Naturalism, Evolution and True Belief

This article on Plantinga i just published in Analysis. It’s a fairly short attempt to refute Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Go here. PDF is here.

Abstract

Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism aims to show that naturalism is, as he puts it, ‘incoherent or self defeating’. Plantinga supposes that, in the absence of any God-like being to guide the process, natural selection is unlikely to favour true belief. Plantinga overlooks the fact that adherents of naturalism may plausibly hold that there exist certain conceptual links between belief content and behaviour. Given such links, natural selection will favour true belief. A further rather surprising consequence of the existence of such links is this: even if semantic properties are epiphenomenal, unguided evolution will still favour true belief.