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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Regarding Steve's Post to Danny Morgan on The Value of Values

SOURCE


A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation

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Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 106 (October 2000): 57-63.

Singer in the Rain
A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation. By Peter Singer. Yale University Press. 64 pp. $9.95.

Reviewed by Nancy Pearcey

Back when E. O. Wilson first promoted his newly hatched theory of sociobiology, protesters doused him with a pitcher of water. Since then, sociobiology has come a long way, baby. Dolled up with fancy new monikers like “evolutionary psychology,” it now saunters boldly into the academy claiming to be not only a valid field of investigation but much more—a comprehensive synthesis of biology and philosophy, a guide to ethics and policy. Many scholars are now scrambling for the lady’s hand, eager to claim her for their own philosophical programs.

Yet evolutionary psychology turns out to be disturbingly fickle, capable of supporting a wide range of ethical conclusions. For even if we grant that certain human behaviors have an evolutionary origin, that does not tell us which behaviors are normative or morally good. In his latest book, A Darwinian Left, Peter Singer joins the line of suitors, hoping to win over evolutionary psychology to his particular liberal agenda. Whether he succeeds is another matter.

Sociobiology originally raised hackles, Singer explains in an interview, because it was regarded as a revival of “nasty, right–wing biological determinism”—a revival, that is, of Social Darwinism, which has long harnessed the idea of the survival of the fittest to notions of progress through competition and the ruthless pursuit of self–interest. In evolutionary psychology, the selfish individual has merely been replaced by the selfish gene.

Interestingly, Singer does not deny this unpleasant view of human nature; indeed, he urges the left to face up to its truth. Leftist utopianism is based on the assumption of the malleability of human nature, leading to dreams of “the Perfectibility of Man.” Nor are these merely idle dreams—they have inspired attempts to remake society and human nature, issuing in the totalitarian state.

But Darwinism implies that human nature is not completely malleable, Singer argues: the left must “face the fact that we are evolved animals, and that we bear the evidence of our inheritance, not only in our anatomy and our DNA, but in our behavior too.” Thus humans possess “evolved dispositions”—for example, to act from self–interest and to form hierarchical social arrangements—and political thinkers need to take these dispositions into account. Not that Singer thinks leftists should give up their ideal of, say, an egalitarian society; but they should understand that it “is not going to be nearly as easy as revolutionaries usually imagine.”

Yet this dark view of human nature is only half the picture, Singer insists. Recent Darwinians have shown that humans are hard–wired by natural selection for cooperative as well as competitive behavior, even for altruism. Singer cites now–familiar studies of kin altruism, where apparently sacrificial behavior on the part of a mother for her child is “explained” as a strategy for passing on her genes. He also describes game theory experiments showing that cooperative strategies—tit for tat—work best in getting what we want. Of course, neither of these examples represents altruism in the ordinary sense; they are merely extended forms of self–interest. Nevertheless, they are enough to satisfy Singer that Darwinism may now be harnessed to support the left’s vision of a more cooperative society.

Does Singer ultimately succeed in crafting a Darwinian left? Not exactly. To begin with, for all his eagerness to be identified as a man of the left, Singer shows a cavalier disregard for the concerns of real leftists. Historically, the left focused on the ownership of the means of production; in today’s “identity politics,” the enemy is no longer capitalism but racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet Singer says nothing about any of these; instead he offers a definition of the left so broad as to be meaningless. “[T]he core of the left is a set of values,” he writes. A person of the left sees “the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in the universe” and wants “to do something to reduce it.” Under this expansive definition, everyone who favors social amelioration—including, no doubt, everyone reading this review—is a leftist.

Clearly, Singer is just not all that interested in leftist political theory. Neither is he very interested in evolutionary psychology, it turns out. For all his eagerness to woo Darwinism away from the right, he recognizes that evolution cannot provide a basis for the “set of values” he wants to defend. Earlier sociobiologists like Wilson had hoped that evolution would reveal “ethical premises inherent in man’s biological nature,” challenging “the traditional belief that we cannot deduce values from facts.” But those earlier hopes have been chastened, and today most proponents of evolutionary psychology vigorously disavow the naturalistic fallacy of seeking to derive “ought” from “is.”

“Evolution carries no moral loading, it just happens,” Singer writes. “Even an evolved disposition . . . cannot serve as the premise of an argument that tells us, without further ethical input, what we ought to do.” Darwinism tells us merely what barriers exist in human nature to enacting a given political agenda, allowing us to better assess costs and benefits; it does not provide a justification for values. And “since to be of the left is to hold certain values,” Singer writes, “Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with whether one is left or right.”

So why did he write the book, one wonders. It turns out that the most important function Darwinism performs for Singer is to debunk certain pre–Darwinian ideas: to wit, the biblical account of human origins and the ethic that goes along with it—especially the idea that humans are unique and ought to be treated differently from nonhumans. That view has been “thoroughly refuted by evolution,” Singer asserts. By positing an unbroken historical continuum from animals to humans, “Darwinian thinking provided the basis for a revolution in our attitudes to non­ human animals.” Thus a Darwinian left would “work towards a higher moral status for nonhuman animals, and a less anthropocentric view of our dominance over nature.” Here we recognize Singer’s familiar profile as a supporter of animal rights (and of euthanasia and infanticide—for humans at least). And here is also where his real interest lies: in supporting an ethic of “impartial concern” for all sentient beings.

But how to support such an ethic? Having ardently courted evolutionary psychology through most of the book, in the final pages Singer drops it suddenly like an old mistress when true love comes along. And true love for Singer is . . . reason. In some unexplained way, natural selection has made us “reasoning beings,” which enables us to transcend the impulses instilled by natural selection. Through reason we are able to develop genuine altruism, not merely kin altruism or enlightened self–interest. “We do not know,” Singer writes wistfully, “to what extent our capacity to reason can . . . take us beyond the conventional Darwinian constraints on the degree of altruism that a society may be able to foster.”

In other words, Darwinian evolution has produced a capacity—reason—that transcends Darwinian evolution. Singer hopes that the insights of reason may eventually “overcome the pull of other elements in our evolved nature” until we embrace “the idea of an impartial concern for all of our fellow humans, or, better still, for all sentient beings.”

Singer doesn’t account for this novel capacity that frees us to act against our evolved nature—he simply pulls it out of a hat. Quoting arch–Darwinian Richard Dawkins, he holds out the prospect of “deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.” In other words, reason is presented as a mysterious capacity capable of creating something de novo, something that has never existed before—one might even say ex nihilo. With this godlike power, we can rise above our evolutionary origins. “Although ‘we are built as gene machines,’” he says, quoting Dawkins again, “‘we have the power to turn against our creators.’”

The eloquence of Singer’s language signals that here we have tapped his most ardent beliefs. This is not Singer the “thinking machine,” as he has been labeled for his cool, calculating utilitarianism regarding euthanasia and infanticide. No, this is Singer the true believer. Here reason is treated as far more than a utilitarian instrument. It is nothing less than the means of achieving freedom—metaphysical and moral freedom. Singer alludes to Hegel, who “portrayed the culmination of history as a state of Absolute Knowledge, in which Mind knows itself for what it is, and hence achieves its own freedom.” We don’t have to buy Hegel’s metaphysics to see that “something similar really has happened in the last fifty years,” Singer enthuses: “For the first time since life emerged from the primeval soup, there are beings who understand how they have come to be what they are.” In short, through scientific rationality, Hegel’s vision of absolute freedom now shows promise of realization: “In a more distant future that we can still barely glimpse, [scientific knowledge] may turn out to be the prerequisite for a new kind of freedom.”

This is an astonishing finale to a book that is otherwise sober and restrained. Singer prides himself on being a realist, offering “a sharply deflated vision of the left, its utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved.” That may be true when he describes the biological constraints on human possibilities. But when he promises “a new kind of freedom” from those same biological constraints, he becomes a flaming utopian, as passionate as any revolutionary.

In the end, Singer’s hope of giving the left a solid basis in science fails—not merely because of ongoing debates over whether Darwinism really explains human behavior but because Darwinism is ultimately irrelevant to his moral vision. Darwinism has its uses in debunking Christian theology, but when it comes to constructing his own ethic, Singer makes a leap of faith to a mystical notion of reason that transcends Darwinian biology.

Needless to say, such a leap renders Singer’s position hopelessly self–contradictory. For the same Darwinian premise that undercuts morality by rendering all behavior merely survival strategies, also undercuts epistemology by rendering the ideas in our minds likewise merely survival strategies. As Richard Rorty has written, “keeping faith with Darwin” means understanding that the human species is not oriented “toward Truth,” but only “toward its own increased prosperity.” Truth claims are just tools to “help us get what we want.” Or as Patricia Churchland puts it, an improvement in an organism’s cognitive faculties will be selected for only if it “enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Darwin himself wrestled repeatedly with the skeptical consequences of his theory. Just one example: “With me,” he wrote, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” (Significantly, Darwin always expressed this “horrid doubt” after admitting an insistent “inward conviction” that the universe is not the result of chance after all, but requires an intelligent Mind, a First Cause. In other words, he applied his skepticism selectively: when reason led to a theistic conclusion, he argued that evolution discredits reason. But since reason was also the means by which he constructed his own theory, he was cutting off the branch he was sitting on.)

Similar self–contradictions are endemic in the literature on evolutionary psychology. A prime example is The Moral Animal, where author Robert Wright spends hundreds of pages describing human beings as “robots,” “puppets,” “machines,” and “Swiss watches” programmed by natural selection. He insists that “biochemistry governs all” and that free will is sheer illusion. He unmasks our noblest moral impulses as survival “stratagems of the genes,” as mere devices “switched on and off in keeping with self–interest.” But then, in a grand leap of faith, Wright insists that we are now free to choose our moral ideals, and he urges us to practice “brotherly love” and “boundless empathy.”

This persistent inner contradiction stems from the fact that evolutionary psychology is essentially a search for a secular morality. Darwinism cut the modern world loose from religious traditions and systems of meaning; the result is a culture adrift in a sea of relativism. Now Darwinism is itself being plumbed as a source of meaning, a cosmic guide for the problems of living. Yet the Darwinist view of human nature is so negative, so counter to traditional notions of human dignity, morality, and reason (not to mention common sense), that there is an almost irresistible impulse to take a leap of faith back to those traditional notions, no matter how unsupported by the theory. For who can live with a theory that tells us that “ethics is illusory,” and that “morality is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends,” in the words of Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson? Who can live with a theory that tells us that if “natural selection is both sufficient and true, it is impossible for a genuinely disinterested or ‘altruistic’ behavior pattern to evolve,” in the words of M. T. Ghiselin?

Peter Singer, for one, cannot. One solution would have been to revive the traditional theism that made disinterested altruism a moral ideal in the first place (albeit with a distinction between humans and other “sentient beings”). Instead, he tries to graft that moral ideal onto the Darwinian tree. The graft will not take, and the result is a fatal incoherence.


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Nancy Pearcey is a fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and managing editor of the journal Origins and Design. She is coauthor (with Charles Colson) of How Now Shall We Live?


http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0010/reviews/pearcey.html

15 comments:

  1. In the end, Singer’s hope of giving the left a solid basis in science fails—not merely because of ongoing debates over whether Darwinism really explains human behavior but because Darwinism is ultimately irrelevant to his moral vision.
    I sincerely doubt that Pearcey is so dumb as to think that Singer is not keenly aware of "is-ought" distinctions, and that his utilitarian ethics were based on science???

    Darwinism has its uses in debunking Christian theology, but when it comes to constructing his own ethic, Singer makes a leap of faith to a mystical notion of reason that transcends Darwinian biology.
    A "mystical notion"? Is Pearcey claiming here that reason is not the instrument by which we evaluate moral decisions, and by which we accomplish moral tasks? No. But she is claiming that Singer is somehow constrained to answer every question with "science says..."

    Needless to say, such a leap renders Singer’s position hopelessly self–contradictory. For the same Darwinian premise that undercuts morality by rendering all behavior merely survival strategies, also undercuts epistemology by rendering the ideas in our minds likewise merely survival strategies.
    As we've been discussing, I fail to see how developing morals as tools to accomplish survival for as many as possible, and to accomplish as little pain for as few as possible, in some way is "self-contradictory".

    Let us grant that our ideas are "just" survival strategies. Does this immediately assign them a lesser value than if they are of some immaterial substance? Or can we not maximize our own survival, and that of our species, and still be rational/ethical? If not, Pearcey sure doesn't bother telling us why not.

    As Richard Rorty has written, “keeping faith with Darwin” means understanding that the human species is not oriented “toward Truth,” but only “toward its own increased prosperity.” Truth claims are just tools to “help us get what we want.”
    Nietzsche and others have argued that reason CAN be used ONLY as a tool to accomplish goals. Of course, what those goals are rooted in is the key question, now isn't it? Imagine that our goal, and our survival strategy, is to cultivate virtue in ourselves and in others. We reason that the more virtuous we are, and those around us, the more successful our societies will be, and peaceful, and knowledgeable. In this sense, is pursuing the goal via our "survival strategy" a bad thing? Of course not. Pearcey is being rather shallow by insinuating that all selfish or egoistic behavior is immoral.

    Or as Patricia Churchland puts it, an improvement in an organism’s cognitive faculties will be selected for only if it “enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”
    This isn't entirely accurate. Natural selection favors whatever replicates itself most successfully, yes. However, chance coupled to selection gave us a mind which had creative cognitive faculties which developed tools and complex social behaviors. What this statement ignores is that some behaviors and knowledge are not instinctive, but learned and passed on through social networks. Natural selection does not apply to memetics or correlate quite so well with social behavior (or else we have Social Darwinism, then don't we?).

    Darwin himself wrestled repeatedly with the skeptical consequences of his theory. Just one example: “With me,” he wrote, “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”
    Yes, yes, we've been through this before, and you didn't bother to respond to me there.

    Simply put, the method by which our minds were made, whether "poof" or natural evolution, tells us nothing of their reliability. As I said, we must test their conclusions against reality, and maintain an epistemic skepticism in so doing, and use what works, and reject what doesn't. It's called learning. Natural selection doesn't work very well at explaining things which are passed down within cultures and societies (knowledge).

    (Significantly, Darwin always expressed this “horrid doubt” after admitting an insistent “inward conviction” that the universe is not the result of chance after all, but requires an intelligent Mind, a First Cause.
    I would like to see her quote in context. So far as I know, Darwin was an agnostic until he died, mainly due to the death of his daughter (that dirty ol' Problem of Evil).

    In other words, he applied his skepticism selectively: when reason led to a theistic conclusion, he argued that evolution discredits reason.
    Wait a minute. This is dishonest. No, he didn't. When something is reasonable, it is reasonable. Darwin expressed angst because so many people could not maintain their faith in God because of his theory, and he said more than once that he saw no reason why one had to exclude the other.

    He became an agnostic himself mainly due to personal circumstance, and not because of evolution. Even if he had, though, it doesn't mean that he found theistic conclusions falsified by evolution. It just means he found evolutionary theory was a natural explanation for the diversity of life on earth, and the historical progression of life forms.

    But since reason was also the means by which he constructed his own theory, he was cutting off the branch he was sitting on.)
    No, Nancy is making Darwin say and believe things which were not necessary, and he didn't.

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  2. Daniel:

    Simply put, the method by which our minds were made, whether "poof" or natural evolution, tells us nothing of their reliability. As I said, we must test their conclusions against reality, and maintain an epistemic skepticism in so doing, and use what works, and reject what doesn't.

    And how exactly does one "test" the conclusions of one's mind "against reality" without presupposing the reliability of one's mind? Likewise, how does one determine "what works" and "what doesn't" without presupposing the reliability of one's mind?

    Can anyone say "malignant epistemic circularity"? :-)

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  3. James,

    Thanks for the response. I realize I'm rather "small fish".

    I argue that we cannot avoid presupposing the reliability of our minds without self-undermining and being self-refuting.

    How does one "trust" the conclusion of one's own mind that:
    "My mind is unreliable"?

    Is this not self-refuting?

    In that sense, presupposing that our minds are reliable, in order to test their reliability (via the scientific method or other methods which imply uniformity) seems unavoidable. Now, it doesn't seem that you have presented an argument that it is possible to doubt the validity of one's mind without being somehow self-refuting. If you have, or anyone you can link to, I would appreciate it.

    Of course, I imply in my article elsewhere that "if it works, use it", and that this is why we are here writing on computers in the 21st century rather than digging burrows and throwing rocks at each other. I also maintain that a espistemic skepticism is warranted by virtue not of which process we are created by (whether evolution or "poof"), but by the fact that we are a part of nature, and so we are by default limited in our understanding and in the ability to know many things about ourselves and our perceptions.

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  4. I argue that we cannot avoid presupposing the reliability of our minds without self-undermining and being self-refuting.

    And this is, actually, an example of a good transcendental argument (unlike TAG).

    P1: The existence of reliable minds is a precondition of the possibility of human knowledge.
    P2: Human knowledge is possible.
    C: Therefore, reliable minds exist.

    This is an anti-skeptical argument, and a true TA (though perhaps it could be worded better).

    Of course the presuppositionalist will question how human knowledge is possible without the Christian God, etc., but then that goes into their whole, bad TAG again. While it says nothing about the truth or falsity of Christianity, it is a valid and sound TA.

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  5. Daniel:

    I argue that we cannot avoid presupposing the reliability of our minds without self-undermining and being self-refuting.

    But that's not what you argued (or claimed, at any rate) above. You suggested that we can tell whether our minds are reliable by testing their conclusions against reality. But such an inference would obviously be viciously epistemically circular: the conclusion that one's mind is reliable would be warranted only if one's mind is reliable in the first place.

    Is this not self-refuting?

    It's certainly true that the belief that one's mind is unreliable is self-defeating. But that's beside the point here. You implied that one can confirm the reliability of one's mind via some process of "testing" one's beliefs "against reality". This is the epistemic equivalent of trying to lift yourself off the ground by tugging on your own bootlaces.

    In that sense, presupposing that our minds are reliable, in order to test their reliability (via the scientific method or other methods which imply uniformity) seems unavoidable.

    It may well be unavoidable, but that doesn't make it epistemically respectable. After all, presupposing that one's mind is reliable in order to argue that one's mind is unreliable also "seems unavoidable"!

    In general, the fact that one cannot avoid presupposing X in order to mount an argument for X doesn't thereby render that argument a cogent argument.

    The real issue here, which none of your comments above address, is the problem of self-defeat introduced by belief in evolutionary naturalism. If you believe that your cognitive faculties are the product of purely naturalistic evolutionary processes, then you have no good reason to think that they are significantly truth-directed (as Churchland, Rorty, etc., have recognized). For natural selection isn't the least bit concerned with the veracity (or otherwise) of an organism's beliefs, only with their behavioural consequences. But once this connection is made, the enlightened evolutionary naturalist has an epistemic defeater for all his beliefs -- including his belief in evolutionary naturalism.

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  6. Yo' Mama:

    This is an anti-skeptical argument, and a true TA (though perhaps it could be worded better).

    Yes, it's an anti-skeptical TA, but not a very interesting one. For any skeptic worth his salt will simply question our grounds for believing P2.

    Someone who doubts the reliability of our minds is hardly going to be moved by an anti-skeptical argument premised on the possibility of human knowledge. A good TA requires a minor premise that the skeptical target is not prepared to deny.

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  7. For any skeptic worth his salt will simply question our grounds for believing [Human knowledge is possible.]

    1) The denial that human knowledge is possible refutes any argument the skeptic will attempt to make against the premise.

    2) [And more importantly,] Any atheist worth her salt will simply question the Christian presuppositionalist's grounds for believing the premise, "If knowledge, then God."

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  8. Yo Mamma, for (1) read "Ignorance" by Unger. Unger makes the case that one can be skeptical about the possibility of human knowledge without claiming to know anything.

    Secondly, the reliability of human minds may be necessary for knowledge, but not sufficient.

    Further, of course reliable minds exist. The question is whether this fits in with a worldview that provides a defeater for reliable minds. If anything, your argument defeats naturalism.

    Lastly, why would a theist worth his salt question Prov. 1:7??? That seems odd.

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  9. Yo' Mama:

    1) The denial that human knowledge is possible refutes any argument the skeptic will attempt to make against the premise.

    Well, if you're going to take that line, you might just as well argue that the denial that our minds are reliable refutes any argument the skeptic will attempt to make against the premise. This merely confirms my point about the triviality of your anti-skeptical argument.

    But in any case, the skeptic isn't the one doing the arguing here. He's doing the doubting. The anti-skeptic is doing the arguing.

    2) [And more importantly,] Any atheist worth her salt will simply question the Christian presuppositionalist's grounds for believing the premise, "If knowledge, then God."

    How this is so much as relevant to my interaction with Daniel, or to my response to your original comment, I can only guess.

    But certainly any atheist worth her salt is going to question the transcendental premise of the presuppositionalist's argument. And any presuppositionalist worth her salt is going to offer argumentative support for that crucial premise, rather than merely asserting it. Such is the nature of atheist-theist debate. So what's your point?

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  10. The real issue here, which none of your comments above address, is the problem of self-defeat introduced by belief in evolutionary naturalism. If you believe that your cognitive faculties are the product of purely naturalistic evolutionary processes, then you have no good reason to think that they are significantly truth-directed (as Churchland, Rorty, etc., have recognized). For natural selection isn't the least bit concerned with the veracity (or otherwise) of an organism's beliefs, only with their behavioural consequences. But once this connection is made, the enlightened evolutionary naturalist has an epistemic defeater for all his beliefs -- including his belief in evolutionary naturalism.

    1) If the evolution of the brain did not yield true conclusions, as I pointed out with tool-making and the ability to learn from nature, then survival is indeed a part of behavioral consequences. If the brain's ability to learn from its surroundings, filter out false conclusions, and make correct choices, were not a part of evolution, we wouldn't be here on computers, and would still be on the African Savannah, hunting and gathering.

    2) You (and all the rest) have yet to show that even if evolution did not select for "learning brains" that it follows that our brains did not acquire this characteristic as a result of random mutation. Remember, as strange as it sounds, that evolution is the coupling of chance/randomness of mutation and environmental effects (and learning events) to the non-chance/non-random selection of those which confer any benefit towards reproduction/survival. So it is quite an onus upon the person who declares that evolution automatically rules out the ability to produce a brain which is capable of sorting out information in such a way as to arrive at dependable conclusions.

    This bar of proof none has even come close to scaling.

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  11. How this is so much as relevant to my interaction with Daniel, or to my response to your original comment, I can only guess.

    I suppose that Yo' Mamma is pointing out that at best, you hope to convince me that evolution is false, or that my mind is not reliable, neither of which are anywhere within your grasp. If they were, and you did, it would still be quite a leap from there to "therefore God".

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  12. And any presuppositionalist worth her salt is going to offer argumentative support for that crucial premise, rather than merely asserting it.

    Then I've never encountered a presuppositionalist worth her salt. Maybe you'll be the first. What is some of the "argumentative support" for the premise "If knowledge, then God"?

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  13. Yo' Mama,

    I have not yet had the opportunity to give Calvindude's essays on the argument that logic necessitates God. However, this appears to be the first and only person that I've seen respond to the challenge with an attempt to justify the premise.

    Perhaps you could evaluate his attempt?

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  14. Daniel:

    1) If the evolution of the brain did not yield true conclusions, as I pointed out with tool-making and the ability to learn from nature, then survival is indeed a part of behavioral consequences.

    It's common for evolutionary naturalists to take for granted that having true beliefs confers survival advantage. But on closer scrutiny, this is far from obvious.

    In the first place, the best any self-respecting metaphysical naturalist can accommodate with respect to intentional mental states such as beliefs is epiphenomenalism: mental states are real, not reducible to physical states, but supervenient on physical states. However, even granting that epiphenomenalism is coherent, it remains that mental states would not enter into the causal chain. They're merely along for the ride, so to speak. Thus the behaviour of the organism would be solely a function of its physical states; its beliefs would make no causal contribution and the content of its beliefs would be strictly irrelevant to its behaviour.

    But even if one grants the naturalist that the content of beliefs can causally influence an organism's behaviour, its behaviour would not be a function of its beliefs alone but rather a function of the conjunction of its beliefs and its desires (at least). Now suppose that the organism has a set of beliefs B and a set of desires D, such that the members of B are predominantly true and B&D results in survival-promoting behaviour S. For any B&D, one can posit any number of alternative sets of beliefs B1', B2', B3', etc., and corresponding sets of desires D1', D2', D3', etc., which also result in S but such that the members of B1', B2', B3', etc. are predominantly false. In other words, a set of predominantly false beliefs can be just as conducive to survival as a set of predominantly true beliefs, so long as the desires conjoined with those beliefs result in survival-promoting behaviour.

    If the brain's ability to learn from its surroundings, filter out false conclusions, and make correct choices, were not a part of evolution, we wouldn't be here on computers, and would still be on the African Savannah, hunting and gathering.

    This, of course, begs the question entirely. For if the argument I've sketched is sound, then part of the reason we're here on computers is because evolutionary naturalism is false.

    2) You (and all the rest) have yet to show that even if evolution did not select for "learning brains" that it follows that our brains did not acquire this characteristic as a result of random mutation.

    This doesn't help you one iota. Certainly it's possible that your mind is reliable by a happy evolutionary fluke. But that mere possibility isn't nearly enough to evade the spectre of self-defeat. You need good reason to think it probable that, given evolutionary naturalism, our minds are reliably truth-directed.

    I suppose that Yo' Mamma is pointing out that at best, you hope to convince me that evolution is false, or that my mind is not reliable, neither of which are anywhere within your grasp.

    No, neither of the above. The aim of the argument is convince you to abandon evolutionary naturalism. If you were a theistic evolutionist, for example, this awkward problem of self-defeat would not arise.

    If they were, and you did, it would still be quite a leap from there to "therefore God".

    I've nowhere claimed that this argument against evolutionary naturalism establishes the existence of God.

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  15. Yo' Mama:

    Should I take your repeated attempts to change the subject as a tacit concession of the points I've raised about your initial comments? ;)

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