Where does the evolutionary argument for naturalism work?

I’ve never been moved by Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in general, but I’ve also always found it plausible that naturalism and evolution undercuts cognitive reliability in certain areas, such as metaphysics. It seems, on the other hand, really plausible that we would get cognitive reliability for empirical things (largely because of the fact that naturalism makes causal theories of content very likely).

One might go on to conjecture that Plantinga’s argument works everywhere outside of empirical areas. I thought so until I realized that there is a significant area of normativity where the argument doesn’t work: prudential value judgments. This is because that life and reproduction is good for living things, and many other goods, noncoincidentally, contribute to life and reproduction. But at the same time, we are evolutionarily selected for successful promotion of life and reproduction. A being that believed that life is bad would be unlikely to promote its own survival, and hence unlikely to pass on its genes.

Plantinga’s standard answer to similar objections in the empirical arena is that behavior does not come just from beliefs, but from a combination of belief and desire. But this response is rather implausible in the prudential rationality case. It is extremely plausible that there is a conceptual link between a mental state representing something as good for one and having a desire for that thing. If there were no correlation between a mental state S respecting a thing and having a desire for that thing, that mental state just is not a belief that the thing is good for one.