Ever since Kant it has been recognized that empiricism is not anything that gives us “Truth,” or at least we cannot know that it does. We know this without having to bring evolution into it. Yet we do have ways of understanding the world that are consistent and reliable, or, one might say, “intersubjectively sound.”

And, since most of what actually concerns us is empirical knowledge, we are more or less stuck with science to deal with information that is important to us. With “Truth” being well outside of our abilities, we assign truth-values to statements collectively in a manner that agrees with our sensory and intellectual abilities, and then we use such truth-statements to model the world–including evolution.

Kant, however, had no reason to assume that our faculties actually correlate reasonably with our world, so that he even supposed that the three dimensions of space that we experience were merely a product of our brains (he even had “proofs” of it). What evolution does is to explain how what we see generally has a good correspondence with “small-t truth,” especially where it comes to understanding spatial and temporal relations. While what we see might in fact be completely fictional (we can’t check, for all we know of “the world” is mediated by our own senses and cognition) if nonetheless predictable, presumably the simplest way for evolution to model the world is going to be fairly straightforward. As “practical reason” goes, then, evolution gives us reason to believe that the world maps out reasonably close to how we experience it to be.

We know quite well that evolving to survive has not given us a clear and “truthful” knowledge of the world, for we are subject to optical illusions, and we have a psyche which is prone to believe in invisible and unobservable beings. However, we have a variety of means of “knowing the world,” hence we can check our illusions and biases against more solid processes, like checking and rechecking our observations and our logic (the latter two may be fictional, as I said previously, but they are reliable and able to be “intersubjectively sound”).

Again, evolution provides the reason we can check our faulty evolved understanding, because on the whole we must be able to relate reliably to the environment in which we evolved. Thus, while mistakes are inevitable in evolution, the “core of knowledge” ought to be sound (at least “intersubjectively” so), and the outlying mistakes will not be repeated by correlative processes, while reliable understanding should be corroborated by different processes and senses.

The fact is that Plantinga falls on his own sword, since he’s stuck like theist Kant, without having any “practical” reason to suppose that our faculties correlate at all with empirical “truth.” Evolution gives us the only reason we have to think that our minds ought to be generally reliable, even if they are not going to be perfect sources of knowledge.

Indeed, why is it that past thinkers have had an unclear view of things, typically naive realism, if God is responsible for our “minds”? Now that’s a real problem, for we came into our knowledge of the brain and both its reliability and mistakes only by making a huge number of mistakes, having to check one source of knowledge against another one for millenia, before we finally got it right (Kant, no matter the many problems with his “Critique of Pure Reason,” seems to have gotten the main solution right). If we have it right now, that is.

People used God to prop up naive realism, to say that God is why we know that red things really are red (now we know that “red” is just something primates evolved to see food)–although one must credit the God-believing Kant for understanding how wrong such a view must be. The fact is that people believed that God is truth, so he gave us senses that give us the Truth about the world (see, for instance, Descartes), when in fact our senses are only reliable (not necessarily a source of Truth) when we carefully filter them through our logic and knowledge.

No, theism never gave us any knowledge about the world, although Kant, Newton, and others, show that theists may be good thinkers. Only observation and checking one source against another one ever gave us a reliable way of dealing with the world–even a world that, we have reason to believe, gave us a reasonably straightforward spatial model of that world, via evolutionary pressure to survive and to navigate in that world.

Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7