Alvin Plantinga’s new book on Science and Religion is out.

[Doug Shaver]

Is it just me, or is there a lot of atheist sour grapes in this thread?

I can't speak for any of the other atheists here, but I plead not guilty.

'Gee, Dawkins really demolishes all the Christian arguments for God.'

I have never said that.

[shunyadragon]

Is it just me, or is there a lot of atheist sour grapes in this thread?

Unfortunately, its just your imagination

'Gee, Dawkins really demolishes all the Christian arguments for God.'

I see no one here defending Dawkin's statements concerning philosophy. No he made assertions, which do not demolish any arguments.

Dawkin's is an excellent scientist, but not a philosopher, plumber or electrician. I study his science, but would not trust him to fix my dripping tap.

[Seasanctuary]

I've done more reading on the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism lately, and now see the heart of it being:

Propositions themselves aren't physical things. Genuine beliefs contain propositions. Since natural selection can only be affected by physical things, belief content is utterly irrelevant to naturalistic evolution.

[Doug Shaver]

I have not yet read the book referenced in the OP, but I have read much of Plantinga's previous work. Here is a copy of an article I put on my Web site a couple of years ago.

dougshaver.com

One of today's most prominent Christian apologists is the philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame University. He has written a trilogy setting forth a new epistemology by which Christians can justify claiming to know that their beliefs are true. The books in the series are Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief. A thorough critique would probably take at least another book if not a trilogy of its own, I'm not going to even try to begin it here. I'm going to address just one point he mentions briefly and almost offhandedly in the second and third volumes.

In the final volume of the series, Plantinga claims that under any naturalistic assumption, there is no good reason to have any confidence that anything we believe is true. In particular, he argues, the process of evolution, absent any supernatural intervention, was extremely unlikely to have produced brains that could effectively distinguish truth from falsehood. Many rebuttals have been published since the book came out, and he addresses some of them in an online article, "Naturalism Defeated" (Plantinga 2004). Among the objections that he addresses is what he calls the Maximal Warrant Objection. This paper will review and critique his response to it, concluding that it does not overcome the objection. From this it will follow that Plantinga's argument fails to present a real epistemological difficulty for adherents of naturalism.

Plantinga compares two hypotheses about human origins, both of which assume the truth of the current theory of evolution by natural selection and assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. On one hypothesis, which we may be label theistic evolution (TE), God, as understood by the major monotheistic religions, was in some way involved in the evolutionary process so as to ensure that humans acquired reliable cognitive faculties. On the other, naturalistic evolution (NE), there is no god or other supernatural agency that could have affected the course of human evolution. According to Plantinga, the assumption of reliable cognition (R) cannot be justified under NE and therefore is defeated. But without R, the theory of evolution loses its own warrant and so the believer in naturalistic evolution is caught in an epistemological quandary. Theistic evolution, on the other hand, does support R. That being so, Plantinga concludes, naturalistic evolution "can't rationally be accepted" (1994).

Plantinga summarizes the Maximal Warrant Objection thus: "According to this objection, R has a great deal of intrinsic warrant for us. . . . It has so much intrinsic warrant, in fact, that it can't be defeated—or at any rate can't be defeated by the fact that P(R/N & E) is low or inscrutable" (2004). "Warrant" here is Plantinga's preferred term for that which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. A proper critique of his proper-function theory of warrant (Plantinga 1993) would take us far beyond the scope of this paper. Without getting sidetracked by debates over the nature of knowledge, we'll say that some person S ought to believe a proposition P if and only if P is warranted for S.

The maximal warrant objection claims that R is properly basic—what many epistemologists call a foundational belief. It gets its warrant not by inference from other propositions but in some other way that appropriately terminates the chain of justification. An appropriate termination has to be non-arbitrary, but it is widely supposed that the reliability of at least some of our cognitive faculties can be non-arbitrarily justified. Plantinga seems to agree with this, or at least not to wish to challenge it: "Let's also agree that R does has [sic] warrant and perhaps a great deal of warrant, when it is taken as basic. Still further, we can add that R plays a unique and crucial role in our noetic structures: if we are reflective and come to doubt R, we will be in serious epistemic trouble" (2004).

This does not imply, he argues, that it cannot be defeated. And that is quite so, but the question is whether naturalistic evolution does defeat R if R is taken to be properly basic. It does not seem to. If we are justified, antecedently of our accepting either naturalism or evolution, in trusting our cognitive faculties, then naturalistic evolution cannot itself be a defeater for R. Plantinga's case depends on his observation that, conjoined with naturalism, evolutionary theory gives us no reason to expect reliable cognitive faculties. But that is irrelevant even if it is so. As Plantinga himself points out, our belief in evolution itself depends on R because the entire enterprise of science presupposes that, in general, our cognitive faculties work the way we think they ought to work. And, according to his own "First Principle of Defeat," "If S rationally believes that the warrant a belief B has for him is derivative from the warrant a belief A has for him, then B is not a defeater, for him, of A" (2004).

Now, what he says is not that evolution itself defeats R, but the conjunction of evolution with naturalism. But naturalism does not add anything to evolutionary theory that makes it inconsistent with R. It simply denies a proposition that theism adds to evolutionary theory that, according to Plantinga, makes the theory imply R. Theism could not do that, though, if evolution were antecedently inconsistent with R, or in any case, Plantinga does not argue that theism is neutralizing any inconsistencies between evolution simpliciter and R. His argument implies rather that theism itself is what justifies R, and the only role evolution serves is to describe the means by which God made our cognitive faculties reliable (2004).

A portion of his response to the Maximal Warrant Objection seems intended to demonstrate that under naturalism, R should not be regarded as properly basic. If he succeeds at all, it is only by incorporating various elements of his proper-function theory, which appeals to design plans, cognitive environments, and various intents and purposes, among other things (Plantinga 1993, 19). A naturalist accepting an alternative epistemology incorporating some more conventional version of foundationalism could disregard Plantinga's comments on this particular point. At the very least, an argument to the effect that, with or without evolution, we could never justify trusting our cognitive faculties unless we believe in God would appear to be assuming Plantinga's conclusion.

So, if we regard R as axiomatic—which is just another way of saying it is properly basic or foundational—then it does not matter if naturalistic evolution fails to justify it, and so the naturalist is in the epistemic clear unless, somehow, NE entails that R is either impossible or extremely improbable. Plantinga does not demonstrate such an entailment, and so his argument fails even if nothing else is wrong with it. In addition, though, his implied claim that we should be surprised if naturalistic evolution had produced reliable cognitive faculties is questionable.

He invites us to imagine "Paul," a hominid like us inhabiting a world similar to our own. Paul has desires that in some cases, if fulfilled, would result in his demise, and his beliefs are formed independently of the reality in which he lives. Just by chance, though (Plantinga proposes nothing else to account for it), the behavior resulting from his conjoined desires and beliefs happen to be what he needs to do in order to survive (2004). We can stipulate that, under NE, this could possibly have happened. In the actual world, though, it did not happen, and this ought not to surprise us. A rigorous defense of this proposition cannot be attempted here. Papers addressing some of the issues relevant to the discussion include Churchland (1994), Churchland and Sejnowski (1990), Dennett (1978), and Rosenberg (1999). What follows are some very condensed comments that the author hopes are pertinently suggestive.

Churchland's "four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing" (Churchland 1987, 548) are the fundamental desires that we should expect evolution to have hard-wired into our cognitive systems. We should also expect any other desires we might have acquired to have been favored insofar as their satisfaction would help us satisfy these fundamentals. What we desire should correspond at least occasionally to what we need. Our cognitive faculties seem to produce, among other things, moment-by-moment decisions about whether and how to undertake behaviors that will satisfy those desires. This is a kind of computation. The brain might or might not do some things that no computer can do, but we don't have to settle that argument here to affirm that the brain is at least a computer, i.e. that among the things it does is to compute. At least some and perhaps all of our beliefs are the output of computational processes to which the inputs include sensory data or previously formed beliefs. This kind of computing power is biologically very expensive. While this does not imply that it must have been adaptive, it justifies a supposition, absent evidence to the contrary, that it was in fact adaptive.

There is only one actual world, but we can imagine an infinity of other possible worlds, and a random belief generator could produce propositions corresponding to any of them. Beliefs generated with only a random connection to reality are thus virtually guaranteed to be false, and so there is a high probability that any particular behavior based on randomly generated beliefs will fail to be that which would fulfill any given desire the behavior is meant to accommodate, including those four fundamental desires. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that natural selection would favor any cognitive mechanism that managed in some way to track sensory input about the organism's real environment and process it with something approaching logical consistency, and to suppose that sensory input to itself be reliable.

The only hope of defending a disconnect between beliefs and behavior seems to lie in maintaining an ontological distinction between the syntax of neurophysiology and the semantics that permeate our conscious thoughts (Plantinga 1994). Churchland argues, cogently in the author's opinion, that while a conceptual distinction can be rhetorically useful, nothing compels us to deny that "awareness just is some pattern of activity in neurons" (1994, 30-31), and if that is true of awareness, we should expect it to be true of beliefs as well.

If this is so, then it is not the case that reliable cognitive faculties would be an improbable outcome of naturalistic evolution; but, even if it were the case, naturalistic evolution still would give us no reason to question the prima facie presumption of our having reliable faculties. Naturalists are therefore justified in dismissing Plantinga's argument and continuing to hold their belief that our cognitive faculties are indeed reliable and were produced by natural selection without any supernatural assistance.

References

Churchland, Patricia Smith. 1994. Can neurobiology teach us anything about consciousness? Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67, no. 4:23-40. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3130741 (accessed December 4, 2009).

Churchland, Patricia Smith. 1987. Epistemology in the age of neuroscience. The Journal of Philosophy 84, 10:544-553. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026917 (accessed November 26, 2009).

Churchland, Patricia Smith, and Terrence J. Sejnowski. 1990. Neural representation and neural computation. Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind. 343-382. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214198 (accessed December 4, 2009).

Dennett, Daniel C. 1978. Why you can't make a computer that feels pain. Synthese 38, no. 3:415-456. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20115302 (accessed December 4, 2009).

Plantinga, Alvin. 2004. Naturalism defeated. http://www.calvin.edu/academic/ philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/naturalism_defeated.pdf (accessed December 9, 2009).

Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant: The Current Debate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Oxford Scholarship Online. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/ philosophy/0195078624/toc.html (accessed September 27, 2005).

Rosenberg, Alex. 1999. Naturalistic epistemology for eliminative materialists. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59, no. 2: 335-358. JSTOR. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/2653675 (accessed December 4, 2009).

© source where applicable

[Seasanctuary]

Is there really anything revealed that is genuinely new in the book concerning this argument I have read in a number of his articles?

Having just finished the book, I'd say: no. Where the Conflict Really Lies is a polished, broad presentation of Christian apologetics as it relates to science. I would point people to it as the best place to start reading about the evolutionary argument against naturalism, but it was very heard-this-before to me.

As much as he derides popular atheist books, his own reads in a similar way. My irony meter was often blinking.

[Whag]

Anyone who knows about Plantinga's grimey associations with ID as well as his role in the Synthese affair regarding Francis Beckwith knows how laughable it is that Plantinga thinks he has a useful perspective on this subject.

[Kenny]

Anyone who knows about Plantinga's grimey associations with ID as well as his role in the Synthese affair regarding Francis Beckwith knows how laughable it is that Plantinga thinks he has a useful perspective on this subject.

I thought Plantinga’s discussion of the ID movement was pretty even handed. He responds to some criticisms of the movement while endorsing others. But the nature of the political situation these days is such that anything less than a scathing rebuke of the ID folks amounts (in the eyes of many) to an unqualified endorsement of ID. It’s a “If you’re not for us, you’re against us” sort of mentality out there. I wonder when the rabid anti-ID folks are going to start referring to those who do not fully embrace their point of view as “compromisers.”

[Whag]

I thought Plantinga’s discussion of the ID movement was pretty even handed. He responds to some criticisms of the movement while endorsing others. But the nature of the political situation these days is such that anything less than a scathing rebuke of the ID folks amounts (in the eyes of many) to an unqualified endorsement of ID. It’s a “If you’re not for us, you’re against us” sort of mentality out there. I wonder when the rabid anti-ID folks are going to start referring to those who do not fully embrace their point of view as “compromisers.”

I beg to differ.

http://www.discovery.org/a/3331

My favorite part of that piece:

Newton was perhaps the greatest of the founders of modern science. His theory of planetary motion is thought to be an early paradigm example of modern science. Yet, according to Newton’s own understanding of his theory, the planetary motions had instabilities that God periodically corrected. Shall we say that Newton wasn’t doing science when he advanced that theory or that the theory really isn’t a scientific theory at all?

That seems a bit narrow.

Bigshot philosopher argues for god of the gaps, then fails to notice the resolution to Isaac's quandary came later with LePlace -- without any invoking of GOTG.

I mean is this guy useless or what?

[Whag]

Here's Neil Tyson expertly laying waste to the GOTG logic that Plantinga defends in that DI piece I linked to. Only in this video, Tyson is referring to Bill OReily's use of it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5dSyT50Cs8&sns=em

[Jaecp]

I thought Plantinga’s discussion of the ID movement was pretty even handed. He responds to some criticisms of the movement while endorsing others. But the nature of the political situation these days is such that anything less than a scathing rebuke of the ID folks amounts (in the eyes of many) to an unqualified endorsement of ID. It’s a “If you’re not for us, you’re against us” sort of mentality out there. I wonder when the rabid anti-ID folks are going to start referring to those who do not fully embrace their point of view as “compromisers.”

Well, ID isn't science.

Have you looked much into the history of the movement Kenny? About the supreme court case in 1987 that made teaching creationism in public schools unconstitutional, of how the early ID proponents then set about modifying their creationism textbook to say stuff like designer instead of god, of how "creationists" became "design proponents"

ID isn't all that different, if its different at all, from Creationism.

The wikipedia page is very good. It reads like something I could have written after having my pair of 30 page discussions about Id here on Tweb

[Kenny]

Well, ID isn't science.

Have you looked much into the history of the movement Kenny? About the supreme court case in 1987 that made teaching creationism in public schools unconstitutional, of how the early ID proponents then set about modifying their creationism textbook to say stuff like designer instead of god, of how "creationists" became "design proponents"

ID isn't all that different, if its different at all, from Creationism.

The wikipedia page is very good. It reads like something I could have written after having my pair of 30 page discussions about Id here on Tweb

Yes, I’m aware of the propaganda. And, just to be clear, I am neither a supporter of the ID movement nor a detractor. For all I know, their scientific arguments are good, or, for all I know, they’re crap. I’m a layperson when it comes to biology and I haven’t had a lot of time to look into the issue for myself.

But I do know something about the philosophy of science. And there is something of a consensus (as much as one can typically hope for in philosophy at any rate) that it is difficult (and probably impossible) to come up with any clear criteria that separate science from pseudoscience. It’s called “the problem of demarcation.” (I also, because of some of the circles in which I am involved, have some inside info concerning the Dover trial; I know that some of the anti-ID experts concerning the philosophy of science deliberately argued, for the sake of “the cause,” for positions concerning the problem of demarcation that they themselves took to be false).

I also know that all of the arguments I’ve heard for the claim that ID should not be identified as science are terrible. And it’s not just me or pro-ID folks (which, keep in mind, I am not) who think so. These are reasons why anti-ID philosophers of science such as Philip Kitcher reject the position that ID isn’t science and argue instead that it is failed science.

[siliconwafer]

Well, ID isn't science.

Have you looked much into the history of the movement Kenny? About the supreme court case in 1987 that made teaching creationism in public schools unconstitutional, of how the early ID proponents then set about modifying their creationism textbook to say stuff like designer instead of god, of how "creationists" became "design proponents"

ID isn't all that different, if its different at all, from Creationism.

The wikipedia page is very good. It reads like something I could have written after having my pair of 30 page discussions about Id here on Tweb

ID theory says an intelligent agent is responsible for creating the world, but it does not give the identity of that intelligent agent. Moreover, the intelligent agent who is responsible for creating the world does not have to be supernatural.

Just because some ID proponents modified a textbook about creationism does not mean that ID is the same as creationism. Some people are involved in both ID and creationism. ID and creationism share certain similarities, but they are not identical. Creationists such as Ken Ham would not promote ID theory because it does not give the identity of the intelligent agent.

[Kenny]

I beg to differ.

http://www.discovery.org/a/3331

My favorite part of that piece:



Bigshot philosopher argues for god of the gaps, then fails to notice the resolution to Isaac's quandary came later with LePlace -- without any invoking of GOTG.

I mean is this guy useless or what?

You missed the point. The question at issue there isn’t what sort of hypotheses or theories count as good scientific hypotheses or theories or correct ones but which ones count as scientific hypotheses or theories at all. It's the problem of demarcation that's at issue. One need not endorse a GOTG theory, or even think it is a good theory, in order to believe that it counts as science.

[nightbringer]

... of how the early ID proponents then set about modifying their creationism textbook to say stuff like designer instead of god, of how "creationists" became "design proponents"

ID isn't all that different, if its different at all, from Creationism.

Even if the motivations behind ID are the same as those behind Creationism, that doesn't mean that the contents of the two are the same. Indeed they plainly aren't.

[Jaecp]

Yes, I’m aware of the propaganda. And, just to be clear, I am neither a supporter of the ID movement nor a detractor. For all I know, their scientific arguments are good, or, for all I know, they’re crap. I’m a layperson when it comes to biology and I haven’t had a lot of time to look into the issue for myself.

What scientific arguments are you thinking of?

But I do know something about the philosophy of science. And there is something of a consensus (as much as one can typically hope for in philosophy at any rate) that it is difficult (and probably impossible) to come up with any clear criteria that separates science from pseudoscience. It’s called “the problem of demarcation.” (I also, because of some of the circles in which I am involved, have some inside info concerning the Dover trial; I know that some of the anti-ID experts concerning the philosophy of science deliberately argued, for the sake of “the cause,” for positions concerning the problem of demarcation that they themselves took to be false).

Who, perchance, did that?

Anyway,

Philosophy, as I understand it, often struggles with finding answers that it will endorse because, as I understand it, you guys want 100% before you can call it truth.

For the court room, its "without a reasonable doubt" so if the question of, say, whether we're brains in a vat came up in a discussion amongst philosophers came up we could say that we don't or can't know for sure (and if there is some brilliant counter to "Brain in a Vat", I'm just going for one of those "ineffable" questions as my example)

So, in the court room, when discussion Brain in a Vat we can safely discount it because, while possible, it isn't at all plausible. We can safely say its false.

Granted, I don't know much about the problem of demarcation. I look at psuedoscience vs science on a case by case basis and the majority of psuedoscience I look at (all of it I tend to see, really) is easily seen as psuedoscience (magic healing crystals for the fail. Incense does not cure cancer. http://www.bmse.net/bmseweb/ is coming to Portland this weekend. Yay!

I also know that all of the arguments I’ve heard for the claim that ID should not be identified as science are terrible. And it’s not just me or pro-ID folks (which, keep in mind, I am not) who think so. These are reasons why anti-ID philosophers of science such as Philip Kitcher reject the position that ID isn’t science and argue instead that it is failed science.

How much do you know about Dover vs Kitzmiller? It came up in the proceedings that ID was created out of failed creationism by swapping out references to god with scientific terminology. ID has the trappings of science but is, well, a wolf in sheeps clothing.

ID theory says an intelligent agent is responsible for creating the world, but it does not give the identity of that intelligent agent. Moreover, the intelligent agent who is responsible for creating the world does not have to be supernatural.

I'm aware of the rhetoric. Are you aware that the intelligent design textbook "Of Panda's and People" was originally titled "Creation Biology" and that the word god was just swapped out for "Intelligent Designer" and creationists just swapped out for "Intelligent Design Proponents?"

Are you aware of the wedge document that makes their goals explicit? These people are not who they say they are.

Just because some ID proponents modified a textbook about creationism does not mean that ID is the same as creationism. Some people are involved in both ID and creationism. ID and creationism share certain similarities, but they are not identical. Creationists such as Ken Ham would not promote ID theory because it does not give the identity of the intelligent agent.

A rose by any other name.

Ken Ham wants the name of God shouted from the rooftops. The people at the discovery institute want God snuck into classrooms with a mask on.