Plantinga’s Argument Against Naturalism

Hello Rabbi,

Please excuse the English. I read your book The Science of Freedom, it was very good. Despite having learned about free will/determinism for a few years, there was still a lot of new material in there that I hadn’t learned about.

This question is specifically about one of Plantinga’s arguments against naturalism, namely, the idea that evolution only requires correct action or survivability, but not correct belief. The belief could have been different, as long as the actions/reactions were the same. This, in effect, cuts the branch off of the tree one is sitting on, as it calls into question all of our rational intuitions.

Initially, this point seems like a good argument, but practically I don’t quite understand how it would play out. Sure, perhaps it could apply to such a simple action/reaction of seeing a tiger, but when there are many different complex factors, it is much more difficult to say that our perception doesn’t need to match reality.

Even with tigers, it pays us to know that there is actually a tiger in front of us (or that reality matches our perception in general). If not, our minds would continuously have to play tricks on us; the types of false perceptions that emerge in this picture would only be beneficial to this one specific case.

For example, if when one saw a tiger, they thought it was cute and wanted to pet and touch it, but the only way to do that is to run away from it, then they would still survive a tiger attack. But this only works when there’s one tiger in front of you. What about when there are two tigers on opposite sides of you? What about when there are other animals, or an avalanche? It would seem that the most efficient way for evolution to teach us to run away from what’s in front of us is to just have our perception match what is actually in front of us.

I look forward to hearing your response.

Thank you,