Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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In the same thread, Barry thinks he has a gotcha:
| Quote | Hold the presses News Desk! In the comments to my prior post the materialist commenters all swore up and down that it must absolutely be the case that natural selection usually selects for behaviors resulting from holding true beliefs. Yet these same materialists also insist that the vast majority of humans throughout history have been motivated at a very basic level by false beliefs — i.e., religious beliefs and other superstitions.
It cannot possibly be the case that they are trying to have it both ways. Can it? |
Actually, with complex humans having competing goals and aims, social lives as well as analytic abilities, it's very simplistic and stupid to think that merely having it one simple way will ever work.
Generally, when people note that evolution takes the easy way and tends to produce veridical cognition, they mean that the senses are largely sound and that we have the capability of reasoning well through them. Not that we necessarily do, not that social conditions can't prevent it. Does Barry think that we have no inkling of the age of stuperstition, or of the Inquisition? We have jury trials because most people can reason fairly well when instructed to focus upon evidence, and we don't prevent IDists, Mormons, or Scientologists from participating, no matter how loony they are in regions of their lives.
It's the "meta" aspect where people don't get things right all that often. In some sense, it's really quite all right if you're an animist, just so long as you understand the regularities that are necessary in figuring out how the car crashed--say, in a jury trial. But the less that empiricism seems to have to do with one's personal life, the more likely they are to let their metanarrative overrule facts and proper inference.
And no, this isn't something whipped up in response to Barry's BS, I made similar points yesterday shortly after the reaction to his post showed up on TSZ:
| Quote | The man hasn’t played hide-and-seek?
Perhaps if he had he’d know that outrunning the other players is frequently a part of winning.
I doubt that trying to outrun a saber-tooth would often lead to winning.
A better example would be Fred and Barry. Fred wants to know how biology works, what causes similarities between organisms, or in other words, he wants an explanatory theory. Barry just wants to play to the crowd, believe some feel-good claims (whether we find them to be feel-good doesn’t affect the fact that they generally do), and to insist that the belief he had that all life was designed is definitely true.
Unfortunately, evolution explains both for social animals like humans. IOW, we do have the capacity for figuring out what evolutionary processes make sense of biology in order to understand biology as a whole, but people grandstanding and denying the science can do quite well, too.
We seem to have evolved the capacity for understanding the world reasonably well (even if it took a good deal of time to move from naive realism to scientific understanding), and also for denying the same for basically social reasons. |
Evolution tends to get the facts right, as well as simple reactions to those facts (run away from sabertooth, or get a bunch of guys to chuck spears at it). It clearly never gave us Truth as Plantinga appears to be certain he has--does he really think that animists were correct about the world? At the "higher level" humans typically wing it, invoking whatever can be analogized to fit matters. Thus, the origin of life might be some sort of manufacture, or due to some sort of reproduction--by gods, or the earth, or whatever (earth may be a god(dess)).
Evolution never came close to guaranteeing us correct theories, only the empirical bases for these theories. That Barry doesn't get this distinction (whether it was made over there or not) goes to his reactive thinking and undeveloped capabilities for integrating facts and processes.
Glen Davidson
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http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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