Considering the breathtaking speed at which our understanding of (and mastery over) nature has matured over the last one hundred years, it's almost impossible to understand there is still a debate about the merits of biological evolution one hundred fifty years since the publication of the Origin of Species and mountains of (conclusive) evidence (and zero counter-evidence).

Perhaps it's not too difficult to see why the debate still rages on. It appears everyone (the farmer, the politician, the elementary school science teacher, the preacher, the nurse, etc.) these days is suffering from a mass delusion, a sort of superiority complex thinking they know more about such subjects as Genetics and Molecular Biology than career scientists in these fields.

I've never heard of a cab driver or an office clerk expressing opinion on quantum electrodynamics or general relativity. Nobody at the airport seem to argue about thermodynamics. When it comes to evolutionary biology, however, it seems everyone believes they have sufficient knowledge in the subject that their views are as valid or even more valid than that of the biologist (I find it curious that these way of thinking about evolutionary  biology does not apply when it comes to one's health--who disputes drug resistance?).

Now, if I were to say "I do not believe in quantum mechanics," no one would pay attention to me. Scientific theories are not upheld or discarded by anyone's subjective feelings or state of mind. Neither does one's lack of understanding establishes grounds for rejecting a scientific theory.

Alas, the rules for evolutionary theory are different.  If Jack the Plumber can't understand ("see") how human beings and primates share common ancestry, evolutionary theory must be wrong. Heck, Jack could just outright deny evolutionary theory because he blinked once, blinked twice and figured he just does not believe in it. And in the land of government for the people by the people, enough Jacks could bring to power someone who does not even understand technology and power are synonymous in the planet we call home.

The term God could mean different things depending on the topic. Regardless, however, to use the term “God” to mean both supernaturalism and the theistic God (particularly of the Abrahamic religion) is an inexcusable sloppiness—often done on purpose to confuse matters and sneak in arguments from supernaturalism in support of the theistic God. My use of the term God is always intended to mean the latter, which is far from the typical definition of supernaturalism as being outside of nature and thus the purview of naturalistic explanation.

The Abrahamic God is indeed no idle bystander concerning the material world. He splits the ocean, stops the rain, creates fire out of thin air, turns humans to statue instantly and breathes life to inanimate objects, raises the dead, and in some (recent) accounts, might even have ‘guided’ evolution. This God is clearly very much into the natural world and, if not He directly, His interactions with the natural world are accessible to naturalistic inquiry. Of course some may say God, despite plenty of Biblical (and Qur’anic) evidence to the contrary, never breaks the laws of nature. This is of course a defeater to the very claim God intervenes in the natural world (unless one happens to believe nature is deterministic and “God foresaw, thus”, nevertheless one still loses the argument “God intervenes”).

I will leave this topic here for now. My focus here is on supernaturalism, that which is ‘outside’ of nature and to require a naturalistic explanation is considered begging the question. I believe supernaturalism is the fertile ground from which Christianity apologist like Plantinga and others draw their arguments from.

Supernaturalism, by its very definition, is a collection of beliefs that live (and die) in the belief forming faculty of human beings. With no casual link to the natural world, the premise of supernaturalism could be stated as “all logically consistent theories are true of reality” so long as the theories address what is ‘outside of nature’, as logical consistency is the only test to their validity.

But of course the problem here is that the reflective person S who accepts logically consistent theory A as true of reality presupposes S is capable of forming true beliefs—regardless if S accepts naturalism or supernaturalism or something else. The challenge to the naturalist is to provide verifiable evidence to A. Whether the naturalist succeeds or not, the fundamental question about S’s ability to forms true beliefs remains unanswered. And if it were indeed the case that S is improbable to be capable of forming true beliefs, the consequence of this conclusion is more devastating to the supernaturalist for supernaturalism completely depends upon our ability to form true beliefs.

Methodological naturalism (naturalism hereafter) says only that all natural phenomena are best explained by natural causes. Naturalism is a means to an end (that of explaining natural phenomena) and in principle says nothing about the (continued) successfulness of those that practice it. What is often the case with anti-naturalists like Plantinga is that they point to the lack of naturalistic explanation to a natural phenomenon and conclude naturalism is inconsistent (and shouldn’t be taken seriously). Herein lays the first problem with EAAN. By pointing to a gap in a naturalist’s explanation as to how the truthfulness of a belief can be casually efficacious in such a way as to be evolutionarily beneficial, Plantinga then makes the leap to conclude there is no good reason to believe the truthfulness of our belief (all that is derived from it, including naturalism and evolutionary theory). By replacing the experimenter (her success in carrying out the experiment to be exact) with the experiment itself, Plantinga commits the straw man fallacy. Not only has Plantinga placed the burden-of-(naturalistic)-proof for any natural phenomenon on the naturalists, but he equated naturalists’ inability to produce a proof for any given phenomenon as evidence against naturalism all together.

If history is any lesson, it has been the case that gaps in the naturalist explanatory scheme have been ‘short’-lived (perhaps we are biased to explore certain class of phenomena by our nature such that this is the case, but that is another story). There is every reason to believe this gap too will close and the anti-naturalists will search for other gaps to pick on.  

Needless to say, there is also good reason to believe the truthfulness of our beliefs given naturalism and the evolutionary theory (N&E). When a naturalist holds a belief to be true, which presupposes she is capable of true beliefs (regardless of N&E or supernaturalism—more on this in part II), her theories (the truthfulness of her theories to be exact) are casually linked to the natural world (and generally are not mere conjectures of an inaccessible reality). Furthermore, statistically speaking, it is probable, given the verifiably truthful beliefs naturalism has produced thus far, her beliefs are trustworthy, even if the exact naturalistic explanation of why her beliefs are trustworthy given evolutionary theory elude her (for the time being).