[Questioner] Is Plantinga's evolutionary argument
against naturalism any good? If it is,
what are the answers to the main
objections and can it be used in an
informal context? [Justin] Okay, Bill do you want to 
comment on that? [Dr Craig] Me?
[Justin] Well, the evolutionary argument against naturalism, could you first of all in a nutshell, explain it?
[Dr Craig] Well as I understand, this is not something I've
specialized on, but as I understand the
argument, it's not an argument against
naturalism to show that its false. What
it is, it's an argument designed to show
that naturalism could never be
rationally affirmed. And the idea there,
is that, if naturalism were true, then our
cognitive faculties are not aimed at
truth but they're aimed at survival and
in order to survive your beliefs don't
need to be true they just need to sort
of get you through. And you could - there
could be any number of ways in which
your beliefs could be false but they
would produce behavior that would have
survivability value. So, the idea is that, if
naturalism were true
our cognitive faculties will have been
shaped by
factors that are not truth aimed, but
simply survival aimed. And
that this should undermine our
confidence in our cognitive faculties,
that they really are producing
preponderantly true beliefs. The
probability is that many of the beliefs,
much of the beliefs that we hold,
wouldn't be true even if they helped us
survive. But then that would undermine
our confidence in naturalism itself
because that is a conclusion of the
same cognitive faculties so that
naturalism would be self undermining. One
could never have any confidence that
naturalism were true because it's shaped by
cognitive faculties which are probably
unreliable. So that's the argument. [Justin] So that's the argument. [Dr Craig] Would that be how you understand it Tim?
Would that be an accurate summary or do you understand it differently? [Dr McGrew] That's an accurate summary but the
question then arises: is the epistemic
warrant that we have for our beliefs
simply the fact that they're produced by
faculties that are producing an agreeably
high proportion of truths over falsehoods
or does it have something more intrinsic
to do with the evidence accessible to
the individual? And so that - but actually the way you just
put it
does lead me to maybe modify my
statement to this extent: if one accepts
epistemic externalism then I think
Plantinga's version of the argument does pose
a problem for the externalist. But I do
think it's tightly bound up with that internalist
and externalist dispute which is a
really live issue. [Dr Craig] Yeah. [Justin] We'll let them sort that out afterwards.
It is a somewhat technical question and we got somewhere with that. Anyone with any easier questions?
