Hi, Dr A.
Dr Adequate writes:
In most cases, an increase in rationality is going to be pro-survival. Plantinga can imagine a belief system where this is not the case, but it's like trying a pin balanced on its point: it's an unstable equilibrium in the space of ideas, and is incredibly unlikely to arise as a result of natural causes.
I don't know anything about Plantinga, and I don't have the time or interest to read his stuff right now. But, it sounds to me like the line of reasoning he's putting forward is based on the old strawman that Darwinism is based entirely on randomness.
Of course, when you strip the capacity to think rationally from the equation, Plantinga might be surprised to know that what evolution actually presents to us is pretty much what he's suggesting.
You've heard of
Zonosemata? It's a really popular study in undergraduate textbooks to show the process of experimental design. For those who don't,
Zonosemata are Tephritid flies that flap their patterned wings to mimic the territorial mating displays of jumping spiders, which then scare away jumping spiders that might otherwise prey upon them.
Clearly,
Zonosemata did not use an objectively rational thought process to arrive at this behavioral trait (can you imagine a fruit fly thinking to itself, "My wings look at lot like that predator's legs....hmmmm"?). Thus, the only conclusion is that the fly developed the mimicry through irrationality, or, more likely, through a lack of any sort of thought process entirely.
Reason appears to be a more efficient way to regulate responses to the world than a whole suite of irrational input-output response mechanisms, because the latter would require each stimulus-response process to be wired individually (each of which would have to individually go through the tedious process of fixation in the population over multiple generations, etc.), whereas objective rationality just requires a single pattern of observation and learning that can be adapted to most circumstances beyond those for which we already have encoded, "instinctual" behaviors.
Edited by Bluejay, : Can't go around misspelling fly names: people might think I'm a bad entomologist.
Darwin loves you.
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