NATURALISM, EVOLUTION, AND TRUE BELIEF
Stephen Law
Plantinga’s
evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) is currently one of the most
widely discussed arguments targeting philosophical naturalism (see, for
example, Beilby 2002). Plantinga aims to show that naturalism, in
combination with evolutionary theory, is, as he puts it, ‘incoherent or
self-defeating’. His argument turns crucially on the claim that, in the absence
of any God-like being to guide the process, natural selection is unlikely to favour
true belief. This, Plantinga supposes, is because natural selection selects
only for adaptive behaviour. It is irrelevant, from the point of view of
unguided evolution, whether the beliefs that happen to cause that adaptive
behaviour are true.
I argue
that, even in its most recent incarnation, the EAAN fails. In particular,
Plantinga overlooks the fact that adherents of naturalism may hold, seemingly
quite plausibly, that there exist certain conceptual links between belief
content and behaviour. Given conceptual links of the sort I envisage, natural
selection will indeed favour true belief.
