lolol 12:00 "This is confused". PERFECT response. I remember watching Stick say this and I was just like 'Stick, bruh, you've missed the point by a few miles'
When I first watched your one-minute video, I was almost sure that there would be someone out there that would find it ridiculous and respond to it. Thank you for giving a more in-depth video on the topic.
“The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.” Patricia Churchland, nontheist philosopher “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” Charles Darwin “If my brain is nothing but a pile of atoms, then I have no reason to believe that anything it tells me is true. Including the notion that my brain is a pile of atoms.” J. B. S. Haldane, atheist geneticist, co-founder of neo-Darwinism
On its own, the Darwin quote can be a little misleading. For historical context, check out this paper I wrote: protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/5wQkCP7qnUjVWKuzctrB?domain=rdcu.be . (Note: one of the letters is misdated, and there are one or two typos that came up in the formatting process - I'm pursuing corrections on both counts).
@@amoswollen3860 Nice article! What inspired you to look to shed light on the context? And what do you subscribe to? (Naturalistic evolution, theistic evolution, creation, etc.?)
@@silversilk8438 Hey, glad you liked it! I decided to write this article when, one day, while browsing waterstones, I opened up Darwin's autobiography and saw the passage where he goes into the doubt. I was reading through the EAAN literature at the time - and still am - so it peaked my interest. I went home, did some digging, noticed that this was a gap in the literature needing to be filled, and lockdown boredom did the rest. As far as my own views, I'm still (unfortunately) fairly agnostic as to the probability of theism over naturalism - I'm only seventeen, and there's so much to read. That said, if you held my toes to the fire and asked me to choose I'd pick theism, and if you held them even closer I'd affirm theistic evolution, too. (Dispositionally, I'm a Christian on account of Pascal's Wager).
Why would believes under naturalism not inform our ations? If any thought T is linked to a brainstate S via a function phi [phi(S)=T], and any action A is linked via the function rho [rho(S)=A], then also T and A are linked through the brainstate. If we have a brainstate S1 that is produced by another brainstate S2, this is equivivalent to a thought T1 being linked with a thought T2 (what we could call reasoning). Since brainstates (and therefore thoughts) can influence each other, our actions are more accurate, if we produce brainstates that model reality. You are correct, that a single thought might not have selection pressure, but any combination of thoughts has. For example, in response to observing a red leaf i might have a brainstate that corresponds to the thought "there is a blue leaf". But only once another brainstate is initiated that correspond to "blue leafs are dangerous", and then "run", do these brainstates inform our actions. In conclusion, your argument essentially just makes the point that the label we put on concepts (is the leaf red, blue or green) is not selected by evolutionary mechanisms, but the interactions of the concepts we create are clearly selected for. So yeah if evolutionary naturalism is true i would have no idea if a tree is a "tree" or a "baum" (german for tree), but any thought of the concept of a tree would be selected for to correspond to the actual experience of a tree.
This video was really well-done. The hardest part for me to explain to people is how naturalism entails semantic epiphenomenalism, but you did a phenomenal job. :-)
professer stickman's idea that religion will always bring people together isn't necessarily always right for instance religion has and can cause people to become social outcasts and even cause martyredom
Very good and respectful response. It seems Professor Stickman was a little too arrogant about atheism being true and theism being primitive that he forgot to make a philosophical argument in a philosophical discussion.
Why do you need to have a soul for your beliefs to influence your actions? My brain appraises the object moving toward me as a car--that is, forms a belief about it; that neurological belief-formation triggers hormonal responses and movement; I get out of the way. No soul required. Belief motivated action; evolutionary theory and naturalism are both preserved.
Don't see why God would fix any of this. On Christian theism God doesn't care about true beliefs, he cares about you having a relation with him and getting into heaven. It's not like all smart people are in heaven and all the dumb ones are in hell. If God can get you to believe that "Jesus is Lord" that's his work done, doesn't matter if you think it's true because you think all the gospels were written in english by Jesus himself or if you believe in God because some fallacious argument, as long as you believe it.
I just want to say that I like your post. I'm not sure I follow your reasoning, but it seems to me that while you disagree strongly, you also wanted to do it respectfully.
No, I don't really think so. If the Christian God is real, than he would want to give us functioning minds to see how the world shows his designing hand. Us seeing this would enable us to believe in him better, and thus we would enter a relationship with him. If the world really was made by God, he wouldn't need to mess up our brains so that we could formulate the Cosmological argument; we would just be able to reason it out with good brains, and create the argument because of its truth.
@@petery6432 I agree there will be some correlation, one could just as easily say that it's evolutionarily useful to form true beliefs over false beliefs. But I think the point of the EAAN is to be a bit more sceptical about settling for correlation because evolutionary usefullness and truth isn't the same thing. But then, similary, relation with God and our worship/adherence/assent etc aren't the same as truth either. Some people I've met who are strong believers are believers because of false beliefs they have and as I understand it that's ok with God.
Even if evolution as we understand it selected true beliefs, we still couldn't use that to justify the truth of our beliefs, because we'd be using one of our beliefs to justify its own truth! Similarly, you claim that your position is consistent because God would've given you a reliable brain (though I don't think this is true because it is possible that an unreliable brain leads to a greater moral good). But, that God exists is one of your beliefs, so you're doing the same thing! Theism doesn't solve anything in this regard!
It’s impossible to give an argument that our cognitive faculties aren’t unreliable. All we can do is avoid positions that entail they *are* unreliable. If the EAAN is correct, we have no reason to think that a given belief is true. This means that the totality of our beliefs is probably false (analogy: I have no reason to think that the age of a given person in this comments section is an even number rather than an odd number or vice versa, but I do have a reason to doubt that the totality of people in the comments section - or even just a majority - have an even numbered age). On theism, this argument gets cut off before we get to the conclusion, because it’s not clear that we DO have no reason to trust our cognitive faculties. The question of whether God has morally sufficient reasons to deceive me is a good one, but also a really complicated one. Have a nice day! :)
@@ApologeticsSquared Fair enough. I'm interested though, if God has morally sufficient reasons to allow all the suffering in the world, how could he not have morally sufficient reasons to allow you to have an unreliable brain? As a matter of fact, a world where we falsely believe that there's a lot of suffering is morally superior to a world where there actually is a lot of suffering, so I think it can be argued that, given theism, it's more likely that we live in the world where our brains are unreliable. What do you think of this?
@@Nickesponja My response, basically, is that if God wanted me to be in some mental state, and decided that deception was a legitimate method to get me to possess that mental state, then He would seem to have an infinity of options available to Him - an infinity of “paths” to get me there. However, He prefers that I suffer less, so He would choose the least suffering-filled path to get me to that mental state. Given God’s omnipotence/omniscience, then I would expect that this path would be relatively painless. But it isn’t. I had painful surgery just a few weeks ago. So, this scenario probably didn’t happen. Why? That’s not answered here. This is an explanation *that* if theism is true, God didn’t deceive me. Not why He didn’t. So, I actually use the suffering to argue in my favor!
@@ApologeticsSquared When dealing with these conversations, we often assume that the rulels of logic hold and if we do then we can make conclusions. If we dont, then well we cant conclude anything, even if God exists, that doesnt tell us whether a given claim is true or false and leads to a very paradoxicl behaviour because this argument assumes logical thinking Also the analogy, just because you dont know which has the majority between even numbers and odd numbers, doesnt mean you couldnt test for it. You could try to find the IP addresses of various individuals and determine their age and if even>odd or odd>even by the end of this process, you could conclude that even if we dont know the rest, its more likely for the majority of the numbers we do know to lead to a majority overall. Note that its not required for us to know a census of all the ages, but would be a matter of liklihood. Same applies to science (of which evolution comes under), we test for it and it holds up. The evidence for evolution is astounding. However religion is far more shaky on this. Stating that god exists or that god has the capacity to provide you truth arent claims we can test for, we merely have assertions of people claiming he can. We could say the bible itself is evidence, but like other historical texts we shouldntt just conclude thats true and weigh it up with further evidence and hrow out the stuff that we dont have evidence to believe in. Sometimes things in the bible are plausible, but we cant test for them yet people believe it anyway, science provides both the plausibility as well as demonsrating it in the real world, and when evidence comes to light tha something is wrong with a subpart of science, then the model changes to fit that. As far as trusting in something, I would say most people believe in Science because it works (for example, when i type on a keyboard, i expect these words to appaear in the screen). Slowly but surely less people believe claims in the bible and other texts, because claims made in them have been percieved as less reliable due to the power of science. In the case with God, you still have to believe in that he gives your thinking meaning and you dont know this is true without circular reasoning. Science by contrast I wouldnt say is "true", but id say its effective and self consistent and thus we should trust in it because it provides results, whereas Christianity had 2 millenia to provide results and in its own philosphy accomplished very little in regards to human progress (this statement doesnt include political or economic influences that is). An nteresing question people have asked over the years is "what is the meaning of the universe?" he issue with this question is that it assumes a meaning to the unviverse exists in he first place and we could apply this to lots of truth claims as people come accros in religion. Now in other areas of logical ideas such as maths, we dont assume a solution exists (exceptions exist for specific circumstances like proof from contradiction) but for all the sutff we handle in school, these have all been proven. A long text, im not very good at writing, so mayb srayed a bit here and there
11:20 You can always tell when someone hasn't looked much into comparative religion when they say that religions are a "set of propositions". Plenty of religious rituals and practices evolve before the propositions are properly formulated. Even when the propositions are formulated many people may still participate in religion without particularly caring about the propositions. In fact I would argue that the rituals, symbols and ways of doing are more intrinsic to religion than beliefs or propositions.
@@hedgehoginacanoe5838 Religion is a real phenomenon that has had an incredibly large impact on society for 1000s of years. Studying how it develops and how it differs between cultures opens a window into the human experience.
@@goclbert just because it’s been in society for a long doesn’t mean it has been proven example Santa has been in society for a long doesn’t mean he exist.
Nice video! Some comments I hope you can address: So it seems to me that EAAN skirts around how evolution chooses fitness over the content of our beliefs. I don't think is controversial (? congitive scientists correct me if I'm wrong) as we know of many events where our brain evolved to take shortcuts in our cognitive processes to better adapt to the world e.g. agent detection. We learn cognitive biases to avoid them precisely because our cognitive faculties aren't perfect. So one objection I have is how God solves the problem, as a theory. Because for one, it seems to me that if God exists, he should rather have us perfectly describing reality than not. If no, I don't exactly get the reasons why God would prefer partly reliable minds, because then it just seems like we're making ad hoc and post hoc rationalisations. Also, wouldn't it be evolutionary simpler to track the truth in most circumstances? I would assume that having a belief like "flame->skin hurt->move hand" is more advantageous and efficient than "flame->4 is a prime number->move hand". If evolution cares about efficiency too, then it seems to at least undercut many of these types of examples. Although I do see how sometimes false theories being more advantageous and efficient (for eg, phenoumenality of colour vision) Hope you could get in touch my questions! Take care.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your argument, but how do you know that theism is any better than naturalism under the scenario you describe? For example, couldn't God have pre-programmed our brains to hold or prefer false beliefs? How would you know if that were the case?
Like a colour blind person who sees red as blue and blue as red they have learnt by seeing all their life what context "red" which is actually blue goes in and they can draw and colour accurately so you would never know they perceive a very different world they don't actually see a blue sky they see a red sky that they call blue they don't see a red pen they see a blue pen they call red.
Point is they essentially learned wrong imagine your sense was switched hot felt cold and cold hot to be in alignment with everyone else you would call what you felt as hot cold and what you felt as cold hot you won’t know you have learned wrong until you compare sensations or you are fixed at which time when feeling cold you would say oh that is hot and everyone would say you mean it is cold. Because that person learnt wrong to match it shows that their perception their brain could not be trusted what they considered reality was wrong so you can tell me you feel x or see y but that doesn’t make it true even though to you it is and since the brain is the foundation of knowledge if the foundation is flawed then the entire thing will fall so to keep on saying I really see y or feel x or science this, doesn’t matter and you have missed the point.
@@hiddenrambo328 gotcha. Wasn’t sure if you were implying something else vis a vi believers or atheists. But I get what you mean, colour blind would learn “wrong” in a sense yes.
Two points of contention to your video. As for your thought experiment from 06:55. The labels you put on the beliefs your dog holds are meaningless. Since it is simply the belief that corresponds to a stimulus and triggers a certain response. So if each stimulus-response pairing gets its specific belief then the dog can still reason with these propositions. All that has happened is that we have renamed all the numbers in our calculations. If the dog in your example is actively looking for mice to hunt and he often finds them near a certain area. The belifes relating to the area, and him killing a mouse can be linked. So he will spend more time around the area, thereby finding more mice and increasing his fitness. All that matters is that his structures are reasoneably consistent and that new structures are formed when existing ones are triggered together (so basically if logic is possible). If your point is instead, that since we cannot prove our ability to form any logical reasoning since the supposition of being able to reason logically is needed to justify this claim. Then i will agree in so far, as that we need to take the ability to make logical deductions for granted. So while acknowleging that, in the end we need to accept this as an unknowable. But while this supposition allows us to make predictions that reflect at least our own reality, and no other supposition does the same it seems a good one to make. In contrast to bringing in an unfalsifiable unprovable belief in god, which just adds no explanitory power, ontop of our previous supposition. Sorry for the length of this comment but i found the discussion very interesting and had to at least state my oppinion somewhere. Please ask me to clarify any of the points i they are unclear.
SO let's look at the example of running away from a tree when you hear a noise. Well let's say the noise was the wind. in this case running away did not aid in the survival, because the noise was just wind, and not running away would not put us in danger. Now let's say the noise was someone that fell, and got hurt. Staying might have save a life and aiding in human flourishing. So in this case running away might have not put them in danger, but would not have helped human flourishing as much as not running away. So you could come up with numerus scenarios. The point, is, the best possibility we have of survival is if we I having our a match realty. And you could say what if it was a lion, or tiger in the tree. Yes that could be true, so it is important that we have methods that confirm our beliefs match reality. There are people that for example can tell you want snakes are piousness. There are people that can go in the woods, study the surrendering, and can say there was some type of large animal here recently.
I don't know if you still read comments from "old" videos, but if what you say at 5:03 is correct, then a naturalistic explanation of the brain would only need to account for our actions, not our beliefs or the interactions between them. This goes against the argument you gave in your video "from consciousness to God". I just wanted to point that out :)
Yes there are intelligent people, depending on how you define intelligent people that believe a God exist. But intelligent people making arguments a God exist doe not meant the arguments are intelligent, rational, or advance arguments that a God exist. You can be a intelligent, and/or sophisticated people that make a non intelligent argument.
Yes the truth of beliefs do play a functional role. So your argument is because a persons actions might be based on a false belief, then true beliefs don't matter, and we have no method to confirm if our beliefs match reality. Well that is factually false. Your whole argument seems to hedge on the assumption that we can't confirm beliefs match realty to any degree of certainty, and/or or even if we could true beliefs don't matter.
I understand this is an internal critique for those with the worldview that includes the positions that Evolution and Naturalism are both true, but are you someone who holds the position that Evolution is true and guided by God or do you have a different position regarding Evolution?
Yeah your whole argument is assuming we don't have any method to confirm our beliefs, and/or conclusions match realty do a high degree of certainty. Well we do, so your argument falls apart.
Btw, the conjunction of Naturalism and Uncaused things or state of affairs can also lead to a radical skepticism (particularly global empirical skepticism). :)
I disagree :) The naturalist can simply hold that (1) our perceptual experiences and ordinary surroundings are contingent; and (2) everything contingent has a causal explanation. This avoids perceptual skepticism, since neither our perceptual experiences nor our ordinary perceived surroundings could inexplicably - without any objective probability attached - come into existence. So long as the naturalist accepts these, they avoid perceptual skepticism while maintaining their naturalism.
@@MajestyofReason Hey! Hi, Joe! 👋🏼 Thanks for your comment, bro. :) I think the problem might still be roaming around somewhere. The naturalist at the end of the day has to accept some basic, uncaused state of affairs. So from there, the worry might be (as Rob Koons said in one of your amazing videos): how do I know that my empirical data is not in the same boat as the uncaused state of affairs? Well, everything contingent (like my empirical data) has a causal explanation. Fine, but that seems consistent, for all I know, with a scenario in which every contingent stuff is being explained by “me”, the basic, uncaused cause. I could try to avoid that by arguing that “me” entails all my empirical data (my sense experiences, impressions, etc.) which is clearly contingent (as you mentioned), but then I could equally argue that the whole cosmos (all ‘natural’ reality) is clearly contingent and therefore needs an “outside” explanation. If *somehow* the whole ‘natural’ reality doesn’t need an explanation (i.e. it’s basically uncaused), then the problem of empirical skepticism will threaten me again (so we technically come back to the start). What do you think? :o
@@esauponce9759 "how do I know that my empirical data is not in the same boat as the uncaused state of affairs?" You don't, a priori. But, you assume that it's not and look for a cause (using the scientific method), because it's better to seek for a cause of something that doesn't have one than the opposite. I understand if this answer doesn't leave you satisfied. Now consider the following question: how do you know that there are no uncaused things (besides God)? I reckon that any answer to this question will be about as satisfactory as my previous answer to the other question.
@@Nickesponja Notice that the whole project of “trying to look for a cause of my empirical data using the scientific method” is itself dependent upon you knowing (somehow) that your empirical data is *not* uncaused (i.e. it has indeed a cause). So it seems you (and I), somehow, know (a priori, maybe) that our empirical data is not in the same boat as an uncaused state of affairs. How do we know that? That’s one of the interesting things that Rob and Oppy discussed in Joe’s channel (and also in some papers and in a recent book, I think), and part of that is what tries to motivate this argument about uncaused things, naturalism, theism, skepticism and ultimate origins. And just to clarify: I don’t claim that there are no uncaused things. On the contrary, I know there is at least one uncaused “thing” (or, more generally, a state of affairs).
@@esauponce9759 No, we don't need to know that something has a cause to look for it, just as you don't need to know if there is cheese in the fridge in order to look for it. Why would we?
I also think that primitive people were in many ways more wiser than us for instance they believed in a flat earth and a God and they had philosophical ideas like the ancient greeks were philosophers yet our society cares not as much about philosophy the earth is flat that is pretty simple to defend because light travels at far distances something that would not happen on a curved ball with tons of curves
Oh don’t even try bringing you flat earth crap out. ZERO evidence or explanations work for a flat earth. You guys can’t even answer basic questions when asked!
The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism fails because it's a straw man. According to the argument, the naturalist position is that our beliefs are formed by biological evolution. This is a very odd proposition since it would mean that our beliefs are genetically inherited and we're basically born with a ready-made set of beliefs. No naturalist that I've ever heard of would suggest such a bizarre idea. Rather, the naturalist position is that evolution has provided us with a brain that can form beliefs through experience and by communicating with other brains. A brain that can observe the world through our senses will also have the capacity to test its beliefs empirically. This is of course the basis for the scientific method which has resulted in - among other things - the evolutionary theory. Not only is there no tension between accepting evolutionary theory and believing in naturalism, evolutionary theory is the result of the application of methodological naturalism.
God bless you brother. What you are doing is great, but please don’t forget sharing the gospel. If you don’t know the true gospel, I can show you what the Bible says about it.
You can’t get of “the crazy train” by just believing in god. Evolution could produce some truth tracking faculties and god could produce truth tracking faculties. Both could also produce some non-truth tracking faculties. We therefore hold to our beliefs fallibly. You can’t rule out any skeptical alternative this way. If you are deluded you are deluded and you wouldn’t know, deal with it!
Also you couldn’t even solve this philosophically since either God or evolution could have messed up all your capacity to do philosophy. (Maybe except the most basic stuff like you can’t doubt that you’re thinking and not be thinking, etc.)
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow "You can’t get of “the crazy train” by just believing in god." You're right - if you believed in a god who didn't give you the capacity to think rationally, it wouldn't get you off the "crazy train". You'd have to believe in a God who definitely did give you the capacity think rationally. Even if you turned out to be wrong, then you at least wouldn't still be stuck on this particular train.
@@MatthewFearnley Interesting. What are your thoughts about this comparison: - Someone said they just believe they are in one of the worlds where evolution happened to give them sufficiently truth conducive mental faculties. (Given that you agree evolution could do that) - Someone said they believe they are in a world where a god created them to have sufficiently truth conducive mental faculties. Does the belief really help much? Couldn’t either of them just be wrong for any reason. But if the first on is right and the belief is enough then why worry about the EAAN. If the belief is not enough why accept the second.
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow Wow, that's a great question.. Let me first say that I'm still trying to understand the EAAN. Although I don't believe in naturalism, I also don't understand why a naturalistic evolutionist should be caused to evaluate their position differently in the light of this argument. So a lot of the rest of what I say is just going to be thinking out loud... I think I would say that the first belief (that we're in a world where evolution brought about the mental capacity for truth) is compatible with naturalistic evolutionism, or Christian evolutionism, or other worldviews - perhaps with some heretical evolutionist sects of Pastafarianism. I think it must be the case that any belief that gives us good reason to believe that our brains have this capacity for truth, is enough to get us out of the particular quandary ("crazy train") raised in the argument. So if we agree on the first belief, then the next logical step from this position might perhaps be to question whether some of these beliefs truly give us good reason. We might first decide that for instance Pastafarianism doesn't, but the reasons why we would favour Christianity over Pastafarianism would fall outside the EAAN. Maybe the question is, do we have good reason to believe that evolution *would* bring about the capacity for reason? - A Christian might say: probably, but if not, then I guess it must have happened through something other than evolution. - A naturalistic evolutionist might say: probably, but if not, then ... What does the naturalist say? I think the basic possibilities are: a) I guess we didn't evolve. (But then on naturalism I have no other explanation of how we came to be...) b) I guess I must not have the capacity for reason... Both are pretty awkward conclusions. But the naturalist obviously still has the "probably" to fall back on, and as "probablies" go, it has a fairly wide mainstream acceptance. So it feels like fairly stable ground for naturalism. But there are still a couple of loose ends: 1. Do we have a strong case that evolution *would* bring about capacity for reason, or only for some related ideas: that we can see roughly how evolution might bring about capacity for reason; that evolution probably happened evidentially; and and that we do in fact (probably) have that capacity for reason? 2. We've alluded to the possibility that we may in fact *not* have capacity for reason in point (b) above, and I think this is the EAAN's trump card, but I don't feel like it's properly come into play. I don't really see the best way to apply it though.. To briefly touch on the second belief (that God created us that way).. I don't think the EAAN requires us to jump to that conclusion. It's probably been carefully named - an argument "against naturalism", rather than an argument "for theism" - although admittedly that is certainly plugged as an alternative in the video. (I'll also just take a moment to speculate that my response might have developed quite differently if the first belief proposition had included the specific nonexistence of God, but I think either way this was interesting to think about.)
@@MatthewFearnley Big thanks for the response. This kind of conversation is why I hang in TH-cam comments. 💜 I’ll let your thoughts sink in a bit and will return when I’ve had the chance to ponder 😊
6:30, No that argument is flawed because it assumes that 'beliefs' are passed down biologically, which is false. If I were to raise 2 humans in 2 different environments that encouraged different beliefs, they would have different opinions and different ways of thinking. The human mind evolved the mechanism to adapt to different environments, and to configure its own neurology to ensure survival, not hard-wired 'beliefs' (although there are some very basic ones such as object permanence- although this is still debated). Reasoning, and 'logic', are the means by which human brains understand existing things, anything beyond it would be inherently unknowable (and the fact they exist as well), and it wouldn't matter because they are beyond human reasoning. This couldn't be 'resolved' by invoking the supernatural, because you are then assuming that you can know aspects of things which exceed human comprehension, which is silly- unless it isn't supernatural, then you'll have the burden of showing evidence. Evolution, like all scientific theories is just a model by which we understand things, it like all other scientific theories are inherently constrained by our neural architecture, nothing about this 'disproves' evolution, because that itself is also human reasoning.
Nowhere in this video did he ever suggest beliefs are passed down biologically. Literally nowhere. You don't even care enough to present his own argument in an honest way.
@@thepalegalilean Well at , 7:21, he literally imagines a scenario where false beliefs are passed down biologically. (Even though that's not how the brain works).
@@clopensets6104 He didn't say that at all. And if you watch the video past the time stamp you cited, You would see that. What he was saying that was passed down biologically is fitness of survival. His whole argument is that evolution doesn't cause your beliefs to be correct or even coherent. The only thing evolution cares about is that you survive to see another sunrise. And literally nothing outside of that. Therefore if naturalistic evolution is true, We have absolutely no foundation or reason for trusting our beliefs. The idea that beliefs were passed down biologically was never a part of his argument.
@@thepalegalilean You and the guy in the video both have a totally incorrect view on brain evolution. In complex organisms (like us), the brain evolves to be better at adapting to new scenarios, otherwise known as 'learning'. The brain does have hard-wired elements, such as rudimentary phobias, and sexual urges, but those are already identified to be subjective. Whereas the brain's ability to learn is what allows for us to reason, because being able to learn requires the capability to reason objectively. In this way a human is not limited to just one circumstance he/she can reason and adapt in totally different scenarios. This means that the reasoning is indeed objective, because if it were subjective, then it wouldn't have the capability to adapt to totally different environments and scenarios. As humans, our technological and scientific advancements are reflections of this advance capacity for objective reasoning.
@@clopensets6104 It seems you're the ignorant one on this issue. Evolution doesn't help you to reason. Because biological evolution, Whether it is happening in the brain or any other place, Only cares about your survival. It literally does not help in any other meaningful way. If humans can survive better being mindless apes such as gorillas or chimps, That's what we will become. Because that's what evolution does. But what evolution cannot do is teach you belief systems. Assuming belief systems are even possible in biological evolution, The only thing they will ever be is a byproduct of the stimulus of fitness survival. There is no guarantee these beliefs would even be true, much less coherent. As in, If naturalistic evolution is true, There is no reason as to why you should trust your own beliefs, Is much less wonder whether or not they are true. As far as learning goes, That means absolutely nothing. Every creature, No matter how simple or complex, Learns. That's what is called survival of the fittest. Darwin himself said that it is not the strong or the smart that survive, But those species which are best able to adapt to change. What you call learning or adapting to new scenarios, We've been calling natural selection for a long, long time. And as Darwin has long since taught us, evolution just cares about your well being. It will never teach you to reason, Because that does not help you survive. You will not develop any beliefs. And any you might have, Are simply a byproduct of natural selection, rather than anything that can be discerned as usable. Or even true. As square guy already said, This is a philosophical issue. The science of biology is not going to help you resolve this. So you can either accept evolution or naturalism. But if you accept both you will logically run into this contradiction. And nothing you do is going to help you get out of it.
I have no idea what you mean by content of beliefs. You are conflating philosophical naturalism, and other things that would be true, if philosophical naturalism is true. Again saying evolution cares, is nonsensical. Biological evolution can not occur if organisms don't reproduce. If that is what you mean, then you should just say that.
(Fair warning it is long) To clarify the "Primitive thinking" he mentioned, what he means is that belief in supernatural thinks such as gods are often the result of humanity not understanding a large and significant factor of their life, such as it's origin, and with modern technology and understanding of the universe it's "primitive" to assume a supernatural being created the universe when we're getting a clearer picture of the beginning of our universe every year. I do not reject the idea of a god but I do not believe in a god since facts and rational solutions are more concrete and work in physics so far, but given concrete evidence and I will believe, say with quantum theory and special relativity, they are both scientific theories and not scientific laws, which means I don't believe they are true but the closest we have gotten so far. And then you went completely religiously biased.... such a shame... you claim that the unflasifiable is the absolute truth with no physical or scientific evidence to back it up, no, separation of state and church is the proper way to do it for a bipartisan government structure. Okay, if I've understood what you're trying to say, the state of your brain causes action and belief and that belief doesn't always benefit evolution nor that it causes your actions, did i get that right? Well the brain is a bit more complex than that, it's adaptable beyond the "factory new" state if it had simply been grown, our actions and beliefs chance the state of our brain and we can train in or train away different habits or thought processes, a good example is Anti-social personality disorder (ASPD), and while sociopath and psychopath aren't scientific terms. The different diagnoses that the general population refer to the two are interesting, the "psychopath" diagnosis is one of genetics, a genetic disability that makes the diagnosed virtually unable to feel things such as empathy or sympathy. Wile the "sociopath" diagnosis is similar in the inability to feel sympathy and empathy it is learned behaviour, our bodies are extremely lazy and will conserve any and all energy it can without impacting the risk of death, there are some exceptions as there is in everything though. But "sociopathy" can also be trained away if the diagnosed is willing to change, they can survive in society and the wild but they might not like being different, or they do. The placebo effect is also a great example of our beliefs impacting our brain and body, if we truly believe something can cure us it might actually do it as it can boost the immune system and change the hormone levels in our blood killing the intruding organism, as the brain is effected, thinking the crisis is averted. We as people are moldable because our brain's functions are. A new belief doesn't have to be beneficial though but it might appear at the same time as a beneficial trait, it's like having a room filled with hydrogen, you won't get anything else from it by pouring in nitrogen gas as it's chemically inert, however at the same time oxygen might be poured in creating water. Or you might pour in chlorine gas making hydrogen-chloride, but neutralizing it by adding oxygen at the same time which creates water which reacts to form muriatic acid in dissolved form, now you no longer have acidic air even if there's still a pool of acid on the ground, but your survival chances have improved. Basically, the addition of a trait might not be beneficial or it might be damaging but it has survived because other traits have neutralized the effects if only it were present. Okay now for a bit more disturbing turn, yes such a "messed up brain" can be picked by evolution, because it's not only your decisions that determine your fitness, it's also others, in the past, people with down syndrome and cerebral palsy didn't survive, they were weak and they died. Now however humans don't have the thought of "only the strong survive" and we aid those with disabilities, they have survived because we take pity or have love for them and one of your or society's traits as a whole might be beneficial to one such individual. I myself do not function in social situations but I do in survival situations, I can survive by myself but the average human needs human contact, you could argue that I have better fitness as I can survive on my own, but I also function poorly in modern society and I may end up in a fight that damages my body and brain, or my brains might even paint a wall or a sidewalk, so I also have worse fitness, just in different circumstances. My belief that there is no god might lead to me being less social and not going out during a pandemic and potentially saving my life, even if we prove in the future that there is a god, or your belief in a god results in you going to church and becoming a pastor with a happy family instead of say, turning to drugs and overdosing. The situations determine our choices and our future, and two different choices might even lead to the same road. It does not push radical skepticism as you believe it does, it teaches you that even if we might think something is true now doesn't mean that new evidence won't come up later disproving or changing the theory, it is only logical to assume that the natural laws which we haven't been able to disprove, are true, and that theories that hold up to our current understanding are mostly true, but that they can all be disproved and we might have to rethink all of physics. Argumentation on the on the go... he watched the beginning of the video where your stance is a bit unclear and decided to make a video, or it's an example of one of humanity's greatest flaws... he made a mix up and said the wrong thing. (It's quite common when you're busy with other things such as work and make videos in your spare time)
These theories about the role of religion are hideously flawed. Pagans didn't go, "The sun is powerful, so the sun must be a god!" Instead, pagans went, "the gods are powerful, and so one must be associated with the sun." Literally the wrong end of the stick.
@@toomanymarys7355 Not all, many saw the sun as a god for it's blinding and scorching, yet life giving capabilities in young Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, just because you, or the majority thinks one way does not mean the rest think the same, without the knowledge of space, the sun, physics and natural law that we have today, it is entirely reasonable to start wondering if the blinding lifegiver in the sky is a diety
Wait you arent a theistic evolutionist right? I think it is really weird to say that an all loving God would create humans with this horrible proces. It kinda undermines the Free will defense. For example: God created beautiful creatures like the dinosaurs, but got tired of them so He said: "Here eat this meteorite"
Seems abit silly. If you hold that God is omniscient and has knowledge of everything every act he does has reasons unless you may provide reasons why God's action call this reason X is is wrong it would just show that God isn't omniscient. On that note just because you don't have the current knowledge of why God may do a action X does not mean there isn't a reason or logic behind it.
Fun fact: we got saddled with see-and-say anti-phonics failed reading programs because of atheist educators trying to attack the idea of the importance of beliefs vs actions. Which is why leftists still try to defend it, even though Johnny can't read.
The one confused, is you. If your imaginary friend gave me reliable cognitive faculties and I conclude it doesn’t exist, then my cognitive faculties were NOT RELIABLE. 😂
The notion that evolution could support the God Hypothesis is pure post hoc rationalisation that attempts to retcon theology by just crossing out naturalism andputting God in its place. It's a disingenuous argument that has no merit. You can't assert one creation story for thousands of years, and then completely change it once you find out that it's wrong, and worse, claim that 'it was evolution all the time'. I think you read too much into his use of the word 'primitive' - and wrongly claimed that the presence of sophisticated arguments that attempt to justify such primitive thinking means that religious belief isn't primitive. It's wrong to make that claim, especially in light of the oft touted 'properly basic belief' notion employed by apologists. I think you misunderstood Stick - he didn't claim that true beliefs promote survival because of science.Your number 2 is innacurate. One might say it's pure number 2. He said that true beliefs promote fitness because they are true - it has nothing to do with how we can use technology to help us. You don't need science to know that a tiger will eat you. You just need to know that a tiger will eat you. If it's not true that a tiger will eat you, you risk wasting valuable energy running from it and dying of dehydration because the tiger is at hte watering hole. Thus a fasle belief about the tiger will lessen your fitness. Only a true belief will increase your fitness. Stick doesn't deny that the content of our beliefs cause our actions. I'm not even entirely sure how anyone could deny this. The content of our beliefs cause our actions. If our actions increase our fitness, we will survive while those whose actions decrease fitness won't. Actions responding to true beliefs lead to higher fitness than actions responding to false beliefs. Therefore, true beliefs lead to increased fitness, and are retained at the expense of false beliefs. True beliefs are selected for under evolution. But there are beliefs that have no bearing on fitness. Evolution does not 'deselect' 'neutral beliefs, or at least does so at a very slow rate. Your idea that 'the truth isn't doing anything' is wrong. Of course the truth is doing something. It's being truth. But I think the assertion is just a red herring. You seem to be asserting that truth has no bearing on our actions - but it does. If our actions are responding to something false - then they will not produce fitness. So if our brain cannot discern truth, our actions will not be effective.You said yourself that evolution cares about the things that cause our actions. How is a brain perceiving its suroundings not a thing that cause our actions? Therefore evolution does care about how our brain functions - ie its accuracy in perceiving reality - ie truth. Your 'bodily actions are set inmotion by your beliefs. It's your beliefs that trigger them. If you believe that noise is a low flying missile, they will cause your brain to send messages to your body to duck. The contents of your beliefs are very much in the causal chain leading to your actions. "only the physical state of your brain is responsible for your actions"???? How on earth do you think your brain works? To put it somewhat mechanically, the response to a stimulus is dependent on your belief about which response is appropriate. It's your beliefs (your cognitive state) that direct the neural chain that connects the stimulus to the response. ooohhhh - and here comes the rub. It always comes down to chance, doesn't it. Despite the demonstration that truth is more fit than untruth, and the very basis of evolution being the survival of the fittest - you still clutch at 'chance' being the only thing that naturalism can be ruled by. Despite evolution necessarily compensating for chance - you theists still cling to it like a lifejacket made from cement. So you're wrong. The truth of abelief does play a functional role, since only a true belief can make a true (and therefore more fit) connection between stimulus and response). We do have reason to believe thatany given belief is true. And anything you canpropose to undermine that reason, also takes down theism with it - because if we can't know truth, then you sure as hell can't pretend that some unseen Being has revealed it to you. What naturalism has as an advantage is the consistent verification that we canknow truth - verification by experience. It's either accept that or accept solipsistic nothingness, from which neither naturalistic nor theistic worldview can escape. How can you know it's true that God would let you know what's true? you're appealing to my worldview to make that assertion!!! lol. It is very staisfying saying that. I now know why you thiests do it. Let's look at your thought experiment. Instead of looking at the mouse pounce as one isloated example, let's consider that it's an action that has to take place ten times a day, every day for the whole of your dog's life. Because a dog's gotta eat, right? But a dog's gotta drink too, and avoid getting stung by bees and avoid walking off cliffs and avoid getting eaten by crocodiles. I don't know how many neural messages get sent out per second, but even the act of standing up requires millions of minute adjustments every minute. I wouldn't be surprised if the average living thing sends out billions of neural responses in a single hour. let alone a day. What do you think the probability is of your dog surviving reality given that there are billions of false neural decisions being made? Are you seriously going to tell me that - yeah - we could exist under naturalism given everything is a result of sheer chance? Do not be ridiculous. If chance was the governing factor under naturalism - nothing would survive more than five minutes. Wow. I must admit I started this section of the comment before you got to the point where you do actually extend the one action to every aspect of your dog's life. I had charitably assumed you hadn't realised that every neural action would be subject to chance under your analogy - but it seems you are aware. So you should be very aware of how ridiculous you are being. Why aren't you? Isn't it funny how probability suddenly doesn't matter, after all your bunk about using Bayes (incorrectly) to affirm the resurrection... What really irks me is that in fact you seem to know how ridiculous you're being because you say 'this example may be impossible'. I don't understand why you didn't explore that idea more fully. Because there is no 'may be' about it. It is impossible. And that fact completely blows apart the point you are trying to argue. And you make matters worse by doubling down with your assertions about beliefs to do with covid. You literally just admitted that it (may be) impossible - and yet you immediately presented it as a possibility. "Radical skepticism" lol - yeah, except when it comes to God, right? So with radical skepticism, comes radical special pleading apparently. Consistency is your natural enemy it seems. That doesn't seem like a very good philosophical defence of the EAAN. So the only point in your favour here is that Stick was lazy in his introductory statement. ps. If you want a more extensive breakdown of the flaws in the EAAN you should check out Digital Gnosis's video about it. Plantinga is not an expert on evolution and his arguments are weak.
lolol 12:00 "This is confused". PERFECT response. I remember watching Stick say this and I was just like 'Stick, bruh, you've missed the point by a few miles'
Do you find the evolutionary argument against naturalism persuasive? And if you do, what's your stance on the issue?
@1:19 "When people believe the same thing they tend to stick to each other"...Unless you are stick people.
This argument is very easily and often misunderstood by atheists. So I appreciate you taking the time to clear up the misconceptions. God bless!
Thanks for speaking with clarity and charity as always.
OH YEAH BABY DR SQUARE!!!
Mic drop! Keep up the good work.
When I first watched your one-minute video, I was almost sure that there would be someone out there that would find it ridiculous and respond to it. Thank you for giving a more in-depth video on the topic.
so when do we get a response to a 4-dimensional person?
According to a higher dimensional being it has already happened.
Even though I personally don't believe in god, I enjoyed the video! You were levelheaded and presented some arguments I hadn't heard before
Thanks! :)
“The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.”
Patricia Churchland, nontheist philosopher
“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”
Charles Darwin
“If my brain is nothing but a pile of atoms, then I have no reason to believe that anything it tells me is true. Including the notion that my brain is a pile of atoms.”
J. B. S. Haldane, atheist geneticist, co-founder of neo-Darwinism
On its own, the Darwin quote can be a little misleading. For historical context, check out this paper I wrote: protect-eu.mimecast.com/s/5wQkCP7qnUjVWKuzctrB?domain=rdcu.be . (Note: one of the letters is misdated, and there are one or two typos that came up in the formatting process - I'm pursuing corrections on both counts).
Thank you for these quotes!
@@amoswollen3860 Nice article! What inspired you to look to shed light on the context? And what do you subscribe to? (Naturalistic evolution, theistic evolution, creation, etc.?)
@@silversilk8438 😁👍
@@silversilk8438 Hey, glad you liked it! I decided to write this article when, one day, while browsing waterstones, I opened up Darwin's autobiography and saw the passage where he goes into the doubt. I was reading through the EAAN literature at the time - and still am - so it peaked my interest. I went home, did some digging, noticed that this was a gap in the literature needing to be filled, and lockdown boredom did the rest.
As far as my own views, I'm still (unfortunately) fairly agnostic as to the probability of theism over naturalism - I'm only seventeen, and there's so much to read. That said, if you held my toes to the fire and asked me to choose I'd pick theism, and if you held them even closer I'd affirm theistic evolution, too. (Dispositionally, I'm a Christian on account of Pascal's Wager).
Why would believes under naturalism not inform our ations? If any thought T is linked to a brainstate S via a function phi [phi(S)=T], and any action A is linked via the function rho [rho(S)=A], then also T and A are linked through the brainstate. If we have a brainstate S1 that is produced by another brainstate S2, this is equivivalent to a thought T1 being linked with a thought T2 (what we could call reasoning). Since brainstates (and therefore thoughts) can influence each other, our actions are more accurate, if we produce brainstates that model reality. You are correct, that a single thought might not have selection pressure, but any combination of thoughts has.
For example, in response to observing a red leaf i might have a brainstate that corresponds to the thought "there is a blue leaf". But only once another brainstate is initiated that correspond to "blue leafs are dangerous", and then "run", do these brainstates inform our actions. In conclusion, your argument essentially just makes the point that the label we put on concepts (is the leaf red, blue or green) is not selected by evolutionary mechanisms, but the interactions of the concepts we create are clearly selected for. So yeah if evolutionary naturalism is true i would have no idea if a tree is a "tree" or a "baum" (german for tree), but any thought of the concept of a tree would be selected for to correspond to the actual experience of a tree.
This is a great comment and I'm responding to get updates on it :)
Excellent video Dr. Square ❤️
You deserve more subscribers
Thanks! :)
I really wouldn't want someone who supports a hatful religion to get more attention
@@hedgehoginacanoe5838 neither would i
@@tbcop9898 then why say he deserves more subs when he supports and somewhat endorses a hatfull religion
@@hedgehoginacanoe5838 he doesn't support a hateful religion.
Intellectual stick fight!
Great video! 🙌
This video was really well-done. The hardest part for me to explain to people is how naturalism entails semantic epiphenomenalism, but you did a phenomenal job. :-)
Sounds like nonsense.
professer stickman's idea that religion will always bring people together isn't necessarily always right for instance religion has and can cause people to become social outcasts and even cause martyredom
10:58 now some atheists will say you're anti science lol
Then you can tell them they're anti philosophy. lol
Excelent!
Professor Stick seems to be using scientism rather than science
Very good and respectful response. It seems Professor Stickman was a little too arrogant about atheism being true and theism being primitive that he forgot to make a philosophical argument in a philosophical discussion.
I think you're spot on here!
Atheism is true. If someone doesn’t believe a god or gods exist then atheism is true. What part don’t people get about that?
Why do you need to have a soul for your beliefs to influence your actions? My brain appraises the object moving toward me as a car--that is, forms a belief about it; that neurological belief-formation triggers hormonal responses and movement; I get out of the way. No soul required. Belief motivated action; evolutionary theory and naturalism are both preserved.
Don't see why God would fix any of this.
On Christian theism God doesn't care about true beliefs, he cares about you having a relation with him and getting into heaven.
It's not like all smart people are in heaven and all the dumb ones are in hell.
If God can get you to believe that "Jesus is Lord" that's his work done, doesn't matter if you think it's true because you think all the gospels were written in english by Jesus himself or if you believe in God because some fallacious argument, as long as you believe it.
I just want to say that I like your post.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning, but it seems to me that while you disagree strongly, you also wanted to do it respectfully.
@@MatthewFearnley Yeah, have huge respect for some Christian philosophers, just don't really see the symmetry breaker here :)
No, I don't really think so. If the Christian God is real, than he would want to give us functioning minds to see how the world shows his designing hand. Us seeing this would enable us to believe in him better, and thus we would enter a relationship with him. If the world really was made by God, he wouldn't need to mess up our brains so that we could formulate the Cosmological argument; we would just be able to reason it out with good brains, and create the argument because of its truth.
@@petery6432 I agree there will be some correlation, one could just as easily say that it's evolutionarily useful to form true beliefs over false beliefs.
But I think the point of the EAAN is to be a bit more sceptical about settling for correlation because evolutionary usefullness and truth isn't the same thing. But then, similary, relation with God and our worship/adherence/assent etc aren't the same as truth either.
Some people I've met who are strong believers are believers because of false beliefs they have and as I understand it that's ok with God.
Even if evolution as we understand it selected true beliefs, we still couldn't use that to justify the truth of our beliefs, because we'd be using one of our beliefs to justify its own truth!
Similarly, you claim that your position is consistent because God would've given you a reliable brain (though I don't think this is true because it is possible that an unreliable brain leads to a greater moral good). But, that God exists is one of your beliefs, so you're doing the same thing! Theism doesn't solve anything in this regard!
It’s impossible to give an argument that our cognitive faculties aren’t unreliable. All we can do is avoid positions that entail they *are* unreliable. If the EAAN is correct, we have no reason to think that a given belief is true. This means that the totality of our beliefs is probably false (analogy: I have no reason to think that the age of a given person in this comments section is an even number rather than an odd number or vice versa, but I do have a reason to doubt that the totality of people in the comments section - or even just a majority - have an even numbered age). On theism, this argument gets cut off before we get to the conclusion, because it’s not clear that we DO have no reason to trust our cognitive faculties. The question of whether God has morally sufficient reasons to deceive me is a good one, but also a really complicated one.
Have a nice day! :)
@@ApologeticsSquared Fair enough. I'm interested though, if God has morally sufficient reasons to allow all the suffering in the world, how could he not have morally sufficient reasons to allow you to have an unreliable brain? As a matter of fact, a world where we falsely believe that there's a lot of suffering is morally superior to a world where there actually is a lot of suffering, so I think it can be argued that, given theism, it's more likely that we live in the world where our brains are unreliable. What do you think of this?
@@Nickesponja My response, basically, is that if God wanted me to be in some mental state, and decided that deception was a legitimate method to get me to possess that mental state, then He would seem to have an infinity of options available to Him - an infinity of “paths” to get me there. However, He prefers that I suffer less, so He would choose the least suffering-filled path to get me to that mental state. Given God’s omnipotence/omniscience, then I would expect that this path would be relatively painless. But it isn’t. I had painful surgery just a few weeks ago. So, this scenario probably didn’t happen. Why? That’s not answered here. This is an explanation *that* if theism is true, God didn’t deceive me. Not why He didn’t.
So, I actually use the suffering to argue in my favor!
@@ApologeticsSquared That's actually pretty clever. Thank you
@@ApologeticsSquared When dealing with these conversations, we often assume that the rulels of logic hold and if we do then we can make conclusions. If we dont, then well we cant conclude anything, even if God exists, that doesnt tell us whether a given claim is true or false and leads to a very paradoxicl behaviour because this argument assumes logical thinking
Also the analogy, just because you dont know which has the majority between even numbers and odd numbers, doesnt mean you couldnt test for it. You could try to find the IP addresses of various individuals and determine their age and if even>odd or odd>even by the end of this process, you could conclude that even if we dont know the rest, its more likely for the majority of the numbers we do know to lead to a majority overall. Note that its not required for us to know a census of all the ages, but would be a matter of liklihood.
Same applies to science (of which evolution comes under), we test for it and it holds up. The evidence for evolution is astounding. However religion is far more shaky on this. Stating that god exists or that god has the capacity to provide you truth arent claims we can test for, we merely have assertions of people claiming he can. We could say the bible itself is evidence, but like other historical texts we shouldntt just conclude thats true and weigh it up with further evidence and hrow out the stuff that we dont have evidence to believe in. Sometimes things in the bible are plausible, but we cant test for them yet people believe it anyway, science provides both the plausibility as well as demonsrating it in the real world, and when evidence comes to light tha something is wrong with a subpart of science, then the model changes to fit that.
As far as trusting in something, I would say most people believe in Science because it works (for example, when i type on a keyboard, i expect these words to appaear in the screen). Slowly but surely less people believe claims in the bible and other texts, because claims made in them have been percieved as less reliable due to the power of science. In the case with God, you still have to believe in that he gives your thinking meaning and you dont know this is true without circular reasoning. Science by contrast I wouldnt say is "true", but id say its effective and self consistent and thus we should trust in it because it provides results, whereas Christianity had 2 millenia to provide results and in its own philosphy accomplished very little in regards to human progress (this statement doesnt include political or economic influences that is).
An nteresing question people have asked over the years is "what is the meaning of the universe?" he issue with this question is that it assumes a meaning to the unviverse exists in he first place and we could apply this to lots of truth claims as people come accros in religion. Now in other areas of logical ideas such as maths, we dont assume a solution exists (exceptions exist for specific circumstances like proof from contradiction) but for all the sutff we handle in school, these have all been proven.
A long text, im not very good at writing, so mayb srayed a bit here and there
11:20 You can always tell when someone hasn't looked much into comparative religion when they say that religions are a "set of propositions". Plenty of religious rituals and practices evolve before the propositions are properly formulated. Even when the propositions are formulated many people may still participate in religion without particularly caring about the propositions. In fact I would argue that the rituals, symbols and ways of doing are more intrinsic to religion than beliefs or propositions.
Why look into something that doesn't exist
Most rational scientists dont look into flat earth or santa
@@hedgehoginacanoe5838 Religion is a real phenomenon that has had an incredibly large impact on society for 1000s of years. Studying how it develops and how it differs between cultures opens a window into the human experience.
@@goclbert I mean things like gods or other deities
Which is all religion is believe in thing that dont exist to make you feel better
@@goclbert just because it’s been in society for a long doesn’t mean it has been proven example Santa has been in society for a long doesn’t mean he exist.
@@kyc3641 I'm an atheist. I was speaking of the merit of studying religion.
Nice video! Some comments I hope you can address:
So it seems to me that EAAN skirts around how evolution chooses fitness over the content of our beliefs. I don't think is controversial (? congitive scientists correct me if I'm wrong) as we know of many events where our brain evolved to take shortcuts in our cognitive processes to better adapt to the world e.g. agent detection. We learn cognitive biases to avoid them precisely because our cognitive faculties aren't perfect.
So one objection I have is how God solves the problem, as a theory. Because for one, it seems to me that if God exists, he should rather have us perfectly describing reality than not. If no, I don't exactly get the reasons why God would prefer partly reliable minds, because then it just seems like we're making ad hoc and post hoc rationalisations.
Also, wouldn't it be evolutionary simpler to track the truth in most circumstances? I would assume that having a belief like "flame->skin hurt->move hand" is more advantageous and efficient than "flame->4 is a prime number->move hand". If evolution cares about efficiency too, then it seems to at least undercut many of these types of examples. Although I do see how sometimes false theories being more advantageous and efficient (for eg, phenoumenality of colour vision)
Hope you could get in touch my questions! Take care.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding your argument, but how do you know that theism is any better than naturalism under the scenario you describe? For example, couldn't God have pre-programmed our brains to hold or prefer false beliefs? How would you know if that were the case?
No, just his reasoning.
First comment 👍👍
As usual. :)
@@ApologeticsSquared thanks 👍
I can see why a theist might think that beliefs are independent of actions. They tend to create all sorts of beliefs without practical effects.
26th
Like a colour blind person who sees red as blue and blue as red they have learnt by seeing all their life what context "red" which is actually blue goes in and they can draw and colour accurately so you would never know they perceive a very different world they don't actually see a blue sky they see a red sky that they call blue they don't see a red pen they see a blue pen they call red.
Point is they essentially learned wrong imagine your sense was switched hot felt cold and cold hot to be in alignment with everyone else you would call what you felt as hot cold and what you felt as cold hot you won’t know you have learned wrong until you compare sensations or you are fixed at which time when feeling cold you would say oh that is hot and everyone would say you mean it is cold. Because that person learnt wrong to match it shows that their perception their brain could not be trusted what they considered reality was wrong so you can tell me you feel x or see y but that doesn’t make it true even though to you it is and since the brain is the foundation of knowledge if the foundation is flawed then the entire thing will fall so to keep on saying I really see y or feel x or science this, doesn’t matter and you have missed the point.
Who learned wrong?
@@guyjosephs5654 The colour blind people.
@@hiddenrambo328 gotcha. Wasn’t sure if you were implying something else vis a vi believers or atheists. But I get what you mean, colour blind would learn “wrong” in a sense yes.
@@guyjosephs5654 Yeah the second comment was just an extension of the first. But I see why you would think that.
You would be surprised how many people hold contradictory beliefs.
I would be surprised except that I wouldn’t be surprised. :P
@@ApologeticsSquared No I suppose you wouldn't. 😁
Two points of contention to your video.
As for your thought experiment from 06:55. The labels you put on the beliefs your dog holds are meaningless.
Since it is simply the belief that corresponds to a stimulus and triggers a certain response. So if each stimulus-response pairing gets its specific belief then the dog can still reason with these propositions. All that has happened is that we have renamed all the numbers in our calculations. If the dog in your example is actively looking for mice to hunt and he often finds them near a certain area. The belifes relating to the area, and him killing a mouse can be linked. So he will spend more time around the area, thereby finding more mice and increasing his fitness. All that matters is that his structures are reasoneably consistent and that new structures are formed when existing ones are triggered together (so basically if logic is possible).
If your point is instead, that since we cannot prove our ability to form any logical reasoning since the supposition of being able to reason logically is needed to justify this claim. Then i will agree in so far, as that we need to take the ability to make logical deductions for granted. So while acknowleging that, in the end we need to accept this as an unknowable. But while this supposition allows us to make predictions that reflect at least our own reality, and no other supposition does the same it seems a good one to make. In contrast to bringing in an unfalsifiable unprovable belief in god, which just adds no explanitory power, ontop of our previous supposition.
Sorry for the length of this comment but i found the discussion very interesting and had to at least state my oppinion somewhere. Please ask me to clarify any of the points i they are unclear.
SO let's look at the example of running away from a tree when you hear a noise. Well let's say the noise was the wind. in this case running away did not aid in the survival, because the noise was just wind, and not running away would not put us in danger. Now let's say the noise was someone that fell, and got hurt. Staying might have save a life and aiding in human flourishing. So in this case running away might have not put them in danger, but would not have helped human flourishing as much as not running away. So you could come up with numerus scenarios. The point, is, the best possibility we have of survival is if we I having our a match realty. And you could say what if it was a lion, or tiger in the tree. Yes that could be true, so it is important that we have methods that confirm our beliefs match reality. There are people that for example can tell you want snakes are piousness. There are people that can go in the woods, study the surrendering, and can say there was some type of large animal here recently.
I don't know if you still read comments from "old" videos, but if what you say at 5:03 is correct, then a naturalistic explanation of the brain would only need to account for our actions, not our beliefs or the interactions between them. This goes against the argument you gave in your video "from consciousness to God". I just wanted to point that out :)
Team ⬜
Yes there are intelligent people, depending on how you define intelligent people that believe a God exist. But intelligent people making arguments a God exist doe not meant the arguments are intelligent, rational, or advance arguments that a God exist. You can be a intelligent, and/or sophisticated people that make a non intelligent argument.
Yes the truth of beliefs do play a functional role. So your argument is because a persons actions might be based on a false belief, then true beliefs don't matter, and we have no method to confirm if our beliefs match reality. Well that is factually false. Your whole argument seems to hedge on the assumption that we can't confirm beliefs match realty to any degree of certainty, and/or or even if we could true beliefs don't matter.
I understand this is an internal critique for those with the worldview that includes the positions that Evolution and Naturalism are both true, but are you someone who holds the position that Evolution is true and guided by God or do you have a different position regarding Evolution?
Yeah your whole argument is assuming we don't have any method to confirm our beliefs, and/or conclusions match realty do a high degree of certainty. Well we do, so your argument falls apart.
Btw, the conjunction of Naturalism and Uncaused things or state of affairs can also lead to a radical skepticism (particularly global empirical skepticism). :)
I disagree :)
The naturalist can simply hold that (1) our perceptual experiences and ordinary surroundings are contingent; and (2) everything contingent has a causal explanation. This avoids perceptual skepticism, since neither our perceptual experiences nor our ordinary perceived surroundings could inexplicably - without any objective probability attached - come into existence. So long as the naturalist accepts these, they avoid perceptual skepticism while maintaining their naturalism.
@@MajestyofReason Hey! Hi, Joe! 👋🏼 Thanks for your comment, bro. :)
I think the problem might still be roaming around somewhere.
The naturalist at the end of the day has to accept some basic, uncaused state of affairs. So from there, the worry might be (as Rob Koons said in one of your amazing videos): how do I know that my empirical data is not in the same boat as the uncaused state of affairs? Well, everything contingent (like my empirical data) has a causal explanation.
Fine, but that seems consistent, for all I know, with a scenario in which every contingent stuff is being explained by “me”, the basic, uncaused cause. I could try to avoid that by arguing that “me” entails all my empirical data (my sense experiences, impressions, etc.) which is clearly contingent (as you mentioned), but then I could equally argue that the whole cosmos (all ‘natural’ reality) is clearly contingent and therefore needs an “outside” explanation. If *somehow* the whole ‘natural’ reality doesn’t need an explanation (i.e. it’s basically uncaused), then the problem of empirical skepticism will threaten me again (so we technically come back to the start).
What do you think? :o
@@esauponce9759 "how do I know that my empirical data is not in the same boat as the uncaused state of affairs?" You don't, a priori. But, you assume that it's not and look for a cause (using the scientific method), because it's better to seek for a cause of something that doesn't have one than the opposite.
I understand if this answer doesn't leave you satisfied. Now consider the following question: how do you know that there are no uncaused things (besides God)? I reckon that any answer to this question will be about as satisfactory as my previous answer to the other question.
@@Nickesponja
Notice that the whole project of “trying to look for a cause of my empirical data using the scientific method” is itself dependent upon you knowing (somehow) that your empirical data is *not* uncaused (i.e. it has indeed a cause). So it seems you (and I), somehow, know (a priori, maybe) that our empirical data is not in the same boat as an uncaused state of affairs. How do we know that? That’s one of the interesting things that Rob and Oppy discussed in Joe’s channel (and also in some papers and in a recent book, I think), and part of that is what tries to motivate this argument about uncaused things, naturalism, theism, skepticism and ultimate origins.
And just to clarify: I don’t claim that there are no uncaused things. On the contrary, I know there is at least one uncaused “thing” (or, more generally, a state of affairs).
@@esauponce9759 No, we don't need to know that something has a cause to look for it, just as you don't need to know if there is cheese in the fridge in order to look for it. Why would we?
I also think that primitive people were in many ways more wiser than us for instance they believed in a flat earth and a God and they had philosophical ideas like the ancient greeks were philosophers yet our society cares not as much about philosophy the earth is flat that is pretty simple to defend because light travels at far distances something that would not happen on a curved ball with tons of curves
also we'd see the curves if the earth was round but even when we go above extremely high and send balloons with cameras we see no curved globe
@@dfgfdsfsdfsdfds5349
Agreed.
Flat earthers ARE clueless!
Oh don’t even try bringing you flat earth crap out. ZERO evidence or explanations work for a flat earth. You guys can’t even answer basic questions when asked!
The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism fails because it's a straw man. According to the argument, the naturalist position is that our beliefs are formed by biological evolution. This is a very odd proposition since it would mean that our beliefs are genetically inherited and we're basically born with a ready-made set of beliefs. No naturalist that I've ever heard of would suggest such a bizarre idea. Rather, the naturalist position is that evolution has provided us with a brain that can form beliefs through experience and by communicating with other brains.
A brain that can observe the world through our senses will also have the capacity to test its beliefs empirically. This is of course the basis for the scientific method which has resulted in - among other things - the evolutionary theory. Not only is there no tension between accepting evolutionary theory and believing in naturalism, evolutionary theory is the result of the application of methodological naturalism.
God bless you brother. What you are doing is great, but please don’t forget sharing the gospel. If you don’t know the true gospel, I can show you what the Bible says about it.
You can’t get of “the crazy train” by just believing in god. Evolution could produce some truth tracking faculties and god could produce truth tracking faculties. Both could also produce some non-truth tracking faculties. We therefore hold to our beliefs fallibly. You can’t rule out any skeptical alternative this way. If you are deluded you are deluded and you wouldn’t know, deal with it!
Also you couldn’t even solve this philosophically since either God or evolution could have messed up all your capacity to do philosophy. (Maybe except the most basic stuff like you can’t doubt that you’re thinking and not be thinking, etc.)
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow "You can’t get of “the crazy train” by just believing in god."
You're right - if you believed in a god who didn't give you the capacity to think rationally, it wouldn't get you off the "crazy train".
You'd have to believe in a God who definitely did give you the capacity think rationally. Even if you turned out to be wrong, then you at least wouldn't still be stuck on this particular train.
@@MatthewFearnley Interesting.
What are your thoughts about this comparison:
- Someone said they just believe they are in one of the worlds where evolution happened to give them sufficiently truth conducive mental faculties. (Given that you agree evolution could do that)
- Someone said they believe they are in a world where a god created them to have sufficiently truth conducive mental faculties.
Does the belief really help much? Couldn’t either of them just be wrong for any reason. But if the first on is right and the belief is enough then why worry about the EAAN.
If the belief is not enough why accept the second.
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow Wow, that's a great question..
Let me first say that I'm still trying to understand the EAAN. Although I don't believe in naturalism, I also don't understand why a naturalistic evolutionist should be caused to evaluate their position differently in the light of this argument.
So a lot of the rest of what I say is just going to be thinking out loud...
I think I would say that the first belief (that we're in a world where evolution brought about the mental capacity for truth) is compatible with naturalistic evolutionism, or Christian evolutionism, or other worldviews - perhaps with some heretical evolutionist sects of Pastafarianism.
I think it must be the case that any belief that gives us good reason to believe that our brains have this capacity for truth, is enough to get us out of the particular quandary ("crazy train") raised in the argument.
So if we agree on the first belief, then the next logical step from this position might perhaps be to question whether some of these beliefs truly give us good reason. We might first decide that for instance Pastafarianism doesn't, but the reasons why we would favour Christianity over Pastafarianism would fall outside the EAAN.
Maybe the question is, do we have good reason to believe that evolution *would* bring about the capacity for reason?
- A Christian might say: probably, but if not, then I guess it must have happened through something other than evolution.
- A naturalistic evolutionist might say: probably, but if not, then ...
What does the naturalist say? I think the basic possibilities are:
a) I guess we didn't evolve. (But then on naturalism I have no other explanation of how we came to be...)
b) I guess I must not have the capacity for reason...
Both are pretty awkward conclusions. But the naturalist obviously still has the "probably" to fall back on, and as "probablies" go, it has a fairly wide mainstream acceptance.
So it feels like fairly stable ground for naturalism. But there are still a couple of loose ends:
1. Do we have a strong case that evolution *would* bring about capacity for reason, or only for some related ideas: that we can see roughly how evolution might bring about capacity for reason; that evolution probably happened evidentially; and and that we do in fact (probably) have that capacity for reason?
2. We've alluded to the possibility that we may in fact *not* have capacity for reason in point (b) above, and I think this is the EAAN's trump card, but I don't feel like it's properly come into play. I don't really see the best way to apply it though..
To briefly touch on the second belief (that God created us that way).. I don't think the EAAN requires us to jump to that conclusion. It's probably been carefully named - an argument "against naturalism", rather than an argument "for theism" - although admittedly that is certainly plugged as an alternative in the video.
(I'll also just take a moment to speculate that my response might have developed quite differently if the first belief proposition had included the specific nonexistence of God, but I think either way this was interesting to think about.)
@@MatthewFearnley Big thanks for the response. This kind of conversation is why I hang in TH-cam comments. 💜 I’ll let your thoughts sink in a bit and will return when I’ve had the chance to ponder 😊
6:30, No that argument is flawed because it assumes that 'beliefs' are passed down biologically, which is false. If I were to raise 2 humans in 2 different environments that encouraged different beliefs, they would have different opinions and different ways of thinking. The human mind evolved the mechanism to adapt to different environments, and to configure its own neurology to ensure survival, not hard-wired 'beliefs' (although there are some very basic ones such as object permanence- although this is still debated). Reasoning, and 'logic', are the means by which human brains understand existing things, anything beyond it would be inherently unknowable (and the fact they exist as well), and it wouldn't matter because they are beyond human reasoning. This couldn't be 'resolved' by invoking the supernatural, because you are then assuming that you can know aspects of things which exceed human comprehension, which is silly- unless it isn't supernatural, then you'll have the burden of showing evidence. Evolution, like all scientific theories is just a model by which we understand things, it like all other scientific theories are inherently constrained by our neural architecture, nothing about this 'disproves' evolution, because that itself is also human reasoning.
Nowhere in this video did he ever suggest beliefs are passed down biologically. Literally nowhere.
You don't even care enough to present his own argument in an honest way.
@@thepalegalilean Well at , 7:21, he literally imagines a scenario where false beliefs are passed down biologically. (Even though that's not how the brain works).
@@clopensets6104
He didn't say that at all. And if you watch the video past the time stamp you cited, You would see that.
What he was saying that was passed down biologically is fitness of survival.
His whole argument is that evolution doesn't cause your beliefs to be correct or even coherent.
The only thing evolution cares about is that you survive to see another sunrise. And literally nothing outside of that.
Therefore if naturalistic evolution is true, We have absolutely no foundation or reason for trusting our beliefs.
The idea that beliefs were passed down biologically was never a part of his argument.
@@thepalegalilean You and the guy in the video both have a totally incorrect view on brain evolution. In complex organisms (like us), the brain evolves to be better at adapting to new scenarios, otherwise known as 'learning'. The brain does have hard-wired elements, such as rudimentary phobias, and sexual urges, but those are already identified to be subjective. Whereas the brain's ability to learn is what allows for us to reason, because being able to learn requires the capability to reason objectively. In this way a human is not limited to just one circumstance he/she can reason and adapt in totally different scenarios. This means that the reasoning is indeed objective, because if it were subjective, then it wouldn't have the capability to adapt to totally different environments and scenarios. As humans, our technological and scientific advancements are reflections of this advance capacity for objective reasoning.
@@clopensets6104
It seems you're the ignorant one on this issue. Evolution doesn't help you to reason. Because biological evolution, Whether it is happening in the brain or any other place, Only cares about your survival. It literally does not help in any other meaningful way.
If humans can survive better being mindless apes such as gorillas or chimps, That's what we will become. Because that's what evolution does.
But what evolution cannot do is teach you belief systems.
Assuming belief systems are even possible in biological evolution, The only thing they will ever be is a byproduct of the stimulus of fitness survival. There is no guarantee these beliefs would even be true, much less coherent.
As in, If naturalistic evolution is true, There is no reason as to why you should trust your own beliefs, Is much less wonder whether or not they are true.
As far as learning goes, That means absolutely nothing. Every creature, No matter how simple or complex, Learns. That's what is called survival of the fittest. Darwin himself said that it is not the strong or the smart that survive, But those species which are best able to adapt to change.
What you call learning or adapting to new scenarios, We've been calling natural selection for a long, long time.
And as Darwin has long since taught us, evolution just cares about your well being. It will never teach you to reason, Because that does not help you survive. You will not develop any beliefs. And any you might have, Are simply a byproduct of natural selection, rather than anything that can be discerned as usable. Or even true.
As square guy already said, This is a philosophical issue. The science of biology is not going to help you resolve this.
So you can either accept evolution or naturalism. But if you accept both you will logically run into this contradiction. And nothing you do is going to help you get out of it.
I have no idea what you mean by content of beliefs. You are conflating philosophical naturalism, and other things that would be true, if philosophical naturalism is true. Again saying evolution cares, is nonsensical. Biological evolution can not occur if organisms don't reproduce. If that is what you mean, then you should just say that.
(Fair warning it is long)
To clarify the "Primitive thinking" he mentioned, what he means is that belief in supernatural thinks such as gods are often the result of humanity not understanding a large and significant factor of their life, such as it's origin, and with modern technology and understanding of the universe it's "primitive" to assume a supernatural being created the universe when we're getting a clearer picture of the beginning of our universe every year.
I do not reject the idea of a god but I do not believe in a god since facts and rational solutions are more concrete and work in physics so far, but given concrete evidence and I will believe, say with quantum theory and special relativity, they are both scientific theories and not scientific laws, which means I don't believe they are true but the closest we have gotten so far.
And then you went completely religiously biased.... such a shame... you claim that the unflasifiable is the absolute truth with no physical or scientific evidence to back it up, no, separation of state and church is the proper way to do it for a bipartisan government structure.
Okay, if I've understood what you're trying to say, the state of your brain causes action and belief and that belief doesn't always benefit evolution nor that it causes your actions, did i get that right?
Well the brain is a bit more complex than that, it's adaptable beyond the "factory new" state if it had simply been grown, our actions and beliefs chance the state of our brain and we can train in or train away different habits or thought processes, a good example is Anti-social personality disorder (ASPD), and while sociopath and psychopath aren't scientific terms.
The different diagnoses that the general population refer to the two are interesting, the "psychopath" diagnosis is one of genetics, a genetic disability that makes the diagnosed virtually unable to feel things such as empathy or sympathy.
Wile the "sociopath" diagnosis is similar in the inability to feel sympathy and empathy it is learned behaviour, our bodies are extremely lazy and will conserve any and all energy it can without impacting the risk of death, there are some exceptions as there is in everything though.
But "sociopathy" can also be trained away if the diagnosed is willing to change, they can survive in society and the wild but they might not like being different, or they do.
The placebo effect is also a great example of our beliefs impacting our brain and body, if we truly believe something can cure us it might actually do it as it can boost the immune system and change the hormone levels in our blood killing the intruding organism, as the brain is effected, thinking the crisis is averted.
We as people are moldable because our brain's functions are.
A new belief doesn't have to be beneficial though but it might appear at the same time as a beneficial trait, it's like having a room filled with hydrogen, you won't get anything else from it by pouring in nitrogen gas as it's chemically inert, however at the same time oxygen might be poured in creating water.
Or you might pour in chlorine gas making hydrogen-chloride, but neutralizing it by adding oxygen at the same time which creates water which reacts to form muriatic acid in dissolved form, now you no longer have acidic air even if there's still a pool of acid on the ground, but your survival chances have improved.
Basically, the addition of a trait might not be beneficial or it might be damaging but it has survived because other traits have neutralized the effects if only it were present.
Okay now for a bit more disturbing turn, yes such a "messed up brain" can be picked by evolution, because it's not only your decisions that determine your fitness, it's also others, in the past, people with down syndrome and cerebral palsy didn't survive, they were weak and they died.
Now however humans don't have the thought of "only the strong survive" and we aid those with disabilities, they have survived because we take pity or have love for them and one of your or society's traits as a whole might be beneficial to one such individual.
I myself do not function in social situations but I do in survival situations, I can survive by myself but the average human needs human contact, you could argue that I have better fitness as I can survive on my own, but I also function poorly in modern society and I may end up in a fight that damages my body and brain, or my brains might even paint a wall or a sidewalk, so I also have worse fitness, just in different circumstances.
My belief that there is no god might lead to me being less social and not going out during a pandemic and potentially saving my life, even if we prove in the future that there is a god, or your belief in a god results in you going to church and becoming a pastor with a happy family instead of say, turning to drugs and overdosing.
The situations determine our choices and our future, and two different choices might even lead to the same road.
It does not push radical skepticism as you believe it does, it teaches you that even if we might think something is true now doesn't mean that new evidence won't come up later disproving or changing the theory, it is only logical to assume that the natural laws which we haven't been able to disprove, are true, and that theories that hold up to our current understanding are mostly true, but that they can all be disproved and we might have to rethink all of physics.
Argumentation on the on the go... he watched the beginning of the video where your stance is a bit unclear and decided to make a video, or it's an example of one of humanity's greatest flaws... he made a mix up and said the wrong thing. (It's quite common when you're busy with other things such as work and make videos in your spare time)
These theories about the role of religion are hideously flawed. Pagans didn't go, "The sun is powerful, so the sun must be a god!" Instead, pagans went, "the gods are powerful, and so one must be associated with the sun." Literally the wrong end of the stick.
@@toomanymarys7355 Not all, many saw the sun as a god for it's blinding and scorching, yet life giving capabilities in young Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, just because you, or the majority thinks one way does not mean the rest think the same, without the knowledge of space, the sun, physics and natural law that we have today, it is entirely reasonable to start wondering if the blinding lifegiver in the sky is a diety
Wait you arent a theistic evolutionist right? I think it is really weird to say that an all loving God would create humans with this horrible proces. It kinda undermines the Free will defense. For example: God created beautiful creatures like the dinosaurs, but got tired of them so He said: "Here eat this meteorite"
Interesting point. While I don't want to agree or disagree with you, this is an implication of theistic evolution that I'd never considered before..
Seems abit silly. If you hold that God is omniscient and has knowledge of everything every act he does has reasons unless you may provide reasons why God's action call this reason X is is wrong it would just show that God isn't omniscient. On that note just because you don't have the current knowledge of why God may do a action X does not mean there isn't a reason or logic behind it.
Fun fact: we got saddled with see-and-say anti-phonics failed reading programs because of atheist educators trying to attack the idea of the importance of beliefs vs actions. Which is why leftists still try to defend it, even though Johnny can't read.
The one confused, is you. If your imaginary friend gave me reliable cognitive faculties and I conclude it doesn’t exist, then my cognitive faculties were NOT RELIABLE. 😂
The notion that evolution could support the God Hypothesis is pure post hoc rationalisation that attempts to retcon theology by just crossing out naturalism andputting God in its place. It's a disingenuous argument that has no merit. You can't assert one creation story for thousands of years, and then completely change it once you find out that it's wrong, and worse, claim that 'it was evolution all the time'.
I think you read too much into his use of the word 'primitive' - and wrongly claimed that the presence of sophisticated arguments that attempt to justify such primitive thinking means that religious belief isn't primitive. It's wrong to make that claim, especially in light of the oft touted 'properly basic belief' notion employed by apologists.
I think you misunderstood Stick - he didn't claim that true beliefs promote survival because of science.Your number 2 is innacurate. One might say it's pure number 2. He said that true beliefs promote fitness because they are true - it has nothing to do with how we can use technology to help us. You don't need science to know that a tiger will eat you. You just need to know that a tiger will eat you. If it's not true that a tiger will eat you, you risk wasting valuable energy running from it and dying of dehydration because the tiger is at hte watering hole. Thus a fasle belief about the tiger will lessen your fitness. Only a true belief will increase your fitness.
Stick doesn't deny that the content of our beliefs cause our actions. I'm not even entirely sure how anyone could deny this.
The content of our beliefs cause our actions.
If our actions increase our fitness, we will survive while those whose actions decrease fitness won't.
Actions responding to true beliefs lead to higher fitness than actions responding to false beliefs.
Therefore, true beliefs lead to increased fitness, and are retained at the expense of false beliefs.
True beliefs are selected for under evolution.
But there are beliefs that have no bearing on fitness.
Evolution does not 'deselect' 'neutral beliefs, or at least does so at a very slow rate.
Your idea that 'the truth isn't doing anything' is wrong. Of course the truth is doing something. It's being truth. But I think the assertion is just a red herring. You seem to be asserting that truth has no bearing on our actions - but it does. If our actions are responding to something false - then they will not produce fitness. So if our brain cannot discern truth, our actions will not be effective.You said yourself that evolution cares about the things that cause our actions. How is a brain perceiving its suroundings not a thing that cause our actions? Therefore evolution does care about how our brain functions - ie its accuracy in perceiving reality - ie truth.
Your 'bodily actions are set inmotion by your beliefs. It's your beliefs that trigger them. If you believe that noise is a low flying missile, they will cause your brain to send messages to your body to duck. The contents of your beliefs are very much in the causal chain leading to your actions.
"only the physical state of your brain is responsible for your actions"???? How on earth do you think your brain works? To put it somewhat mechanically, the response to a stimulus is dependent on your belief about which response is appropriate. It's your beliefs (your cognitive state) that direct the neural chain that connects the stimulus to the response.
ooohhhh - and here comes the rub. It always comes down to chance, doesn't it. Despite the demonstration that truth is more fit than untruth, and the very basis of evolution being the survival of the fittest - you still clutch at 'chance' being the only thing that naturalism can be ruled by.
Despite evolution necessarily compensating for chance - you theists still cling to it like a lifejacket made from cement.
So you're wrong.
The truth of abelief does play a functional role, since only a true belief can make a true (and therefore more fit) connection between stimulus and response).
We do have reason to believe thatany given belief is true. And anything you canpropose to undermine that reason, also takes down theism with it - because if we can't know truth, then you sure as hell can't pretend that some unseen Being has revealed it to you. What naturalism has as an advantage is the consistent verification that we canknow truth - verification by experience. It's either accept that or accept solipsistic nothingness, from which neither naturalistic nor theistic worldview can escape.
How can you know it's true that God would let you know what's true? you're appealing to my worldview to make that assertion!!! lol. It is very staisfying saying that. I now know why you thiests do it.
Let's look at your thought experiment. Instead of looking at the mouse pounce as one isloated example, let's consider that it's an action that has to take place ten times a day, every day for the whole of your dog's life. Because a dog's gotta eat, right? But a dog's gotta drink too, and avoid getting stung by bees and avoid walking off cliffs and avoid getting eaten by crocodiles. I don't know how many neural messages get sent out per second, but even the act of standing up requires millions of minute adjustments every minute. I wouldn't be surprised if the average living thing sends out billions of neural responses in a single hour. let alone a day.
What do you think the probability is of your dog surviving reality given that there are billions of false neural decisions being made? Are you seriously going to tell me that - yeah - we could exist under naturalism given everything is a result of sheer chance? Do not be ridiculous.
If chance was the governing factor under naturalism - nothing would survive more than five minutes.
Wow. I must admit I started this section of the comment before you got to the point where you do actually extend the one action to every aspect of your dog's life. I had charitably assumed you hadn't realised that every neural action would be subject to chance under your analogy - but it seems you are aware. So you should be very aware of how ridiculous you are being. Why aren't you?
Isn't it funny how probability suddenly doesn't matter, after all your bunk about using Bayes (incorrectly) to affirm the resurrection...
What really irks me is that in fact you seem to know how ridiculous you're being because you say 'this example may be impossible'. I don't understand why you didn't explore that idea more fully. Because there is no 'may be' about it. It is impossible. And that fact completely blows apart the point you are trying to argue. And you make matters worse by doubling down with your assertions about beliefs to do with covid. You literally just admitted that it (may be) impossible - and yet you immediately presented it as a possibility.
"Radical skepticism" lol - yeah, except when it comes to God, right? So with radical skepticism, comes radical special pleading apparently. Consistency is your natural enemy it seems. That doesn't seem like a very good philosophical defence of the EAAN.
So the only point in your favour here is that Stick was lazy in his introductory statement.
ps. If you want a more extensive breakdown of the flaws in the EAAN you should check out Digital Gnosis's video about it. Plantinga is not an expert on evolution and his arguments are weak.