(September 20, 2012 at 7:01 am)Reasonable_Jeff Wrote: It seems to me that at the core of atheism is a deep "faith" in one's own cognitive abilities and their reliability in determining truth.
If atheism is true, then your cognitive abilities have evolved with the aim of survivability....not truth.
Not even. The very basis of classical computation, the process of information for a useful purpose, is a search for truth. Binary, which is about as simple as you can get in terms of elemental functions, is either a true or false state. When you get into thinking, which is computation in some of its more complex forms, you're still basically tossing about countless true-false problems and answering them with experience and observation.
Knowing the truth of a situation is essential to surviving it without having to rely on favorable chance. The more you know, the more favorable your odds. A search for greater truth is not some opposing behavior to a focus on survival. It is merely the mental luxury we animals enjoy thanks to our relatively robust brains and (for many of us, at least) a lack of existential threats to people. It is beyond considerations of immediate survival.
