Dr Adequate writes:
I think we can grant him that; we can imagine someone thinking irrational thoughts such that his irrational beliefs "cancel out", as it were, with the net result that he behaves in a pro-survival way, and if such a system of thought existed, natural selection would make no distinction between this system and genuine rationality.
Ironically, not only can we grant him that, we can give a very likely example. Religion. The tendency to invent religions, including creation mythologies, and then believe them, is a very good example of human brain imperfection. Whether or not this tendency has ever conferred advantages in itself is hotly debated (because it could be a chance by-product of advantageous characteristics). However, we could think of possible advantages, like helping a social animal cope with grief (a potential killer), enabling advantageous emotional attachments between individuals of a very social species when life was often nasty, brutish and short. So we get animism and ancestor worship, and every single culture invents some sort of religion.
We can also look at the basic abilities that make it possible for us to do science, and see that those could be advantageous to hunter/gatherer ancestors. This is where I find Plantinga goes really wrong. He's not trying to disprove evolution, of course. Rather, he's trying to prove his religious belief that there is something more to the human mind than what nature, through natural selection, can produce. He fails, because there's no reason why natural selection shouldn't produce a mind that can analyse nature. Such a mind has obvious advantages.
I'm not demonstrating here that his apparent belief that the human mind has a supernatural element is false. Merely that his attempt to present an argument for that belief is spurious.
Another point that strikes me as odd about his confidence in the reliability of our mental faculties, made in the image of his God, is that he must be aware that most of the world doesn't believe in his God, but does believe in other Gods who are not Jesus. It follows then, that he should recognise the statistically provable fact that a majority of people now and throughout history hold false beliefs (whether his own religion is true or false).
How much does he get paid to philosophise, I wonder?
Here on EvC, we see those two evolved characteristics, the tendency to invent false universes, and the ability to observe and analyse the real one, in direct conflict. We're a weird species, when you think about it.