Faith arguments Part 3

14:50 - 16:00 Lennox: If thoughts are reducible to physical and chemical processes, how do they serve truth?
Dawkins: Truth is what happens in the real world; a brain recognizes truth at whatever level is appropriate for survival; when you see a rock, you don't go charging into it, because you die. If you jumped over a cliff, you'd die - that's truth. Natural selection favours a brain in any animal that recognizes truth and acts upon it.

Dawkins equates truth with what you need for survival. That doesn't explain researchers wondering how distant galaxies were formed, or as it were, any baseline research. The fact that some people insist on baseline reserach suggests that the quest to ponder/understand is not reducible to physical and chemical processes. Worse for Dawkins: survival info is processed at lightning speed in the ancient part of the brain, while the quest to understand takes place more slowly, in the more recently evolved part i.e. different location and different kind of process. Intuiting what happens if you bump into a rock is very different from seeming to 'understand' the structure or history of that rock. D could argue, though, that truth is merely an illusion/intuition of 'beyond-survival-understanding' in our neo-cortex: animals without a neo-cortex can have no thoughts beyond survival, while those with a neo-cortex (mammals and primates in particular) may have some - using reverse logic based on the fact that we humans have a large neo-cortex filled with at-leisure beyond-survival thoughts.

Lennox: Some fellow-humans do quite well telling lies.
Dawkins: That's a separate point. (Lennox agrees.)

It's not a separate point: if truth equalled whatever was needed for survival at some appropriate level, telling lies (saying things you intuit to be 'untrue') would not be a moral problem. You could not convince people to invest in a Ponzi scheme disguised as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because their super-duper survival brain would recognize a Ponzi scheme and know how it works, right? It would be OK to tell them you didn't steal their money, because statements about the presence/absence of excess funds would have practically no truth value in evolutionary terms. (The victims would have to prove in court how and to what extent the extra money they invested and lost would have furthered their evolutionary success...) It is obvious that the concept of 'truth' is more complex and goes way beyond raw evolution. It has to do with interpersonal relationships and transactions, and lies are reprehensible mostly when they are seen as manifestations of intra-species predatory (human on human, as opposed to human on animal, or human reputational) behaviour. Dawkins would do well to consider the sophistication of the society he lives in and is talking to, while Lennox would do well to not pass this up as a separate point. Can physical-chemical processes produce minds that produce rules that punish tax evasion as severely as manslaughter (or even more severely)? It is difficult to see how, to say the least. Truth seems to begin where the direct evolutionary considerations of the individual end, so looking around in the animal kingdom (as kind of reflecting our evolutionary past) doesn't help here.