RE: Finally an atheist proper, with views and questions
June 3, 2024 at 7:04 am
(This post was last modified: June 3, 2024 at 7:07 am by Lucian.)
Another query I had was around the evolutionary argument against naturalism. I have doubts about the soundness of the argument, but tempted to go another way rather than challenging it at a lower level
If we say that a key premise of the argument is that naturalistic evolutionary processes are unlikely to provide accurate beliefs, would it be legitimate to agree to that on a limited level? In other words, yes evolution won’t lead to consistently accurate beliefs, and we see this in the wide disagreement thomrough philosophy, various other academic disciplines, and even in the difficulty of agreeing with one another in more banal topics such as politics etc. we could limit the scope of accurate beliefs to those things in the physical world that we can reliably predict and use those predictions for actions. I am not sure whether to include maths and science here, but that is possible
Whilst this may make naturalism + evolution as beliefs self defeating, it would have a more limited scope of that. Of course, this question I have is outside those areas of likely accurate belief and firmly in the “lots of disagreement” area, but so would the ANE argument itself if naturalism and evolution are true and the argument is sound. I am happy to lean into the possible self-defeating view, but only as far as “we can’t be guaranteed that our views will be accurate” - that doesn’t mean they would of necessity be inaccurate
Probably not a popular route that I am taking. But I haven’t read nearly enough on it and certainly nothing recently.
Incidentally, I think that the poor quality judgements we are all prone to, and difficulty agreeing on many very basic things could be used as an argument against theism. If there is a god with the desire of wanting us to come to him and to know him, why create us in such a way that we will find that so difficult to do and almost guarantees that many won’t be able to be convinced
Thoughts?
If we say that a key premise of the argument is that naturalistic evolutionary processes are unlikely to provide accurate beliefs, would it be legitimate to agree to that on a limited level? In other words, yes evolution won’t lead to consistently accurate beliefs, and we see this in the wide disagreement thomrough philosophy, various other academic disciplines, and even in the difficulty of agreeing with one another in more banal topics such as politics etc. we could limit the scope of accurate beliefs to those things in the physical world that we can reliably predict and use those predictions for actions. I am not sure whether to include maths and science here, but that is possible
Whilst this may make naturalism + evolution as beliefs self defeating, it would have a more limited scope of that. Of course, this question I have is outside those areas of likely accurate belief and firmly in the “lots of disagreement” area, but so would the ANE argument itself if naturalism and evolution are true and the argument is sound. I am happy to lean into the possible self-defeating view, but only as far as “we can’t be guaranteed that our views will be accurate” - that doesn’t mean they would of necessity be inaccurate
Probably not a popular route that I am taking. But I haven’t read nearly enough on it and certainly nothing recently.
Incidentally, I think that the poor quality judgements we are all prone to, and difficulty agreeing on many very basic things could be used as an argument against theism. If there is a god with the desire of wanting us to come to him and to know him, why create us in such a way that we will find that so difficult to do and almost guarantees that many won’t be able to be convinced
Thoughts?
