Saturday, March 13, 2021

Thomas Crisp's evolutionary argument against naturalism

There's this new YouTube channel called Parker's Pensées, and he has some excellent content. Earlier today, I watched this video where he interviewed Thomas Crisp and Tyler McNabb. They talked about an article Thomas wrote for The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. I googled Thomas Crisp and found the article: "On Naturalistic Metaphysics" I just finished reading it and thought I'd share my initial thoughts.

I only read it one time, so this is an off-the-cuff response. I may feel differently about it if I read it some more and think about it, but here's my thoughts for now.

Whereas Plantinga said that given naturalism and evolution, the probability that our belief-producing cognitive faculties would be reliable is low or incrutible, Crisp made a more modest claim. He didn't claim that all our beliefs would be unreliable, but that certain kinds of beliefs would be unreliable. He said the probability that our belief-producing cognitive faculties would give us reliable abstract metaphysical beliefs given naturalism and evolution is inscrutible. The reason is because we haven't evolved significantly from when we were cave men, and those kinds of beliefs would've been completely useless to our cave man ancestors. This avoids a certain criticism that Plantinga's argument has gotten--that surely we'd be better off with true beliefs than false beliefs. In the case of abstract metaphysical beliefs, that's not the case since they lack any practical application for cave men.

Well, naturalism is an abstract metaphysical belief, and it requires a high level of thinking to arrive at it. If our cognitive faculties are unreliable when it comes to these kinds of questions, then we can't rely on them to tell us that naturalism is true. So if naturalism is true, then we can't be rational in affirming it.

That's the arument in a nutshell. He did go into possible responses, but I'm not going to address those since I have my own responses.

My initial impression is that it's an interesting argument worth thinking about, but I'm not totally persuaded just yet. I have a few objections.

First of all, it seems to me that with just a little bit of imagination, we might be able to come up with an evolutionary advantage to having the capacity for abstract metaphysical reasoning. Maybe being able to do philosophy could help you reproduce since "smart" has always been sexy. Suppose we can't come up with a use for it, though. Wouldn't that have more to do with our lack of imagination than with there not being any use for it?

Second, I don't see that it requires a great deal of abstract thinking to arrive at naturalism. All naturalism requires is that you believe what you see and don't believe what you don't see. All we see is physical stuff, and it's easy to see why, on naturalism, we'd believe in it. But the belief that that's all there is doesn't require much abstract thinking it seems to me. It would seem to me that supernaturalism would be less likely than naturalism since supernaturalism requires belief in things we don't usually experience.

Third, abstract metaphysical thinking and reasoning is actually hard, which is what we would expect if evolution is more concerned with practical beliefs that affect our every day lives. The fact that it's hard is evident in the diversity of opinion among brilliant people on metaphysical questions. So maybe our metaphysical beliefs aren't that reliable. Or maybe it just takes a lot more effort to arrive at true conclusions when it comes to metaphysics because evolution didn't equip us that well for thinking about those kinds of things.

I still think Plantinga's argument is better. Plantinga's argument relies on the premise that naturalism leads to semantic epiphenomentalism. As long as that argument goes through, then Plantinga's EAAN is sound. For the time being, I'll stick with that. But if you want to talk about this new argument, you might ought to read the article by Thomas Crisp first. There's more to it than what I've explained, and it's always possible I missed some stuff or misunderstood some stuff. I'm more curious what you think about his argument the way he explained than how I explained it after a first reading. I'm also curious what you think of my objections after reading his paper and if you have any objections of your own. Or do you think it's a sound argument?

No comments: