The EAAN casts serious doubt on the reliability of our cognitive faculties if evolution is true, and therefore naturalism (since the idea of naturalism was thought of by human minds, which are, according to EAAN, unreliable). Put another way, if ToE is true, there is little to no reason to think that your brain is reliably aimed at producing thoughts that align with the way things are, with reality. True beliefs. If ToE is indeed how we and our brains came about, then it is "concerned" with how organisms behave, not how or what they think. What does it matter whether I think strawberries are strawberries, alien life forms, or Carmen SanDiego CDROMs? It doesn't matter, as long as I eat them when I'm hungry and they keep me alive and strong, thereby aiding me in staying alive long enough to pass on my genes to the next generation of children that I'll father. Whether I thought all along they were actually CDROMs doesn't matter in the slightest. It mattered that I behaved in such a way as to keep me alive.
Alvin Plantinga, in his general talks on the subject, uses the example of a man seeing a tiger. The best behavior for him to engage in is to run away.
Beliefs don't causally produce behavior by themselves; it is beliefs, desires, and other factors that do so together. Then the problem is that clearly there will be any number of different patterns of belief and desire that would issue in the same action; and among those there will be many in which the beliefs are wildly false. Paul is a prehistoric hominid; the exigencies of survival call for him to display tiger avoidance behavior. There will be many behaviors that are appropriate: fleeing, for example, or climbing a steep rock face, or crawling into a hole too small to admit the tiger, or leaping into a handy lake. Pick any such appropriately specific behavior B. Paul engages in B, we think, because, sensible fellow that he is, he has an aversion to being eaten and believes that B is a good means of thwarting the tiger's intentions.
But clearly this avoidance behavior could result from a thousand other belief-desire combinations: indefinitely many other belief-desire systems fit B equally well. Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. Or perhaps the confuses running towards it with running away from it, believing of the action that is really running away from it, that it is running towards it; or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly reoccurring illusion, and hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a 1600 meter race, wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.
ISTM that evolutionists' best strategy to attack EAAN is to call into question this idea that it's plausible that a person holding bizarre beliefs like the "large, cuddly pussycat" or the 1600-meter race would have no connection to their behavior. That is, Paul the hominid thinks such and such, it's implausible that he would act in an appreciably different way from the thoughts he is thinking. It is implausible that the man would reliably run away from the tiger unless he thought the tiger were dangerous.
Then I read something that Peter Pike wrote recently:
Further, what evolutionary benefit would there be to deluding yourself that God exists, as all but the 3% of people who are atheists (according to some polls) do? From purely naturalistic principals (sic), the universality of religion is impossible to explain: it must provide an evolutionary advantage, yet it is supposedly completely irrational! In other words, Darwinism has selected for make-believe, and not for the world as it actually is. And that is something that I just can’t put together rationally in my mind.
Humans have been overwhelmingly religious throughout the entire course of human history; very few atheists. We evolved that way, didn't we? Is this not an example of the 1600-meter race that also conveniently ends up escaping the tiger and conferring a survival-oriented behavior? This point, when properly connected, overturns the evolutionary objection to EAAN, further bolstering EAAN.