Christianity Today has an interview with philosopher Alvin Plantinga about his new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism:
In the last, much briefer section of the book, you discuss whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between naturalism and the theory of evolution.
I think that’s an extremely interesting and important point, though to argue for it properly is quite complicated; it’s hard to do in a brief compass. The basic idea, which is far from being original, is that if you are a naturalist and think that we have come to be by evolutionary processes, then you will think that the main purpose of our cognitive processes, our mental faculties, is survival and reproductive fitness, not the production of true belief. Evolution doesn’t give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness. From the point of view of evolution together with naturalism, you wouldn’t expect that our faculties would be really adjusted to truth or aimed at truth. They would just be aimed at fitness.But if this is true, if our minds are aimed at mere survival, not at truth, then it’s not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs; and if that is so, then one who believes both naturalism and evolution should reject the thought that our minds are reliable. But that’s a crippling position to be in. Nietzsche is among the people who have suggested this problem. Some contemporary philosophers—Thomas Nagel, for example—have voiced the same worry, and so did Darwin himself.
December 16th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
Professor Plantinga must be oversimplifying (as he indicates), because faculties adjusted to or aimed at fitness would have to be, to a significant extent, adjusted to or aimed at truth as well. After all, it matters a great deal fitness-wise whether the cliff you’re approaching is really a cliff or just an illusion.
December 16th, 2011 | 1:44 pm
After all, it matters a great deal fitness-wise whether the cliff you’re approaching is really a cliff or just an illusion.
Not really. All that matters is that you have a belief that would prevent you from falling off the cliff. A false belief that “works” is just as good, fitness-wise, as a true belief.
Here’s an article in which I summarize Plantinga’s point about this issue: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/should-you-trust-the-monkey-mind
December 16th, 2011 | 2:04 pm
The discussion after that article Joe links to makes some counterpoints. As David Gerrold put it, “We don’t necessarily want accurate maps, we want useful ones. But accuracy is extraordinarily useful.”
The accuracy of a belief is strongly correlated to its utility. But for Plantinga’s argument to work, it has to be the case that false beliefs are at least as likely as true beliefs to be useful. I’ve never seen a good case for that.
Moreover, you can easily imagine arbitrarily complex chains of ‘false beliefs that have useful consequences’, but evolution must economize. Resources are finite and the more complex the system, the harder and more expensive it is to develop (and the more ways development can go wrong).
December 16th, 2011 | 2:46 pm
When considering this issue I think people have trouble differentiating experiences from beliefs. There is good reason to think natural selection would select sensory apparatus that was accurate with respect to sensing those aspects of the environment which might be harmful or beneficial. Obviously this is conducive to survival. Both animals and humans have such sensory apparatus.
Beliefs however are separate from our senses – we form beliefs when we aren’t able to directly sense something. Those beliefs need not be accurate to benefit survival. Indeed, a strong naturalistic case could be made for us having beliefs that are wrong, and yet benefit survival. Atheistic evolutionists make such cases to explain the existence of religion. Yet therein lays the dilemma. Atheistic naturalists agree humanity has long believed things which they consider to be untrue (belief in a God or gods) and yet the persistence of such beliefs would indicate that false beliefs have a survival benefit. If this is the case, then we are inclined to believe untruths – in which case our cognitive equipment with regard to beliefs (and our beliefs themselves, including naturalism) is almost certainly suspect.
I.e., Evolution undermines natualralism.
December 16th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
It is often hypothesized that the reason human minds are so prone to imagine nonsensical supernatural phenomena is that it’s useful in exactly this way. Most higher animals have an instinct which tells them when a predator may be watching them. If this instinct is too readily triggered, it is much less likely to prove detrimental to survival than if it’s too slow. Consequently, the mind has evolved to generate belief in all sorts of nonsense like Bigfoot, witches, elves, UFO’s and gods.
December 16th, 2011 | 3:03 pm
U writes:
“Professor Plantinga must be oversimplifying (as he indicates), because faculties adjusted to or aimed at fitness would have to be, to a significant extent, adjusted to or aimed at truth as well. After all, it matters a great deal fitness-wise whether the cliff you’re approaching is really a cliff or just an illusion.”
If that is the case, then there is final causality to natural selection, which means that evolution is not inconsistent with intrinsic purpose.
To say that the primitive versions of one’s cognitive faculties are aimed at truth so that as they develop they become more adept at the acquiring truth–in the sense that they are by their very nature, or as you put it, “adjusted” to that end–undercuts philosophical naturalism. And this establishes Plantinga’s point that modern science (and evolutionary theory) is not at all inconsistent with the rationality of religious belief and Christian belief in particular.
On the other hand, if one denies that nature “aims at” anything (that is, one takes a position like that held by Richard Dawkins), then it’s not clear why an organism’s fitness for survival should require that it know the truth about things. Take your example. Perhaps the truth about cliffs impedes the evolution of wings by the ancestors of modern birds. So, in this case, the truth does not aid survival. Consequently, perhaps the belief that naturalism is true aids modern scientific progress and thus human survival, just as false beliefs about cliffs aided the survival of the bird’s ancestors and their acquisition of the power of flight.
That is Plantinga’s point.
So, here’s the conundrum for the naturalist: if natural processes, including natural selection, aim at a particular end, then naturalism is defeated, for one now has intrinsic purpose (and final causality). On the other hand, if natural processes, including natural selection, only at for survival and not necessarily truth (when it comes to an organism’s cognitive functions), then naturalism is defeated, for one now has undercut the epistemic grounding for claiming that naturalism is true.
So, whichever you go, Plantinga wins.
December 16th, 2011 | 4:27 pm
Francis J. Beckwith –
No more than it’s amazing that the water in a puddle conforms so perfectly to the surface it lays on. Or that creatures even marginally less detectable against their background tend to survive to reproduce more than more-visible brethren.
It’s already been pointed out. Accuracy has a broader applicability than falsehood, and is more economical than multifarious special-purpose false beliefs. The bias is toward accuracy.
You don’t need a huge bias to have a significant long-term effect. The Coriolis effect on Earth’s atmosphere is easily swamped by local pressure differentials, and yet on the large scale… hurricanes rotate one way in the Northern hemisphere, and the other way in the Southern.
December 16th, 2011 | 4:38 pm
You seem to have missed the point – there is nothing in nature that conforms cognitive equipment to certainly acquire truth.
Accuracy is only necessary when it comes to sensory apparatus. When it comes to beliefs, a false belief may be more beneficial. As I pointed out, evolutionists themselves believe this in the case of religious belief. There is no such ‘bias’ towards truth in nature – indeed, the idea that there is such a bias is itself a belief that could be called into question by the unreliability of our cognitive equipment!
These are effects explainable by physical laws. There are no such laws acting on our belief formation that would require that it be reliably accurate.
December 16th, 2011 | 5:21 pm
Jack Hudson –
I’m not familiar with anything that lets people ‘acquire truth’ with certainty. Various levels of probability are what we always have to go with.
The problem is, the proposed examples I’ve seen are uniformly complex and Rube-Goldberg-esque. Every one is – ahem – strikingly inefficient. Plantinga contrasts a person who avoids a tiger because they don’t want to be eaten vs. a person who wants to be eaten but thinks running away from the tiger is the best way to get eaten. That will have to be a special case – does the guy think the best way to mate with a woman is to run away, too?
The simplest system that covers all the facts will be the truth. (Or, more technically, no system that covers all the facts can be simpler than the truth.) And ‘economizing’ is a major result of evolution.
You left off the ‘some’ – as in ‘some evolutionists’. Others regard religious belief as either parasitical or relatively neutral side-effects of other cognitive features. Others still don’t account for religion in evolutionary terms.
December 16th, 2011 | 5:56 pm
Ray: The water illustration makes my point. You are saying that water has a particular nature–a form, if you will–that tells us what sorts of ends are appropriate to it. But this is precisely what is denied in philosophical naturalism, namely, that there are no formal or final causes.
You write: “Or that creatures even marginally less detectable against their background tend to survive to reproduce more than more-visible brethren.” But that’s not a false belief had by the predators. It is a sensory impression. A belief is a proposition about something, which could be about a sensory impression. So, if I say, “The barn is red,” that’s a belief. The first-person experience of redness is not the belief.
Thus, beliefs have an “aboutness” or “ofness” about them that are non-spatial and non-physical. So, my belief about creatures that avoid their predators because of chameleon-like powers reveals two things about my cognitive powers: (1) my beliefs are immaterial, and (2) I can know the essential properties of other creatures that are universally true of all those creatures who possess the same nature. The latter also allows me to draw conclusions about proper function and final causality. So, for example, when Richard Dawkins accuses his critics of being “ignorant,” he in fact is suggesting that minds have essential properties that if disrupted from being actualized violates the mind’s proper function. In fact, he strongly suggests that those who do this intentionally have acted immorally, which implies that he believes that there are intrinsically wrong acts. But such judgments require intrinsic purpose, something that Dawkins et al claims evolutionary theory requires that we reject. Of course, I don’t think that all, and neither does Plantinga. Etienne Gilson’s work is particularly illuminating in that regard.
Frankly, I’ve never understood how one moves from evolutionary theory to atheism unless one already believes that the only theism there exists is 19th century Second Great Revival Biblical Fundamentalism with a God-of-the-gaps philosophical theology.
December 16th, 2011 | 5:59 pm
I don’t think one even needs to propose such a speculative case. Atheists agree for example that every system of religious belief in every culture that ever existed was wrong, that is a false belief. Yet we see such beliefs to be ubiquitous in history. It would therefore follow that there is a survival benefit to believing false beliefs – and atheists have imagined what those might be. Yet, if we are inclined to false belief to survive, then it would follow our cognitive equipment is wholly unreliable – and beliefs we have about the naturalistic development of our capacity to form beliefs would themselves be suspect. This isn’t inefficient at all – indeed atheists agree with the facts here.
Even if one believed religious beliefs to be ‘parasitical’ or otherwise introduced into our cognitive capabilities, it would still indicate the capacity for our cognitive equipment to readily acquire false beliefs and undermine the reliability of that equipment. These points are trivial responses to the over-arching demonstration of the unreliability of cognitive equipment with regard to belief formation. Many other examples could be given.
The greater problem naturalism has is there no particularly demonstrable reason to believe our cognitive equipment is reliable via evolution, even if one doesn’t except the evidence that it is unreliable in this regard, which means the belief in the truth of naturalism is still undermined.
December 16th, 2011 | 8:07 pm
Dr. Beckwith writes: “Frankly, I’ve never understood how one moves from evolutionary theory to atheism unless one already believes that the only theism there exists is 19th century Second Great Revival Biblical Fundamentalism with a God-of-the-gaps philosophical theology.”
Arch atheists Will Provine (“Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented”) and Richard Dawkins (“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”) would doubtless be surprised by your statement.
December 17th, 2011 | 2:49 am
Amen to Dr. Beckwith’s point. There’s absolutely no intrinsic conflict between evolutionary theory, Christianity or any form of Theism.
Barry Arrington: Provine and Dawkins are arguably the most radical (along with Jerry Coyne) of atheists, in terms of their advocacy of the claim that atheism is the natural deduction from evolutionary theory. I suspect that it’s wishful thinking on their part. (the quote, that you provide, from Dawkins, comes from a statement that he made to fellow atheist, the analytical philosopher A.J. Ayer, but he’s wrong.)
I think that the late Harvard Biologist Stephen Jay Gould, had it right, when he asserted that one can accept evolution and be an atheist or a religious believer.
December 17th, 2011 | 6:15 am
This argument confuses a lot of issues. The human senses and our basic assumptions about how the world works are the product of evolution and obviously served pre-modern humans pretty well in surviving in difficult conditions.
However, our brains are not particularly well-suited by themselves to engaging in philosophy or science — Aristotle was certainly aware of this and philosophy professors like Prof. Platinga would be out of a job if it was not true. Only especially talented people who invest years of their lives in the study of philosophy or science can do it well.
So education is the crucial link between our Darwinian minds and the ability of homo sapiens to pursue truth. Of course, the truth we do learn through education and research is only as reliable as our senses are but it doesn’t present very many difficulties to say our senses are accurate enough and that Darwinian natural selection would have made this so.
On the other hand, if Platinga’s point is narrowed to the “concern” that the various myths and folklore of pre-scientific societies are highly unreliable, I would absolutely agree.
December 17th, 2011 | 7:47 am
Francis Beckwith is right that water IS an example of formal and final causation. It is the peculiar nature of water, specifically, its ‘dog-leg’ shape that determines their interactive properties. So the weak hydrogen bond that joins each molecule to each other explains so many of water’s properties derives from the specific nature of each water molecule itself. It is the form of the molecule that determines the way they interact – the final cause.
It is more scientifically accurate to say that there are formal and final causes in nature and a species of this is human rationality, or human belief forming capacities. Therefore naturalist philosophers, like Searle, Dretske, Rudder-Baker etc., are wrong to deny intrinsic functions and reasons. And natural selection is an impoverished theory for claiming that all functions are extrinsic, as if NS is some sought of all-powerful creative god (Note ID is at risk of making similar errors).
December 17th, 2011 | 8:40 am
Anyone familiar with cognitive psych and perception knows that mind biases information constantly. Reproducible optical illusions are a continuing example of how the mind imposes a false perception on data. For example, the perceptual colors of brown and purple are not spectral colors. Our tendency to impose patterns on data that do not exist are demonstrated most readily in things like the gambler’s fallacy and the ways that so many people impose trends on truly random data.
Anyone who has studied mathematics and statistics should remember how much had to be “unlearned” in order to make sense of advanced math and statistics. Simple things like the delta epsilon proofs for limits in calculus are initially baffling for beginning students.
Of course the mind is unreliable. However, people can be trained to identify these issues and look past them.
December 17th, 2011 | 10:06 am
It seems that Plantinga’s main mistake is in this sentence: “[I]t’s not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs….” His whole problem is with oversimplifying beliefs as true or false, black or white. Of course very many of our beliefs are false, in that they’re not 100% accurate. But that doesn’t mean that our beliefs and reasoning are preponderantly unreliable.
Pretty much every story in a given newspaper edition is false. It contains errors, misquotes, misleading statements, fallacious reasoning, etc. Many of those errors are a result of bias, something basic to the journalists’ thinking. Newspapers are adapted to, or aimed at, earning profits, not telling the truth. But for all that, they are preponderantly reliable. If there was a report about a battle in Afghanistan, then that battle probably took place and at least resembled the report. We justifiably rely on the newspaper’s reporting (to an extent) even though we know that it is biased and every single article is “false.”
December 17th, 2011 | 11:36 am
Francis Beckwith: The water illustration makes my point. You are saying that water has a particular nature–a form, if you will–that tells us what sorts of ends are appropriate to it. But this is precisely what is denied in philosophical naturalism, namely, that there are no formal or final causes.
Who has claimed philosophical naturalism denies “formal causes”? It does deny final cause or teleology and rightly so.
Water does not have “appropriate” or “inappropriate” ends. It has properties. Likewise, our anatomy has properties but not any “purpose” beyond the statistical correlation between these properties and the penchant of passing those properties onto surviving off-spring.
December 17th, 2011 | 3:33 pm
Sure – and there is nothing inherent in evolutionary theory to indicate there is neccesarily a ‘penchant’ for passing on a trait that would incline our minds to be able to discern the truth of a belief.
December 17th, 2011 | 3:34 pm
Mark writes:
“Likewise, our anatomy has properties but not any “purpose” beyond the statistical correlation between these properties and the penchant of passing those properties onto surviving off-spring.”
But that our minds should think this way is not based on a statistical correlation; it is what we know about its nature and proper ends. For, after all, a certain percentage of people in fact do not think this way. Thus, your observation–even if correct about some things–can’t be applied to the very powers you employ in order to issue that judgment.
As for properties, consider this. Human beings have the essential property to engage in rational thought. Suppose we were to disrupt the development of an otherwise healthy human being so that the power to exercise rational thought never arises. We know this is a wrong because we know the way in which the parts and properties are ordered for the actualization of this power which is a perfection of the human being’s nature. Statistical correlation plays no role in this judgment. What is doing the work is what in fact we know about the proper ends of the human being. This is why we consider certain events as tragic, such as when a young athlete becomes a paraplegic in a car accident or a child is born with deformities. In fact, our compassion for such individuals is driven by what we know about the human person, his essential properties, and the role the community plays in caring for such individuals.
(BTW, I am using the term “property” in the Aristotelean-Thomist sense, and not in the modern analytic sense, which is closer to what AT meant by “accidents”).
December 17th, 2011 | 3:44 pm
Barry writes: Arch atheists Will Provine (“Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented”) and Richard Dawkins (“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”) would doubtless be surprised by your statement.
They would be. But that is equally true of Creationists Henry Morris and Duane Gish.
In that case, the number of wrong people is more diverse than I had suspected.
December 17th, 2011 | 5:02 pm
It makes sense that natural selection might create a creature that has a workable, useful understanding of the real world. A “basically true” perspective.
ISTM the harder thing to explain is why evolution should create a human brain that can understand advanced mathematics, especially when you consider that humans have been around for about 200,000 years, and advanced mathematics has only been relevant in very recent times.
I also think there is a kind of “weak” and “strong” version of Plantinga’s argument, which I summarize here.
http://crowhill.net/blog/2011/12/weak-and-strong-plantinga/
December 17th, 2011 | 9:46 pm
Mark
Who has claimed philosophical naturalism denies “formal causes”?
What sought of naturalism are you referring to? Most naturalists, at least those of the physicalist variety, would certainly (though absurdly) deny “formal causes”. Most philosophers of science would not affirm such a crass vision of the world because they know it conflicts with the evidence.
But there are many professedly naturalist philosophers like Brian Ellis, George Molner, Nancy Cartwright, John Heil etc., whom do endorse some sought of final causation (at least a non-Humean dispositionalism anyway).
December 17th, 2011 | 10:48 pm
Sure – and there is nothing inherent in evolutionary theory to indicate there is neccesarily a ‘penchant’ for passing on a trait that would incline our minds to be able to discern the truth of a belief.
And? The vast majority of humans who have ever lived have believed in witchcraft, alchemy, ghosts, spirits, demons and other such nonsense. Those who are apparently able to discern the truth of beliefs make up a rather small elite among humans and even most of their beliefs are only correct in approximation. So I would agree with your broader point — humans in a broad perspective are pretty lousy at reasoning and science. If we were better, Einsteins and Laplaces and Darwins would come around every day.
And to use Einstein as an example of how science gets done, Karl Popper pointed out that the strength of Einstein’s general theory of relativity did not come from the sophistication of the equations he used or from its elegance but rather from the fact that he uniquely and correctly predicted that the light coming from stars would slightly bend during a total solar eclipse.
So anyone who happens to be around during a solar eclipse and who has a telescope and an appropriate filter can test Einstein’s theory if they want to and find that it is at least approximately true because it makes correct predictions. This belief is as strong as your senses are.
December 18th, 2011 | 1:10 am
But that our minds should think this way is not based on a statistical correlation; it is what we know about its nature and proper ends.
I think the argument you have in mind is the following:
Premise 1: [Accept the Aristotlean/Thomist/natural law framework]
Premise 2: The human mind has as its proper end the pursuit of truth
Conclusion: Humans should pursue truth and should not pursue falsehood
Here, though, you appear to be arguing backwards and saying that since I share common ground with you on the conclusion, that I must necessarily accept your premises. But accepting your premises is a costly proposition because you are right that they contradict neo-Darwinian evolution. However, neo-Darwinian evolution is a scientific proposition that can and has been tested and confirmed while the Aristotlean view of nature of untestable.
Instead, for reasons I stated above, some human minds are capable of pursuing truth some of the time and the reason for thinking this is the reliability of our senses.
December 18th, 2011 | 7:19 am
The neo-Darwinian paradigm has been tested and it fails to explain intentions – that is, propositional attitudes like believing, hoping, desiring etc. If there are no final causes in nature then human intentional states stands out like a sore thumb.
December 18th, 2011 | 8:38 am
I think Platinga’s argument is vulnerable to precisely the same criticisms as Miss Anscombe made of C S Lewis’s claim that Naturalism is self-refuting
Firstly, we can talk of the validity of a piece of reasoning, but not of the validity of “reason, itself.” To quote Miss Anscombe: “Suppose that you are asked to explain “valid,” how will you do it? The most obvious way would be to show examples of valid and invalid reasoning, to make the objections which, in the examples of invalid reasoning, show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises; in the cases of valid reasoning, to elucidate the form of the argument: if the piece of reasoning under consideration is elliptical, to add the statements which are required to enforce the conclusion. Whether you would adopt this method or some other (though I do not know of any other), I suppose you think it somehow possible to explain to yourself or someone else what “valid” means, what the distinction between “valid” and “invalid” is? Now if the naturalistic hypothesis (that human thought is the product of a chain of natural causes) is proposed to you, you say: “But if this were so, it would destroy the distinction between valid and invalid reasoning.” But how? Would it imply that you could no longer give the explanation you gave, point to and explain the examples, say which arguments proposed to you are valid and which invalid in just the same way as you did before the naturalistic hypothesis was supposed?”
Secondly, As Miss Anscombe explains, “You say that on this hypothesis there would be no difference between the conclusions of the finest scientific reasoning and the thoughts a man has because a bit of bone is pressing on his brain. In one way, this is true. Suppose that the kind of account which the “naturalist” imagines, were actually given in the two cases. We should have two accounts of processes in the human organism. “Valid,” “true,” “false” would not come into either of the accounts. That shows, you say, that the conclusions of the scientist would be just as irrational as those of the other man. But that does not follow at all. Whether his conclusions are rational or irrational is settled by considering the chain of reasoning that he gives and whether his conclusions follow from it. When we are giving a causal account of this thought, e.g. an account of the physiological processes which issue in the utterance of his reasoning, we are not considering his utterances from the point of view of evidence, reasoning, valid argument, truth, at all; we are considering them merely as events. Just because that is how we are considering them, our description has in itself no bearing on the question of “valid”, invalid”, “rational”, “irrational”, and so on.”
Miss Anscombe (a Catholic) concluded, “I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the “naturalist” hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.”
December 18th, 2011 | 1:23 pm
Mark:
Our exchange is a nice example of two different ways of doing philosophy. You seem to be convinced that philosophical reflection should be modeled after the hard sciences, and there are, of course, many philosophers who hold that view. So, we could frame your position this way:
Premise 1: [Accept that philosophical reflection should model itself after the hard sciences]
Premise 2: Philosophical claims of final and formal causality are not arrived at through a method modeled after the hard sciences.
Conclusion: Final and formal causality are philosophically suspect.
But it’s not clear why I should accept premise 1 if the accepting of it does not require that I abandon what I know scientifically. In fact, what I know scientifically–including the belief that some form of evolution is true–seems to depend on more fundamental beliefs about the powers of the human mind and their proper end.
So, for example, the argument you offer suggests that I have an obligation to accept your position if it is in fact supported by a better argument than my contrary argument. But that means that I can violate my mind’s proper end.
Of course, how one arrives at this “proper end” is unlike how one arrives at knowledge about evolution, quasars, or whether the Patriots will beat the Broncos. But that only means that not all our beliefs are acquired in the same way or ought to be assessed by the same methods.
Rational deliberation, by the way, does not only depend on the adequacy of our senses, but also on the creative powers of our mind to draw inferences from those sense experiences, often employing the tools of mathematics and logic. But the latter two cannot be established as a consequence of scientific inference. In fact, scientific inferences themselves require them to even get off the ground. So, the syllogism you employ depends on principles of logic that are themselves not derived from any syllogism or empirical referent. They are necessary truths, unaffected by the tumult of the ever-changing material universe, and for this reason, cannot be either established or refuted by any sense experience or scientific experiment. And if one employs these principles of logic and math ineptly, one has misused one’s mental powers. But to say that one has committed such a cognitive crime requires an ideal to which one has not measured up. But ideals are ends to which one ought to strive.
None of this, by the way, is inconsistent with evolutionary theory, as Gilson, Oderberg, and others have clearly shown. It is, however, inconsistent with the claims of those–both theists and atheists–who mistakenly believe that theism depends on gaps in science, as if final and formal causality and God himself require “physical space” in order to be present.
December 18th, 2011 | 6:54 pm
Mark
(philosophical naturalism) does deny final cause or teleology and rightly so.
YOS
But then both evolution and natural selection become incoherent. Natural selection quite clearly aims toward adaptation of a species. Ad-apt means “toward aptness,” which is the final cause of natural selection at the species level. At the general level it aims at the origin of species (or is one factor that directs evolution toward the multiplicity of species).
+ + +
Mark
Those who are apparently able to discern the truth of beliefs make up a rather small elite among humans
YOS
Well, that is the important thing: to believe that one is among the elite. Of course, there is no assurance that this belief is true.
+ + +
Mark
So anyone who happens to be around during a solar eclipse and who has a telescope and an appropriate filter can test Einstein’s theory if they want to and find that it is at least approximately true because it makes correct predictions. This belief is as strong as your senses are.
YOS
My cosmologist friend tells me there are many different beliefs all of them compatible with the facts. Milne’s kinematic theory of relativity is one; Whitehead’s is another, iirc.
It is known from mathematical logic that through any finite set of facts one may draw innumerable theories (or beliefs).
For nearly two millennia, one could test the Ptolemaic model and find that it was at least approximately true because it made correct predictions.
+ + +
YOS
I think there is a confusion. The statement:
‘evolution favors beliefs that are “useful” (for survival/ reproduction) and not necessarily beliefs that are “true.”‘
does not entail the conclusion that all beliefs are necessarily false. It only entails the conclusion that not all beliefs are necessarily true. If one avoids a tiger (running won’t help) because he believes it contains the soul of all dead mothers-in-law or because he believes that the touch of a tiger is polluting, the result may be just as efficacious as avoiding tigers because he believes they smell bad.
December 19th, 2011 | 9:13 am
Evolution doesn’t give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness
This is indeed true, however the error made here both by Joe and Plantinga is the assumption there’s only a random correlation between beliefs that are ‘true’ and beliefs that are ‘adaptive’.
Now it is true that some of our mental traits tend to give us beliefs that are adaptive even though they aren’t really true. We feel disgust at food that smells spoiled. But it is not a true belief that food that smells bad is always bad for us to eat, nor is the opposite true, that food that smells good is always good for us. But even though this belief is somewhat irrational, its rational to use it as a short cut because it happens to be the case that more often than not it is true…at least on earth. One could imagine being taken prisoner by aliens and escaping the jails they have on their planet to discover that on their planet the food that smells bad is the only thing we can safely eat.
But short cuts only get you so far and we have the ability to reason rationally. Now its possible that an entity could have excellent logical reasoning skills, but it happens to live in a universe there that doesn’t help adaptation or survivial. Its also possible that such skills have a 50-50 shot of working, or a better than 50-50 shot of working.
I would say that like our more instinctual beliefs, more often than not our ability to rationally deduce true beliefs aids to our survivial. This is reinforced by the everyday observation we all make that more often than not, people become less rational, less sensible about beliefs as they become less and less related to actual survival. The old man in your family who rattles on about Jews controlling the world, FDR knowing about Pearl Harbor, and aliens being covered up at Area 51 also knows how to get that old furnance to kick on properly when the temperature goes really low and knows to call the doctor when he feels that odd fluttering sensesation in his chest.
This also ties in with the fact that while we tend to be very good at getting at true beliefs that aid survival, we tend to be worse at getting at true beliefs that are more abstract and not directly related to our survival. If I were to take Joe out of the US and pluck him in Tibet for the next ten years, it will not be very long before he started getting at true beliefs directly related to his survival. In 5 years or so if we were to visit him, he would probably be able to give us a grand tour of the place showing us where we should sleep, what parts of town to avoid at night, how to find a doctor if we need one, how to avoid getting in trouble with the Chinese police and so on. But Joe is much less likely to have true beliefs about, say, the subtleties of Tibetean Buddhist cosmology. He is unlikely to be able to tell us much about the various schisms, disputes and leaders of Tibet’s Buddhist monks.
But suppose we were to rerun the experiment, instead of letting Joe run about Tibet we toss him in a Buddhist monestary. If he gets kicked out we will assure him he will be shot. He must make due for a few years by living off their good will. Come back in a few years and I’m sure Joe would be able to tell us who was in charge of the place, who his enemies are, who his allies are. Where the guy in charge stands on the last big schism to happen in his lineage. What the guys under him think of the new boss….and which guy cooks the best noodles.
So when the ability to get at true beliefs helps our survivial, we are indeed very good at it. When it doesn’t, we aren’t. Which makes perfect sense from an evolutionary POV. We need to work hard at our ability to reason rationally when we are talking about more abstract philosophy, metaphysics, theology and so on. But whereever you are, its a pretty good bet you’ll learn very quickly, without flexing much textbook logic, where you can get a cup of coffee.
December 19th, 2011 | 9:25 am
Does anyone else get the sense that the Plantinga / Lewis argument sounds awfully similar to the style of argument you get from the evolutionary psychologists? E.g., if A were the case way back in the past, then (according to our genius reasoning) we would expect to see B today.
The anti-naturalism argument relies on the presumption that we can predict what kind of a mind would be produced by natural selection. Where do we get the credentials for such a prediction? How many minds have we created, that we have all this experience about creating minds?
December 19th, 2011 | 10:00 am
Damien Spillane –
Evolution can have some input on the topic, just as, say, chemistry and physics have some input on economics. But intention doesn’t have to go “all the way down” to exist or arise.
As a simple analogy, in nature, blue pigments are very rare. That is to say, chemicals that reflect blue light and absorb other colors don’t turn up very often.
Most plants and animals with a blue coloration actually have larger structures that reflect blue light via diffraction patterns or directed scattering of light. The “blueness” doesn’t go all the way down to the molecules, but blue jays are still colored blue.
December 19th, 2011 | 10:06 am
If you find Plantinga’s argument convincing, you have to deal with the mirror version.
The thing is, people really are generally bad at thinking logically. People routinely, in large numbers, completely fail to correctly assess the risks associated with various dangers. They buy into superstition and magical thinking, they follow fads, horrific practices, witch hunts, claptrap, and so on.
It takes effort for people to think logically about the world and to carefully examine it while putting aside preconceptions. And when we do, we find things that we didn’t expect – things that strike us as really weird. (I can recommend Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World for a discussion both of the human tendency to fallacy and the ways to counteract it.) This is kind of a problem for the people who try to put forth this argument, if you ponder it for a moment. They are the ones claiming that our reasoning processes are deliberately designed and fashioned by (at least) one master craftsThing, so the fact that our thinking is so easily derailed is kind of a sticking point. By their own lights, our thinking ought to be substantially clearer and better.
Of course, the actual case is more-or-less what we’d expect from an evolutionary origin of humanity: A mind that’s flexible enough to learn and correct errors – good enough for day-to-day operations in the kind of environments we’ve lived in – but nevertheless prone to fallacies and illogic when tired, excited, or careless. (If you want to see an example of the difficulty of abstract thought in your own head, check this out.)
December 19th, 2011 | 10:11 am
YOS –
“Having the effect of” and “aiming for” are two different things.
December 19th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
YOS – Natural selection quite clearly aims toward adaptation of a species.
Ray – “Having the effect of” and “aiming for” are two different things.
YOS
But in the classical understanding of natural τελος a cause A cannot “have the effect of” X ‘always or for the most part’ unless something in A “points” toward X. That is, without τελος efficient causation becomes incoherent, and one is reduced to saying “It just DOES.”
December 19th, 2011 | 12:49 pm
It is a contradiction or a logical fallacy to say that “God could have used Darwinian process to create the living world…”
God cannot contradict Himself, and insofar as Darwinian processes are blind forces or random chaos based, God could not have used them to create anything, just like nature cannot use them to create anything.
See quote:
Plantinga claims, not that evolution is untrue, but that the truth of evolution is incompatible with the truth of naturalism. “As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go,” he argues.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/should-you-trust-the-monkey-mind
December 19th, 2011 | 1:25 pm
Jack Hudson
Sure – and there is nothing inherent in evolutionary theory to indicate there is neccesarily a ‘penchant’ for passing on a trait that would incline our minds to be able to discern the truth of a belief.
No but there is in the relationship between truth and a belief about truth. A false belief may have its usefulness. In an evolutionary situation natural selection may filter ‘false belief traits’ so that animals are left with many beliefs that are false, but useful (this does not mean that false beliefs are useful in themselves…..if you generate a random false belief it may quite probably be not only false but decidedly unuseful).
But here lies the problem for his argument. Humans don’t just have ‘beliefs’ but they generate beliefs. So now the evoluationary question is given th amount of investment required to equip an animal with the ability to generate belief’s on the fly, is fitness indifferent to whether or not those beliefs are true?
I suspect that being able to generate true beliefs has one main advantage over just being able to generate random beliefs that may or may not be true: Namely true beliefs are more likely to work in novel circumstances.
So turn the question/argument on its head. If evolution produces an animal capable of creating beliefs, then its likely that its an animal capable of creating true beliefs. If you want to dispute that you should be demonstrating why its plausible to believe that simply generating random beliefs without any regard to their truthfulness would be equally as ‘fit’ as generating beliefs that are more likely than randomly being true.
Monkeyville
God cannot contradict Himself, and insofar as Darwinian processes are blind forces or random chaos based, God could not have used them to create anything, just like nature cannot use them to create anything.
You are saying then that God is incapable of flipping a coin? That would seem to contradict the definition of God as having infinite power.
Also most scientific theories aren’t formulate with infinite beigns in mind. Darwinian forces are random in the sense that they often come from outside the scope of the theory. For example, a comet hits the earth covering it in darkness for a few years. That’s ‘random’ in the sense you can’t predict it happening from Darwinian theory. But the theory would predict what would happen to life on earth. But its not ‘random’ in the sense that it ‘just happens’. The comet behaves the laws of gravity quite well.
December 19th, 2011 | 1:30 pm
@Francis J. Beckwith, December 18th, 2011 | 1:23 pm
“And if one employs these principles of logic and math ineptly, one has misused one’s mental powers.”
Indeed.
December 19th, 2011 | 2:08 pm
YOS –
Or, in the case of natural selection, one could look at underlying causes like population genetics and predation mortality and…
December 19th, 2011 | 5:51 pm
Crowhill
ISTM the harder thing to explain is why evolution should create a human brain that can understand advanced mathematics, especially when you consider that humans have been around for about 200,000 years, and advanced mathematics has only been relevant in very recent times.
This is a very good point. But humans do not have brains well designed for mathematics, let alone advanced mathematics! If they did then mathematics would not have to be taught through years of tedious instruction, practice, correction and more practice. Doing calculus and other advanced math would take place just as a toddler taking his first steps takes place.
So humans do not have brains well designed for mathematics, but they do have brains that are capable of learning mathematics provided the right type and amount of effort is made. What about the human brain makes this so?
Well for one thing human brains have the ability to store knowledge and transmit it to others. As a result our school kids can learn things, like the quadratic equation, that it took us hundreds of years to break open. Since our brains facilitate culture, we can preserve our discoveries and accumulate them letting later generations build upon collected wisdom rather than having to discover all from scratch. That certainly seems to offer some type of ‘fitness’ advantage.
Another thing is our brains have the ability both to operate in ‘received wisdom’ mode or ‘I’ll figure it out myself’ mode. We can avoid eating fish caught last week because our great-great-great-grandparents taught us to not let fish sit very long. Or we can ‘figure out’ what causes fish to go bad and as a result extend our ability to eat fish by freezing it.
Together this adds up to the ability to both create new beliefs and then test their validity. This would seem to open up a serious fitness advantage. returing to Jack’s point:
Accuracy is only necessary when it comes to sensory apparatus. When it comes to beliefs, a false belief may be more beneficial. As I pointed out, evolutionists themselves believe this in the case of religious belief. There is no such ‘bias’ towards truth in nature – indeed, the idea that there is such a bias is itself a belief that could be called into question by the unreliability of our cognitive equipment!
I think we are getting confused about what counts as a belief here. I think a belief would be a statement about how the universe operates. A false belief may be useful but it is only likely to be useful in a very limited context. A species of animal that does not have a “I’ll figure it out myself” mode to its brain, that is mostly confined to an envirnment where the ‘false belief’ is more often than not useful probably doesn’t tend toward an ability to create ‘true beliefs’. (But then what are we saying here? When the bird whose brain is hardwired to think “dark splotches on the ground at night are water” slams into an empty Wal-Mart parking lot, do we know know if he is surprised? Does he really have a ‘belief’ about dark splotches on the ground or is there just a particular behaviorial rule in his head? we don’t know). For humans at least, “I’ll figure it out myself mode” means a belief will likely get stress tested. A person will try to discover a received belief is wrong by testing it in cases where survival is not directly at stake. This trait of human brains is clearly enhances our fitness since it allows us to discover new beliefs that ‘work’. I think its also likely to give us a measure of confidence about our ability to at least approach true beliefs. It very well may be that a false belief may ‘work’ in lots of contexts, but its more likely it will only work in a few. By seeking to test our beliefs from novel angles we increase the odds, but do not guarantee, that we can get closer to true beliefs
December 19th, 2011 | 8:44 pm
Monkey
insofar as Darwinian processes are blind forces or random chaos based, God could not have used them to create anything
YOS
“Forces” are from physics. The term is used in biology so as to pretend to be physicists. Forces are no more “blind” nor “sighted.” What is the opposite of a “blind” force? One directed toward a goal? So if a place-kicker kicks a football toward the goal posts, the physical laws describing it would be =different= from the motion of other bodies? The measurements would differ? The equations? The parallelogram of vectors?
Alas, no. There is no way of telling =from the physics= whether a force is directed or not; save only this: if the force is not directed in some manner, it can go anywhere, and not “always or for the most part” to the point of minimal potential on the manifold. IOW, there would be no regularity in physics, and hence no physical laws. That’s why we call attractor basins “attractor basins.”
+ + +
Darwinian processes are neither random nor chaotic. If they were chaotic, there would be no regularity in their motion =toward= greater aptness or toward multiplicity of species. Instead, anything could happen, and acorns grow into unicorns.
This was nicely expressed by the mathematical physicist, A. Einstein, in a letter to M. Solovine:
“You find it surprising that I think of the comprehensibility of the world… as a miracle or an eternal mystery. But surely, a priori, one should expect the world to be chaotic, not to be grasped by thought in any way. One might (indeed one should) expect that the world evidenced itself as lawful only so far as we grasp it in an orderly fashion. This would be a sort of order like the alphabetical order of words. On the other hand, the kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s gravitational theory is of a very different character. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order, which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori. Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops.”
+ + +
Ray: in the case of natural selection, one could look at underlying causes like population genetics and predation mortality and…
YOS
Agreed. There are always efficient causes, which can be studied to great profit. But without final causes, these efficient causes would not act “always or for the most part” to the same ends.
Francis Bacon recognized this, and rejected final causes not because they didn’t exist, but because they could not be used profitably to make inventions, etc. the way efficient causes can. To understand that a bird’s wing is FOR flying helps us appreciate and understand the beauty and connectedness of nature; but there is little money in that. To understand HOW the bird’s wing provides flight lets us invent airplanes, jetliners, and strategic bombing campaigns.
So it’s not an either/or proposition. Efficient causes help us understand HOW nature consistently hits a target, but not THAT there is a target in the first place.
December 19th, 2011 | 10:28 pm
YOS –
Seems like assuming what you’re setting out to prove, no?
December 20th, 2011 | 9:57 am
@Ray
No, only describing. If the “forces” were really “blind” they wouldn’t “see where they were going” and would not “always or for the most part” wind up in the same place; e.g., the point of lowest attainable gravitational potential; e.g., greater aptness for an ecological niche.
The alternative is that “it just happens.” That’s what led Newton to suppose God has to intervene from time to time to keep the solar system from evolving into chaos, or why IDers suppose that God has to intervene to account for supposedly “improbable” biological structures.
There is a sort of cognitive dissonance at work when people deny finality in nature while at the same time tacitly relying upon it.
http://thomism.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/3580/
http://thomism.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/what-would-have-to-be-the-case-if-blind-forces-meant-something/
December 20th, 2011 | 10:50 am
[...] Plantinga on Naturalism and Evolution » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog. [...]
December 20th, 2011 | 10:57 am
I think Plantiga’s argument works, but it should be modified slightly (more nuance required):
http://infanttheology.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/blank-slates-babies-and-beyond-of-evolution-and-epistemology-part-vii-of-viii/
+Nathan
December 20th, 2011 | 11:24 am
YOS –
That’s not an intuition I’ve ever shared. As Bertrand Russell put it: “Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave…”
If we find a rock that falls up, it means the “Law of Gravity” needs to be changed. The law is wrong, not the rock! I mean, why do electrons have a particular mass or charge? Because we call objects with those particular properties ‘electrons’! We don’t find electrons with the same mass and a positive charge – we find positrons. If we find an object with a larger mass and an inverted charge, we haven’t found a particularly wicked and unruly electron – we’ve found a proton.
I don’t see any “value add” with the notion that electrons have to be actively maintained by God to hold their particular properties… though apparently Richard Swinburne seems to think so, for one.
In what sense does, say, gravity ‘see where it is going’?
(Besides which, the analogy itself is very muddled. Even blind animals can move in a particular direction.)
No. What led Newton to propose that was the fact that he couldn’t find a solution to the equations of motion for planets that appeared stable – and therefore he proposed intentional intervention. He reached a ‘perimeter of ignorance’ and gave up.
Then Laplace came along and – famously though perhaps apocryphally – “had no need of that hypothesis”, because in perturbation theory he found a solution that didn’t need intention.
December 20th, 2011 | 11:26 am
@Boonton, December 19th, 2011 | 1:25 pm
Boonton, you are obviously lacking basic theological knowledge of what God can and cannot do. See Aquinas, Summa, Part 1:
Question 25. The power of God, Article 3. Whether God is omnipotent?
“I answer that,… Therefore, everything that does not imply a contradiction in terms, is numbered amongst those possible things, in respect of which God is called omnipotent: whereas whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility. Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them.”
With respect to God flipping coins, He has no need to, since He is omnipotent and omniscient. Even Einstein knew that God doesn’t play dice.
Likewise, if God is omnipotent and omniscient, nothing is random or chaotic or blind to Him, in His mind, and in His knowledge. And insofar as Darwinian processes are blind, random and chaotic, they are a direct contradiction to what God can do.
Philosophers like Plantinga, and scientists like Beckwith had better ponder the basics of Christian theology before proposing Darwinian heresies.
December 20th, 2011 | 11:29 am
Nathan – When your link misrepresents Dawkins egregiously from the very first lines, I’m disinclined to keep reading. He doesn’t say that ‘people who are concerned to say that evolution is true’ are “pedants”.
Indeed, he says the opposite, that people who don’t say that evolution is true are pedants, because the evidence is so overwhelming that literally nothing could be called ‘true’ if that ‘standard’ were applied consistently, including such propositions as “Paris is in the Northern Hemisphere”.
December 20th, 2011 | 1:27 pm
@Ye Olde Statistician, December 19th, 2011 | 8:44 pm
“Darwinian processes are neither random nor chaotic.”
Ye Olde,
This is not Darwinism in its original, historical or contemporary sense — Darwin himself argued vehemently against any directed, positive or purposeful force in evolution. So did many or most of the other Darwinians and neo-Darwinians, until this day.
The history of Darwinism, since Darwin’s Origin, is full of such confused doublespeak. This vagueness and inaccuracy in terminology now even has a scientific name — it is called “conceptual confusion”, and it an integral part of the theory of evolution. (Go figure.) None of this confusion has been cleared in the last 150 years, and philosophers of evolution are still arguing about the meaning of biological concepts like — chance or random variation, random drift, random mutation, random fixation, random process, random walk, random sampling, etc.
The key, of course, is the meaning of the word “random”, and since most of the Darwinians have been and are atheists, the word to them means what it says — it is an uncaused or truly random and chaotic process. This is also what is being taught in the schools as the true mechanism of evolution.
Also, from the Christian theological point of view, it doesn’t matter at all whether a modern biological theory of evolution may contain the majority of processes or mechanisms which are somehow non-random and non-chaotic — as long as there is even one single process that is truly random in the whole sum of the mechanisms or processes of evolution, it is unacceptable to Christian theology! So are those who mix teleology with randomness!
The modern post-Darwinists who somehow hope to twist the meaning of the words random and chaotic so they mean something non-random are essentially illogical and rather illiterate (grammatically, philosophically and mathematically), especially if they mean the word random to mean the opposite or what everybody else means by it.
And the modern Christian scientists and philosophers who propose that these mechanisms are non-random and non-chaotic should not be saying that such processes are “Darwinian,” because they defy the overwhelmingly atheistic nature of Darwinian evolution of the last 150 years. So if they have indeed discovered the final and the true theory of evolution acceptable to Christianity, or the solution to the puzzle of evolution and the origin of species, let’s call such evolution by their name — let’s hear their theory and let’s judge it on its own merit without the Darwinian conceptual confusion.
December 20th, 2011 | 1:50 pm
Ray,
You might be right. Unfortunately, I am unable to check the original article now. In any case, it is really ancillary to my argument. Rest assured I would recant of my misrepresentation of Dawkins when/if shown to be the case.
+Nathan
December 20th, 2011 | 2:12 pm
One needn’t reject natural teleology simply because one is disinclined to acknowledge a law-giver. After all, Aquinas also reasoned from motion and from efficient causes; but no one seems to deny motion (as Parmenides did) or to deny efficient causes (as Hume and al-Ghazali did).
Fact is, objects responding solely to “gravity” do not fly upwards, and this is precisely because gravity is directed toward an end; viz., the minimization of the gravitational potential function.
Ray (quoting Russell): “natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave…”
Agreed; and it sort of pulls the rug out from under Hawking, who claimed that the laws of physics could =cause= the universe to come into being. Russell is perfectly correct. Natural laws are mere descriptions; but they are descriptions of =something= already present in nature, as Einstein noted. And it is precisely the regularity of the behavior of natures that indicates the τελος. That behavior would not even be considered a =law= unless it obtained “always or for the most part.”
Ray: “In what sense does, say, gravity ‘see where it is going’?”
In the metaphorical sense. That was why quotation marks were used. Oh, the tone-deafness of the Late Modern to non-literal speech!
Specifically, matter is a certain state of the relativistic ether (i.e., the field of Ricci tensors) and this creates a distortion in the “fabric” of space-time, so that other matter moving toward its natural position will move down the gradient of the field and minimize the potential function. But that is entirely HOW and takes as given that it WILL move down the gradient of the field.
And do not misunderstand Laplace’s comment to Napoleon. My auto mechanic “has no need of the hypothesis” of Darwin in order to fix my car. Laplace understood that for a specific limited task he did not need to incorporate matters that were not even scientific hypotheses.
Or, to return to the main topic….
Since a human being can make a living, find a mate, and reproduce regardless whether he believes in the heliocentric hypothesis or the geocentric hypothesis, there is clearly no evolutionary “pressure” in favor of a correct belief on this matter. One has “no need of the hypothesis.” The belief settled on may be purely empirical (geocentrism) or abstrusely mathematical (heliocentrism) and natural selection will not “see” it. (That “see” is metaphorical.) Hence, the original contention: which is not that evolution leads to false beliefs about propositions, but that it does not lead necessarily to “true” beliefs.
December 20th, 2011 | 5:28 pm
I don’t think the gist of my argument has been addressed. The core trait that should be examined here is not that humans have beliefs but that humans generate beliefs.
If an animal has the ability to generate beliefs, is there any fitness advantage to the ability to generate true beliefs rather than false ones? I think its pretty hard to make a case that the answer is no.
December 21st, 2011 | 9:43 am
Boonton,
Yes, I agree with what you’re saying. Humans certainly aren’t pre-programmed to do advanced math they way we are pre-programmed to recognize faces (for example), but I still find it somewhat remarkable that natural selection would have made a brain that is even capable of the task. I think it’s a weak argument, but it’s worth considering.
Ray,
I agree that there is a “shoe on the other foot” issue here. If natural selection = confused brain and the other alternative (design?) = an accurate brain, what do we do about the fact that our brains really are somewhat confused.
Ye Olde Statistician is right that it’s not an either/or proposition.
December 21st, 2011 | 9:57 am
YOS –
Why? Flesh it out for me.
If you want to say ‘gravity is directed toward an end’ or “natural selection aims for the adaptation of a species” are metaphors, then have at it! If you want to claim them as a reality, though, we still may need to discuss things a bit.
But, should evolution produce a creature motivated by beliefs, then the ability to shape beliefs to reality is an advantage, no? An analogy – if evolution produces a venomous creature, then the creature must have protection from the venom as well. So, a creature that produces and uses beliefs must have the capacity to correct mistaken beliefs.
December 21st, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Crowhill
Yes, I agree with what you’re saying. Humans certainly aren’t pre-programmed to do advanced math they way we are pre-programmed to recognize faces (for example), but I still find it somewhat remarkable that natural selection would have made a brain that is even capable of the task. I think it’s a weak argument, but it’s worth considering.
It’s not at all obvious that our brains are an obvious fitness advantage. In other words while intelligence works great when it does, it requires a huge investment. Our brains consume a lot of energy, their development leaves us very vulnerable for a long period in our life, and even then we run the great risk of being lead astray by their limitations. It’s not remarkable to me that many other species opted for a more minimalist route with less developed brains that come prepackaged with more preset ‘beliefs’ leaving them free to invest resources elsewhere.
Ray
But, should evolution produce a creature motivated by beliefs, then the ability to shape beliefs to reality is an advantage, no? An analogy – if evolution produces a venomous creature, then the creature must have protection from the venom as well. So, a creature that produces and uses beliefs must have the capacity to correct mistaken beliefs.
It seems very consistent with evolution then that most of our false beliefs are those which are the least related with our natural ‘fitness’ in the here and now. For example, no matter what you’re religious beliefs are, it’s undeniable that most of humanity is wrong on the question of what happens after death. Undeniable because most of humanity holds beliefs about the afterlife that are contradictory. A huge chunck believes in reincarnation, another huge chunk has multiple variations on Christian/Islamic afterlife stories while some believe there is no afterlife. Since logically its impossible for even half of humanity to have true beliefs about this, most people are by definition holding false beliefs.
But few people seem to have false beliefs about venomous snakes. No nations have ever gone to war because they disagree over whether or not a viper is venomous. This is exactly what you’d expect. True beliefs get easier to arrive at over issues related to immediate survival and become more difficult as you address issues more abstract. This implies that if we are talking about beliefs like ‘what is evolution’s ultimate purpose, or is there one?’, its very likely that any given answer may not be a true belief, but there is justification to the argument that we wouldn’t expect our brains to be able to find beliefs that are true.
December 21st, 2011 | 3:04 pm
Monkey
The key, of course, is the meaning of the word “random”, and since most of the Darwinians have been and are atheists, the word to them means what it says — it is an uncaused or truly random and chaotic process.
YOS
The solution is not to allow biologists or fanboys to use technical terms from statistics. A random process is not chaotic. In fact, a random process produces overall a determined output, the normal distribution being one example. It results from a great many small causes when the effects combine additively. (If the multiply, you get lognormal; if they combine polynomially, you get extreme value; etc.)
+ + +
Boonton
is there any fitness advantage to the ability to generate true beliefs rather than false ones? I think its pretty hard to make a case that the answer is no.
YOS
It’s not “true” vs “false.” It’s “true” vs “not necessarily true.” Since most beliefs have nothing to do with survival and reproduction, it’s hard to see that there is any “fitness advantage” whatsoever.
+ + +
Ray
But, should evolution produce a creature motivated by beliefs, then the ability to shape beliefs to reality is an advantage, no?
YOS
An advantage to securing food and mates? Why should it be? We are talking about the truth of beliefs, not the accuracy of the senses. The chicken senses the silhouette of a hawk and scuttles for the coop, but not because the chicken has formed a proposition regarding hawks that is true to the facts. It is reacting simply to the fact itself. (“True” is a verb. One must be true “to” something. The Beach Boys told us to be true to our school. Fiction should be true to life. Science must be true to the relevant facts. Etc.)
Remember too that “advantage” is not defined in a universal or objective sense. What makes a feature advantageous depends on what the organism =does= with it. A false belief may be advantageous. This was Dennett’s point, since he regards religious beliefs as false on the face. But if this is true of one belief, it can certainly be true of other beliefs, such as that nature is mechanistic or that τελος does not exist in nature. One may get on well, gaining food or mates, adapting to one’s niche in life, believing all the while that the sun goes around the earth.
Your confusion over τελος may stem from a mechanistic view of nature, shared by such unlikely folks as Behe and Dawkins.
December 21st, 2011 | 4:41 pm
The key, of course, is the meaning of the word “random”, and since most of the Darwinians have been and are atheists, the word to them means what it says — it is an uncaused or truly random and chaotic process.
The only actual random process in science was not introduced until quantum physics in the 20th century. Randomness has, until then, always been about a shorthand way of describing very non-random systems who determinates cannot be measured or calculated properly. In other words, a coin flip isn’t really ‘random’. It’s a lot of applications of the laws of motion and gravity that simply can’t be calculated. The ‘randomness’ of natural selection is the same thing essentially. The comet striking the earth is not a ‘random event’. It’s a quite non-random one given that the comet is just following its path using standard Newtonian laws.
It’s not “true” vs “false.” It’s “true” vs “not necessarily true.” Since most beliefs have nothing to do with survival and reproduction, it’s hard to see that there is any “fitness advantage” whatsoever.
Again what is better from a fitness point of view; the ability to simply generate beliefs or the ability to generate true beliefs? Is generating the belief “snake bites kill” just as good as “snake bites often but not ncessarily are capable of killing”?
You’re right most beliefs have little if nothing to do with survival and reproduction, but its not the beliefs in themselves but our ability to create, test and revise beliefs that should be the focus of the question.
Remember too that “advantage” is not defined in a universal or objective sense. What makes a feature advantageous depends on what the organism =does= with it. A false belief may be advantageous.
Indeed, hence we are right to be skeptical of an evolutionary trait of generating only true beliefs. Let’s imagine two different types of animal. One is like us. It has the ability to generate beliefs but also the ability to act as if a certain newly created belief is true before it has absolutely proven its true. The other generates new beliefs but only adopts them as true or false when they are absolutely proven to be true or false.
The first animal will sometimes adopt beliefs that are false, but nonetheless may be helpful in the right context. For example, “Upon seeing Zog die after getting a snake bite, I’ll guess that all snakes can kill so I’ll avoid them”. The second animal will say “I see Zog died after getting bit by a snake, I cannot conclude just from that he died because of the snake and even if he did it may not mean that all snake bites can kill, nor does it even mean snake bites can kill me…zog may have been allergic to bites in a way I am not etc. etc.” The first animal clearly has an advantage in that he can make use of a useful belief even if it needs revision whereas the second animal may in fact be trusted to never have false beliefs, that trait isn’t much of an advantage if it leaves you indecisive when a decision needs to be made…..
So the question here is because the first animal may adopt novel beliefs that turn out to be untrue, does that mean the first animal cannot eventually get to the truth? I think he can becaue his belief generation system provides for a continuous openness to revision. While a false belief (“all snakes can kill”) may get through the first pass, it becomes less and less likely such a belief could surivive without refinement towards the truth (“some types of snakes can kill, others can’t….some people are more sensitive to snake bites than other people etc etc”)
I think this address the concern that if we can adopt a false belief because it appears to offer us some advantage (there’s a God who lives up in the big mountain), we can’t trust outselves to truely revise that false belief (there’s no God in the big mountain, its just a really big mountain). The best you can do is to assert that while we may trust our revised beliefs, we have to leave open the possibility that they too may be false (the big mountain has a God, but he’s invisible and you can’t detect him unless you use infrared goggles and a ouiji board).
December 22nd, 2011 | 9:33 am
YOS –
But as Boonton has pointed out repeatedly, an ability to correct erroneous beliefs when they fail to work is an advantage. And it doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to work more often than not.
As I pointed out three days ago, this actually seems to match what we observe. Pretty much everything we’ve learned about the universe since we left the savannah has been counterintuitive. Round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, atomic theory, germ theory of disease, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics… all deeply counterintuitive and unexpected. Frankly, in areas we can’t test and have no experience in – my money’s always on the answer being something we didn’t expect.
And yet, when the beliefs we had didn’t work… we came up with more accurate – or at least, less false – beliefs. (See Isaac Asimov’s excellent essay, The Relativity of Wrong.)
That’s ‘fleshing it out’?
December 22nd, 2011 | 11:58 am
It may be helpful here not to focus on ‘big beliefs’ (the purose of life, the meaning of the universe, whether God exists) but on some very simple ones that we can examine. I think my snake beliefs can be helpful in that analysis.
Belief 1: All snakes are deadly.
Belief 2: Certain snakes are deadly, others are not.
Clearly we know that belief 2 is a true belief, belief 1 is a false belief.
But belief 1 may still be useful. A person following belief 1 will incur some costs. He may lose the opportunity to enjoy a snake as a pet. He may miss out on the fact that you can eat some snakes for dinner. Perhaps non-deadly snakes can be used to keep rodent populations in check around grain stores. On the other hand, by avoiding all snakes he will decrease his chances of death from snake bite. Most of the time, the pro of this false belief will far outweigh the cons. Snakes are not that great pets compared to dogs, there’s usually plenty of other things to eat, you can use cats to keep rodents in check if you don’t have mousetraps.
Belief 2 is true and it does seem like it has an advantage over the false belief. But belief 2 is harder to get at. One has to accumulate a lot of knowledge about different snakes. You may have to collect numerous snake stories from your fellow humans or conduct lab tests on the venom of various types of snakes or maybe even risk your life by letting yourself get bit by snakes you think are safe.
So now time for philosophy. Some humans have belief 1, others have belief 2. We know that human belief systems are fallable. We know that a fallable belief production system is perfectly consistent with human nature. Knowing that, do we have a right to say that belief 2 is probably more correct than belief 1?
I would say yes, since belief 2 represents a belief that is consistent with a larger range of data than belief 1. Belief 1 may ‘work’ from an evolutionary stance in the limited context that you happen to live in an environment with dangeorous snakes. But since we know belief 1 is false, we also know that it will not hold up very long to scrutiny. If someone who holds belief 1 starts talking to everyone in the world about snakes, he is going to start encountering people who got bite by snakes and didn’t die. He may even witness this directly, he may even accidently get bite by a snake and not die himself. The false belief is less likely to work over the long run. So there is reason to believe our ability to arrive at true beliefs is real, if not guranteed. But that assumes the belief is about the real world that we live in. Beliefs about an ‘unreal world’ would not be subject to this because there’s no feedback to cause false beliefs to break down.
Consider beliefs about the planet Mars 100-300 years ago. There were many beliefs, most or all of them false. But Mars did not exist as part of our ‘real world’. One person could imagine there were people there, another monsters with three eyes, another monsters who were 100 feet tall and so on. As long as no one actually went to Mars, no actual cameras were sent there, these false beliefs could flourish with no corrections at all. Only by making Mars part of ‘our real world’ by actually looking at it with good telescopes, sending probes to it to report back, did false beliefs start to break apart. It’s not that true beliefs were discovered as much as they were filtered. Out of thousands or more beliefs, the ones killed first and foremost by interaction with the real world are false ones.
So now turn to ‘big beliefs’ such as ‘does God exist’. Evolutionary theory should say that we should be skeptical of our ability to answer that with a true belief provided we maintain a definition of God as some type of entity that stands outside our normal ‘real world’. A strict reading of Genesis can be rejected for evolutionary history because science has brought the study of fossils and dating into our ‘real world’. But the more metaphysical question of was this all intentional or not cannot be answered reliably. Beliefs about these answers are likely to multiply just as beliefs about Mars did and without any ‘check’ from the real world there’s nothing to kill off the false beliefs in order to get at the true ones (or more true ones).
December 22nd, 2011 | 1:25 pm
Re: Boonton December 21st, 2011 | 4:41 pm
“In other words, a coin flip isn’t really ‘random’. It’s a lot of applications of the laws of motion and gravity that simply can’t be calculated. The ‘randomness’ of natural selection is the same thing essentially.”
The topic of randomness has puzzled man since the pre-historic times and it still puzzles most people, including philosophers, scientists and evolutionary biologists. Einstein’s dice quote (from his letter 1926 letter to Max Born) denies randomness even to quantum mechanics, and to Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, thus resulting in a long lasting controversy between the two schools.
Likewise, the Darwinian confusion about the randomness of natural selection or some of its sub-processes is at the heart of the controversy, and most evolutionary biologists don’t even want to acknowledge that there is a deep problem with their own understanding of the underlying mechanisms of their theory or theories, effectively rendering these theories of evolution not a “fact” but a rather dubious non-explanatory or nonsensical proposition.
But the bottom line is that many or most evolutionary biologists have adopted a clear atheistic meaning of randomness akin to pure chaotic chance which then to some more or less significant degree somehow mysteriously creates all this wonderful life that Darwin so poetic about. However, unless these scientists can give their “random” mechanism some real precisely defined “scientific” meaning, such explanation of evolution by random chance is akin to mere magic.
The whole modern endeavour to impose on science and especially on biology “methodological naturalism,” or an aura of naturalism, (essentially by redefining, twisting, or hiding the common sense meaning of words), is nothing but hypocritical humbug which is aimed at hiding God from nature and from the minds of people. The result is clear — such science then becomes a real humbug drowning in all sorts of dualisms and mind-boggling doublespeak.
December 22nd, 2011 | 1:58 pm
Ray
“an ability to correct erroneous beliefs when they fail to work is an advantage.”
YOS
In what way is it “advantageous”? We’re not talking about the ability to obtain more accurate data: e.g., that this snake is deadly but that one is not. And the only “advantages” that matter are those that enable one to secure food and mates. Running from the rustling grass because you =believe= there may be a lion in there is just as effective as running from the rustling grass because you =know= there is a lion in there.
IOW, Dennett’s original point stands: evolution alone shapes us toward =useful= beliefs, not necessarily toward true ones. (And not, be it added, necessarily toward false one, either.)
+ + +
BTW, “towards” is a telos-word.
I’m still trying to figure out your problem with natural laws moving “always or for the most part” toward an end. And I suspect it may be because you think Paley’s “watch” thought experiment is a teleological argument.
The Early Modern rejection of finality in nature is part of what led to the “traditional” problems regarding causation/correlation, induction, etc. that got Hume so hot and bothered.
Whitehead argued that the “problem of induction” is due to the mechanistic concept of matter. “If the cause in itself discloses no information as to the effect, so that the first invention of it must be entirely arbitrary, it follows at once that science is impossible, except in the sense of establishing entirely arbitrary connections which are not warranted by anything intrinsic to the natures either of causes or effects”
– Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p.4
For more detail, see here:
http://www.epsociety.org/userfiles/art-Feser%20%28Teleology%29%281%29.pdf
December 22nd, 2011 | 3:11 pm
Monkeyville
The topic of randomness has puzzled man since the pre-historic times and it still puzzles most people, including philosophers, scientists and evolutionary biologists.
Yes but I think its less applicable here than you think. Throwing dice is just an expression, its not really a random activity. Where the dice ends up depends on very non-random factors like the weight of the dice, gravity, the force of the throw and so on. But since none of that can be calculated the gambler uses randomness in his model.
Randomness is also used for factors that enter from ‘outside the model’. The example I used is a comet hitting the earth. It’s random only in the sense that Darwianian theory doesn’t tell us when and how comets will hit the earth. The event is treated as random but it really isn’t. The comet behaves according to the laws of motion.
The place I’m aware of randomness really being an essential part of science’s theory of nature is in quantum physics. Everywhere else its just a shorthand way to handle calculations that are either too tedious or too difficult ot actually do.
Ye Olde Statistician
IOW, Dennett’s original point stands: evolution alone shapes us toward =useful= beliefs, not necessarily toward true ones. (And not, be it added, necessarily toward false one, either.)
All things being equal, it would seem true beliefs about the real world tend to be more useful than false ones.
December 22nd, 2011 | 8:49 pm
[I]All things being equal, it would seem true beliefs about the real world tend to be more useful than false ones.[/I]
Adam Apple sees the grass rustle and runs because he believes it is a lion, but it is only the wind. Does he survive to find food and mates?
Xenophanes sees marine fossils in the mountains of Greece and believes it is due to a primeval world-flood because he knows of no other natural process for depositing marine life in mountains. Does he obtain food and mates?
Albrecht of Saxony sees marine fossils in the mountains of Germany and believes it is due to an uplift of sea floor because otherwise erosion would have smoothed the earth to an egg. Aside from being celibate, could he have obtained food and mates?
Edward Blyth sees that the less fit organism fails to survive and believes that this demonstrates the fixity of type; that is, that species are unchanging because sports are weeded out. Does he obtain food and mates despite his whiskers?
Charles Darwin sees that the better fit organism survives and believes that this demonstrates the origin of species; that is, that species change because certain races are favored. Does he obtain food and mates despite his whiskers?
Fact is, the human race is actually here and is notorious for entertaining false beliefs on a variety of subjects. (Accuracy of observation is a separate matter.)
The conundrum can be solved if we assume that “belief” is not an inherited, genetic trait, but rather a learned behavior.
December 23rd, 2011 | 7:09 am
Ye Olde Statistician
Adam Apple sees the grass rustle and runs because he believes it is a lion, but it is only the wind. Does he survive to find food and mates?
Takes a lot of energy to break into a full sprint and charge for the nearest tree, climb it and stay up there till its safe. If you expend that energy to get away from a lion its necessary but if you are so jumpy that you’re doing it all the time you’re putting yourself at risks. Risks from wasting energy, risk of injury during your sprint, and risk of looking foolish in front of potential mates ;)
Xenophanes sees marine fossils in the mountains of Greece and believes it is due to a primeval world-flood because he knows of no other natural process for depositing marine life in mountains. Does he obtain food and mates?
A better example because its a belief that’s of the real world but much less connected to direct survival. What’s important, though, is not the particular belief but the mechanism we have of generating a belief and then revising or refining it going foward.
Since Xenophanes’s survivial doesn’t directly depend on the truthfulness of that belief, he has much less incentive to correct it. In fact it might work to *not* correct it. If some younger philosopher is pushing a more true belief about fossils, Xenophanes might find his luck with the ladies is better if he has the young philosopher dismissed as a lunatic rather than admitting its a better belief.
But its still a belief about the real world. That means, since its a false belief, the more you push it the greater the odds are it will start to break down under scrutiny. Xenophanes, though, may resist pushing it a bit more because of its looser connection to actual survivial. Adam Apple, in contrast, has a real problem if he mistakes rustling for a lion too often.
The conundrum can be solved if we assume that “belief” is not an inherited, genetic trait, but rather a learned behavior.
I don’t disagree. A handful of ‘beliefs’ seem to be genetic. It seems, for example, that nearly all humans have an inbred fear of snakes. It’s not very strong and can easily be ‘unlearned’ but it spans most cultures that have been studied, appears even in infancy and almost certainly carries over from primate days. Snakes are a huge problem for primates and a lot of communication they do entails warning each other about snakes in the area. In the developed world its really easy to loose track of just how much of a problem snakes can be if you’re nearly naked, living near and in trees.
But unlike many other animals, most of our beliefs are no inherited but our process of making beliefs is. As I pointed out we have roughly two systems for making beliefs….one is “I’ll figure it out myself” and the other is “I’ll believe what everyone else does”. The latter has plenty of cons clearly but it has several interesting pros. For one thing its fast and more importantly it allows humans to accumulate beliefs from the “I’ll figure it out myself” process. This duel system requires our very large brains which inturn require a very long period of learning and require lots of energy. From an evolutionary point of view we are something of a ‘Hail Mary pass’.
Anyway, the question raised in this thread was given that we may adopt false beliefs should we have any confidence in our beliefs about evolution? I think the reason this question appeals to Joe and others is that it sounds like a clever way to overturn evolution, in reality its just nihilism. If you overturn evolution because you just can’t trust our belief system, well any other belief also gets overturned too.
My position here is that we have a ‘natural belief selection’ process that constantly churns our beliefs reaffirming some, rejecting others. In that process, you can view beliefs themselves as a type of species. The false belief is at the distinct disadvantage in ‘churning’ as it will probably become less and less viable when viewed from different angles. The true belief is at an advantage because when you approach it from an odd angle, it maintains its consistency.
The “all snakes are deadly” and “some snakes are deadly” is an example of why this ‘churning of beliefs’ process is a trait with a lot of fitness potential. We have very good reason to think ‘churning’ beliefs will get us closer to true beliefs and reject false ones.
But the only problem with this is that in order for a false belief to get rejected in the churning process, it must relate to the actual world. Xenophanes’s belief about a world flood is not directly related to survival but it is related to the real world. When other ‘angles’ are examined, the belief starts to look less consistent, less plausible. It’s probably an evolutionary trait that we like beliefs less and less as they appear less and less consistent with the real world.
What happens with beliefs that have little or no connection to the ‘real world’? Well I’m sure they churn a lot but they don’t become inconsistent. Like it or not many religious beliefs are like that. What did the Greeeks believe about gods? That they existed but you couldn’t see them, detect them. They interacted with the real world but in random ways that you couldn’t predict. In other words, you had a belief that could be churned a lot but almost never disproven. As a result, this ‘process’ is not very trustworthy when it comes to beliefs like that. The Greeks didn’t have very good reasons for believing in gods and at the end didn’t have very good reasons for rejecting the gods. It’s much harder to say they were right about those beliefs than it is to map out a progression of bleiefs about fossils as getting closer to the truth over time.
December 23rd, 2011 | 1:49 pm
Boonton, mi amigo, the original point of the essay still remains. There may well be environmental “pressure” that favors accuracy of sensation; but not one that favors accuracy of belief. That’s if you believe that “blind forces” are all that’s involved.
December 24th, 2011 | 10:04 am
YOS –
As I noted in my very first comment on this thread, “But accuracy is extraordinarily useful.”
Are you arguing that accuracy and utility are completely uncorrelated?
December 26th, 2011 | 9:44 am
YOS
Boonton, mi amigo, the original point of the essay still remains. There may well be environmental “pressure” that favors accuracy of sensation; but not one that favors accuracy of belief. That’s if you believe that “blind forces” are all that’s involved.
At its core we aren’t talking about accuracy of sensation. Accuracy of sensation means that the lion biting into you hurts a lot. Knowing the red snakes will kill but the green snakes won’t is not about accurate sensations. Yes there’s a clear evolutionary pressue to be able to see the difference between the red and green snakes but that’s not the same thing as a belief about them being true or not true. whether or not these forces are ‘blind’ (whatever that really means) has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t matter if the red snakes are deadly because they were introduced by a gameskeeper interested in creating an evolutionary pressure against color blindness or if they just happened to ‘fall off a truck’ carrying red snakes through the territory.
I don’t think you can get away from the fact that as long as beliefs have real world consquences there’s an evolutionary pressure that favors the development of true beliefs. This pressure may be tempored by the cost of developing a true belief. For example, it may be less costly to adopt a ‘less true’ belief of ‘all snakes can kill’ rather than figuring out exactly which snakes are and are not deadly.
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