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Friday, January 04, 2019

What if evolution bred reality out of us?

From a brief exchange I had with atheist philosopher Stephen Law on Facebook:

Law
This doesn't sound like your vision of apologetics, Jonathan - which is to follow reason wherever it leads: be it towards or away from faith.

Hays
Speaking for myself, I don't subscribe to following reason wherever it leads: be it towards or away from faith. Reason doesn't have the same status in naturalism that it has in Christianity. According to Christian theology, we're endowed with reason by a wise, benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent creator. According to naturalistic evolution, reason is a byproduct of a mindless process. So why suppose reason is trustworthy if it leads you away from the very basis for trusting in reason in the first place? That's a paradox of naturalism. If it's true, it can't be trusted–in which case it can't be trusted to be true. 

There's a problem when atheists as well as some Christian apologists both treat reason in the abstract, as if the nature of reason is independent of your worldview. But reason isn't normative in naturalism. Reason can't be normative in naturalism. According to naturalistic evolution, human intelligence is the incidental product of an unintelligent process. 

Christianity and naturalism have different backstories for reason. And that makes quite a difference for how we should regard reason. Indeed, eliminative naturalists dismiss mental states as folk psychology.
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Law
No that's a poor argument run by Alvin Plantinga called the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. It doesn't work - even many theists reject it (e.g. Michael Bergmann). BTW, reason is potentially just as much a problem for theism because theism says: your reason can be trusted, but then reason the threatens to undermine theism. So that's the paradox of theism, then! Of course, you do generally follow wherever reason leads, except perhaps when it threatens your faith.

Hays
Sure about that?



For a more technical analysis: 


Law 
Yeh, I know. I have published academic papers on this stuff, particularly the versions aimed at showing naturalism is 'self-defeating' - which is your line. You can even still hear me discussing it with Plantinga in an episode of Unbelievable, I think. As I say, IMO the argument fails. And there are leading theists who agree with me.

Hays 
And there are non-Christians who agree with me (see above).

Law 
Yes we know. But don't go away with the impression you've got some sort of killer argument that deals with any atheist suggesting reason is a threat to theism, or that allows you to discount any such argument. You'd be kidding yourself. 

Hays
I'm quite capable of dealing with atheists who allege that reason poses a threat to theism. I do that on a regular basis.

Law
BTW also don't assume atheists are naturalists - I am the former but not the latter (except on Plantinga's rather weird use of 'naturalism').

Hays 
Well, as Paul Draper points out, 

Many writers at least implicitly identify atheism with a positive metaphysical theory like naturalism or even materialism.


Likewise:

Many ontological naturalists thus adopt a physicalist attitude to mental, biological and other such “special” subject matters. They hold that there is nothing more to the mental, biological and social realms than arrangements of physical entities. 


In the final twentieth-century phase, the acceptance of the casual closure of the physical led to full-fledged physicalism. The causal closure thesis implied that, if mental and other special causes are to produce physical effects, they must themselves be physically constituted. It thus gave rise to the strong physicalist doctrine that anything that has physical effects must itself be physical. 


Law 
Less than 15% of prof philosophers even lean towards theism. Yet only 50% are 'naturalists. So that's fully a third of them that are neither. Including me. PhilPapers survey.

Hays
About that:

13 comments:

  1. The "skyhook" arguments, as Jim Slagle calls them, don't seem so easily defeated just by saying "BTW, reason is potentially just as much a problem for theism because theism says: your reason can be trusted, but then reason the threatens to undermine theism." The naturalist and the theist are not in the same boat. Naturalism as it is provides a defeater for any belief, including itself. But the theist doesn't have to say that reason provides a defeater for theism, or for their skyhook, because it inclines people away from theism. First, does it incline to athiesm more than to theism; if not, the problem is gone. Further, it hardly seems in favor of atheism anyway, save a blip of the last century or so; rather small, historically; and even then, the appearance is illusory, as you note. To be sure, Christians affirm some doctrine of the fall, with repercussions for reason. But the theist still isn't committed to reason being perfect, nor generally unreliable. He doesn't say 'reason can always be trusted' but that 'reason can be trusted some times, even most of the time.' So he can sensibly affirm that reason can be trusted sometimes, can the naturalist? I don't think so, naturalism undercuts any reason to believe anything. The theist is hardly in the same boat! So the skyhook can't be refuted by Law's reasoning as given there.

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  2. "BTW, reason is potentially just as much a problem for theism because theism says: your reason can be trusted, but then reason the threatens to undermine theism."

    A claim with no data to back it up. Furthermore, under theism (and indeed, I'd say to be consistent at all) reason presupposes the existence of God. Thus if reason somehow did undermine theism, you don't lose theism--you lose reason. It no longer has a justification for its validity, and therefore would be toothless. Thus, if Law's claim was accurate, you'd lose the *underminer* of theism, not theism itself. After all, you can't very well take something that is established by a foundation, use it to get rid of the foundation, and then keep the very thing you just obliterated as if it still works.

    Thus, even being as charitable to Law as one can be and granting him as much as one can, at *best* he'd still be left trying to come up with a non-theistic version of reason that actually matters before he could say that theism was undermined.

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    1. In deed, the only way I see that reason could even begin to refute theism is if reason is a necessary result of theism *and* that necessary result of theism is self-refuting. But if Law is going to make that argument, then he'd have to not only show the self-refuting aspect, but he'd have to agree that reason is a necessary result of theism in the first place!

      Which makes one wonder what, exactly, his beef with anything Steve said was....

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    2. Exactly the kind of response (your originial post) I was going to give, only you put it better.

      Law's unargued/unsupported tu quoque does nothing to undermine Christian theism (which also holds that the doctrine of the noetic effects of sin predicts there be a *deviation* from right reason, hence the unbeliever's atheism/naturalism and the false belief in an undermined theism), and only swerves the atheists grounding problem for reason.

      Very typical of Law. It ranks up there with his 'evil God' argument, which Craig annihilated.

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  3. ///Less than 15% of prof philosophers even lean towards theism. Yet only 50% are 'naturalists. So that's fully a third of them that are neither. Including me. ///

    What is (are) his third alternative(s)?

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  4. Others have responded to Stephen Law's criticism of Alvin Plantinga's EAAN. For example:

    https://ojcs.siue.edu/ojs/index.php/polymath/article/view/3054

    https://www.academia.edu/37326741/Response_to_Stephen_Law_on_the_Evolutionary_Argument_Against_Naturalism

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    1. Not to mention, by any objective measure, William Lane Craig trounced Stephen Law in a debate over the existence of God. Law wasn't the worst disputant Craig has ever debated, but neither was he much of a match for Craig.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APfd7B3CEhI

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    2. Thanks for those links responding to Law, Epistle.

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    3. Just attempted to use some of my white belt martial arts Google fu skills. ;)

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  5. 'Less that 15% of prof philosophers even lean towards theism...'

    1. So what? See Steve's link at the bottom of his post.

    2. How many of those philospohers actually spend their professional time thinking about the philosophy of religion? I remember a similar (if not the exact) survey, and of the '3200' odd participants only 980 odd were actual qualified philosophers in contrast to the undergaduates who made up the majority of participants.

    3. On (2), I also remember clicking on the 'participants' link and looking into the first 15-20 names on the list, most of which were made up of philosophers of politics, language, bioethics, and other fields unrelated to the specific field of the philosophy of religion.

    4. On (3), the last survey I saw on *philosophers of religion* showed that 72% are theists or lean towards theism. But again, So what? There is much meta embedded in these sort of surveys that need exploring if any solid points are going to be made.

    On Law's apparent 'goal' to convince theists to follow 'reason' where it leads, which he clearly believes to be away from theism towards atheism:

    1. To add to Steve's point regarding reason and naturalistic evolution's grounding problem, and taking into account the points made by Hoffman (to which Steve linked) regarding evolution's utter indifference to objective reality, let's say that Law's view of the nature of reality is correct, whether or not he can know it through 'reason.' Atheism is true. There exists no God or gods. Naturalistic evolution got us to where we are. As Hoffman (and naturalistic evolution - Hoffman is not controversial on this particular point) says, 'an organism...is tuned to fitness,' which is to say that an organism's 'goals,' 'duties' or 'obligations' lie solely in propagating itself. Surival and reproduction are the *only* goals of naturalistic evolution. Nothing in naturalistic evolution dictates what one *must believe* in order to fulfil these duties.

    2. On (1), now think about this for a minute. Research consistently shows that religious people who believe in a creator God or gods (the latter being significantly less) lead longer lives and (particularly Christians and Muslims) reproduce at significantly higher rates than non-religious people/non-believers. This seems always to have been the case throughout the ages. Natural selection appears indisputably to *favour* such beliefs since those beliefs fulfil the duties and obligations required of an organism.

    3. On (2), so on naturalistic evolution's own grounds, religious people/believers in God hold beliefs that are clearly beneficial for survival and reproduction, are far more efficient in their duties and obligations, and are therefore better evolved than non-religious people/non-believers.

    4. On (3), therefore, Law's arguing against belief in the non-God is an anti-naturalistic evolution position, and utterly incoherent on his own assumptions.

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    1. I've made similar observations before too. It's been quite some years, but the last I heard less than 10% of people in the world were explicitly atheist, and I believe that included those who were agnostic as well. In other words, the overwhelming majority of people believe in some kind of deity, even if they dispute which one it is. The only possible way this can happen if Darwinism is accurate is if a belief in theism gives a significant survivability boost to the believer over the non-believer. What that would be does not seem immediately obvious, however.

      Not only that, but given the argument of the atheist above, the *truth* is that there is no God and yet Darwinism has selected for belief over non-belief. In other words, Darwinism specifically selected *a lie*. And it has a huge impact, given how relatively few atheists there are in comparison to believers. So if an atheist is going to argue both that God does not exist and that Darwinism actually explains the way things are, then I cannot see any way for the atheist to have confidence in the *truth* of ANYTHING. That is why Plantinga's argument has genuine teeth and you can't just hand-wave it away.

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    2. Indeed. The atheist is in a pickle. Natural selection does not seem to 'favour' atheism at all.

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