The human mind is like every other animal mind. If Darwinism is right, and I think it’s the best approximation we have to the truth about how humans came into the world, then all aspects of the human animal are shaped by the imperatives of survival.
He’s probably not a Darwinist though.
Whenever a materialist says this I want to shout: Plantinga’s EAAN!
kudos to @Patrick for posting such a provocative article.
Many of the worst features or the worst human harms inflicted by monotheism have been paralleled in the secular religions of modern times.
Plantinga can’t help you there, though he probably thinks he can.
Human ideas of truth are also shaped by imperatives of survival. And thus the truth standards that Plantinga appeals to, are similarly shaped.
From the article:
In the book, you make a similar point in a slightly different way, saying that the “human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth,” and I’m curious what you mean by that.
response:
…all aspects of the human animal are shaped by the imperatives of survival.
That includes the human mind, so there’s a deep-seated tendency in the human mind to see the world in ways which promote human survival. And the tendency to obsess over reason and rationality overlooks this fact.
So Neil, stop obsessing over rationality and reason. 
Hey @Patrick
Write todays date down. We found one more thing you and i agree on!
Science cannot replace religion.
Now if i could just remember the other thing we agreed on.
We don’t need to appeal to Plantinga’s truth standards. We only need to appeal to the materialist’s own truth standards. It is more like a self-consistency argument. If all thought processes came from naturalistic evolution, then why do we think that our senses are mostly reliable for ascertaining actual truth?
I just post them to be discussed by the group. I don’t necessarily agree with every article I post. For this article, I don’t agree that being an atheist means I (or others) are missing something important in my (their) life. Yea, I really don’t know if God really exists but I am comfortable being an apatheist agnostic atheist.
I’m a sceptic of whether there is such a thing as “actual truth” – as distinct from human ideas of truth.
Our senses are terrible at ascertaining actual truth. Take Quantum Mechanics, our senses are mostly unreliable for ascertaining actual truth.
This seems to be some sort of fundamental relativism. So I take it that you do not believe that there is no such thing as an mind-independent, “objective” truth? If that is so then what is the purpose of debating and persuading others? Why is your idea of what is the truth better than a YEC, for example?
I’m not talking about common sense or everyday experience, which you correctly pointed out is often unreliable, but the entire foundation of reasoning that allowed us to discover QM in the first place.
We found this out through experimentation and not by thought reasoning. The explanation of QM still baffles us as we make more and more complex experiments to show how true a description of nature that it is.
You still need reasoning to plan experiments, carry them out and understand the results you’re getting. This isn’t about theory vs experiment, or intuition vs. logical reasoning. Even if you’re a very intuitive person, logical reasoning exists and everybody uses some of it everyday. That’s what I’m talking about.
If there is such a thing, then I don’t know what it is. Nor does anybody else.
We assess the truth of statements in terms of standards. And those standards are human constructs.
Is either of these statements true?
They meet my standards for acceptance. You can decide for yourself, whether they meet your standards.
Your standard of acceptance for accepting a statement as acceptable?
This statement is false. (Star Trek Robot explodes!)