NEWS FLASH: Tigers Not Part of Early Human Development

 I’ve being going through the back-catalogue of Tales from the Rabbit Hole, an interesting approach to conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.  In the most recent that I’ve listened to, Episode 32, Mick West spoke with the Skeptic of (should be “in”) the North.

 

During their discussion, at about 24:45, there was mention of Michael Shermer talking about the evolutionary benefit of making a Type 1 error (or a false positive) when the data is ambiguous and the example given was of one of our ancestors hearing a rustle in the grass.  The cost of making a Type 1 error and assuming a tiger (when there isn’t one) is minimal, but the cost of making a Type 2 error and assuming there is no tiger (when there is one) could easily be massive.

 

Michael Shermer did in fact raise this as an example, in a blog post called Patternicity: “Better to flee a thousand imagined tigers than be taken unawares by one real one”.  What Shermer isn’t suggesting, however, is that there was an evolutionary pressure placed, by tigers, on humans to make Type 1 errors in response to ambiguous data.

 

Peter Watts did though:

 

Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do.

 

It’s bad enough when apologists use tigers attacking our ancestors as an example when trying to prove that evolution doesn’t exist, but when atheists and skeptics start talking about our ancestors on the African plain being attacked by tigers, it’s a problem.

 

There are two problems really.  First and foremost, tigers have never lived in the wild in Africa (although there might now be feral tigers, that is tigers who have escaped from zoos after being transported to Africa by humans).  If we want to pretend that humans have been shaped into regular Type 1 error makers, by tigers, then we have two options.  First, this applies solely to people with ancestors who lived in the natural range of tigers – with the rest of us not being so inclined. Or, second, our understanding of where we evolved is wrong and we somehow evolved within the natural range of tigers despite the evidence that we evolved into hominid form on the African savannah.

 

The other problem is that if we, as evolving hominids, had not already developed the handy skill of overestimating the level of risk to our lives, we would not have been in the position to evolve into Homo sapiens.  Not that tigers would have eaten us, but lions or wild dogs would have, or any number of dangerous African creatures would have killed us without even bothering to eat us.

 

Making Type 1 errors and treating something benign as a possible threat is not unique to humans: 

I am quite confident that this cat is not going through a calm assessment of the potential for risk associated with the cucumber.  It’s just an instinct to run away from something that looks vaguely like it could be a snake.  Horses are similar, with them freaking out if they see a hose (where they aren’t expecting to see one).  Admittedly horses freak out about a lot of things: plastic bags, people wearing hats, trees, the wind, sand and so on.  Even fish seem to be in the Type 1 error club.  And coral.

 

The point is that this characteristic of being overly cautious about ambiguous data is not a human thing, it’s a characteristic of all higher order animals.  Maybe, it could be argued, even lower order animals are willing (on a metaphorical level) to make the occasional error in order to increase their chance of survival.  We as humans have not developed it, we have just retained it.

 

The idiocy that is involved in thinking that humans cleverly developed this overweening caution due to their interaction with tigers on the African plain and the arrogance to think that it was only humans who did so … both are, sadly, entirely human.

Prediction that creationists will crawl out of the woodwork

I predict (and have done so publically) that creationists will be particularly excited by an announcement that research on cockroaches in Australia indicate that evolution is (to an extent) predictable.  Of course I mean old universe, big-bang accepting creationists, not young earth creationists for whom this research might be less appealing.  I go further to suggest that this excitement on their part will be characterised by a deep lack of understanding as to how evolution works.

The research has looked at the genetics of a type of burrowing cockroach.  The ancient cockroaches that came to Australia about 20 million years ago had a similar diet to your average rural cockroach today (the German or American ones), they would forage on the forest floor among the fallen leaves.  The forest conditions would protect them from the sun.

As the rain forest retreated from Australia and the continent dried out, there was less protection from the sun and burrowing became a valuable strategy.  The processes of evolution resulted in speciation and we ended up with an Australian cockroach that burrows up to a metre below the surface.

What the research shows is that this speciation didn't happen just once, it happened maybe as many as nine times.  Now, the question is – what specific misunderstanding is a creationist going to bring to this issue?

I predict that it will be this, the notion that Dr Lo is talking about evolution happening multiple times from one species to one other species (which he isn't).

Think of this way, there is a rainforest cockroach and a dry scrub cockroach and only the latter must be able to burrow to survive.  Initially there is little or no scrub at all, so there is only the rainforest cockroach, then the rainforest retreats.  But the retreat isn't singular and total, it happens in stages, the rainforest retreats a bit, then a bit more and so on.

So, very roughly speaking, a rainforest cockroach can become a dry scrub cockroach.  Naively we might think that this is a once off and as the rainforest retreats the range of the dry scrub cockroach merely expands while the range of the rainforest cockroach contracts.  What Dr Lo is saying is that this is not necessarily the case.  The rainforest cockroaches living in an area which is becoming dry scrub can evolve into a dry scrub cockroach again.  Naively (again) this might be thought of as a repeat of the same evolution that has happened before, that the population of dry scrub cockroaches (DSC) can be increased in two ways: the normal way with DSC birth rate exceeding the DSC death rate die, and by rainforest cockroaches (RFCs) evolving into DSCs.

You can imagine a male DSC meeting a sexy new female DSC at the border between old scrub and newly ex-rainforest.  The male leaps into a standard chat-up routine: "Well, hello there gorgeous, I've not seen you around before!"  And she replies with: "Uh, hello, no you wouldn't have, I've just evolved."

Of course that's not how it works.  Dr Lo was not doing his research on one species of burrowing cockroach (the DSC) and one species of wood-feeding cockroach (the RFC).  His research involved 25 different species.

He's merely talking about how living things evolve to fill niches.  This phenomenon is well known and is highlighted by the similarity in body types between tenrecs on Madagasca and many other types of animals in the rest of the world.

Here's a tenrec:

And here's a hedgehog:

These two creatures fill the same niche and look quite similar, but they haven't merged into the same species.

In the same way, wood-feeding rainforest cockroaches may well have been put under evolutionary pressure multiple times and thus evolved strategies to survive the disappearance of their rainforest – and a clearly successful strategy is to burrow.  So there will be a range of species of burrowing cockroaches – those that evolved out of other burrowing cockroaches which had, at some time in the past, evolved out of rainforest cockroaches and those that evolved "directly" from rainforest cockroaches.  I write "directly" because a transitional process like evolution doesn't really have direct paths of evolution from one species to another, each individual in the process is its own path and species don't change in one generation.

So, basically, I think that some creationists are going to trip over what is in effect a category error.  Because we lump a whole bunch of species together as "burrowing cockroaches", they'll consider this to be an example of one species arising out of multiple speciation events – as if things were evolving according to some master plan.  People who understand evolutionary processes much better than me will try patiently to explain, but their explanations will fall on deaf ears and the creationists will unilaterally declare another victory.

The subtle distinction between "believe" and "believe in"

If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone going on about "believing in evolution", well … let's just say that I could afford quite a few hot dinners.  Despite being well-fed, however, I'd still be grumpy about the lack of understanding about how "believe" differs from "believe in".

It is probably a largely semantic issue - what do we really mean by believe?

For me, a belief is related simply to the state of considering something to be true.  I believe that I am sitting on a chair (in part because I am sitting on a chair).  For a theist (the sort of person most likely to err and say that others "believe in evolution") belief can mean something more, so that it involves an act of will, perhaps even the overcoming of doubt (often caused by evidence that shows that supports the notion that a specific belief is false).

Sometimes an atheist like myself will use "believe" in a slightly different way, so as to imply doubt - not doubt that has been overcome, but doubt that remains.  So I might say that I believe my football team will win on the weekend, because I don't know that they will and I'm a little more confident that I would be if I just said that I hope that they will win.  But I am nevertheless aware that there's an element of hope in there - you know, like wishful thinking.

I think that this can lead us atheists, at times, to misconstrue how a theist thinks about belief.  We tend to see this form of belief as lying a lot closer to hoping (or dreading if we are less optimistic) while I think that theists see it as being a lot closer to knowing (perhaps some theist or ex-theist could shed light on this).  If so, then there's an element of magical thinking, similar to those life-coaches who rattle off such nonsense as "if you truly believe it, it will come true".

"Believing in" something is quite a different concept to "believing" it.  Say I was listening to the coach of my football team as he described how the team planned to make the finals next season, that they've all been working very hard, making sacrifices and putting the "I" in "team".  To say that I don't "believe" the coach is to say that I think he's lying - they haven't been working hard enough, not enough sacrifices have been made and there's no "I" in "team".  To say that I don't "believe in" the coach is to say one of (at least) three things.

Firstly, I could be saying that I don't have any confidence in him, that I don't think his plans are sufficient to get my team through next season or something like that.

Secondly, I could be implying that I don't think that the idea of coaching is a good one, suggesting that it would be better if all the members of the team just did their own thing and turned up on the day and tried their best (an approach which I heartily recommend to all competitors in the league).

Alternatively, I could be saying that I don't believe that he exists.  This would of course be ridiculous, he's right there, giving a speech that I am listening to.  It would of course be quite different if I didn't believe in the coach that you were listening to, if I could neither hear nor see him.

If we talk about "believing in evolution" then strictly speaking, we know it happens - because we breed dogs, and cats, and sheep, and pigeons ... we can force them to evolve.  Not even a creationist could argue against that (well ... a somewhat mythical beast, the rational creationist, couldn't argue against that).  The sort people making the claim along the lines of "atheists believe in evolution" are actually referring to the theory of evolution.  Does the theory of evolution exist?  Well, yes, it does.  No-one is contesting that, as far as I know, not even the creationists.

We could ask a similar question: "do atheists believe in creationism?"  Strictly speaking, we do, because creationism exists.  We sort of wish it didn't because it rots people's minds, but wishing something doesn't make it true.

Then there are the other meanings of "believe in".

Do we "believe in" natural evolution meaning that we think it is a good idea?  Well, no, I don’t think so.  Instead, we tend to avoid it.  After all, we don't look on dispassionately as our children fail to evolve quickly enough to counter the latest version of the influenza virus.  We don't let women die in childbirth because their hips aren't wide enough.  We don't let myopic people die out (imagine making them drive without glasses for the sake of evolution …)

Or do we have confidence in evolution, in the same way as we might have confidence in and thus believe in the coach? Since evolution is not goal oriented, this doesn't really seem applicable.  There might be some people who have some bizarre faith that, if we don't come to grips with climate change, everything will be alright because we'll just evolve gills.  Such people don't comprehend how evolution tends to viciously prune its metaphorical tree of failed experiments, to the extent that something like 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct (being aware that species are designated by humans, really there are only as many species as we are collectively aware of, so this estimate is based on some rather rubbery assumptions).  If humans manage to be part of screwing the environment up so badly that we can't live in it, we won't magically adapt - we'll just die out, like most of the dinosaurs did as the Earth's climate changed on them over a period of 175 million years.

So, we don't believe that evolution is necessarily good, nor that it necessarily aligns with our goat of ongoing survival as a species.  Therefore, we don't "believe in" evolution in either of those senses.

But, given careful definitions of the terms "believe", "evolution" and "is true", almost every single one of us does believe that evolution is true.

Planting a Swiss Army Knife

It is vaguely possible that there are people who don’t know what a Swiss Army knife is.  Fortunately these sorts of people are evolutionary dead ends, so we don’t need to worry about them.

Plantinga has, along with Humble Don and the Shaved Chimp and many other apologists, tried to argue something along these lines:

Proper function of the heart is the pumping blood around the body.

If the heart fails to pump blood around the body, the owner of the said heart dies.

However, proper function implies conformance with specifications, which in turn implies a designer.

Therefore, god exists, or you die of heart failure … your choice.

Ironically, Plantinga had a triple bypass operation earlier this year (discovered when trying to find his quote using the string “Plantinga and the heart”).  Thank god for those surgeons, eh?

The idea behind this argument is that the human heart (or whatever human organ you want to use) does a particular job, and apparently does it exceptionally well.  Without it we would die – unless science stepped in.  But if you are going to argue along evolutionary lines, what did the heart do before it pumped blood?  How did it get from there to where it is today?

This is sort of where the argument of “irreducible complexity” tries to get purchase.  One can understand how a heart might scale up along with the owners.  A small shrew-like mammal precursor would not need the half-kilo heart that humans carry around with them.

However, there comes a point where there are simply not enough cells in a heart to support any pumping at all.  In the “irreducible complexity” argument there is a gap between a few cells joining up together and not doing anything particularly important, and a quite large number of cells being assembled with the express purpose of pumping (the smallest known mammal has a heart which weighs about 15mg which comprises in the order of half a billion cells).  People like Plantinga try to slot god into this gap.

A problem with this argument (apart from the fact that the mammalian precursor had a lineage which included smaller creatures with smaller heart like structures – for example insects, the smallest known of which is 0.139mm long) is that it assumes a continuity of function.  Nature doesn’t seem to consider itself thus constrained.  For example, scales and feathers and fur are variants of the same basic thing, petals and leaves and thorns are variants of the same thing.  Plants didn’t specifically develop “pointy things to dissuade grazing animals”, they simply co-opted and perfected pointier than average leaves.  (Don’t take this too literally – there was no Supreme Council of Plants with a 1,000 Year Plan to develop thorns.)

The problem comes in when you assume design and you assume that a function that you are bright enough to recognise must have been designed in (and you’re not overly bright).  This is understandable, to a certain extent, in a technological society like ours.  Everything is designed with function in mind (and somewhere close to half of the population are of below average intelligence – not my readers of course, you are all brilliant).

However, getting back on track … I draw your attention to the Swiss Army knife.  This is a perfect example of something specifically designed for one purpose being co-opted for another.

My variant of the Swiss Army knife has a number of goodies:

two sharp blades – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting a proper knife)

two screwdrivers – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting my screwdriver set)

a corkscrew – never used (I have better corkscrews around)

a fish-scaler – never used

a helping you to tie fishing line thingie – never used

a thingie for getting stones out of horses hooves (I assume) – never used

a can opener – never used

a toothpick – lost and never used

a tiny pair or tweezers – never used

a little pair of grips – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting my socket set)

solid construction (ie a hammer) – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting anything more hammer-like)

a lovely pair of scissors – used all the freaking time to cut my nails

In terms of evolution, the Swiss Army knife is in a transitional state between being something which does various things not particularly well into a magnificent device that appears to be designed specifically for cutting nails.  Nothing cuts nails better.

Now, I am pretty sure that the gnomes in Switzerland are not designing towards a perfect pair of nail scissors.  They are just churning out variants of their product, trying to maximise sales.  All that has happened is that I, representing natural selection, have favoured a variant of the Swiss Army knife which performs a key task well.  If the vast majority of Swiss Army knife buyers, like me, purchase them primarily to cut their nails, and a later design change eliminates that function, the Swiss Army knife will die out.  If a later design change maintains the heft of the Swiss Army knife and the scissors but removes unnecessary stuff like the fish-scaler and thus improves its attractiveness on price, then it will become more popular at the expense of more awkward variants.

I suggest that the same thing happened with the heart.  A bunch of cells were already huddled together with some other goal in mind, or even a range of goals, (entirely metaphorically, cells don’t huddle and they don’t have intentions) before being co-opted into the pumping blood malarkey.  

(Similarly, at a much smaller scale, the supposed “irreducible complexity” involved in the inner workings of a cell would also have involved the co-opting of an existing function.)

So, as a last word, if something that was specifically designed for a purpose, like the Swiss Army knife being designed to deprive tourists of their hard-earned Euros, can be co-opted for another purpose, like cutting my toe-nails, then it is surely not too much of a stretch to think that non-directed “design” could co-opt existing structures and modify them to suit a new purpose.  Is it?

When Morality Breaks Down

Over the past few months, I have developed the basis of a morality based on no more than the emergent need to survive.  I say “emergent need to survive” because survive is what every single creature, human or otherwise, from which we descend has done – at least long enough to produce at least one viable child.

Before I started though, I posted a prelude – Being Bad – in which I mused on why we do bad things:

So, the question that really intrigues me is this: why do we have (or pretend to have) this morality when we so often, and often so easily, throw it away?

Are there specific situations in which acting contrary to our morality might, paradoxically, be the right thing to do?

I now want to return to these questions.

--------------------------------

Living and letting die

If we live in a community in which the principle of not killing each other is held high, then we stand to gain security if we avoid acting violently towards each other.  We might not, however, be so forgiving when we come upon strangers from outside our community.  While we might be “good” to our immediate neighbours, we are quite likely to be “bad” to our more distant neighbours for at least two reasons.

Firstly, we do not know with any certainty that a foreigner is as committed to the concept of not committing violence towards others as we are ourselves.  Secondly, a foreigner may not be considered to be as human as a member of our own community.  This means that our moral injunction is weakened with respect to a foreigner and we can rightly fear that even if the foreigner considers killing people to be wrong, they might not consider us to be real people.

(Note also that when it comes to be being observed, the killing of another human being is not entirely a moral question.  It is illegal to kill another person under the vast majority of circumstances.  For that reason, when planning to kill another person, it is not primarily for reasons of protecting their image as a moral person that a killer tries to avoid detection.  It is in order to avoid the legal consequences.  Even in more primitive social groupings, the power over life and death is usually vested in a leader or leadership group.  There will exist rules, if not laws, about who is allowed to kill whom and when.  These more formal rules generally override moral considerations.)

When it comes right down to basics, we are not overly concerned with the survival of others – even if we might make a show of thinking that way.  It certainly seems to be true that those who are close to us are considered to be important but the greater the separation between us and some “other”, the less we truly care whether they live or die, irrespective of whether we think we should care or not.

What we are primarily concerned with is not being killed ourselves, to the extent that if our survival is threatened many of us would be quite capable of bringing about the death of another and the vast majority of us would stand by while another dies if intervening were to put us at some sort of risk.  (Note that almost everyone reading this will have sufficient wealth that they could make a completely painless sacrifice in order to help save lives in other countries, but only a small percentage will do so.  The rest just stand by while other, distant people die.)

Thieving

The same sort of argument as presented above applies to theft.  When someone engages in theft, they generally do not do so merely because they think that their need overrides the moral injunction, but more often because they do not expect to get caught or that if they do, they believe that they can laugh it off.  Many a time when pushed, a person who has committed a theft – especially someone who is not known to be dishonest – will give as a reason for their action: I thought I could get away with it.

That said, sometimes we do justify stealing because we consider our need to be sufficiently great.

Being able to steal without getting caught conveys considerable evolutionary benefits, similar in form to the benefits which accrue from the ability to kill first by betraying another’s trust (their belief that you will not try to kill them).  As has been stated in earlier articles, we are all the descendants of people who did better at the “trustworthiness” game than others.  Our ancestors were sufficiently willing to take from others when necessary, even when doing so threatened the survival of those taken from.  At the same time they were able to maintain an image of trustworthiness amongst their peers, at least sufficiently well enough and long enough to produce viable progeny.

In a functional sense, the ethical structure that I have presented is not overly concerned with the rights of others to own things.  The primary concern is the ability to maintain ownership of one's own belongings. 

Again, the moral injunction is weakened when we consider people outside of our own community.  Powerful nations take land from smaller nations, soldiers pillage towns and hamlets and professional thieves steal happily from those outside their own circle – but of critical importance not within their own group.

Perhaps there are modern day saints in the world who have never taken a towel from a hotel, or soap or toiletries, or eaten a grape in a store, or taken a morsel of food from a platter or display that they were not entitled to, or been aware that they have been overpaid but not said anything, but they are likely to be extraordinarily few in number.  An overwhelming majority of us frequently take things which do not belong to us, which we know to belong to someone else.

Geographical considerations

The Ethical Hierarchy applies within a community.  When we meet a person from outside our community we are aware of a few things: they do not know our rules; we do not know their rules; they are not necessarily our friends and are possibly our enemies, and we have good reason to suspect that they might feel the same way.  If a stranger looks different to us, the distance between us and that stranger lengthens.  Nevertheless, we do seem to apply our ethical structures in relation to those outside our community – to a certain extent.

We expect strangers and foreigners to be less moral than us: most travellers carry their belongings very close to themselves partly for this reason.  Those who are so inclined (pick pockets, scam artists, tourist booth operators) prey on tourists for two reasons: firstly, they have money to steal and secondly, they are foreigners - they are not part of the community.  Equally, as tourists we will sometimes haggle to the point where we may feel that we might be cheating a stall owner.  This may not dissuade us because that stall owner is not part of our community.

That said, we do not all become totally immoral when in other countries.  Let us use the example of prostitution, noting that a number of countries which are popular tourist destinations also have a thriving sex industry.  In a few instances (Thailand for example), the sex industry caters largely to the natives and tourists may merely take advantage of it, if they chose.  While the morality associated with frequenting prostitutes may be quite different in these countries, sometimes being expected rather than frowned upon, the majority of westerners would still consider themselves bound by their own community’s moral standards rather than those of the nation they are visiting at the time.  This is for two reasons (at least).

Firstly, the moral standards on the issue of prostitution are quite strong in most western nations.  Not everyone can turn off many years of conditioning and operate according to a new moral standard during a short visit to another country.  Westerners generally consider the sex industry to be fundamentally wrong  and even a moral argument about the benefits of providing much needed financial support to people who earn their living from the industry in other countries is insufficient to overcome the imperative to conform with one’s native societal views on prostitution.

Secondly, there is a slight chance that tourists who take advantage of the opportunity to consort with a prostitute might be caught by a member of their own society, someone who knows them, and that they would as a result be judged according to their own community standards rather than by the standards of the visited community.

However, longer term exposure to another culture, or being in the company of others who have had longer term exposure to another culture, can break down one’s standards.  Expatriates living in countries in which prostitution is condoned begin to express a much more liberal view towards the practice.  This may not necessarily mean that expatriates become regulars at the types of places that they would never frequent in their country of origin, but they certainly become more accepting of those who do.

It is also well known that military men who visit foreign lands regularly take advantage of the opportunity to consort with prostitutes.  Usually there are “leaders” among the group who have already been exposed to the foreign culture and have had their moral standards “compromised”, for want of a better word.  These “leaders” demonstrate by example that contravening this particular moral injunction in a particular situation brings no consequences.

It is interesting to note that military men who have regular dealings with prostitutes in other countries do not necessarily become regular clients of prostitutes in their own country.  This may be a financial consideration but is more likely a result of returning to their own community in which injunctions against prostitution remain in force.

So, in short, we tend to apply our ethical structures in foreign situations according to how it would reflect on us among people of our own community.

If no-one cares whether we apply our community standards in a foreign lands or not, then we don’t care (or we care less) – meaning that we can feel free to cheat a poor stall owner by means of excessive and intimidating haggling.

If our fellows do care, then we also care – so we do not automatically avail ourselves of the local sex industry when travelling.

However, even if our community of origin does care about our behaviour in other countries, but we think we can get away with otherwise immoral behaviour without being caught or are in a group of people all (or most) of whom are complicit in contravening a specific set of moral injunctions, then we may be liberated to contravene similarly.

Caring about others – or not

A slight variation of the application of our ethical structures in a foreign situation comes up when we hear stories of events in other countries.  It is worth comparing two horrendous events from the 1990s – the genocide in Rwanda and the massacres committed during the war in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia.  I read with horror the stories of brutality in both countries and truly wished that someone would step in and do what it took to stop the madness (NATO, the UN, the African Union or even unilateral action by an interventionist nation like the US or France).  However, when images from the refugee camps in Bosnia were televised, I felt a far more visceral response than when I saw images from the refugee camps in Burundi.

It is sad to say that seeing a group of Africans suffering in squalor was nothing particularly new, especially after events in South Africa, Mozambique, Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia.  Seeing Europeans in the same situation however, came as more of a shock.  In part that might be due to the association with the death camps of World War II, but there was also an element of the fact that the people being depicted were Europeans.  And I am of European origin.

Watching horrible events happen to other people does affect us.  Some might argue that when this is considered in relation to the Ethical Hierarchy, we should be surprised that we care at all about events that clearly have no impact on our own personal safety.

This is erroneous because we humans have the ability to consider what it would be like for us if we ourselves were in such a situation.  Certainly we can see that other people rather than ourselves are currently suffering on television, but we can understand that we would be threatened if such a situation were repeated in our own communities.  Therefore we perceive this situation as wrong.

When we see the suffering of a type of person that we can associate more closely with, in the way that most westerners could when presented with images of Europeans in refugee camps, the sense of outrage and unease is heightened.  For a westerner, seeing a large group of third world people suffering is “comfortably” wrong.  We would not like to see ourselves in their situation, but we might see it as completely unlikely.  When we see people very like ourselves suffering, it is much less comfortable and we tend to place more emphasis on how wrong the situation seems to us.  In such a situation, we perceive the threat to our survival much more clearly.

A conclusion to the Morality as Playing Games series

Game theory, some would argue, is about winning games and for that reason has nothing to do with ethics.  I have shown, however, that game theory can also show us how to not lose, and not losing is key to survival.  I have used this understanding to develop a conceptual ethical structure which can act as a mechanism for promoting our survival in a community in which we would otherwise have little basis for trusting others.

My argument is that the fundamental basis for what is morally “right” and “wrong” is a consideration of what promotes the longer term survival.  And while the ethical structure that results from such a consideration may be characterised by self-interest in one sense, it is fully consistent with what we observe in reality with people frequently appearing to act against their more immediate self-interest – in part because their small but ostentatious acts of self-abnegation in the near term can mean the difference between survival and death in the long term.  With the introduction of the concept of “legacy survival”  we are provided not only with a further explanation for acts which are inconsistent with apparent (short-term) self-interest but also an understanding as to why, under certain circumstances, people may be motivated by their morality to accept potentially lethal risks.

However, in order to maximise the chance of long-term survival, we must not only espouse the morality which results from our ethical structures but also have the capacity to act against that morality when necessary – we need to be bad when being bad is called for.  This allows the fact that we humans almost universally consider ourselves to be fundamentally moral to be reconciled with the fact that we are wracked by human failings, consistently failing to uphold the moral injunctions and imperatives that we espouse.  If the emergent function of an ethical structure is to promote survival, then it is entirely rational for us to work tirelessly towards establishing ourselves as morally upright individuals while not permitting ourselves to be locked too securely into a morality that only promotes our survival prospects in under certain circumstances.  It is entirely rational to retain some freedom to manoeuvre, including the option to abandon key aspects of our morality when circumstances change, such as when it becomes apparent that persisting on a moral path is no longer consistent with the best chances of survival.

It is in this way that one could even say that occasionally, by acting against the imperatives and injunctions of our ethical structures – that is by “acting immorally” or “being bad”, we are not only being rational but we are doing what is right in terms of our survival prospects and, as a consequence, we are doing what is fundamentally moral.

Morality as Playing Games

In the series of articles preceding this one, I have built a case for a morality which could reasonably be expected to develop via evolution.

In The Moral Animal, I introduced the concept of moral agency and argued that even non-human animals demonstrate it.

In The Prisoners and The Farmers and Zero Sum Games, I discussed the moral aspects of two classic game theory scenarios.  I extended that discussion further when introducing the Siamese Emperor.

I have discussed the problems associated with trying define meaning into morality or imposing a level of Divine Command onto it.

In Towards A Rational Origin of Ethical Structures, I harked back to the idea of Ethics as Winning Games and also the concept of Supreme Indifference.  In this article, I touched briefly on the concept of an “ethical structure”, explaining what it does, but I didn’t explain fully what I mean by an ethical structure, or what an ethical structure is.

I want to pause for a moment before explaining my concept of an ethical structure in order to highlight something which might not be readily apparent to the reader approaching this for the first time, even though it may seem to be obvious in hindsight.

Things, acts, words, world views, perspectives and so on are all right or wrong, good or bad, in terms of your ethical structure.  Note that while the term “moral framework” is preferred by some and “ethical framework” is also occasionally used, I shall be using the term “ethical structure” exclusively to denote the concept that will soon be explained more fully.

No matter what it is called and no matter what the preferred method of constructing it is, an ethical structure is not a valid subject for assessment in terms of itself.  An ethical structure is not good or bad, nor is it right or wrong.  An ethical structure is inherently amoral – if someone thinks they can make an ethical assessment of, or moral judgment on their ethical structure, then they’ve left something out of that ethical structure (the values and the methodology on which they base that assessment or judgment).

Note that an ethical structure is not amoral in the usually pejorative sense that people are said to be amoral when they appear unconcerned about or care little for determinations regarding morality and immorality.

An interesting concern arises when considering the argument that an ethical structure cannot be reasonably assessed in terms of itself.  Is assessing the morality of another person’s ethical structure justifiable?  It seems that once the argument that ethical structures are inherently amoral has been accepted, it is unreasonable to assess the morality of another person’s ethical structure – which would be inherently amoral from their perspective.

What can be justified is assessment of the morality of decisions that flow from another person’s ethical structure in terms of your own ethical structure, although such assessments will be subjective and relative.  It is also justifiable to contest decisions made by someone who ostensibly shares the same ethical structure.

An assessment that may be more profitable, and is entirely justified, is the assessment of a competing ethical structure conducted on the basis of evidence and reason.

An example might be useful here, since I appear to be straying very close to the form of moral and cultural relativism that is better labelled as “moral cowardice”.

Imagine a scenario that plays out in a village not too far from yours: a well-fed male walks up to a starving female who immediately cedes her food.  The well-fed male accepts the food and eats it, leaving none for the starving female.

Within your ethical structure, this is probably wrong – maybe because you have a concept of assigning resources according to need, rather than gender.  In that village, however, food might be distributed according to eye colour and the female (having blue eyes) would only get food if there was enough available.  This is a rather deliberately arbitrary distinction – the point being that the decision to distribute resources based on eye colour is not really a moral failing, it’s irrational.  When critiquing the ethical structure of others, we are justified in assessing their decisions as morally deficient (in terms of our own ethical structure) and their ethical structure as lacking a sound, rational basis.

When we begin, however, to accuse others of having irrational ethical structures, it behoves us to ensure that our own ethical structures are rational.  To that end, it is should be noted that it is not rational to attempt construction of an ethical structure on the basis of what is good and right.  If you can make such a determination then you already have an ethical structure.  Similarly, when assessing whether an ethical structure is rational, it is necessary to delve more deeply than preconceptions of good and right.

This brings us to a question which many people are reluctant to raise, let alone address.  What is an ethical structure for?  What is its function?

In Towards A Rational Origin of Ethical Structures, I argue that the (emergent) function of an ethical structure is the promotion of survival.  The idea that the function of an ethical structure is to promote personal survival would probably be considered by many people to be quite cynical but this is based on an incorrect assumption that an ethical structure itself should be moral, rather than serving to guide our morality.

There are some who would argue that their ethical structure is based on religious convictions rather than any consideration of survival.  These people, however, are merely putting more focus on their legacy survival rather than their physical survival.  They are labouring under the misapprehension that they are the embodiment or earthly vessel of some eternal aspect, the survival of which is more important than their physical survival.  Their ethical structure is still based on survival, survival of their immortal soul, rather than their mortal body.

In the next article, I will more fully explain the concept of an ethical structure, the function of which is to promote survival.

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I just want to cut one other argument off at the knees.

I’ve already touched on Divine Command Theory, but there is another argument which some might raise; the function of an ethical structure has something to do with pleasing god.

This pleasing of god is not due to altruism on the part of theists, it’s a contractual arrangement.  The followers of a god that I am most familiar with (i.e. Christians) have made it abundantly clear that if you obey the laws set down by their god, then eternal bliss awaits.  If you fail to obey the laws, then it’s eternal torment.

Theists are merely obeying the terms of an implied (and imaginary) contract.  They reveal this when they argue that without (their) god there is no good.  In other words they are asserting that if they themselves did not believe in god, they would recognise no obligation to be moral.

The gossamer-thin civility exhibited by some of our fellow travellers is truly frightening.

Since we have evidence of people losing their faith, even when it has been quite firmly held, the development of a robust basis for morality that is independent of belief in a god should be a priority.

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As mentioned earlier this article is one of a series. It was preceded by Physical Survival and Legacy Survival and we reach the penultimate article in An Ethical Structure. It all started with the first prelude, Saving the Dog.

Planting a Tiger

I previously discussed the different levels of confidence used by scientists and theists when declaring something to be “true”.  Scientists like to use something around 99.9999% certain, while theists (like Craig and Plantinga) like to use something above 50%.

Plantinga uses this sort of certainty to argue (as he did in a presentation given at Biola University) that evolution provides evidence of creation.  Anyone reading the full set of notes for that presentation will be amused by the contents of the last paragraph on page four – unless of course they are unaware that tigers are perfectly capable swimmers making the handy lake somewhat less handy.  (Tigers are also very quick, they are good jumpers and can climb – so good luck trying to escape one by climbing up a cliff!)

Interestingly, Plantinga seems to start off using the formulation P(R|N&E) correctly (unlike Craig who misuses it right from the start, see Sweet Probability).  However, Plantinga has gone well off the rails by page six, in “3.The Argument”.

When introducing P(R|N&E) (on page three), Plantinga describes the formulation correctly, stating that it represents “the probability of R, given N&E”.  Note the words given N&E (being naturalism and evolution, where R is the reliability of our cognitive faculties).  The probability being discussed here is based on a precondition that N&E are true.  See the table of options:

Using Plantinga’s apparent assumption that the probability of anything is about half, we might say the likelihood of naturalism and evolution being true is 50% and the likelihood of them being false is 50%.  But the formulation that Plantinga is discussing here presumes that N&E is true so the bottom row isn’t under consideration.  Given Plantinga’s standard handling of probability one would think that if naturalism and evolution are true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is 50% and the probability of them not being reliable is 50%.  Apparently not.

Let’s look at the meaning of the terms.

Plantinga defines “naturalism” as “the theistic picture minus god”.  Um, what?  No, that’s not how atheists and those who subscribe to what is better known as “materialistic naturalism” see the world.  It’s not a case of “everything theists think but with god carefully excised”.  (Admittedly this argument fails if Plantinga has in his head the idea that naturalism means the habit of walking around without clothes on but the likelihood of that being the case is no higher than 50%.)

Wikipedia is a bit more forthcoming: “the viewpoint that laws of nature (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe.”

Plantinga does not define evolution, but we can (albeit somewhat foolishly) give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he has a proper understanding of the term.  Per Wikipedia: “the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins”.

Plantinga begins to introduce confusion when defining “cognitive faculties”.  This term as defined by Plantiga means: “the powers or faculties of capacities whereby we have knowledge or form belief: memory, perception, reason, maybe others” (my emphasis).

Note carefully that Plantinga has made “have knowledge or form belief” primary in the definition of a term which is not standard (cognitive function is more common).  The importance of this might not be immediately obvious.

Time and time again with William Lane Craig we found that he conflates the disparate meanings of terms and here Plantinga does the same thing, specifically with the term “belief”.

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.  From a philosophical or scientific viewpoint, “belief” can be used in relation to things about which we could be said to have “knowledge” (or justified true belief), so long as:

1.    we maintain a specific belief about a thing

o   we can’t know something if we don’t believe it

2.    we have good reason to maintain a specific belief about a thing

o   we don’t know something if we don’t have adequate justification for believing it

3.    our specific belief about a thing is consistent with the facts associated with that thing

o   we can only be said to know something if it is true

We generally work with concepts at the belief level because while we are generally quite proficient at holding things to be true, particularly if we want them to be true, we are less good at analysing our reasons for holding things to be true and getting confirmation as to whether they actually are true.  To work around these shortcomings, one needs to use a process involving scepticism (not believing something unreservedly but rather requiring some sort of supporting evidence, preferably involving an element of unbiased systematic observation, empirical measurement, falsifiability and reproducibility) – in other words, the scientific method.

There is no inconsistency if a materialistic naturalist were to use belief in this sense given that it would be consistent a sort of tentative truth statement.  To a materialistic naturalist, “I believe that X is true” would merely be shorthand for “I am reasonably confident that X is true, under the circumstances, but I am not sufficiently certain to say ‘I know that X is true’”.

The “under the circumstances” is important.  Say I was in the Army and it was my job to go to into weapons shooting range to collect targets after the exercise was over.  I would want to know that the exercise was over.  If, on the other hand, I was the person who collects golf balls at the driving range, then I could accept a lower level of certainty.  I could go out so long as I believed that the driving range was not in operation and not require the level of certainty that would constitute knowing that driving range was not in use, because while I’d not like to be hit by a golf ball due to the pain involved, I reckon the likelihood of being killed by a golf ball to be minimal.

(“Reckon” is the term I use to avoid using “believe” and “know”, I use it with implication of computation and thought so that “I reckon X is true” means “Having thought about it, I have come to the conclusion that there is sufficient justification for me to hold X to be true”.)

Let’s label this rational stance of holding, or reckoning something to be true without going so far as to say it is known to be true as belief type one, or “belief¹”.

The type of belief that Plantinga conflates with belief¹ is the sort that is associated with faith.  This sort of belief, which we can label as belief², can often be expressed with a “believe in” statement and is thus inconsistent with belief¹:

While it is indeed possible to say “I believe² in Mark’s story”, this is stating a rather different position to that expressed by “I believe¹ Mark’s story”.  It should be noted that a Christian theist traditionally believes² in a god who is not only the source of all truth but is, in a sense, Truth itself.  It is therefore incoherent for a Christian theist to espouse belief² in a god who, in their mind, might in fact not be true as is implied in a scientific understanding of belief¹.

Note also that it is quite logical that some beliefs² should inform some beliefs¹ and that some beliefs¹ should provide support to some beliefs².  If Mark’s story is the Gospel of Mark, then a believer² in God will be likely to consider that story credible and will therefore be more likely to believe¹ it.  Equally, someone who reads Mark and reckons that it is true is likely to consider that as support for the belief² in God.

It seems to be the scientific, materialistic “holding something to be true” belief¹ that is central to Plantinga’s four possible categories of mind-body interaction detailed on page four:

·         beliefs¹ do not impact on behaviour (epiphenomenalism)

·         beliefs¹ cause behaviour “but only by virtue of their electro-chemical properties, not by virtue of their content” (Semantic epiphenomenalism)

·         beliefs¹ cause behaviour “by way of content but (are) maladaptive”, and

·         beliefs¹ cause behaviour and are adaptive

Having detailed these four “jointly exhaustive categories”, Plantinga then goes on to discuss, in amusing detail, the sort of beliefs^1/2 that a prehistoric hominid called Paul might have about tigers.  (The term belief^1/2 indicates a possible conflation of the two forms of belief.)

Note here that prehistoric hominids could arguably include humans since there were preliterate humans who were not able to write down history, there is a possibility that there were early humans who did not have a language that was sufficiently rich to convey history and there were certainly early humans who had no real history to convey.  However, if Plantinga meant to imply that Paul is pre-human hominid, then one might wonder why he is worried about tigers at all, tigers never having lived in Africa.  To be as fair as possible, let’s assume that the “tiger” is really a large cat-like thing with a taste for prehistoric hominid flesh.

Plantinga suggests that there is any number of combinations of belief^1/2 and desire (goals, perhaps) that are consistent with an adaptive “tiger” avoiding strategy.

For no adequately explained reason, Plantinga then claims that (given all the possible combinations) the probability that Paul acts the “right” way for the “right” reason is actually low.

This is worth focussing on for a moment.  These are the specific possibilities that Plantinga raised:

1.    Paul wants to be eaten, but wants so much to be eaten that he runs away from tigers to find a more likely diner (so Paul does not believe¹ that the chances of being eaten by any given tiger is sufficiently high to satisfy his goal of being eaten)

2.    Paul wants to pet what he believes² to be a large friendly pussycat, but believes² the best way to arrange a good petting is to run away from the tiger (this does not qualify as belief¹ because of absence of justification, there is sufficient evidence available to bring both of Paul’s conclusions into question)

3.    Paul wants to be eaten, but is confused by the concepts “towards” and “away from” (so Paul believes² that his running away from the tiger will increase his chances of being eaten by that tiger – again this does not qualify as belief¹ because of absence of justification)

4.    Paul is worried about his weight, and has resolved to run whenever he sees a tiger shaped illusion (so Paul believes² that the tiger is just something convenient for motivating his exercise regimen – again this does not qualify as belief¹ because of absence of justification)

5.    Paul is involved in a prehistoric athletics event, is highly competitive and believes² that the appearance of a tiger is the starting signal for some sort of jolly race (yet again this does not qualify as belief¹ because of absence of justification)

I am not kidding, read the top of page five if you don’t believe me!

I’d like to add:

6.    Paul has observed that when his fellow prehistoric hominids are eaten by tigers, they don’t seem to relish the experience, so Paul believes¹ that being eaten by a tiger is a suboptimal outcome and does what he can to avoid ending up as tiger poo.

7.    Paul has an inbuilt instinctive reaction to fear large things with sharp teeth. When his brain registers images of a large thing with sharp teeth collated from visual input, signals are sent to his endocrine system stimulating his adrenal glands which puts Paul into a state of excitement which he interprets as fear, the attention system in his brain will be shouting “big thing with fangs!” at his cerebral cortex and the combination of these will result in a quick decision to maximise the distance between Paul and the large thing with sharp teeth.  Quite probably, Paul’s brain will make the snap decision to run either back the way he came (since the path will be known to him), or directly away from the tiger (slightly more risky if the location is not well known to Paul).  That decision will then later be incorporated into Paul’s history as a rational decision to run away in a carefully selected direction (beliefs¹ about tigers being added post facto) or Paul will have a brief moment to rue the fact that he apparently either didn’t run fast enough, or he chose the wrong way to run.  If he was like Mr Plantinga, he might have a slightly longer moment to think, as he’s splashing around in some Asian river: “Oh my god, tigers can SWIM!!!! Why didn’t someone tell me that? I never should have left Africa.”

Now what Plantinga is telling us is that, because he thinks he can construct a thousand (approximately or as a minimum, I don’t know) different belief^1/2-desire scenarios in which Paul might avoid being eaten, of which only those which bear some similarity to #6 involve a true belief^1/2 (I don’t think he would factor in a version of #7) then evolution, as expressed as a species becoming incrementally better at not being eaten by tigers, will not increase a species’ likelihood of holding true beliefs^1/2 about tigers.

Really?

Even more amusingly, Plantinga then says “of course the argument for a low estimate of P(R|N&E) is pretty weak” (“pretty” here might mean “extraordinarily”).  Then a couple lines below he claims that we must therefore be agnostic about the value of P(R|N&E).

No, Mr Plantinga, we don’t.  Certainly not based on your argumentation and especially not given that you clearly have entertained false beliefs about tigers and, so from an evolutionary standpoint, you’re probably not qualified to talk about evolution.  (This was a poor attempt at a joke, don’t take it too seriously.  Some of the people who might have been eaten by tigers if they were living in a somewhat more tiger rich environment are qualified to talk about evolution.  Just not Plantinga or anyone else tempted to believe without evidence that large cats are basically house cats on steroids.)

However, based on Plantinga’s argument, we should be sceptical about anything that Plantinga has to say that involves probability including his conclusion that P(R|N&E) is low.

Towards the bottom of page six, Plantinga suddenly changes the definition of a term in his argument.  B was introduced the bottom of page four to denote a tiger avoiding behaviour (selected as a consequence of the belief-desire nexus), to something denoting a belief^1/2.  Perhaps Plantiga didn’t do this to sow confusion.  Perhaps not deliberately.

Fortunately, the use of this term isn’t really important in terms of the overall argument.  What is important is that Plantinga introduces a new definition of “belief”:

But now suppose we return to the person convinced of N&E who is agnostic about P(R/N&E): something similar goes for him. He is in the same position with respect to any belief B of his, as is the above believer in God. He is in the same condition as the person who comes to think she has been created by that Cartesian evil demon. So he too has a defeater for B, and a good reason for being agnostic with respect to it.

3.THE ARGUMENT

Now for the argument that it is irrational to believe N&E: P(R/N&E) is either low or inscrutable; in either case (if you accept N&E) you have a defeater for R, and therefore for any other belief B you might hold; but B might be N&E itself; so one who accepts N&E has a defeater for N&E, a reason to doubt or be agnostic with respect to it. If he has no independent evidence, N&E is self-defeating and hence irrational.

I’m going to try to translate Plantinga’s notes into English, free free to comment if you think my translation is unfair or inaccurate:

But now suppose that we return to the person who believes or holds that naturalism and evolution is true (and) who believes or holds that the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable is unknowable, something similar goes for him.  He is in the same position with respect to any belief he holds, as is the believer in God (who comes to believe that her belief in God is wish fulfilment). He is in the same condition as the person who comes to think she has been created by that Cartesian evil demon. So he too has something that indicates that his beliefs may be unreliable, and a good reason for being agnostic with respect to the subject of any belief he holds.

3.THE ARGUMENT

Now for the argument that it is irrational to believe or hold that naturalism and evolution is true.

The probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable is either low or unknowable; in either case (if you accept that naturalism and evolution is true) you have something that indicates that the very belief that your cognitive faculties may be unreliable is unreliable itself, as is the case for any other belief you might hold.

However a specific belief might be the belief that naturalism and evolution is true itself; so one who accepts that naturalism and evolution is true has something that indicates that the belief that naturalism and evolution is true is unreliable, a reason to doubt or be agnostic with respect to it. If he has no independent evidence, the belief that naturalism and evolution is true is self-defeating and hence irrational.

Where is the additional “belief” introduced?  It’s when Plantinga misuses conditional probability, as he does in his ontological argument (as later stolen by WLC).

P(R|N&E) means “what is the likelihood of R, given that N&E is already satisfied” (as addressed in Sweet Probability).  Plantinga then refers to N&E as a “belief”, via the already confused term B, even though the probability of N&E in the term P(R|N&E) is 100% because it assumed to be true.  So now we have:

·         belief¹ – the conditionally holding true of a thing due to sufficient supporting evidence (a belief¹ that will be abandoned if evidence shows the thing to be false)

·         belief² – the unconditionally holding true of a thing by faith (a belief² that is maintained in the absence of supporting evidence and possibly even in the presence of negating evidence) and

·         belief³ – the unconditionally holding true of a statement in a conditional logic structure (a belief³ that can be turned on and off at will).

Plantinga’s argument can be reworded thus (using the polysyllogism form introduced in The Logic of an Apologist):

1.    Premise 1 – If naturalism and evolution are true (A) then the likelihood of our cognitive faculties being reliable is low or unknowable (B)

2.    Premise 2 – If the likelihood of our cognitive faculties being reliable is low or unknowable (B) then the probability of the subject of any belief¹ being true is unknowable so long as there is no independent evidence (C)

3.    Assertion 1 – Naturalism and evolution are true (A)

4.    Conclusion 1 – The probability of the subject of any belief¹ being true is unknowable so long as there is no independent evidence (C)

5.    Assertion 2 – Assertion 1 falls into the category “any belief¹” (D)

6.    Conclusion 2 – The probability that naturalism and evolution are true is unknowable so long as there is no independent evidence (E, from D and C)

Well, ok.

I’m happy with the probability of naturalism and evolution being unknowable, even though there is independent evidence for at least evolution and insufficient evidence to support anything other than naturalism.

Plantinga, however, tries to confuse the argument by defining both low probability and an unknown probability as a “defeater”, allowing someone who is so inclined to think that an unknown probability is indistinguishable from a low probability.  He’s trying to argue that the assertion that “naturalism and evolution are true” leads inexorably to the conclusion that “naturalism and evolution are not true”.

All he manages to do, however, is show that if naturalism and evolution are true, then we cannot know with 100% certainty that naturalism and evolution are true.  In other words, if naturalism and evolution are true, the scientific fact of naturalism and evolution is precisely the same as any other scientific fact – we don’t know anything to be true with 100% certainty.

(There’s an extremely remote, non-zero chance that The Matrix was actually an ironic mockumentary screened by our mechanical overlords to taunt us and we are plugged into vats precisely as shown in what is portrayed to us as “fiction”.  This extremely unlikely possibility chips away from any otherwise perfect certainty we might have had about our world.  Scientists will think you are some sort of batty philosopher if you raise this argument, but eventually will concede that they cannot know that we aren’t in vats.)

But let’s look again at the path that Plantinga took to get to this somewhat less than totally convincing conclusion.  It all hinges around the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable.  Darwin and Churchland apparently thought that this probability is relatively low, Quine and Popper (bless their cotton socks) apparently thought that this probability is relatively high.

But to what extent are we considering when discussing “reliability”?  This is another theist trick, they use terms that sound firm and chunky but which are, when you look at them more closely, gossamer thin.

We all know that our cognitive faculties are imperfect (or at least that those of others are).  Well we know with 99.9% certainty.  We make mistakes, we make things up, we misremember things, we are susceptible to illusion, we don’t pay attention to everything that goes on around us, we trust those we shouldn’t and we don’t trust those we should, we see faces where there are no faces, we run from things that seem to be tigers but aren’t and yet we fail to notice the car hurtling towards us on the road that we pulling out into.

So long as we don’t define what we mean by “reliability” there’s nothing really contradictory in the positions of Quine, Popper, Churchland and Darwin.

If we were wrong all the time, we’d not survive.  Clearly on every single level at which it is important to (generally) be right, we are (generally) right.  So Quine and Popper are right, our cognitive faculties are (generally) reliable.

But we don’t have to be right about everything to survive.  Males of various species can get aroused by very basic simulations of females of their species (artificial cows used to collect semen from bulls look nothing like real cows).  The ability to be ready to mate at short notice is a benefit, even if a chap might occasionally get ready erroneously.  Similarly, it’s a benefit if we don’t eat things that will kill us.  There is a good reason to not eat some of the things that the Bible prohibits because they can make us sick (meat left out overnight, pork which is not sufficiently well cooked, shellfish).  Thinking that being sick afterwards is a punishment from God for eating the wrong thing is equally as efficacious as just avoiding them because they make you sick.  So, we can be wrong about a lot of things and still get an evolutionary advantage from it, which means Darwin and Churchland were right too.

Plantinga totally ignores that the scientific method takes into account the suggestion that, individually, our cognition is faulty but that this may be overcome if we don’t assume our beliefs¹ to be true, we gather evidence to support or refute our beliefs¹, we have the intellectual courage to accept when evidence does refute our beliefs¹, we invite others to critically assess our evidence and our interpretations of that evidence where it seems to support our beliefs¹ and we have the grace to accept that we were wrong if the evidence or interpretation is shown to be problematic.

The only person in this whole debacle who is shown to be comprehensively* wrong is Plantinga.

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* Where “comprehensive” means “with a likelihood of greater than 50%” and/or “as in being eaten by a tiger”