[asa] Natural Selection and Reliable Beliefs

On the philosophy of religion blog Prosblogion (
http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2008/02/naturalism-evol.html), I've
been going back and forth with someone about Plantinga's argument against
natural selection producing reliable beliefs. I happen to like Plantinga
and reformed epistemology generally, but I don't understand the force of
this particular argument.

Right now the discussion turns on a hypothetical creature, in a
hypothetical world in which naturalism is true, that believes trees are
witches. The creature has the belief "appletree witch is blooming." That
the creature could hold this belief supposedly demonstrates that natural
selection can result in unreliable beliefs, which supposedly leads to the
conclusion that there is no reason to accept an epistemology rooted in
natural selection / naturalism.

I understand that by the rules of formal logic, a proposition can't be
partly true. However, it seems silly to me to claim that "appletree witch
is blooming" is really a single proposition that must be either true or
false. Below is what seems to make sense to me. Logicians, am I just
getting the rules of logic wrong here?

If "appletree witch is blooming" has to be analyzed only as single
proposition, this just seems like an unrealistic language game to me.
People / organisms simply don't form beliefs like this all at once.

"Appletree witch is blooming" includes at least the following beliefs that
realistically would develop separately because they each have survival value
in diffent contexts. They can be stated as separate propositions:

p1 there is an appletree
p1(a) appletrees have the proprty of hardness
p1(b) appletrees have the property of fixity
p1(c) if I crash into the appletree it will hurt me

p2 appletree is a witch
p2(a) witches have the property of protecting or cursing the clan
p2(b) witches ought to be venerated so that the clan is protected
p2(c) the clan needs a shaman to communicate with the witches

p3 appletree is blooming
p3(a) blooms have the property of emitting fragrance
p3(b) blooms lead to buds and fruit
p3(c) blooms have magical properties that the shaman can use to appease
witches

So fine, "appletree witch is blooming," standing alone as a single
proposition, technically is false. But who cares aside from the guy who
wrote the logic textbook? p1 that I stated above confers survival value
based on properties of the external universe and is reliable.

I'd suggest that Plantinga's argument here works only if *all *of the
beliefs subsidiary to the challenged proposition are also unreliable.
Otherwise, the best you can say is that natural selection will produce some
reliable beliefs because all organisms encounter the same physical universe,
even while natural selection might also result in some unreliable beliefs.

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Received on Sat Feb 9 20:09:39 2008