Religion & Law

Philosophy and Naturalism

By John Pieret

I recently took some interest in Alvin Planting'a evolutionary argument against naturalism, posting here, here and here on it.

British Philosopher Stephen Law has taken on a portion of Plantinga's argument, that Law calls the belief-cum-desire component, and, I think, neatly demolishes it. Very briefly, Plantinga argues that our cognitive beliefs are not directly adaptive but only our behavior is. But our behavior is not just a result of our beliefs but also of our desires. That means, Plantinga contends, that, on a naturalistic evolutionary account, we cannot say that our beliefs are reliable because false beliefs can, nonetheless, result in adaptive behavior. Therefore, if one of your beliefs is that naturalism is true, that belief is self-defeating.

One of Plantinga's illustrations is as follows:

So suppose Paul is a prehistoric hominid; a hungry tiger approaches. Fleeing is perhaps the most appropriate behavior: I pointed out that this behavior could be produced by a large number of different belief-desire pairs. To quote myself: 'Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief.

[W]hen we turn from beliefs to belief-producing cognitive mechanisms of the sort with which we are equipped (e.g. reason, perception, memory), it is no longer clear that there are many (indeed, any) unreliable versions of such mechanisms that, by virtue of unguided evolution pairing them with certain hard-wired desires, will nevertheless result in the sort of sophisticated patterns of adaptive behaviour we exhibit.

Nevertheless, the belief-cum-desire argument, even if not indispensable to Plantinga's larger project, nevertheless constitutes one of the most interesting and initially intuitively appealing parts of Plantinga's larger case, and its loss is significant.

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on July 03, 2009 (boomark / email).