it can mean what you think/believe is "true" based on information/data, and also what you think/believe about life the universe etc, which has nothing to do with whether something is "true". And I think that the author of this article is mixing them up.

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Ok, I understand that distinction.

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.