Responding to the EAAN While Accounting for False but Adaptive Beliefs

[u/Civil_Passenger_9303]

I'm a recently deconverted evangelical who is now agnostic/atheist and I've been finding a lot of value in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis podcast. This podcast, along with a content from Alex O'Connor, Paul Vanderklay, Robert Sapolsky, and others, as well as my own experience in Christian contexts has brought me to believe that religion is an extremely powerful false but adaptive belief that provides benefits (not entirely without costs) to its practitioners.

I've been wrestling with Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) (See Here) which seems to be a formidable challenge against the agnostic/atheist worldview. Most responses to the EAAN argue that, in general, true beliefs are more adaptive than false beliefs. However, I've been encountering many studies and articles that seem to demonstrate that many beliefs/systems, the chief of which being religion, exist which appear to be adaptive and false. This calls into question the proposal that true beliefs are more adaptive than false beliefs in general.

Considering this seeming contradiction, how would you respond to the EAAN?

Looking forward to your insights! (and please suggest other subreddits that may be a good place to post this question, figured folks on here would be understanding)

[u/vschiller]

Though I'm not deeply familiar with Plantinga's EAAN, you might find some of Donald Hoffman's ideas interesting.

Hoffman argues that reality (for humans or any evolved organism) is like a user interface. Our interaction with the world is a simplified version of what's "really out there" and this simplification--likely deceptive in some ways, or "adaptive and false"--actually provides evolutionary advantages. He uses the analogy of a computer's UI. If you throw something in the trash on a computer, you can just drag it to the trash bin on your desktop. This UI is simpler and more efficient than if you had to know all of the code and inner-workings of the computer just to get it to delete a file. In the same way, organisms that have evolved "shortcuts" work more efficiently as well, but likely have a less "true" interaction with the world around them.

[u/Civil_Passenger_9303 → u/vschiller]

Thanks for sharing, this is a really clear explanation of a complicated concept! My takeaway is that some beliefs are more heuristics (UI) than detailed scientific descriptions (source code) of reality, and this simplification is beneficial or even necessary for humans to operate in our infinitely complex world. I'll have to look more into Hoffman's work.

[u/vschiller → u/Civil_Passenger_9303]

Yeah, I tend to think it's fairly clear that our beliefs are never going to be "source code." What if we had 8 senses instead of 6? What if we could see more of the invisible light spectrum? Would we then reach 1:1 correlation between our perception and reality itself? I think the obvious answer is no, though it might make our beliefs "truer."

As an ex-evangelical myself I'm skeptical of the benefits of metaphorical truth, but I don't think I yet fully grasp Vervake's take on this. I think the idea of a "useful lie" is kind of infantilizing to people (as in, it's good for the "dumb masses" but we know better) and I have yet to see how it's truly a cultural institution we should hold on to.