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I can get that the word “exist” might be a stretch, something like “exist as we are” might be better, or “thrive” maybe. I could imagine that, without mutual care, we were independent animals, maybe forming a family group for a few years or something, but we could never have accomplished something as simple as building a cement bridge without a lot more cooperation.

So, to the 3 premises by Widdershins:

If we care about people sometimes, that’s sufficient, and I think that is easily proven from just about any dataset of people. Even with the WWII example, some Americans did care about the Japanese. I don’t think Nazi treatment of Jews proves people don’t care about each other.  The question of degree doesn’t need to enter as long as you stay away from the extremes.

So that solves the problem of making the 2nd premise false. How can a social creature survive without caring for others? Caring is true by definition.

The difficulty, the illogic of our existence, is then that we obviously do exist, we exist as we do due to our social psychology, yet we can observe a lot of not caring and can even come up with anti-social behavior that benefits a few for a short period.

Another reason I don’t think the scientific reasoning is critical is that it is a fairly recent invention. People were much meaner to each other for most of history, openly so. And the explanations, gods, were constantly questioned with no alternative answer. Yet we survived.