Quote for the Day

(One of Richard Swinburne's criticisms of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism:)

‘All this [i.e., a scenario in which organisms like us evolve in such a way that the beliefs in their belief/desire pairs are sytematically false, and yet they produce adaptive behavior] is logically possible. But it would require a very complicated mechanism of belief and desire production by our brains to bring it about. By far the simplest mechanisms ... for producing beliefs and desires will be two separate mechanisms, one of which produces beliefs and the other of which produces desires. So, for given beliefs different desires would lead to different behaviour; and, conversely, for given desires different beliefs would lead to different behaviour. Plantinga-type scenarios are not compatible with this ... It is much more probable that, if biochemical processes cause beliefs and desires and these cause behaviour, those processes would throw up simple mechanisms than that they would throw up very complicated ones in which beliefs vary with desires in such a way as to cause behaviour that mimics that caused by simple mechanisms’ (Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed., 2004, 352-353).