Alvin Plantinga, the prominent Notre Dame University philosopher, says that if you’re a believer in evolution, you have no warrant for believing in naturalism (atheism, roughly speaking). Here’s part of his argument, to whet your interest:
Now what evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behavior, (perhaps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that issues in survival and reproduction.
Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn’t, as such, care a fig about true belief.
[Link: Evolution vs. Naturalism - Books & Culture]
Update 9/6/08: I have turned off threaded comments, as explained here. This will unfortunately jumble up the sequence of the comments on this post, for which I offer my apologies.
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It seems obvious that a true belief would be adaptive. The organism would then be behaving, to the extent that behavior would be driven by belief, in relation to reality.
Did you read what Plantinga wrote about that?
True beliefs are adaptive, but could’nt the same be said for false beliefs? If you are trying to get away from a tiger and you have the false belief that the tiger is the starting signal to a 1000m race, would not that obviously false belief be adaptive? Here’s what Plantinga said:
Sure, a belief may be false. It the evolutionary pressures to instill true beliefs are greater than the pressures to instill false beliefs. Sure, a belief might accompany the frog flicking its tongue out, but first of all, that’s a random hypothetical (much like mutations can cause all sorts of changes in morphology). There’s nothing there except the value of the tongue flick to keep the belief around, which may very well happen. But in the case of a true belief, there’s a feedback mechanism: not only can it accompany some adaptive behavior, like the false belief did, but it also has the value of conforming with reality, which will add to its adaptive value.
So when Plantinga says it doesn’t care “a fig,” that is a pretty broad brush. It’s not such a black and white situation, false beliefs can occur under evolution and adaptation, but true beliefs have greater adaptive value, everything else being equal.
Paul,
Wouldn’t the result of that feedback mechanism be another belief about reality, whose true-value doesn’t matter so long as it results in certain adaptive behavior? What is needed is a causal link between true beliefs and adaptive behavior. What prevents false beliefs from causing the adaptive behavior that natural selection loves?
Paul
I almost forgot that you said recently that the thought/belief/desire is the exact same thing as the physical brain state. From what I can tell, you are saying that ‘true’ is merely a label – that a brain state is labeled as ‘true’ if and only iff it produces adaptive behavior. If that is an accurate summary, you’ve now squeezed out truth and replaced it with something like pragmatism or ‘what works’. Being a rational human being has nothing to do with being logical or rational.
Hi Paul,
As always, you presume too much.
But for today only I’m running a push, pull and drag sale: whatever you bring to the lot I’d like to take in on trade.
So, if it be obvious that true belief is adaptive what do you do with the belief of the vast majority of all humanity at all times in theism (and objective morality)?
Obviously adaptive, right? Obviously true?
By the way, as you say that beliefs drive behaviours I take it you do not believe they are epiphenomena? As beliefs are causal then, per your statement, by what are they caused?
Charlie,
1. a very basic logical idea is that if A leads to B, or if A causes B, that doesn’t mean that B necessarily leads to A, or that B causes A. So, in your formulation, you went from (A) a true belief can be (B) adapative to (B) if something is adaptive it must be (B) true.
2. Everything that occurs in evolution is not adaptive, so false beliefs can occur, even on a widespread scale such as religious beliefs. Evolution is full of false starts, blind alleys, mistakes, etc. On vast time scales, though, adaptation wins; but false beliefs occur on such a small time scale, so it’s hard to go from widespread belief to necessarily adaptive.
1. No. The result of the feedback is that the true belief is held more firmly, acted on more, etc.
2. See #1 (I think, I’m not sure what you mean in your 2nd sentence).
3. Nothing, it’s possible, as I said above in an earlier post. I’m just saying that true beliefs would have a greater tendency to be adaptive than false ones, not that false ones could have no adaptive value.
Thanks for your reply, Paul.
1) I did indeed. So your argument, that true beliefs are obviously adaptive, also includes that false beliefs can also be adaptive?
2) Interesting use of time in this defence, given that religious belief has accompanied the most ancient of all human civilizations of which we are aware. As long as humans have been human and have had human beliefs they have had religious beliefs, as far as we can tell.
So evolution doesn’t select for true beliefs (even though they are adaptive)? If we evolved (and naturalism is true) we are no more likely to have true beliefs than not? That’s exactly what Plantinga was arguing.
He said adaptiveness doesn’t guarantee us truth in our beliefs and you say evolution hasn’t even had time to have selected for true beliefs. Your argument verifies that evolution can’t guarantee us true beliefs.
It’s not clear to me that correspondence and pragmatic are a truly binary opposition: that something “works” is central to our capacity to make the comparison between “proposition” and “reality.” By and large Newtonian physics “works,” so we say it is true, yet at the quantum level Newtonian physics simply doesn’t “work.” We judge something to be false because it “doesn’t work”: we cannot do anything with it, at least by way of prediction and control (understanding that is an overly simplified and potentially antiquated understanding of empirical veracity). The very basis of “worldview” comparisons in Evangelical apologietics is that (we are told) the Christian worldview “works” and other worldviews “don’t work.”
One could tout the “correspondence relation” (which itself is very ambiguous, in my mind) as much as we want, but the pragmatic “it works” (or “as far as we can tell given our current understanding”) is essential for correspondence to be established.
Oops, one more comment so I can be “notif[ied about] followup comments via e-mail.”
Charlie’s question about beliefs as epiphenomena is hugely important.
Let’s grant, arguendo, that there is a feedback mechanism in evolution whereby that which works for reproduction is reinforced in succeeding generations. It is very easy then to see how behaviors would be reinforced and repeated, for obviously behaviors could affect organisms’ reproductive success.
Can the same be said for beliefs? Only if the feedback mechanism includes beliefs in the cycle of causes. But what are beliefs? There are two main answers non-theists offer (see here also). One of them is that beliefs “ride along” on top of brain activity, not causing anything at all. This is the epiphenomenal view Charlie alluded to. If this one is to be believed, then there is no chance that Paul’s feedback mechanism could apply, for without some involvement in the causal loop, there would be nothing to reinforce true beliefs over false ones. True beliefs, and the organism’s ability to develop and recognize true beliefs, would be strictly and completely accidental, if they happened at all; and they would not be conserved or transmitted to the next generation.
Another position regarding beliefs is that they just are brain states; that the particular dynamic configuration of one’s neurons is identical in every sense to one’s beliefs. If this were the case, then the beliefs would be part of the feedback loop. There are other problems with this position, which are not my topic this time. For now we ought to at least be able to agree that if beliefs are epiphenomena, there is no reason whatever to suppose that they are true or reliable, or that we could recognize them as being true or reliable even if accidentally they were from time to time.
And that, of course, means that if one believes that thoughts are epiphenomena, one must also believe that one cannot believe truly, which is incoherent and impossible.
Charlie, I agree, evolution doesn’t guarantee anything, especially on small time scales, and even on big time scales, I think. What evolutionist is offering guarantees? None worth the name.
Tom, I’m not sure the distinction you raise between epiphenomenon and the”(solely) brain state” position is significant here. (I’m not arguing for epiphenomenonalism, by the way.) If the brain states in the solely brain state position can be part of the feedback loop, then why would it matter if a belief rides on top of it or not?
If beliefs are epiphenomena, they’re not a part of the causal loop. If they’re not a part of the causal loop, they cannot be part of the feedback loop you offered in your defense of your position. If they’re not in the feedback loop, the feedback-loop version of a response to Plantinga falls apart.
Hi Paul,
That’s pure equivocation on the word “guarantee” and an avoidance of the issue.
Too bad.
That’s exactly the point. If it’s all brain states, neurophysiology and physical causation then it precisely does not matter if, what, or whether there is a belief involved. The belief is irrelevant. Therefore, there is no reason it would be true and no reason to take it as obvious that true beliefs are adaptive.
What is adaptive is the brain state, a gated mechanism with an acausal rider, the belief.
Likewise, if the belief is merely identical to the brain state in every way then it is semantically void and carries no propositional meaning. In that case there is no such thing as truth or belief and only on/off, fire/pause.
In any case you, Paul, have admitted, or strongly implied, in one turn of comments that true beliefs are obviously adaptive, that false beliefs are adaptive, and that no beliefs are adaptive.
Having stated above that evolution does not guarantee that our beliefs are true (correlate to reality) then Plantinga’s point has been made – belief in naturalism is (self) defeated. If you believe in it you can’t trust your beliefs.
If the belief merely rides on top of the brain state, then the belief is not part of the feedback loop, but the brain state it’s attached to is, so there’s still something filling that role in the feedback loop, even though it’s not the belief per se.
So what’s the difference, other than the philosophical position, so to speak, that beliefs aren’t in the feedback loop. On the ground, everything’s still the same.
Charlie, can you explain the equivocation?
This critique of materialism has cropped up a lot here, and here’s my answer to it. *Ultimately,* that’s right, but that’s like saying that Newtonian physics isn’t really true since Einsteinian physics, yet we use Newtonian physics everyday quite well, thank you. Ultimately, Newton wasn’t right, but it doesn’t matter 99% of the time.
What we call propositional ultimately reduces down to on/off in materialism, but that doesn’t stop us from using the idea of truth in our everyday life quite well, thank you.
Hi Kevin,
Just a little counterpoint to your comment, with which I agree in general.
1) Brahe’s geocentricism “worked”. He could predict very accurately, within a minute of an arc, where Mars would be at any given time. But his belief was wrong.
2) When a beaver hears running water he patches his dam. This works. But when he hears it running on a recording he patches that as well – even in the middle of a dry field. And if he is in a leak-proof concrete man-made dam he busily “patches” it as well. Whatever he’s doing works, but if he “believes” anything (“there is a leak I must patch”) then his belief is wrong.
Hi Paul,
The equivocation is that when I said evolution doesn’t guarantee that our beliefs are true (which you’ve now agreed to) I was stating that it does not cause us to have true beliefs, that there is no reason to think it does, and that it is just as likely not to.
Then you personified evolution and acted as though I was foolish enough to talk about it as though I expected it to be making promises. You exemplified this aspect of your response when you asked “what evolutionist guarantees…?”
To Tom you said:
Exactly. The belief is irrelevant and could be anything. It need not be true, and probably isn’t.
Thank you for admitting that naturalism and evolution give us no reason to believe that our beliefs are true. Of course, this is exactly the point of the OP which you thought to contest.
Your reference to Newton, in fact, merely points out further the validity of Plantinga’s argument. What is not ultimately true (I do not make this concession re: Newton by the way, but accept it for argument’s sake) can work 99% of the time. Therefore, it would be selected for as this utility is all that is visible to selective forces.
Geocentrism works on the ground 99.99999999% of the time but it is wrong. Naturalism and evolution (Plantinga says N & E ) would have left us with just that knowledge or capacity for knowledge, as it did the beaver fixing the leaking water (see my comment to Kevin). When it is behaviour which is adaptive, and you admit that false beliefs can be associated with adaptive behaviours, and that beliefs may not even have causal force (but earlier you said beliefs were drivers) then we have by your own comments the admission that N & E does not select for true beliefs nor the propensity toward them.
N & E cannot be rationally believed because if it is true our beliefs are not rational.
Charlie,
(1) True, but I’m not claiming that a pragmatic conception of truth is all there is. All I am arguing is that the correspondence-pragmatic relation is not a binary one, but both are necessary for the other to function.
(2) On the issue of animal “cognition” (and much of human “cognition”; I’m using that term very loosely), it is not an issue of “belief”. Beliefs and propositions play a very small role in human life and I think any philosophy or psychology that makes the belief central or even foundational is fundamentally wrong. It is not an issue of rejecting beliefs or the existence of beliefs, but of situating them correctly in human existence. This, I believe, is where Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and their kind of phenomenology becomes very important.
I find this discussion of beliefs as “causes” to be puzzling. How do beliefs “cause” anything? What is it in the nature of a belief that it can take up this role?
I know the notion of belief as cause is very present in analytic philosophy, but I don’t see any reason for accepting it.
Charlie,
I don’t see why this is necessary. Human beings are not beavers and I think it faulty to argue that just because beavers demonstrate the phenomenon you are talking about that it is then somehow impossible for man (or any creature) to develop beyond that. If there is truth to my argument that correspondence and pragmatism are not opposites but co-necessary, then there is a ‘mechanism’ (using that term loosely) for the development of further capacities of understanding and knowledge.
Hi Kevin,
It’s not that because beavers make such errors therefore man cannot develop beyond their level. The beavers (and Tycho Brahe, do not forget) demonstrate that wrong “beliefs” can “work”. That is, the fact that something works does not guarantee that it is correct. Therefore, the idea that true beliefs are adaptive, or that working beliefs are true, is defeated. It can guarantee no such thing and there is no additional mechanism to add on to N & E by which to ensure that true beliefs would have been adaptive in our unique evolution. As has been said, N & E can select for a creature that can leap across a stream and catch an apple, not figure out the cosmos. To paraphrase Einstein because I am too lazy to look up the quote, the unfathomable thing about the universe is that we can fathom it.
This is the very question I posed to Paul and his predecessors in this argument and from whom I get no answer.
What is a belief, in naturalism, that it can cause anything? By your question you seem to think they are nothing. Paul seems to have arrived at that conclusion, after first saying that they drive behaviour. Given naturalism I can only see that a belief is nothing and can cause nothing.
But Paul was right the first time.
Then as per your first comment how does “proposition” “work” in such a way as to be “pragmatic”?
In theism we have the answer. What we all know to be true, that beliefs and propositions have the ability to be true, that science actually has the capacity to describe nature, is justified by our being made in the image of God. And God told us that He cannot lie, and that nature can reveal truths about Him, and that He is the Truth, etc.
All N & E can give us is “it work/s/ed” – to one degree or another.
Can you elaborate a little as to what that situation is?
Kevin,
I find it difficult to believe that you actually think this. Doesn’t your belief that Charlie is wrong/mistaken cause you to type up a response? And the belief that the submit button causes the response to appear on the blog causes you to click it?
OK, my thinking is horrible. Where’s that delete button when you need it? Desire of the will, not belief, causes you to type up a response. Belief is involved in the process somewhere, but I was wrong to say that belief causes the typing. You can believe Charlie is mistaken and then desire to do nothing.
Paul, this ought not to be hard.
You said earlier that the reason true beliefs are likely to appear increasingly more often over time (and presumably false beliefs would appear less often), is because of a feedback mechanism of which true and false beliefs are a part. If beliefs are not part of that feedback mechanism, then your answer is irrelevant. “On the ground,” everything is not the same. You can’t say that beliefs are influenced by a feedback mechanism in which they do not participate.
Also, you said,
Drop “per se” from that, please, to be accurate. If beliefs are epiphenomena, then it’s not beliefs that are filling that role in the feedback loop, period.
Thank you, too, and you’re welcome!
This is not the time to change the subject, Paul. The subject is not whether we can use the idea of truth in our everyday life. Of course we can do that. The subject is whether using the idea of truth makes sense if “what we call propositional ultimately reduces down to on/off.” The point is that there is something self-contradictory in that; that it is fairly equivalent to, “My overall set of beliefs includes the belief that our ability to produce true beliefs comes from an evolutionary process that lacks the ability to produce true beliefs in any reliable manner.”
That’s the question at issue, and the one we need to stick with, thank you very much.
Kevin,
Steve already said pretty much the same thing I’m going to say, but I can’t restrain myself from repeating it.
Something caused you to write this statement (call it S) on this blog. Actually there were several somethings, several causes flowing together, each of them (perhaps) individually necessary, all of them, together, certainly sufficient to cause you to write S here. We might call each contributing cause c1, c2, c3 … cx, and the entire sufficient set of causes C.
It would seem likely that one of those necessary contributing causes cn for your writing S would be your own belief that S. This is a fairly common sense position to take, after all: if you did not believe that S, then it seems rather unlikely you would have presented S to us as a representation of what you believe.
Or are you saying that your belief that S is not a member of the set C ?
Back to plain English: don’t you think that your own beliefs contribute to your writing or saying what you believe?
Further: Don’t you think that your belief that the water is shallow causes you to step in the water rather than dive headfirst? Does your belief that lightning might strike you cause you to stay indoors during a thunderstorm? Does your belief that candidate X is better than candidate Y cause you to vote for X instead of Y, if you vote? Or are your beliefs thoroughly irrelevant to every action you take?
I think that the problem you pointed out just now, Steve, is resolved by considering whether beliefs are part of the set of causes, as I wrote it below.
A lot of activity here since I posted, I’ll try to catch up.
Charlie, forgive me if I’m short-circuiting a lot of points, but I thought you distilled the argument down very well when you said
I hope I don’t recycle the argument back to a previous point with this, but the answer to your distillation of the argument is that evolution works in tendencies, not in absolutes. So there are no guarantees, but there can be tendencies one way or the other. I can’t prove the following, so if you want to claim victory because I can’t offer a proof, I accede (until I develop a proof), but it seems to me that adaptation would tend to favor true beliefs over false ones. This depends on the notion of feedback that I introduced; and whether beliefs ride on top of brain states or not, and therefore can or can’t contribute to feedback doesn’t seem to change the outcome, not in terms of Tom’s last comment about feedback, but in terms of whether evolution would produce tendencies toward true beliefs.
Sorry if I missed a point mentioned earlier, I’ll have to go back and check the posts and see what I missed.
By the way, the argument is now convoluted enough that I’ll ask again if anyone wants to use Google Documents to really outline the argument, pro and con, and do it right.
You are right and I kind of pointed to that when I said belief is involved in the (causal) process. I didn’t want people to think that I thought belief alone causes action. Imagine the shame….
No
Charlie,
No, it is not; it is made problematic, but it isn’t simply “defeated.” We both would agree that, if we accepted evolution (which, admittedly, is also vague as there are many theories of evolution), true beliefs can be adaptive and working beliefs can be true. This possibility is not defeated by showing that working beliefs can be false. There is no guarantee needed and I would add that we have no such guarantee in a non-evolution approach (see more below).
Honestly, we would have to discuss this on a case by case basis: my beliefs about, say, the nature of “property” is inconsequential to my sitting here and typing on this computer; I can type just as well and just as meaningfully whether I’m a realist or a nominalist, whether I think properties inhere in substances or if I see them as dynamic patterns, or even if I’ve never considered the nature of abstract properties. So beliefs can be more or less important depending on the issue under consideration.
One interesting point, though, about your example of the beavers: using the tape recording is blatantly artificial. In the natural world, the world in which the beaver naturally lives, its behavior is appropriate. So I find the fact that the beaver can be tricked by inserting artificial conditions to be indicative of a non-subject-object approach that grounding our understanding in beliefs (that are potentially divorced from the world) entails: the beaver’s behavior is closely tied to its natural environment, the natural world in which it continually inhabits, and not some artificial world constituted by beliefs that are then somehow ‘compared’ with ‘the real world.’ Put one more way, it’s world is the natural world in which it continually finds itself, not some abstract ‘subjective’ world that is then somehow tied to an ‘objective’ world.
No, you misunderstand: I don’t understand how a belief in any understanding can ’cause’ anything. The very concept itself is a mystery to me. What exactly do beliefs cause and how do they do so? If anything beliefs seem to be a consequence, not an initial cause, of everyday life.
Prior to all propositions, to all beliefs that are potentially divorced from the ‘real world,’ there is practical coping with things in the world. As I open the door when I leave the house there is absolutely no need for me to believe or affirm, “Doors are for opening.” Rather, I simply walk towards it, extend my arm (with the resultant twist in my trunk, slight lowering of my shoulder, stopping walking, etc.), my hand naturally shapes itself as needed for opening the particular kind of door I have, I open it, walk through, and close it. Yes, this practical relation is meaningful, but it has no need of particular beliefs about the door.
In fact, we have a very fascinating case in psychology, often called ‘blindsight,’ where someone has no perception of an object and its properties (size, shape, color, etc.), no matter how many times you ask them about it, yet they can very naturally stretch out their hand and pick up the object, can (in some cases) catch a ball that is thrown at them, and can naturally cope with objects without being able to say what kind of object it is, its size and shape. Similarly, there are cases where the patient lacks the capacity to name objects and describe their uses (what they are good for, how to use them, etc.), but can then, in the next instant, take up the object and use it for its given purpose.
So having correct beliefs about something is not necessary for successfully coping with it, for meaningfully and truthfully coping with it. This, I believe, is important for the example of the beaver: this is, in some form, its mode of coping with its environment. It is not a matter of belief, but of transparent coping with affordances (to use a term from ecological psychology): with uses, capacities for coping with things, of concretely taking up an object and using it for ‘pragmatic’ purposes.
That’s not an answer: that simply pushes the question back. The belief that you can know truth does nothing for demonstrating how you know truth, which is exactly what is at issue here. I’ve argued above that pragmatism in some form is an essential component of correspondence views of truth such that the correspondence relation cannot be grasped apart from a pragmatic concern with ‘what works.’ So I fail to see how simply adding “we are made in God’s image” ‘answers’ anything; at worst it is just another example of a potentially problematic belief and one that cannot be verified because we have no way of seeing some kind of correspondence relation between God’s structure of knowledge and our own.
Let me add that I think the focus on beliefs is a very large misunderstanding of the structure of human understanding. So if we are indeed made in God’s image in this epistemological sense, then we are misunderstanding God’s structure of knowledge/understanding.
Lastly, I argued above about situating belief in relation to transparent (i.e. non-propositional, not in need of beliefs) coping. Of course the above is a very cursory analysis, but you can find much more by looking further into Heideggerian phenomenology.
Let me end by saying that this post is already pretty long and, from past experience, I realize that it will bring up more questions and more need for further elucidation…and I just don’t have the time to go much more into it right now. So I’ll apologize up front and in advance if I don’t take the time to respond to your response; nothing personal…
)
Paul,
You are not doing at all well here, I’m afraid. I’m dumbfounded.
How on earth could feedback contribute to the development of something that is not a part of the feedback loop?
Paul,
There’s no reason why evolution can’t produce a brain with 100% false beliefs and 100% correct behavior so that the organism survives selection. If there is something preventing this, or favoring some other outcome then the universe is ‘rigged’ and that points to purpose.
The way I see it Naturalism says there’s no requirement for the link between belief and behavior to be there. Why act on any belief? Plenty of organisms lack beliefs and evolution selects them just fine. Naturalism also says there’s nothing preventing selection of organisms with a Bizarro World mentality that is backward and illogical. All that is necessary is “it works”.
An example of this Bizarro World mentality would be an organism that says “I believe I will live if I jump off this building. I want to live, therefore I won’t jump.” False and illogical (and strange), yes, but it works.
Kevin, this is a very good question:
Nevertheless we all know that beliefs cause things. it’s quite inescapable. I hope you saw my response to your earlier comment about this.
I think for most people the difficulty you point to is this: it’s impossible to imagine how beliefs can have causal efficacy, if causal efficacy is understood strictly in terms of the kinds of things studied by empirical sciences. We’re very familiar with Newtonian effects. Quantum or relativistic effects are weird but we can at least imagine them being physical in nature; they’re at least susceptible to mathematical modeling. But we don’t know how to put beliefs in any kind of similar framework.
Does that mean they can’t have causal efficacy? Well, we already know that they do, so it can’t mean that. It must mean they have a different kind of causal efficacy. That leaves open two possibilities: either they partake of physical reality in some way science has not opened up yet, or they are not physical.
If the first, then maybe someday we’ll understand the “how” you referred to, and we’ll understand it in physical terms. Or maybe we won’t; maybe they’re just physical, yet forever beyond the reach of science.
The possibility also exists, though, that beliefs are not physical things at all. If that is so, then we won’t ever understand the “how” in any mathematical terms, nor will we understand it as an exchange of particles or an interaction of energies. We’ll have to give up on those being the categories that define understanding. We might have to just take the causal efficacy of beliefs as a brute given.
That is quite consistent with Judeo-Christian theism, by the way. Charlie was right:
Your answer was,
If you insist on “how” being answered physically, then it’s not an answer, but that insistence is question-begging.
Sure it answers something. God is non-physical, God can cause things; God created man in his image, including having a mind that can cause things in non-physical ways. Is this problematic? Yes, in the sense that it doesn’t answer everything; but it is by no means incoherent. Can it be verified? What kind of verification did you have in mind? I assume you’re not an Ayres disciple. It can be verified by all the means by which we know there is a God.
Tom,
I don’t want to take any more time tonight here (and the posts seem to be multiplying like well-fed furry gremlins), but I start answering this in my response to Charlie: beliefs are not fundamental, but are grounded in transparent practical coping. There are many examples of meaningful and successful coping in the absence of belief or the perception of an object’s properties.
The primary problem I have is that here we are engaging in a theoretical discussion, so beliefs take on more of a primacy than they have in our average everyday lives, or put more starkly, for the large majority of our lives. Much/most of what I do happens without any need of belief affirmation, the ‘perception’ of a correspondence relation between my beliefs and ‘reality’ (Moreland’s way of discussing this by speaking of our perception of a correspondence relation is so incredibly problematic and so foreign to how we actually live our lives), and other such belief-centered understandings. Beliefs are meaningless apart from this wider ground of transparent coping and so whatever role they play (and in some cases it is a very important role, as in philosophical analysis) is secondary to much of our lives. It is when we take philosophical analysis, scientific experimentation, taxonomy, and mathematical deduction to be paradigmatic examples of understanding that we go wrong.
I could point to this lack by simply asking what role Aristotelian phronesis plays in modern analytic philosophy. This skillful and largely unarticulated capacity to meaningfully deal with things is ignored and reduced to cases of theoria.
And with that I’m done for the night.
I hope you have a good rest of the evening, Kevin.
Your response here is fine and your points well-taken. Not every human action is caused by a belief. But in spite of all you have said, there are still effects in the world whose set C of causes quite obviously have beliefs as members; and if that is true, then beliefs must have causal efficacy.
There is so much more that could be said, but the issue at hand is whether beliefs have causal efficacy, and that, I think, is quite well established.
I have an additional thought for Kevin, based on several weeks of your contribution here.
You seem to find it quite important that we understand this:
1. Evangelicals often get things wrong.
2. Moreland and Craig in particular get things wrong.
3. The only way to get things right is to understand Heidegger correctly.
4. There’s nothing you can do here to help us understand Heidegger correctly because it’s too difficult.
I think it’s perfectly legitimate for you to say these things and to make these points. You have expressed them quite clearly, and you ought to feel satisfied that you have successfully done so, though by your own admission you haven’t actually explained why (1) through (3) are true. Because of (4), as you have told us, you haven’t been able to get beyond stating them as bare assertions.
If (4) is true, though, and there’s nothing we can do here about (1), (2), and (3), then I don’t know what you might be able to do about it. That will have to be up to you. Continuing to re-state (1) through (4), however, lacking any further explication or defense of those points, is probably no longer necessary.
Hah!! Point well taken.
)
Hi Kevin,
You misunderstand.
What has been defeated is not sheer possibility but the proposition that we can expect that N & E give us true beliefs and that this is probable.
So pragmatism doesn’t necessarily entail correspondence. We are all agreed.
Technically all that is changed here is the environment, and environments change every day. Substitute the recording played in the field for a bubbling ground feed and you have the same problem. The beaver would build the dam where it was not needed. At any rate, the point is demonstrated that behaviours can be beneficial and adaptive wihtout corresponding perfectly to reality. All I’ve done is give a couple examples that spring readily to mind. Plantinga argued several more hypothetical examples, including the fly-eating-frog in the link.
In naturalism I can see your position – where all causes are physical. But in a world where will and intent exist and have causal efficacy (the real world) the beliefs that influence them likewise are causal.
This does sound fascinating. It sounds like ESP. Do you have references I could look at?
I’m not sure whose side you’re on here. You are arguing that we can have false beliefs and yet cope, ie. succeed.
That’s Plantinga’s point restated yet again. False beliefs are adaptive and the expectation that evolution would select for only or mostly true beliefs fails again. So, given N & E we have no reason to trust our beliefs since we can cope with our environment with false beliefs or no beliefs at all.
No, that is not what is at issue here. That might explain why you are arguing for both sides. What is at issue is whether or not we can count on N & E to fashion true beliefs and whether or not it is rational to believe in N & E based upon this.
Since even you demonstrate that beliefs need not be true to be adaptive we cannot rationally expect this.
I agree that correspondence will have pragmatic value, but we’ve seen that pragmatic value can inhere without correspondence.
I can learn alot about everything if I read everything. I have no reason to believe that Heidegger is the answer to all the world’s problems. From what you’ve said only the very few can even understand him just right.
No problem. I do tend to have a style.
Hi Tom,
My thoughts exactly.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for that comment. Of course it seems like true beliefs ought to be favoured because we tend to think (rightly so, I will offer) that we can have true beliefs. What I meant in my first comment about you assuming too much is that you know we have true beliefs, and you think naturalism is true, so you (have to) presume naturalism can justify true beliefs – in such situations you just invoke “evolution” as though it is somehow to provide the answer. One day you can’t even know the LNC holds and the next you think evolution steers us toward knowing truth.
I don’t say this as a form of triumphalism but we see this pattern over and over again: morality is ungrounded, you might be a brain in a vat, you might not exist, laws are brute facts, you can’t consider the beginning of the universe, you can’t trust your senses without verification but you rely on them in your verificationist theory of knowledge, you resent when I restate your positions and then say that my restatement is only valid if we take your ideas to their logical conclusions (?!)….
In all earnestness, don’t you see any reason to rethink your starting position?
I don’t get it. Plantinga writes: “So, if we assume that these hypothetical creatures are in the same kind of cognitive situation we ordinarily think we are, then certainly they would have been much more likely to survive if their cognitive faculties were reliable than if they were not.” [Read: Beliefs that are reliable (mostly true) aid in natural selection.]
So there is a reason to assume that beliefs are based on reality – natural selection should prefer them. The creatures in Plantinga’s scenario are the product of natural selection, a process that would tend to favor those with more reliable (truthful about the natural world) cognitive faculties.
His basic argument rides on the fact that because cognitive faculties do not have to be based on reality to have an adaptive impact, we should then assume that they have a 50/50 chance of being tied to reality. I don’t think this assumption is valid, and he seems be acknowledging that in his quote above but then not allowing it in his proof.
It would be like saying that because we don’t know if it will rain in a specified location in the Sahara dessert on October 12th, 2032, we must assume that the chances of rain in the Sahara dessert on that day are 50/50. Why should we accept that premise?
Tony, you need to take note of how Plantinga treats that section. He points out that this is a question-begging assumption, which therefore cannot be used as a premise in the argument. See the paragraph beginning,
And see also the paragraph following that one.
Hi Tony,
You quote Plantinga and build an argument fromhis saying”
But he says immediately following:
From that position he discusses our warranted thoughts about their beliefs. We have no reason to presume their beliefs either true or false. The physiology which created the action also created the belief and there is no reason to think it favoured truth over falsity. The action is all that matters.
What he acknowledges in his quote is that we, believing ourselves to be able to believe rightly, assume that the N & E population would be more likely to survive if thinking rightly. But if we start from scratch there is no reason to assume that.
The question he is addressing is “are we warranted, under N & E, in assuming that our beliefs are true?” In order to assess this warrant we can’t presume first that they are.
Why am I *presuming* that naturalism justifies true beliefs instead of reasoning my way to it? I offered a reason why evolution would favor (note the mitigating word “favor” instead of “justify”) true beliefs, and that is: correspondence with reality offers real benefits.
ultimately, nothing is guaranteed or absolutely proven, you’ve got that right, but morality is actually grounded in evolution. That’s not the type of grounding you mean, I know, but it is still a type of grounding.
Not sure what this means.
Huh? I don’t think I said that in any general sense (maybe in a discussion about evolution, perhaps, because evolution isn’t about the beginning of the universe).
trust them for what? For qualia, sure, but for objectivity, no, not without verification.
Right, because data from senses can be verified.
You seem to be writing this as if the contradictions in my position are blatant, but they’re anything but.
Only when the conversation has been frustrating and you incorrectly restate my positions. I apologize for any ill feelings.
Paul,
Because you haven’t reasoned your way to it. You’ve rebutted Plantinga (to a disputable level of success), but you haven’t reasoned your way to a justification of true beliefs on naturalism. Rebutting a contrary belief, even if it were successful, would not constitute that justification.
So are you agreeing or disagreeing? Connecting an electric wire to a rod pounded deep into the earth is also a type of grounding. What type are you talking about, and is it relevant to this discussion?
I’m not sure what we need to do to catch you up on the discussion here. It’s a bit frustrating…. Holo and others have talked at length about verificationism. It’s not about whether “data … can be verified.” It’s a theory of knowledge that says no knowledge is meaningful without empirical verification. Whether or not sense data can be verified is irrelevant to verificationism.
Thank you, Tom. Sometimes I think I might be losing my mind.
Hi Paul,
I think you’ve missed the point and I didn’t bring each of these up in order to go through the disputes again (except, since you asked and Tom didn’t mention it, on the universe you told me you were too uninformed (and we discussed this a second time) to even have an opinion as to whether or not the universe had a beginning or not, let alone, by implication, worry about the consequences if it did. What I still chuckle about is how you said that because you were not willing to draw a conclusion that “with all due respect” neither should I.)
I know you and I disagree as to how well you’ve supported your positions and to what degree they may or may not have failed.
I’m just asking that you think again about the whole thing as a unit. Every time you choose to dispute a blog post, which you seem to be doing merely because you feel you must deny any proposition a Christian might hold to, and then you find yourself making the admissions you have here, I would think you would wonder.
I’m likely to suggest it again and again whenever this kind of situation arises, just so you know.
Thank you for apologizing for any ill feelings, but I wasn’t referring to any. I’ll dig up the reference to my supposedly misstating your position and your admission that that was, in fact, your position, but only if one were to take your statements to their logical conclusion (and that’s exactly what one must do, obviously).
I apologize if this feels like badgering, but I really must say that this seems so absolutely obvious to me that I want you to see it as well.
Please forgive the continuation of my off-topic strand here. This is about the bigger picture rather than just this thread.
If I could email it I would.
Here’s the thread, Paul. Your comment is first, with two of mine, one quoted.
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/06/the-sense-of-god/#comment-6472
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/06/the-sense-of-god/#comment-6477
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/06/the-sense-of-god/#comment-6478
For the record, let me quote my subsequent comment as well.
Tom, I only said that I had provided a reason as to why “evolution would favor true beliefs,” not a justification of true beliefs in naturalism. There is a difference, if only in the difference between “favor” and “justification.” You’re arguing against a larger claim that is down the road, we’re still working on the smaller issue.
I was disagreeing with Charlie’s absolute (as I assumed it to be) grounding.
Verificationism is a whole ‘nother topic, eh? Can we hold off on that, in the interests of trying to contain the discussion to a mere blooming, buzzing confusion of topics and subtopics?
Eh, my tactic was confused. I was trying to show you that I do and have thought about the whole thing by addressing each part of you comment, but I see how that can be misconstrued tactically.
It doesn’t feel like badgering at all, Charlie, and as you know, I can speak up when it does feel like badgering, don’t worry about that! ; )
With regards to taking things to their ultimate conclusion, I’ve agreed with you several times, one of the right above when I was addressing each item in your list individually, about where things are taken in their ultimate considerations. But aren’t you missing my *approach* to that situation, which is similar to how we use Newtonian physics. If we can, for the sake of analogy, call Newtonian physics false, we still work with Newtonian physics realistically and use it successfully, even though we know, ultimately, that its false. *That’s* the approach I take when I say that, yes, ultiimately, I don’t know if I’m a brain in a vat, but realistically, I act as if I’m not a brain in a vat. Did that help?
Don’t get me going, Tom. This is one of those major sticking points with me.
Tom, I’m not clear what the pronouns in your comment above are referring to. What’s the 2nd “it’s” referring to, my theory or the correct one (!).
Perhaps all this is not a problem if we substitute another word for “data?” Make me an offer.
Agreed, and the Einsteinian vs. Newtonian physics analogy really doesn’t change anything. If it becomes apparant at some point in time that both theories ultimately fail, then they are false. Right now that isn’t the case.
In both places “it’s” is a contraction for “verificationism is.”
Why does Plantinga think people will look at green grass and ever believe it is blue?
How would a false belief like ‘All grass is blue’ ever get formed?
How would it not get formed? What would keep it from forming? Why would true beliefs have been privileged over false ones at that stage of natural history?
Remember, we’re talking about the earliest stages of human evolution, when organisms were in transition from having no beliefs to having something like beliefs (whatever that something might have been). Remember also that beliefs do not drive evolution, behavior does. Beliefs could influence evolution indirectly via their effect on behavior, of course, and it’s easy to see how they do that in homo sapiens today. But Plantinga is not talking about homo sapiens today, he’s talking about the first emergence of something like beliefs. If this belief-like something was not accurate in the way “grass is green” is accurate, yet its interaction with behavior was such that it was not selected against, it very well might have persisted, immune to detection by the organism or its descendants. The same might have happened with many, many other beliefs.
The fact that this is possible under naturalism and evolution (N&E) renders our entire belief-producing and belief-evaluating structures (under N&E) unreliable and undependable.
Exactly my question earlier. In an uncaring universe with no law of evolution built into it at the beginning, there is no reason why true beliefs would be favored. There’s no requirement for beliefs to begin with! There is no reason why logical thoughts or beliefs would be favored either. All that evolution favors is adaptive behavior. Doesn’t matter how you get it.
Tom, thanks for the clarification on “it’s.” Verificationism is another topic, Charlie first brought it up in this thread, let’s leave it for another day.
Tom,
I read (and re-read) the paragraph you mentioned and I still find it inscrutable. Why does Plantinga assert that adaptive behavior makes it no more likely that the hypothetical creatures’ cognitive faculties are reliable in the paragraph you cite, but if the creatures were in the same cognitive situation we are in “then certainly they would have been much more likely to survive if their cognitive faculties were reliable than if they were not.” What I mean is what distinguishes our cognitive situation from the hypothetical creatures, and what purpose does their example serve? (I mean this sincerely — I just don’t get what it is that the hypothetical creatures illustrate that using our cognitive abilities would not.)
Hi Charlie,
I responded in a reply to Tom above — if you can explain to me what I was trying to ask Tom (why are the hypothetical creatures not subject to a rule that reliable cognitive faculties would be favored in natural selection when we are) I would appreciate it.
It seems to me that the hypothetical creatures serve no argumentative purpose when Plantinga seems to admit that in the situation we are in we are warranted in believing that our cognitive faculties are reliable.
Tom,
You wrote: “How would [false beliefs] not get formed? What would keep [false beliefs] from forming? Why would true beliefs have been privileged over false ones at that stage of natural history?”
The answers to your questions seem obvious to me.
False beliefs could be formed but wouldn’t they have trouble surviving against reliable beliefs in natural selection? Cows are sometimes born with two heads. That cows can be born with two heads (and eat twice as much!) doesn’t mean that cows with two heads have an advantage or even equal opportunity against cows with one. By the same token, beliefs that reliable would have an advantage over beliefs that are not.
Plantinga writes about a hypothetical early man that perhaps “…thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. … Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.” Yes, but someone who thinks that the best way to pet a creature is to run away from it would likely survive the encounter with the tiger BUT this belief system would have other effects that would be less favorable. Humans and dogs (and other domesticated creatures) have a symbiotic, beneficial relationship that sometimes involves petting. This man’s belief about petting would interfere with that relationship, excluding him from those benefits and having a negative (for him and his belief) outcome that could be determined in natural selection.
I still don’t see how Plantinga’s argument is based on anything other than a misunderstanding that because a false belief can both happen and be selected it must therefore have an equal chance of being selected against one that is also reliable. Adaptive and reliable should win over adaptive every time.
Tony,
Hope you don’t mind if I answer before Charlie does. What makes you think there is such a rule under Naturalism? That’s the question we keep asking. There are organisms today that have *no* cognitive faculties. They remain relatively unchanged since their branch of life began billions of years ago. Natural selection has favored them to an equal extent as it has favored the branch of life leading up to todays humans. Knowing this, I don’t understand how you conclude under Naturalism that certain cognitive faculties are favored, when it’s clear that they aren’t even required.
So in addition to my opening question, I would also ask you to clarify the following:
a) what does it mean for natural selection to ‘favor’ an organism?
b) do you think humans will be favored by natural selection more so than these ancient, primative organisms mentioned above?
SteveK,
Thanks for your reply — I appreciate the input.
Firstly, Plantinga says that natural selection would favor organisms with reliable cognitive faculties. He writes:
“So, if we assume that these hypothetical creatures are in the same kind of cognitive situation we ordinarily think we are, then certainly they would have been much more likely to survive if their cognitive faculties were reliable than if they were not.”
I agree with you that “There are organisms today that have *no* cognitive faculties…Natural selection has favored them to an equal extent as it has favored the branch of life leading up to todays humans.” But that isn’t Plantinga’s argument. He isn’t saying that creatures with cognitive faculties are to be favored in natural selection over those without them. He his saying that there is no reason to suspect that creatures with reliable cognitive faculties should be favored over those with reliable ones.
I mean that natural selection will “favor” an organism in that organisms with a heritable attribute that gives them an advantage in their environment will increase in numbers at the expense of other organisms in their species (and possibly other organisms as well). “Favor” might have been a poor word choice — but I didn’t (and don’t) intend to mean anything than a conventional understanding of basic evolutionary theory.
I don’t think that humans will be favored by natural selection more than primitive and ancient organisms. Some primitive organisms, like smallpox, and ancient ones, like South Asian birds, have clearly been less favored by natural selection (recently) than humans, but I don’t think that any living thing on our planet is more evolved than anything else if that’s what you mean.
I’m still wondering why it’s been asserted that reliable cognitive faculties are not an advantage in natural selection over ones that are not reliable.
Tony,
Looks like we ran out of nested replies above…
I don’t think this is the assertion being made by Plantinga or others here. The assertion, in the words of Darwin himself, is this “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?”.
The assertion is that Naturalism as a worldview has no reason to believe that evolution would produce true beliefs.
Tony,
The two statements below seem at odds with each other. In the first you are saying humans have no advantage. In the second, I presume you are speaking of humans with reliable cognitive faculties. Here you say they DO have an advantage of some sort. Can you clarify?
Hi Steve and Tony,
I have written a longish answer to Tony’s question but I think it is unnecessary right now. I like the direction your conversation is turning.
I’ll keep watching and see if there is a point at which my comment would be of help, or at least, would cause no harm.
Continue on.
(Yea, SteveK, it looks like there’s something wrong with the reply function right now.)
To your last point, Plantinga writes “These [the hypothetical creatures'] beliefs have been produced or caused by that adaptive neurophysiology; fair enough. But that gives us no reason for supposing those beliefs true.” This sounds to me like he’s saying that false beliefs are just as likely to be selected through natural selection (adaptation) as true ones. And Tom says above, “Why would true beliefs have been privileged over false ones at that stage of natural history?” So I do believe that the assertion in question (that reliable cognitive faculties are not an advantage in natural selection) is being made by both Plantinga and others here.
As to your second point I’m not totally sure I understand your confusion. Maybe it would help if I restated both thoughts in one sentence, to read something like: “A reliable cognitive belief in humans would have little impact in human competition for resources with, say, a sponge, but would likely have a selective impact in the competition for resources with other humans.”
Tony,
I think that is right. Maybe my confusion is in the way everyone phrases the claim.
Reliable in what way? It sounds like reliable = selected. As far as selection goes, false or illogical beliefs can be equally reliable. I gave an example earlier of a false and illogical belief being ‘reliable’…“I believe I will live if I jump off this building. I want to live, therefore I won’t jump.”. Selection loves this just as much as a true and logical belief.
I don’t see that selection cares if beliefs are true or logical – or if beliefs are part of the causal chain. Every belief – logical, true or otherwise – could result in doing the opposite or doing nothing at all (no causal link). In the end, selection is only concerned with the *result*, not the cognitive process. Agreed?
SteveK,
With reliable I’m just echoing the words of Plantinga’s essay. My understanding is that with “reliable” he means “true.” In that sense your definition of reliable conflicts with what I think Plantinga intends; there can only be one reliable (true) belief, but there can be a limitless number of false ones.
I think that your second paragraph makes a mistaken assumption in concluding that because natural selection can have an adaptive impact based on a false belief then it doesn’t care about the truth (reliability) of the belief. This assumption, I think, is contestable when it comes to the impact of natural selection on beliefs. In fact, it seems sensible to conclude that true beliefs (reliable ones) would have a tendency to be more selectively useful than false ones.
There is a limit on how many replies can be nested. I can increase the limit if you want.
Tony,
I know selection only cares only about the behavior. You assume true beliefs produce such behavior more frequently than false beliefs. Why?
I’m repeating myself, but selection only cares about outcomes, not the details of the cognitive process.
Maybe Charlie would like to add something here.
Three reasons.
1) The first one I wrote above (“Plantinga writes about a hypothetical early man that perhaps “…thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. … Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.” Yes, but someone who thinks that the best way to pet a creature is to run away from it would likely survive the encounter with the tiger BUT this belief system would have other effects that would be less favorable. Humans and dogs (and other domesticated creatures) have a symbiotic, beneficial relationship that sometimes involves petting. This man’s belief about petting would interfere with that relationship, excluding him from those benefits and having a negative (for him and his belief) outcome that could be determined in natural selection.
In the case of beliefs, the process affects the outcome. Saying that natural selection only cares about behavior doesn’t void the relationship. It’s like saying locomotion only cares about movement, so the study of anatomy is unimportant. The legs bring about the locomotion. The beliefs bring about the behavior.
I think it’s an interesting fact that natural selection can, at times, reward behavior that’s brought about by false beliefs. But that is not the same thing as claiming indifference about the reliability of cognitive faculties. In other words, it seems to me that Plantinga’s argument is like saying that a) because a blind archer can sometimes hit the target, b) a blind archer has the same chance of hitting the target as a sighted one.
Okay, that excellent idea of Steve’s has died and you all are back to a point to which I think I might contribute.
Hi Tony,
Since Plantinga’s argument and our answers are not winning you over perhaps you won’t mind retracing the steps a little?
Given N & E:
What causes a creature’s behaviour, B?
A brain state (b), correct?
Which, under N&E is a physico-chemico occurance, correct?
What causes a belief, T?
Also a brain state (t). Perhaps it is caused by the same brainstate that caused B (b and t are identical) or perhaps it is caused by another brain state unrelated to to the one that caused B.
It seems obvious to me right now, where the ‘not material’ does not exist, that minds and beliefs cannot rise above this situation of brainstates causing brainstates causing B and causing T.
So now we have to determine whether T can cause B.
We know that t can be causally efficacious, being living, cognitive persons with will and intent, but we are here presuming N&E. So, does T cause B?
If so, in what way?
Well, T is a brainstate t, and I think we can say that a brainstate can be a cause of another brainstate. T is actually identical with t.
But what caused T/brainstate t, to arise?
Even if you want to correlate this finally to what goes on in the outside world there is no connector between the cognition and truth.
Event E happens. The creature perceives this somehow (is affected by material caused by or associated with E; some sense apparatus is physically/chemically induced to send a signal to the brain which causes a brainstate).
What has to happen for an adaptive B to arise now? Only that the firing of the neurons triggered by the physical interaction with the environment leads more likely to survival than to death.
Say a creature senses that there is no surface beneath its foot. Say it has a 50-50 chance of this sensation causing it to step forward and a 50-50 chance that it recoil.
The sense-to-brainstate (b) that caused the behaviour here is all that matters. The brainstate that caused the recoiling is selected for – the creatures whose reaction was the ‘step forward’ state, more often were injured or plummeted to their deaths and reproduced less frequently and were less likely to pass along the propensity for said brainstate.
Need this reaction be accompanied by a belief? No, obviously not. empirically, Steve has discussed where natural selection has vastly favoured non-cognition.
Logically, in fact, not only is it not necessary, but a belief, an intermediate brainstate (t) between sense and action, would only slow the creature’s reaction and more liekly cause death/injury and less likely be selected for. Kevin even says there is empirical evidence that most of our Bs do not require Ts.
So, if there is a correlated belief, it is more likely to survive if it arises after-the-fact; after the sensation causes the brainstate that causes the action. The belief is a brainstate resulting from, not in, the brainstate causing the action.
Therefore, it is more likely to be acausal and non-adaptive; and therefore invisible, once again, to selection. It need not be ‘right’ and there is no reason to think it would be. How can it be ‘right’ anyway, being merely a brainstate?
Pause:
What is a belief?
A brainstate.
What is its cause? Either another brainstate (a physico-chemico condition) or a physico-chemico condition of the environment.
Either way, it is qualitatively no different than the brainstate that causes the adaptive action. The chain is Event>Reception/Trigger>Brainstate 1 > Brainstate 2> …. Brainstate b> Adaptive Behaviour, B. It doesn’t matter if there is a brainstate (t), for belief in this chain or not, they are all equally physical states wherein the ‘content’ of the ‘belief’ is irrelevant.
Substitute brainstate(t) for brainstate 1 and it makes no difference.
But perhaps, being social, linguistic animals, the belief T, caused after-the-fact, can be passed on to other creatures and influence their survival. The creature can tell them what happened and give his reason for it, his T.
This holds promise, except that it doesn’t matter what T is as long as it results in a precondition to b, and thereby to B in the listeners . And there was no reason to accept that T would be ‘true’ more often than not. So the words spoken by the survivor cause soundwaves which cause reception which causes a brainstate in his listeners which makes them more likely to enter the brainstate b which results in B when the sensation of ‘no ground’ arises. If his teaching is to have any adaptive effect then those who were inclined away from b and B were selected against.
Again we have a chain of physical causes in which the content of T was irrelevant; the listeners did not receive anything, immaterial from the survivor, their bodies merely sensed the impulses his body caused and their brains achieved a physical state.
(Consider the Bee* …)
But does their reflecting on T have anything to do with their accepting of T? In other words, does its likelihood for accuracy affect, perhaps, the likelihood that they will ‘believe’ it and thereby enter into the brainstate which most likely leads to adaptive behaviour, B?
1) Under N&E this is, yet again, merely a chain of phyically-induced brainstates, so no, content never becomes relevant.
2) What if we explore the idea without resorting to dismissing it via 1) above?
We would have to presume that the listeners are somehow logical creatures, able to deduce fact, likely to be able to reflect on the telling of T, relate it to the environment and accurately assess its correlation. This all begs the question. For the listeners are the creatures. Their past influences have all been the same as that which gave rise to T. There is no reason to think that they have built up a preponderance of ‘true’ beliefs about the environment with which to assess T as presented.
To assign them this ability is to beg the question.
Plantinga:
So what about petting the dog and fleeing the lion? Why should the man think he ought to pet the dog in order to enter into symbiosis with it? If actually petting the dog and entering into a relationship with it is adaptive, then, as before, all that matters is the behaviour, not the acausal belief about that behaviour. The belief that trails behind the behaviour could be “I’m palping the surface of this dog in order to ensure good crops”.
“It’s cuddly, and I would have preferred to turn and run in order to enjoy the best petting experience possible, as with those cuddly cats, but I must be rational and think of the future…”
This is exactly what we are asking, not what we can presume going in.
Plantinga asks just that question:
And no, if we don’t presume this, then this is not what we conclude.
*
Bees can communicate and teach one another where nectar is. They can even learn the foreign language of bees from other continents.
When a bee performs his “here’s the map” dance the other bee learns the route.
Does “cognition” play any role? Does “belief”?
Do we posit that learner bee is saying to himself “Worker Bee #2354 is generally truthful, so I will listen and follow his instructions. I hope I can remember what he is telling me. I think it best that I follow his instructions and not strike out on my own. I think it best that I even go hunting nectar today rather than spend a pleasant afternoon watching ants milking their aphids…”
Does the teacher bee believe that by pausing and taking time to do his dance that he is telling other bees where the nectar is? Does he pause and repeat to make sure they are getting it? does he worry that he was clear enough?
Of course scientists studying bees will attribute a selective advantage to communicating and learning. Is “belief” ever posited as a necessary component in their scientific explanations? It is not. Determinism doesn’t allow for it and naturalism doesn’t require it.
As we have seen, naturalism doesn’t actually explain it.
Therefore, belief in naturalism explains away belief in naturalism.
It occurs to me how arrogant it is that I try to take on Plantinga’s role and I hope I haven’t butchered his case with my view of it.
Here Plantinga answers more fully some of those objections he referred to in the OP article.
http://philofreligion.homestead.com/files/alspaper.htm
Thanks for the long, engaged reply Charlie. It will take me a little while to read and digest. I’ll get back as soon as I can.
Tony,
Truth is not equivalent to reliability in Plantinga’s article. Truth can be a property of an individual belief, whereas reliability is a property (or not a property) of a belief-forming system. It’s not enough to be able to produce true beliefs; one has to be able to do so reliably.
Further on communication and reflection on beliefs:
There is another snag in the system, which is evolution’s gradualism. If the ability to communicate a belief is part of that which makes true beliefs more adaptive, or likewise, if the ability to reflect on the belief makes true beliefs more adaptive than false ones, then several things must arise at once:
1. The capacity to develop beliefs
2. The capacity to form beliefs in some kind of cognitive structure such that it can be reflected upon or communicated; i.e. language or something like language.
3. The ability to form judgments regarding beliefs when reflecting upon them.
4. The ability for the hearer to receive the communication sender’s signal and process it, so as to form thoughts similar to the sender’s thoughts.
I don’t see how reflection or communication are of any help to the formation and adaptiveness of true believing unless all of this happens at once. If any of these steps are missing, there is no selective advantage, and the true belief is invisible to selection.
I believe this supplies at least part of the answer to Tony’s 8/17, 9:29 pm question about the differences in our cognitive situations. It probably also addresses Tony’s 8:17, 10:31 pm comment. In that comment, Tony suggested that being able to network beliefs would be adaptive: to be able to generalize and discriminate concepts like “dangerous animal,” “friendly/helpful animal,” “approach,” “do not approach.” There is a whole lot that would have to appear in the mind/brain at the same time for that to have been of selective advantage. Evolution is either very, very gradual, adding selective/advantageous one feature to an organism at a time, or else once in a while it is lucky beyond credibility.
I’m no Plantinga either
but I thought you wrote a good case, Charlie.
Tom,
One thing I noticed are the similarities between Plantinga’s argument against Naturalism and Searle’s Chinese Room argument against AI.
Under both arguments, beings with cognitive abilities are questioned as to whether they can have true beliefs (knowledge) about the objects available to their senses (Chinese characters, lions). The rule book (reasoning process that produces behavior) in Searle’s example comes from outside the room. In the case of Naturalism, the rule book comes from within the room itelf (the universe), or is a product of the room. In both arguments, we have beings that *think* they know the truth-value of their beliefs – this Chinese character means X, lions are dangerous. In both arguments neither can *know* this.
Wikipedia’s Chinese Room Argument entry is a good short presentation, and here is a longer one, for those who want to know what Steve is talking about here.
Tom,
I found it funny that in the last link you provided to the Chinese Room argument we find this…
“Searle’s own hypothesis of Biological Naturalism may be characterized sympathetically as an attempt to wed – or unsympathetically as an attempt to waffle between – the remaining dualistic and identity-theoretic alternatives.”
waffle
Tom, beliefs can arise in gradualism the same way biological structures sometimes do: a structure that arose for one purpose becomes adaptive for another purpose, and the original purpose dies away because the second one is more adaptive. In this case, it can be a biological structure that originally served some adaptive need also happens to create another function (like belief) that turns out to have adaptive power.
Charlie,
No problem with your analysis until I came to this line: “Logically… a belief, an intermediate brainstate (t) between sense and action, would only slow the creature’s reaction and more liekly cause death/injury and less likely be selected for.”
It sounds to me like you’re equating belief with reaction. I think of beliefs as being of a higher order than reaction. In other words, I can believe that high heat is bad for me, but I don’t think that my belief is what compels my hand to reflexively withdraw from first touching a 400 degree surface. Belief could, however, compel me to not touch a red surface again. But this sounds like what you go on to say so I’m not going to labor it.
You then write (my numbers inserted for purposes of argument):
“1) So, if there is a correlated belief, it is more likely to survive if it arises after-the-fact; after the sensation causes the brainstate that causes the action.
2) The belief is a brainstate resulting from, not in, the brainstate causing the action.
3) Therefore, it is more likely to be acausal and non-adaptive; and therefore invisible, once again, to selection. It need not be ‘right’ and there is no reason to think it would be.”
The problem with your scenario above is that it sidesteps the fact that beliefs can cause behavior (I believe that if I don’t jump from this burning building I will die), and that it asserts that once formed beliefs are not then tested (acausal and non-adaptive). This is
Let’s forget about how beliefs may be formed for now, or what exactly in the brain represents a belief. If we can say that beliefs exist, that should be enough. Can we agree that beliefs can both be a representation of reality (I see a lion) and they are used by the brain to make (non-reflexive) choices (a lion wants to kill me, the best way to avoid dying is A, B, or C, etc.)?
You wrote: “There is no reason to think that they (the hypothetical creatures) have built up a preponderance of ‘true’ beliefs about the environment with which to assess T as presented. To assign them this ability is to beg the question.” But I understand Plantinga’s argument to be that the N&E position is by itself contradictory. But it’s only contradictory if you take away its premise – that beliefs that are reliable are more useful in natural selection. (Plantinga even states “Of course you are more likely to achieve your goals, and of course you are more likely to survive and reproduce if your beliefs are mostly true.” How does this reconcile with your point 3 I quoted above?)
So here’s how Plantinga’s argument reads to me: The belief that all squares have four sides is untenable, and here’s why: Imagine that there is another planet where geometric objects exist. What are the odds that squares have four sides there? Infinitesimally small, because we can’t just assume that squares have four sides. (That would be begging the question, when what we are setting out to prove is that squares don’t have to have four sides.)
I seriously still don’t get this argument, although I very much enjoyed reading your explanation, Charlie, and a lot of it was genuinely helpful for me. For me, at least, the interesting issue is do beliefs undergo natural selection – if it can be shown that they cannot, then I could at least agree with parts of Plantinga’s conclusion.
Hi Tony,
Thanks very much for actually reading that rambling and somewhat confusing comment and actually engaging it. That level of interaction is very rare in my experience.
I have several things to say but I want to wait a bit and make sure I’m not just firing off rebuttals point by point. I think you say many of the things I would say but it still feels like you are not stepping back out of our current presumptions.
To illustrate for now, let me look only at one line:
The key thing here is you are lsing the context of the quote and what Plantinga was doing.
He said (his italics, my bolding…)
We are not allowed to assume this going into our investigation – either of the hypothetical creatures or ourselves.
Charlie,
I think my principle problem with Plantinga’s argument is wrapped inside that last paragraph.
Except for the second sentence I either don’t understand or agree with anything in there.
It seems like Plantinga wants to say the argument for N&E is fallacious because the premise is faulty (the premise being that we are more likely to survive and reproduce if our beliefs are mostly true and our cognitive faculties are reliable). But why doesn’t he just say that the premise is faulty and go about proving that? In the best case scenario Plantinga’s is a confusing way to pose an argument, and in my reading and re-readings it seems to jump ahead of some interesting ideas and deliver a conclusion that doesn’t follow. (Maybe the article is too heavily abridged / edited?)
Tom, your reply on August 18th, 2008 4:06 pm talks about all the problems with beliefs forming through evolution. I think this is a separate but related issue to the one of Plantinga’s question of reliability; Plantinga doesn’t seem to be saying that beliefs could not possibly form through evolution, just that if they did they would not be reliable. I agree with Paul that, similar to complex biological structures, it is not incredible to hold that something as complex as beliefs could arise from simpler systems. I understand your position there, but I think reasonable people can disagree on the level of complexity that can result from evolution.
I do have one question, if anybody knows the answer: Plantinga’s argument reads so abruptly and incompletely to me that I can’t believe this is his full case. Is there a better (longer, more complete) example of his argument online somewhere?
Tom,
I’m reading a longer version of Plantinga’s article (that Charlie provided me a link for), and in that article he says, “It begins from certain doubts about the reliability of our cognitive faculties, where, roughly,[5] a cognitive faculty–memory,perception, reason–is reliable if the great bulk of its deliverances are true.” I take that to mean that truth is a property or reliability.
You can listen to Plantinga give a talk on this argument here. He goes into more detail compared to what is written in the Christianity Today article and I think that helps clear up a lot of questions. My opinion is that Plantinga has developed a pretty strong argument.
I’m sure there are rebuttals, but I think the biggest problem for the naturalist is giving the *semantic propositional property* (which is the truth value) of the belief the power to cause a physical, adaptive reaction – as opposed to a physical property causing the reaction. Give it a listen !!
JP Moreland gives a talk on this subject in this YouTube video. I find the argument compelling just as Plantinga, CS Lewis and many others find it compelling. I still don’t understand why naturalists don’t see it that way. Why should the evolutionary mechanism care if your thoughts correspond with reality, or not?
HT: Victor Reppert