[This is a continuation of Section Two, Reason and the First Person. An index with links to all parts of the work as they are posted can be found [url=https://forum.evangelicaluniversalist.com/t/sword-to-the-heart-reason-and-the-first-person/1081/1]here.]
[This series continues Chapter 18, “Atheism and the Justification of Non-Justification Ability”.]
[Entry 1]
(picking up from the end of the previous entry)
Reed (the theist): I find myself curious to know… excuse me, “desiring to be told”… what types of usage this principle of behavior exhibited itself in, among us humans when we first developed.
Chase (the atheist): When we first developed as a species per se, we had the legacy of billions of years of environmental conditioning and mutation from previous species, having honed our inherited instincts to such a pitch, that we were in a position to respond to certain types of stimuli, in such ways that we would consequently behave in fashions most probably suitable to succeed and survive.
R: And we call this response today, or our reflections on and expressions of this response, “the estimation of probability”.
C: Correct: which doesn’t keep us from erroneously attaching more meaning to the event than is actually happening, but that type of result is probably unavoidable. Certainly the existence of such further beliefs about the event are themselves self-consistent with the theory.