Reply #123: There is no dilemma [View All]

[Jim__]

Just about every thinking person I know accepts that human knowledge is uncertain. History proves it.

---the more you regard our cognitive faculties to be reliable for truth-tracking when functioning as they're supposed to, the more it looks like they were designed to be by an intelligent designer.

Nonsense. Clearly, a system that is adapted to perform well in an environment, is most likely to have adapted to perceive that environment accurately, accurate to the point necessary for survival. Your speculation that we could have it all exactly backwards and still be optimized for survival is absurd. A self-correcting process, like evolution, seems highly likely to be reliable. The process obviates the need for a designer.

The real risk for human knowledge is not that it perceives its environment inaccurately; it's that it perceives its environment incompletely. There are most likely many characteristics of our environment that are not particularly critical to our short-term survival. It is these aspects of our environment for which we have not developed reliable faculties. The task in acquiring knowledge is to use our well-adapted faculties to test our hypotheses about those things we do not naturally perceive well.

--the less you regard our cognitive faculties to be reliable for truth-tracking, the less warrant you have for relying on them with respect to a belief in evolutionary materialism itself.

I believe our perceptual and analytical faculties, both necessary for survival, are reliable. It's our speculative faculties whose reliability I doubt. That is why I believe our speculations must be tested. Testing can bring our speculations in line with reality. Over time, untested speculations built on top of other untested speculations are likely to wander far from any relation to reality.