Saturday 11 September 2021

Nothing more than survival adaptations?

Some Internet atheists are found of Carl Sagan's dictum, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", which they then apply within a framework in which atheism is accepted as a default belief, and anything which is not atheism is a priori deemed to be extraordinary.

There are many problems with this approach. Who got to decide that an ultimately uncaused universe was deemed a default, and a caused universe was extraordinary? Arguably, the idea that anything at all can result from nothing is extraordinary. It's also a naked assertion that there needs to be a "default" at all. Again arguably, a claim should be accepted on the basis of the strength of the evidence for its truthfulness, independently of any (likely value-laden) prior assessment of how extraordinary it is or isn't supposed to be.

But in any case, let's run with the idea. According to the atheist, with his belief in the evolutionary myth, all human faculties - all human faculties (please think about that for a moment) - are explainable as beneficial survival adaptations. Or stated the other way round, there are precisely zero human faculties or abilities which are anything other than an adaptation to allow individual humans to be more successful, not just at any activity in general, but at breeding in particular, and breeding only.

That's quite an extraordinary claim, isn't it?