are you suggesting that evolution is a fact?
I am glad they are clear to you 
If you are talking about simple adaptions I agree.
No…
Intuition.
Beauty.
Aesthetics.
Teleology as Motivation.
Consciousness.
None of these are science per se (though some of them can have scientific applications).
People who think only SCIENCE can be used to navigate the waters or reality live a very black and white existence.
There is no such “ensuring” mechanism on theism. A God could deliberately set up a world such that beings such as ourselves making incoherent choices and trains of reasoning nevertheless have the experience of making sense.
You don’t have any assurances on theism either. You are forced to simply assume that God is the sort of being that would “make reasoning valid”. It’s just one of those attributes of God you have to assume, and it’s not clear what the “mechanism” even is here. How does one “construct” reason? Please explain that to me. What’s God’s mechanism?
But we don’t see that. All we see is that there is no way to justify reason without using it, and that goes for all of us.
In contrast, in the theistic worldview, it is possible that God endows sentient beings with rational faculties that are truth-seeking, because he wants them to know him and discover his creation.
It is also possible that God doesn’t endow sentient beings with rational faculties that are truth-seeing, because he doesn’t want them to know anything at all. Or that he thinks it makes it more interesting if we’re often wrong.
The faculties I use to reason, including crafting this very argument, are those endowed by the nature.
Seems to me I can say the exact same thing. I can’t tell you HOW nature does it, but neither can you for God. I’d like to see you try.
But that’s evidence BOTH of us have.
So that evidence would also apply to how you think God designed your critical faculties. Why is it, if God is supposed to have created us with guaranteed-to-work rational faculties, we have all these weird cognitive biases that afflict us all? Are you telling me that you as a Christian is somehow not afflicted by these common errors in reasoning?
It seems very unlikely that the evolutionary processes that created our brains are perfectly geared towards truth-seeking.
Even if evolution was false and God created us, we still have all this evidence that our critical faculties are unreliable in all these ways. That would seem to indicate that God, in fact, doesn’t want us to be reliable thinkers.
Instead, evolutionary processes are more likely geared towards survival, which may sometimes be truth-seeking but very often not. In fact, naturalists themselves have said as such, by positing that being religious possibly gives you or your group evolutionary advantages, even if the claims of religion are false.
Yes, those evolutionary accounts would be an explanation for why we make errors in reasoning on naturalism. But then what is the theistic explanation for why we do that? Then it’s God’s work, which undermines the faith that God would want to make us perfectly capable of reasoning correctly. Either way we still end up with the same problem, that we have evidence that our critical faculties are prone to make errors in reasoning.
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I should add with respect to your last point here I think you’re conflating reason itself (the system of logical rules by which we try to reason), with the capacity of humans to employ it (how good we are at obeying the rules).
Talking about whether reason itself is “veridical” is to talk about whether reason is capable of bringing us to the conclusions that follow given certain premises.
But whether humans are capable of employing reason competently is another matter.
Going back to the ruler analogy. Suppose the ruler says “20 cm” on it. In this analogy reason itself is the ruler. Now the question is whether the ruler really is 20 cm?
Consider that this is a different question from whether some particular person is competent in employing the ruler. Suppose we have bad eyesight, and shaky hands. The ruler could be perfectly equal to 20 cm, but if we can’t hold it steady and we only see blurry lines that is not an indictment of the ruler’s accuracy.
In this same vein, the list of cognitive biases suggests we are not always competent operators of the ruler. But this does not in and of itself give us reason to doubt the ruler’s veracity. The problem is, we only have the ruler. And any attempt to justify the ruler’s accuracy is tantamount to holding it up in front of a mirror and comparing it to it’s reflection.
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No, you really can’t. Or at least all of your attempts on Christian Forums have been failures.
You don’t need to invoke group selection to explain the success of the sickle cell mutation. Malaria has been an intense enough selection pressure that selection for the heterozygote more than compensated for the high mortality associated with having two copies of the mutant allele, enough to keep the allele at an intermediate frequency in the population. Note: evolution is often not nice.
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You basically made the argument for me. There is some reason to believe that our rational faculties are truth-seeking with regards to things that have to do with immediate survival. But there is no guarantee that they are truth-seeking with regards to more abstract things, such as religion or philosophy. There are few evolutionary mechanisms that select against incorrect religious claims, even today.
In the theistic worldview, it’s quite trivial to posit good reasons why God would want our rational faculties to be truth-seeking. First, as God is omnipotent, omniscient, and the Creator of the universe, including our minds and bodies, he certainly has the capability to design our rational faculties to be truth-seeking. Secondly, Christian theists have traditionally believed that God is perfectly good, he wants to make himself known to humans, and he never lies. These attributes of God are posited on independent grounds, i.e. we are not just making up these beliefs about God for the sake of this argument. (This is also the reason why YECs are often reluctant to posit that God created the universe with only an appearance of age, because the implication is that God would be lying; i.e. our rational faculties would not be truth-seeking.) Thus, there is ample reason to believe that God would make our rational faculties truth-seeking, at least in the case of judging whether theism is true or not.
The existence of cognitive biases and human fallibility doesn’t undermine this at all; it could, for example, be attributed to human sinfulness, which is also a traditional feature of the Christian worldview. You might now be going crazy that I’m casually bringing up bits and pieces of Christian doctrine that you think are ridiculous or unjustified; but the point is even if you don’t believe Christianity is true, you have to admit that Christianity does have a coherent way of explaining these features of the world.
In contrast, you have no recourse to any of these mechanisms in a closed naturalistic worldview. At most, you can hope that evolutionary processes are enough to select for humans with truth-seeking faculties. But as I argued above, there’s no guarantee this applies to abstract thought. Additionally, truthfulness is not always needed even for survival. For example, racism and tribalism is so common, possibly because from a survival viewpoint, it is beneficial to delude yourself into thinking that anyone not of your own group is evil, untrustworthy, or inferior. Thus, as I was arguing before, you have to take it as a brute fact that nature gives you truth-seeking faculties somehow, even if the evidence is against it.
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Yeah, it’s also trivial to posit it’s opposite.
God could be a sadist.
First, as God is omnipotent, omniscient, and the Creator of the universe, including our minds and bodies, he certainly has the capability to design our rational faculties to be truth-seeking.
Just as he has the capacity to do not do it. Or to be truth-averting.
Secondly, Christian theists have traditionally believed that God is perfectly good, he wants to make himself known to humans, and he never lies.
This God you are assuming, and the attributes of this God you are giving it, are becoming ever more self-serving and complex all the time it seems. Is there no limit to what you will not just flat out assume about God so that you can convince yourself that God has made reason reliable?
These attributes of God are posited on independent grounds, i.e. we are not just making up these beliefs about God for the sake of this argument.
Oh but you are. The justification for reason has to come before all else, since reason is the very thing through which you must analyze all evidence and arguments.
If you were to proceed to invoke later discovered “evidence”, such as scripture, for your belief that God has all these self-serving characteristics that makes you expect reason to be reliable, then you will simply be guilty of circular reasoning.
It’s all question begging, ad-hoc nonsense.
Thus, there is ample reason to believe that God would make our rational faculties truth-seeking, at least in the case of judging whether theism is true or not .
What are those ample reasons? You haven’t actually given a reason to think God would want to make our rational faculties truth-seeking. You’ve merely suggested that it is POSSIBLE that God would do this. You’ve done no work to show that it is probable.
And in any case, if you were to try to do so, you would be guilty of circular reasoning. The reliability of reason is the very thing you are calling into question. You can’t then USE reasoning to arrive at conclusions about it’s reliability, such as reasoning about why some God would want to create reasoning reliable.
That’s.
Circular.
Reasoning.
The existence of cognitive biases and human fallibility doesn’t undermine this at all; it could, for example, be attributed to human sinfulness, which is also a traditional feature of the Christian worldview.
That would of course be completely ad-hoc. And it wouldn’t solve your problem, because you now have evidence that your critical faculties can’t always be relied upon. The question you are posing to ME is “what reason do you have to trust your reasoning?”. And I’m saying nobody can give such a reason which isn’t just a blind faith statement. And then you’re bringing up evidence to show that our critical faculties can’t be trusted, but that applies to you too. If reasoning is how you arrive at the idea that sinfulness is what makes our critical faculties unreliable, then how can you trust your reasoning about sinfulness?
You might now be going crazy that I’m casually bringing up bits and pieces of Christian doctrine that you think are ridiculous or unjustified; but the point is even if you don’t believe Christianity is true, you have to admit that Christianity does have a coherent way of explaining these features of the world.
I can just as well invoke evolution to explain why these cognitive biases exist. In particular evolution actually explains why they take the particular nature they do, which the “sin” hypothesis doesn’t. At best the sin hypothesis makes a blanket statement that humans could be prone to make errors in reasoning, but there’s no reason to expect any particular pattern of reasoning errors to be more likely than another.
In contrast, something like stereotyping bias, or hyperactive agency detection, or sexual overperception, make perfect sense on evolution. Yet you’d have to invoke the idea that these biases are just the chance product of some sort of “sin” magic infusing humans.
In contrast, you have no recourse to any of these mechanisms in a closed naturalistic worldview. At most, you can hope that evolutionary processes are enough to select for humans with truth-seeking faculties. But as I argued above, there’s no guarantee this applies to abstract thought. Additionally, truthfulness is not always needed even for survival. For example, racism and tribalism is so common, possibly because from a survival viewpoint, it is beneficial to delude yourself into thinking that anyone not of your own group is evil, untrustworthy, or inferior.
Isn’t it ironic that you’re making my point for me here? Turns out evolution explains these patterns in our thinking very well.
Thus, as I was arguing before, you have to take it as a brute fact that nature gives you truth-seeking faculties somehow , even if the evidence is against it.
Same goes for you. The exact same goes for you. You have to take it as brute fact that God would want to give you truth-seeking faculties somehow, even though we have evidence against it. And then you invent some ad-hoc idea about sin affecting our reasoning ability. But if sin has affected your reasoning ability, then how can you trust it?
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I would think I am at every point! I don’t think of reason as a set of logical rules, but as a capacity. We have rules of logic etc., but that’s not what I’m talking about when I say “reason”. Reason is something that people do.
It doesn’t matter. The big picture is that reason demonstrates repeatedly that it provides an accurate picture of reality. That it can’t provide a picture of every aspect of reality is irrelevant to this argument. Under naturalism, we can say why we have confidence in our reason without appealing to any external underpinning. That doesn’t mean there’s a guarantee, and as far as I can tell religious people can’t guarantee the accuracy of their reason either. Also, it seems that you’re saying that your hypothetical underpinning (God) will provide you with special understanding of the very area which involves God (religion), which seems very odd.
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Small nitpick. We are separated by about 40 million mutations. 35 million are substitution mutations which necessarily produce 1 base difference for each mutation. Another 5 million are indels that involve 65 million bases total between the species. So we differ by about 90-100 million bases total across 40 million mutations. This info is based on the chimp genome paper.
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Which is now out of date. The number of differences should have been reduced by now.
Is there a good reference for the most up-to-date estimates?
We turned @roohif loose on this, and the paper might have some information: De Novo Ape Genome Published, Without Human Reference.