9/5/08

In Defense of Plantinga

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Posted by IrishFarmer
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24 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 5, 2008 at 5:22 PM

    Josh ran a thread here about Plantinga's argument a while back, I guess while you were MIA. That discussion kind of died at two thirds. I put some effort into a counterargument (posted here), and was a little disappointed that Josh never came back to tell me what he thought of that. Perhaps you'll give me your take on it. I don't know if anyone here will be bothered to defend Evan :)

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  2. zilchSeptember 5, 2008 at 5:48 PM

    Hey, irishFarmer! Long time no read!

    As one of the "fundy atheists" involved in this discussion over at DC, I just want to put my two cents' worth in. I won't attempt to defend Evan's points: he can do that himself if he wants- I'll just say why I found Plantinga's arguments unsound, and thus judged him so harshly. I hasten to say that I intend no disrespect to his person, and I admit that I haven't read much of his work, but I will stick by my opinion of the article that Evan quoted here.

    To avoid confusion, I'll remind us that all of Plantinga's argument here is what he claims to be a necessary consequence of evolutionary theory and naturalism- so he is presenting what he imagines must be the logical conclusion of atheistic scientists, not his own theistic position.

    My problems with the "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism" are as follows:

    One: Plantinga assumes, without mentioning it, that a line can be drawn between "adaptive behavior" and "beliefs", and that beliefs are independent of adaptive behavior.

    But he offers no evidence for this: and on the contrary, beliefs are the conscious tip of all kinds of adaptive behavior our brains produce, and they are also evolved entities: starting in the biosphere, and now extending into the ideosphere. Rocks do not have beliefs- people do. In between the lines get fuzzy, depending on how you define "belief". Anyone who has played with a dog will credit them with beliefs too, unless one considers language necessary for beliefs. But Plantinga grants frogs beliefs; he must start with some animal having evolved the ability to have ideas, otherwise there will be no position for him to attack.

    In any case, the ability to hold beliefs evolved gradually, and there is no way to draw a hard and fast line between what exactly constitutes a belief and what constitutes "neurophysiology", as Plantinga puts it: it's all neurophysiology, and beliefs cannot be cleanly cut from instincts. If you don't believe me, I'll look up some links about the fear of snakes, for instance.

    This leads to the next problem: the ability to hold beliefs that work is also subject to natural selection. That's why we can do it: it confers fitness to be able to think "these leaves are bad" or "if I hide behind this bush, my prey won't see me". We thinking animals can think as well as we do because it has helped us survive. But Plantinga doesn't seem to think this: he imagines that a frog, for instance, is just as likely to think something false as something true. While we cannot yet tell what frogs are thinking, it goes against everything that we know about evolution to suppose that they have beliefs, but that these beliefs have only a fifty-fifty chance of being "true". Such beliefs would confer no survival value; and complex abilities that take time and energy, as having beliefs does, do not evolve if they do not confer fitness, one way or another.

    As I said in my quote above, beliefs of this kind cannot be considered as being absolutely "true" or "false"- they are models which work more or less well. Frogs snap up objects of a certain size that fly into their field of view. This serves them well in the wild, but they will also happily eat BB's until they are too heavy to move. So is their belief "those little flying things taste good" a "true" or a "false" belief? Depends, but it works well enough if no smartass humans are around.

    Because the ability to learn and hold beliefs is an evolved trait, subject to natural selection (not invisible to it, as Plantinga assumes), Plantinga's calculation that results in a vanishingly low probability of getting even 3/4 of one hundred beliefs right, given an assumed starting probability of 1/2 for each belief, is wrongheaded on two counts: one, such beliefs cannot be classified as "right" or "wrong", and two, even if we develop some scale for "better-worse fit with the world", perhaps in this case judging the frog to be "right" when it catches a fly, "wrong" when it catches a BB, it seems very unlikely that half of all such beliefs are "wrong". It's an ill-defined equation, in any case.

    And there are ways of dealing with our imperfect beliefs. We can learn to distinguish BB's from flies in various ways: practice, technology, passing on traditions. So while we will never achieve perfection in our beliefs, there is no reason for the "deep and pervasive skepticism" that Plantinga claims must follow from evolutionary theory and naturalism.

    I suspect Plantinga came to these mistaken conclusions because he is a philosopher used to dealing with concepts in the realm of systems of formal logic, but does not have much background in evolutionary science. As I said at DC, it's a case of starting from the word when he should have started from the world.

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  3. AnonymousSeptember 5, 2008 at 6:56 PM

    IF said...Though, to be fair to John, it's much easier to critically analyze something with which you disagree.

    Yes it is my friend! And yet it's hard to actually do a good job of critically analyzing something with which you disagree, too.

    ;-)

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  4. EvanSeptember 5, 2008 at 10:36 PM

    I'd like to respond point by point but I don't really see what there is that you've criticized here.

    So I guess I'll try to get to the nub of my position and ask you what your response would be.

    It's my position that skepticism about belief is absolutely necessary. I think it's proper to doubt perceptions and cognitive processes. But I believe the job of philosophers is to highlight where there is a proper method for people to acquire true beliefs. Plantinga doesn't even begin to suggest that there is such a method.

    He punts to God, but worse than that, he doesn't suggest what (a) God's method of instilling such a truth-detector is (b) how God makes it work imperfectly and (c) how God allows people to tell when it is working and when it is not working.

    So if we assume his argument is true, we still have no technique for testing the validity of his position. He is making a scientific claim, which is that human brains work in some mechanism that is designed by God. This is in theory a testable hypothesis if he would give us some mechanism, but he doesn't.

    The skeptic has no problem here, because there is no reason to believe assuming naturalism and evolution that any percentage of beliefs would be true. The task of the skeptic is to discover a method of determining true beliefs, something that philosophers have tussled with for over three millenia and that has yielded such accomplishments as the internet, landing a man on the moon, curing previously uniformly fatal diseases and sending spaceships out of our solar system.

    This seems to suggest that they have at least done a passable job at allowing us to find some true beliefs without any obvious deific interference.

    So I ask you if you can tell me: how it is that God allows some people to have true beliefs and some people to have false ones?

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  5. Emanuel GoldsteinSeptember 5, 2008 at 11:38 PM

    I am not sure why people keep calling John a "philosopher".

    What I do know is that in his new book, in the intro, he claims to have the "equivalent" of a Ph.D.

    He does not.

    Further, as you point out, he keeps making misrepresentations that he knows have been exposed; however, he will not allow any serious counter arguments through moderation.

    That is why all the posts you mentioned have the character that they do.

    I wouldn't take that site too seriously, because it is not even close to a level playing field, so to speak.

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  6. JoshSeptember 6, 2008 at 8:48 AM

    Sorry Adonais, I truly want to get back in to that discussion. I have a response half-finished, which turned into a new entry, and then I got a new book on the matter in the mail...

    Distraction compounded by distraction.

    I'll be back...

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  7. IrishFarmerSeptember 6, 2008 at 6:24 PM

    Josh ran a thread here about Plantinga's argument a while back, I guess while you were MIA. That discussion kind of died at two thirds. I put some effort into a counterargument (posted here), and was a little disappointed that Josh never came back to tell me what he thought of that. Perhaps you'll give me your take on it. I don't know if anyone here will be bothered to defend Evan :)

    I glanced over it, but only read about half. I don't have time to read it right now since my family is visiting me for a little while, then I have to report back to my unit tomorrow and jump back into the grind.

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  8. AnonymousSeptember 6, 2008 at 8:55 PM

    No worries. I wrote a lot of words, but the argument can be summed up simply as saying that Plantinga's formulation of the hypothesis is unusable, as the quantitative conclusion that he wants to draw can not be obtained from the qualitative probability-based argument. So the conclusion just becomes subjective, and you can basically arrive at any conclusion you want. I proposed an alternative formulation of the hypothesis as "R is incompatible with E&N" that does away with the probability jargon (which was useless anyway), and on this form, the hypothesis becomes amenable to testing, and I proposed some strategy for doing that test—of course to the opposite effect, to refute the hypothesis :) That was pretty much it.

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  9. IrishFarmerSeptember 6, 2008 at 9:59 PM

    Hey, irishFarmer! Long time no read!

    As one of the "fundy atheists" involved in this discussion over at DC, I just want to put my two cents' worth in. I won't attempt to defend Evan's points: he can do that himself if he wants- I'll just say why I found Plantinga's arguments unsound, and thus judged him so harshly. I hasten to say that I intend no disrespect to his person, and I admit that I haven't read much of his work, but I will stick by my opinion of the article that Evan quoted here.

    The thing about the argument is that it's much like Antony Flew's verification principle. Flew's atheistic philosophy turned out to be self defeating, but it was a clever argument. That's why I like the EAAN by Plantinga. Even if it turns out to be wrong, it was still a clever argument, and I think it should be respected on that ground alone.

    Plantinga, like Flew is a personal hero of mine. I think that like Flew, it shouldn't matter where you stand on the issues, you should still be able to recognize greatness, so to speak.

    Regardless, if you haven't read much of his work, I can understand why you don't respect him altogether much. I myself have only scratched the surface on Plantinga's work in espitemology, but I think that a lot of the criticism of Plantinga was based on misunderstandings.

    To avoid confusion, I'll remind us that all of Plantinga's argument here is what he claims to be a necessary consequence of evolutionary theory and naturalism- so he is presenting what he imagines must be the logical conclusion of atheistic scientists, not his own theistic position.

    Well...I don't see that it just has to be atheistic scientists. I would say the majority of people who both think that evolution more-or-less accurately describes the history of life, and also base their philosophy around naturalism are laypeople.

    But yes, I think that did confuse some readers over at DC. They seemed to think that Plantinga was claiming that all beliefs are false. Which, of course, would sound patently absurd to anyone remotely familiar with Plantinga's epistemology.

    One: Plantinga assumes, without mentioning it, that a line can be drawn between "adaptive behavior" and "beliefs", and that beliefs are independent of adaptive behavior.

    I think this statement could use some clarification.

    However, I don't agree that Plantinga is basing his argument at all on this assumption.

    For instance, he claims in his frog example that the frog will eat its food based on what it believes. Now, clearly this example is absurd because it's unlikely that frogs actually believe anything about flies, but let's assume for the moment that a frog's mind is on par with a human's.

    Plantinga seems to agree that beliefs are the evolved byproduct of natural selection and change acting on the structure of the brain. However, he hardly claims that beliefs are independent of adaptive behavior. He DOES claim, however, that TRUE beliefs are indepedent of adaptive behaviors. And maybe this is what you take exception to.

    However, the only creatures which reproduce are the creatures which survive long enough to reproduce. In order to do that, they must have numerous adaptive behaviors, and in the case of the frog, this includes eating flies to stay alive. The thing is, the behavior of eating the fly can be caused by any number of beliefs. The frog will eat the fly if it knows that eating the fly will provide it with the nourishment it needs to stay alive (the true belief) or the frog believes that it needs to search for the correct fly to eat to turn into a prince (a false belief). Now, since either belief leads to the same adaptive behavior, why should natural selection 'care' whether the frog has the proper faculty to know truth from delusion.

    The fact is, by the very nature of natural selection, neither belief has an advantage over the other.

    Unless you feel otherwise...?

    But he offers no evidence for this: and on the contrary, beliefs are the conscious tip of all kinds of adaptive behavior our brains produce, and they are also evolved entities: starting in the biosphere, and now extending into the ideosphere. Rocks do not have beliefs- people do. In between the lines get fuzzy, depending on how you define "belief". Anyone who has played with a dog will credit them with beliefs too, unless one considers language necessary for beliefs. But Plantinga grants frogs beliefs; he must start with some animal having evolved the ability to have ideas, otherwise there will be no position for him to attack.

    Firstly, I don't think Plantinga actually thinks that frogs have beliefs. I think it was just an illustration meant to be distance the issue from the subject - that is, Plantinga wanted to talk about human beliefs without referencing humans directly since it might cloud the issue.

    Second, for the sake of keeping things simple, let's deal only with humans. Humans are capable of beliefs, correct? Well, in that case, I don't see how it matters whether beliefs are evolved or not. Beliefs are either true/accurate or false/inaccurate.

    In any case, the ability to hold beliefs evolved gradually, and there is no way to draw a hard and fast line between what exactly constitutes a belief and what constitutes "neurophysiology", as Plantinga puts it: it's all neurophysiology, and beliefs cannot be cleanly cut from instincts. If you don't believe me, I'll look up some links about the fear of snakes, for instance.

    Well, I think it would be a mistake to confuse a reactionary anxiety to certain external objects or situations with a belief. For instance, people suffering from anxiety conditions more often than not recognize that their anxiety is actually irrational, but they can't help but feel the way they feel. In other words, their anxiety isn't based on what they believe, but is simple based on pure instinct, if you will.

    That said, I get what you're saying and I agree. I guess I don't know enough about Plantinga, but I would certainly agree that beliefs are "emergent" effects of our neurophysiology.

    This leads to the next problem: the ability to hold beliefs that work is also subject to natural selection. That's why we can do it: it confers fitness to be able to think "these leaves are bad" or "if I hide behind this bush, my prey won't see me". We thinking animals can think as well as we do because it has helped us survive. But Plantinga doesn't seem to think this: he imagines that a frog, for instance, is just as likely to think something false as something true. While we cannot yet tell what frogs are thinking, it goes against everything that we know about evolution to suppose that they have beliefs, but that these beliefs have only a fifty-fifty chance of being "true". Such beliefs would confer no survival value; and complex abilities that take time and energy, as having beliefs does, do not evolve if they do not confer fitness, one way or another.

    The problem however, is that theoretically false beliefs can just as well confer a survival advantage. As in the example, the frog which believes that he will be turned into a prince by the fly, is just as likely to eat the fly (and thus survive) as the fly who believes that the fly will provide him with life-sustaining nourishment. Natural selection has no inherent mechanism to discriminate between either belief, so I don't see how it is more likely that adaptive creatures should hold one over the other. As a point of fact, only one belief which leads to adaptive behavior is actually correct, and that is the belief that the fly needs to be eaten to provide nourishment. However, there are numerous beliefs which are incorrect which would lead to the same behavior. One could argue, though I won't do it here, that it's actually more likely based on this fact that the frog should hold to a false belief than a true one.

    As I said in my quote above, beliefs of this kind cannot be considered as being absolutely "true" or "false"- they are models which work more or less well. Frogs snap up objects of a certain size that fly into their field of view. This serves them well in the wild, but they will also happily eat BB's until they are too heavy to move. So is their belief "those little flying things taste good" a "true" or a "false" belief? Depends, but it works well enough if no smartass humans are around.

    I don't understand. It is either true or false that the fly tastes good to the frog. I fail to see how that belief lacks a truth value.

    And there are ways of dealing with our imperfect beliefs. We can learn to distinguish BB's from flies in various ways: practice, technology, passing on traditions. So while we will never achieve perfection in our beliefs, there is no reason for the "deep and pervasive skepticism" that Plantinga claims must follow from evolutionary theory and naturalism.


    I think you're confusing the intent of the argument. Plantinga, again, is not claiming that our beliefs are false, or that our cognitive faculties are mostly or partly unreliable necessarily, but only in case evolution and naturalism are both true.

    In other words, it seems he holds that we should trust our cognitive faculties in general, but that we couldn't rationally justify this trust if evolution and naturalism are both true.

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  10. IrishFarmerSeptember 6, 2008 at 10:16 PM

    It's my position that skepticism about belief is absolutely necessary. I think it's proper to doubt perceptions and cognitive processes. But I believe the job of philosophers is to highlight where there is a proper method for people to acquire true beliefs. Plantinga doesn't even begin to suggest that there is such a method.

    Actually, Plantinga would say that we can trust our cognitive faculties.

    In other words, our reason can provide us with true beliefs.

    Regardless, if Plantinga wants to argue that evolution and naturalism leave us in the proverbial dark when it comes to scrutinizing truth, then it still isn't his burden necessarily to recommend a means for us to discriminate between truth and untruth. That's irrelevant to the argument.

    However, in spite of all that, you're asking the wrong question. We all know that we can determine truth, and that our cognitive faculties are reliable enough. So with that in mind, the question is really about which beliefs make sense of this ability. Is it naturalism, or supernaturalism?

    So if we assume his argument is true, we still have no technique for testing the validity of his position. He is making a scientific claim, which is that human brains work in some mechanism that is designed by God. This is in theory a testable hypothesis if he would give us some mechanism, but he doesn't.

    His claim is really philosophical. We can study and understand how and why we think the way we think, the question is - as I stated above - what makes sense of our ability to hold true beliefs, and so on.


    The skeptic has no problem here, because there is no reason to believe assuming naturalism and evolution that any percentage of beliefs would be true. The task of the skeptic is to discover a method of determining true beliefs, something that philosophers have tussled with for over three millenia and that has yielded such accomplishments as the internet, landing a man on the moon, curing previously uniformly fatal diseases and sending spaceships out of our solar system.

    Well, the problem is that if Plantinga's argument is sound, then this pursuit of truth is impossible.

    This seems to suggest that they have at least done a passable job at allowing us to find some true beliefs without any obvious deific interference.

    No one is arguing that our beliefs are false.

    So I ask you if you can tell me: how it is that God allows some people to have true beliefs and some people to have false ones?

    The question isn't one of a physical "mechanism", but a metaphysical justification. So I don't really know how to answer that question in a relevant manner.

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  11. AnonymousSeptember 6, 2008 at 11:47 PM

    It's clear that Plantingas argument here as some merit insomuch as many Atheists believe that belief in God is an evolutionary adaptation. So there is one particular belief they deem "false" that helps people survive or come to terms with reality.

    If they admit to this then everything else is fair game.

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  12. EvanSeptember 7, 2008 at 8:27 AM

    Irish I guess we are at an impasse then.

    Do you not see that Plantinga is making a scientific statement? If he believes that the only way an evolved organism can have true beliefs is that God lets that organism do it -- isn't he under some obligation to show how this would happen and what would be different if it were not the case?

    Otherwise he's just gesticulating and making word games.

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  13. AnonymousSeptember 9, 2008 at 6:57 PM

    I saw this article today which may be of interest to this discussion: Superstitions evolved to help us survive.

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  14. EvanSeptember 13, 2008 at 11:18 AM

    M, it's one thing to say that some beliefs may exist in evolved brains that are false. This is indisputable. Everybody of every worldview accepts that the world is drowning in falsehood. I doubt any skeptics, philosophers, or believers would dispute this point.

    It's something altogether different to say that all beliefs are false.

    Plantinga's argument depends on the second being true if naturalism is true. He doesn't even make an attempt to show this.

    If naturalism can be true and, holding to naturalism, we can hold any true beliefs at all, then Plantinga's argument fails.

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  15. AnonymousSeptember 17, 2008 at 1:26 AM

    More discussion on the matter: Predicting Evolution: How Likely is it that Human-level Intelligence will Evolve Again? in volume 14 number 2 of Skeptic Magazine. I haven't actually read it myself, I didn't find a copy of it yet...maybe it actually supports Plantiga's hypothesis :-) (though I doubt it) Anybody read it? Any good?

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  16. IrishFarmerSeptember 21, 2008 at 5:34 PM

    Do you not see that Plantinga is making a scientific statement?

    No, I really don't. He's making a metaphysical claim, not a physical claim. This really lies in the realm of reasoning and logic, not empirical scrutiny.

    No offense, but you've been unable to distinguish basic points like this since your original post, so I suppose we are at an impasse.

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  17. AnonymousSeptember 22, 2008 at 5:04 AM

    "He's making a metaphysical claim, not a physical claim. This really lies in the realm of reasoning and logic, not empirical scrutiny."

    Que what?

    Are you saying that the evolutionary argument against naturalism can be divorced from the empirical evidence that exists in support of evolution? I think you need to explain that somehow.

    Plantinga's hypothesis is explicitly framed in Bayesian terms, and I certainly thought that this implies that it invokes empirical evidence for Bayesian updating of the priors. Bayesianism as a philosophy of science will suffer the problem of subjectivity, as I mentioned before, when applied to a sample of one and not adequately supported by induction and previous empirical results. But evolution has tons of empirical evidence in support of it. If you're suggesting that Plantinga's argument is agnostic with respect to empirical evidence, well, then I guess the discussion is over :)

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  18. JoshSeptember 22, 2008 at 10:15 AM

    Adonais,

    Plantinga is not attacking the empirical basis of evolution. He is just pitting it against naturalism in a probabilistic way.

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  19. AnonymousSeptember 22, 2008 at 6:56 PM

    "Plantinga is not attacking the empirical basis of evolution. He is just pitting it against naturalism in a probabilistic way."

    And on what *basis* can you hope to say anything about probabilities? A priori speculation? Then you have the subjectivity problem and the argument becomes veridically worthless.

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  20. JoshSeptember 22, 2008 at 11:02 PM

    "And on what *basis* can you hope to say anything about probabilities? A priori speculation? Then you have the subjectivity problem and the argument becomes veridically worthless."

    Adonais, allow evolution to be 100% true. That isn't the point. The point is the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable given naturalism and evolution.

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  21. AnonymousSeptember 23, 2008 at 1:43 AM

    Josh:

    "Adonais, allow evolution to be 100% true."

    Oh, and why evolution, and not naturalism? They are symmetric in Bayes' formula, why do you allow E to be true instead of N? Not harboring any preconceived notions I hope.

    I guess we're not communicating here. What I'm saying is that if you really want to interpret the various P() in the Bayesian formula as genuine probabilities in the mathematical sense, we are required to know something about the probability density functions involved. For the conditional probabilities of R, E and N we have no such knowledge whatsoever (that I'm aware of anyway). The other option, which is the case with the EAAN, is to understand P not as actual probabilities, but as our degrees of belief in the trueness or falsity of their argument. Here we can reinforce the priors by empirical evidence, but the conditional probabilities remain completely open to subjective interpretation. Left like this, the argument is useless, you can prove anything you like with it, and therefore nothing.

    If you want to remedy this situation (though I get the feeling you don't actually want to) there are some options, one of which is to formulate the whole hypothesis without probability jargon, simply as "R is incompatible with E∩N". This says exactly the same thing, but on a form that is amenable to testing by proving the negative, which is an entirely scientific enterprise. Ockham would be proud. What is your objection towards trying to clarify things this way?

    Or here's an even more radical idea: if you want to investigate the probability of naturalism, why not try to estimate P(N) directly? In Bayesianism, this prior is amenable to empirical updating for revising our confidence in the hypothesis directly, without detouring via conditional probabilities and quantities that are impossible to estimate or support empirically.

    But if you insist on staying with the obscurantism of the EAAN and its useless probability jargon, then we are stuck with a formula that is seemingly completely independent of the priors, because the outcome is anyway determined by whatever binary guess we make for the conditional probabilities. But what's the value of such a guess? Even a chimpanzee can guess, one banana for "yes" or another banana for "no", the monkey might even make the same guess as you.

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  22. JoshSeptember 23, 2008 at 10:19 AM

    Adonais,

    I think you are missing the point of the argument. It isn't meant to show that either N or E is false (directly). It is meant to show that they are pitted against each other.

    You don't seem happy with the way Plantinga works with probabilities. I can't, for the life of me, figure out why you dislike how he's done it. Of course, (R) isn't incompatible with N & E, it's just extremely unlikely. Sure, it is possible that that N & E produced (R) just happenstance, but when you consider the amount of other logical possibilities you are led to say that the probability is low, even if you don't know exactly what that probability is. It is logically possible that a tiger just appear in front of me, but I'm not scared of this possibility because I know it's very low (even though I don't know how low).

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  23. AnonymousSeptember 23, 2008 at 3:23 PM

    "Of course, (R) isn't incompatible with N & E, it's just extremely unlikely."

    But this is a subjective statement since you arrived at it by speculating about conditional probabilities which no one knows how to calculate, and someone else can arrive at an equally valid but opposite conclusion by the same rules. If it's only unlikely in some person's mind then there is no real contradiction between R, E and N, and there's no problem that needs to be solved to begin with.

    "but when you consider the amount of other logical possibilities you are led to say that the probability is low, even if you don't know exactly what that probability is."

    Other logical possibilities? I think there are only two: either R, E and N are compatible or they are not, there's nothing in between. Your probability-based formulation is only a token description disguising the fact that all the terms symbolize are your personal confidence or degree of belief in them.

    "It is logically possible that a tiger just appear in front of me, but I'm not scared of this possibility because I know it's very low (even though I don't know how low)."

    What does this have to do with Palntinga's argument? This sounds like a Boltzmann brain argument, which is a flawed argument. I don't see how that has anything to do with the EAAN.

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  24. ErlSeptember 28, 2008 at 12:42 AM

    I'd say that the problem i have with Plantinga's arguments that the premises of evolution argue against a mind able to perceive truth are unsound at two points.

    The first is that his contentions: "there is no reason to assume that evolution grants a true mindset" and "it is at least possible that creation in the image of God would lead to true thinking" are sufficiently weak as to overlap. Or rather, based only on his contentions, an evolved mind might see truth while a created mind saw falsehood. So he hasn't actually made a strong enough argument for the philosophical inconsistency of an evolutionary argument for the creation of humanity.

    The second is that his argument seems to rely on some assumptions about the relationship of evolution to belief. The reward-system in animal and human brains is not a metaphysical one. It simply is--it lets the brain know it has done good work. The metaphysical understanding of the basis of this reward--e.g., I will eat because I need food for energy--comes from the rational faculty, which itself would evolve to best analyze the world as it exists. Thus evolution is only indirectly responsible for our thoughts, in that it gave us the capacity to think them. To suggest that it would be evolutionally sensible to produce a brain that approximated rational thought but had several premises flipped is silly: either 1) the system would demonstrably differ from reality, and would be selected against, 2) the system would only differ from reality in a meaningless semantic sense, i.e., "turned into a prince" is understood as "become full," or 3) would be so complex as to be vanishingly unlikely.
    From that I would argue that evolution, which needs to deal with the world as it is, is far more likely to produce brains or minds to engage truth than God, who does not.

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