…and this is a 
The more sophisticated creationists like to toss the name "Alvin Plantinga" into arguments — he's a well-regarded philosopher/theologian who favors Intelligent Design creationism, or more accurately, Christian creationism. I've read some of his work, but not much; it's very bizarre stuff, and every time I get going on one of his papers I hit some ludicrous, literally stupid claim that makes me wonder why I'm wasting time with this pretentious clown, and I give up, throw the paper in the trash, and go read something from Science or Nature to cleanse my palate. Unfortunately, that means that what I have read is typically an indigestible muddled mess that I don't have much interest in discussing, and what I haven't read is something I can't discuss.
Well, we're in luck. Plantinga has written a short, 5 page summary of his views on evolution and naturalism, and it's lucid (for Plantinga) and goes straight to his main points. The workings of the man's mind sit there naked and exposed, and all the stripped gears and misaligned cogs and broken engines of his misperception are there for easy examination. Read it, and you'll wonder how a man so confused could have acquired such a high reputation; you might even think that philosophy has been Sokaled.
Begin at the beginning. He doesn't think much of atheism, and as we'll discover, doesn't like naturalism or evolution at all.
As everyone knows, there has been a recent spate of books attacking Christian belief and religion in general. Some of these books are little more than screeds, long on vituperation but short on reasoning, long on name-calling but short on competence, long on righteous indignation but short on good sense; for the most part they are driven by hatred rather than logic.
Hmm. It's not a good start when the author is so oblivious to irony that he opens his paper with a name-calling screed in which he lambastes others for writing name-calling screeds. Especially when, as we read further, we discover that Plantinga is the one lacking in competence, good sense, and logic.
Plantinga's claim is straightforward. Naturalism, the idea he defines as the claim that "there is no such person as God or anything like God", is in "philosophical hot water" and is untenable, and specifically, it is in complete contradiction to evolution — "you can't rationally accept both evolution and naturalism", contra Dawkins' claim that evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Very straightforward, but it sounds like lunacy. Plantinga's going to have to be very, very persuasive indeed to convince me of that claim.
The way he does this starts off well. He points out that we naturalist/evolutionist types are also materialists who believe human beings are just material objects with no souls, that we operate on principles described by chemistry and physiology, and that we evolved. That's quite right. He gives the impression that he doesn't believe any of this (and I know from his other writings that he doesn't), but that is my position, and that of just about any other modern atheist you might name. Now let us consider the implications.
But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn't, as such, care a fig about true belief. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents." Taking up this theme, naturalist philosopher Patricia Churchland declares that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; hence, she says, its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately:
Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive … . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival [Churchland's emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.
What she means is that natural selection doesn't care about the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behavior. Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce.
Yes, exactly! Just believing in something, whether it is Christianity or physics, doesn't mean it is necessarily true. Our brains attempt to model the world for functional purposes and lack any inherent, absolute means to detect truth. I agree 100% with what he's saying, but now watch as he takes this foundation and runs it off the rails.
He imagines a hypothetical population of creatures living on another planet who operate entirely on these rules. What will happen to their beliefs?
So consider any particular belief on the part of one of those creatures: what is the probability that it is true? Well, what we know is that the belief in question was produced by adaptive neurophysiology, neurophysiology that produces adaptive behavior. But as we've seen, that gives us no reason to think the belief true (and none to think it false). We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2. But then it is massively unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability. If I have 1,000 independent beliefs, for example, and the probability of any particular belief's being true is 1/2, then the probability that 3/4 or more of these beliefs are true (certainly a modest enough requirement for reliability) will be less than 10(to the power -58). And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only 100 beliefs, the probability that 3/4 of them are true, given that the probability of any one's being true is 1/2, is very low, something like .000001.[7] So the chances that these creatures' true beliefs substantially outnumber their false beliefs (even in a particular area) are small. The conclusion to be drawn is that it is exceedingly unlikely that their cognitive faculties are reliable.
(First, an amusing aside: footnote [7] is an acknowledgment of the assistance of someone else in doing those calculations. He needed help from an expert to multiply simple probabilities? Does being a philosopher mean you're incapable of tapping buttons on a calculator?)
I think you can now see what I mean when I say Plantinga's ideas are muddled lunacy. This is the same innumerate error creationists make when they babble about the odds of a single protein of 100 amino acids forming by chance; they assume that it's all a matter of sudden, spontaneous good fortune that a protein (or in this case, a brain) has all of its traits fixed, with no input from history or the environment. In Plantinga's imaginary materialist/naturalist world, beliefs are only the product of random chance.
In Plantinga's world, if we queried the inhabitants with some simple question, such as, "Is fire hot?", 50% would say no, and 50% would say yes. This world must be populated entirely with philosophers of Plantinga's ilk, because I think that in reality they would have used experience and their senses to winnow out bad ideas, like that fire is cold, and you'd actually find nearly 100% giving the same, correct answer. Plantinga does not seem to believe in empiricism, either.
What it does mean, though, is that if there are ideas that are not amenable to empirical testing, such as "I will go to heaven when I die", those ideas have a very low probability of being true. We can think of those as being the product of random input, in some ways, and since they cannot be winnowed against reality, they are unreliable.
Plantinga has heard this objection before, sort of. He's heard it, but it hasn't quite penetrated; he recites the common objection with some garbling.
What sort of reception has this argument had? As you might expect, naturalists tend to be less than wholly enthusiastic about it, and many objections have been brought against it. In my opinion (which of course some people might claim is biased), none of these objections is successful. Perhaps the most natural and intuitive objection goes as follows. Return to that hypothetical population of a few paragraphs back. Granted, it could be that their behavior is adaptive even though their beliefs are false; but wouldn't it be much more likely that their behavior is adaptive if their beliefs are true? And doesn't that mean that, since their behavior is in fact adaptive, their beliefs are probably true and their cognitive faculties probably reliable?
Almost. So close, and yet he still doesn't get it. A large part of our behavior will be functional (not contradicting reality) and some of it will even be adaptive (better fitting us to reality), and a lot of it will be neutral (contradicting reality, perhaps, but in ways that do not affect survival), but this does not imply that our cognitive faculties are necessarily and implicitly reliable. We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience.
Plantinga really thinks that one of the claims he is arguing against is that materialists/naturalists assume our minds are reliable.
But of course we can't just assume that they are in the same cognitive situation we think we are in. For example, we assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. We can't sensibly assume that about this population; after all, the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable.
To which I say…exactly! Brains are not reliable; they've been shaped by forces which, as has been clearly said, do not value Truth with a capital T. Scientists are all skeptics who do not trust their perceptions at all; we design experiments to challenge our assumptions, we measure everything multiple times in multiple ways, we get input from many people, we put our ideas out in public for criticism, we repeat experiments and observations over and over. We demand repeated and repeatable confirmation before we accept a conclusion, because our minds are not reliable. We cannot just sit in our office at Notre Dame with a bible and conjure truth out of divine effluent. We need to supplement brains with evidence, which is the piece Plantinga is missing.
He's reduced to a bogus either/or distinction. Either we are organic machines that evolved and our brains are therefore collections of random beliefs, or — and this is a leap I find unbelievable — Jesus gave us reliable minds. Seriously. That's what his argument reduces to. He flat out says it.
The obvious conclusion, so it seems to me, is that evolutionary naturalism can't sensibly be accepted. The high priests of evolutionary naturalism loudly proclaim that Christian and even theistic belief is bankrupt and foolish. The fact, however, is that the shoe is on the other foot. It is evolutionary naturalism, not Christian belief, that can't rationally be accepted.
Apparently, because Plantinga cannot imagine a source of information to imperfect minds other than the Christian deities, we're supposed to conclude that microwave ovens cannot be the product of ape brains shaped by evolution, with new and deeper understanding of the physical world derived by trial and error.
I really cannot take Alvin Plantinga seriously, ever.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Posted by: Sgt. Obvious
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May 29, 2009 10:45 AM
And he started off so well... Disappointing.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | May 29, 2009 10:46 AM
Well, that's just clearly bogus. Everybody knows that reliable minds are a gift from Apollo!
Posted by: James Sweet | May 29, 2009 10:50 AM
I stopped reading as soon as I got to that thing about (I paraphrase because I can't bring myself to go back and read it) the odds of any given belief being true are 50%. I've heard that applied to the specific proposition of whether there is a God or not, and while that is Very Very Stupid, at least there you can make an argument that there is no data, so the 50/50 fallacy at least has a momentary flavor of plausibility... But to say that the 50/50 fallacy applies to all beliefs?????
Wow.
Posted by: Rudi | May 29, 2009 10:51 AM
Another classic example of how indoctrination in Christinanity has fatally incapacited an otherwise thoughtful mind. What a waste.
Posted by: Rudi | May 29, 2009 10:53 AM
Another classic example of how indoctrination in Christinanity has fatally incapacited an otherwise thoughtful mind. What a waste.
Posted by: m5000 | May 29, 2009 10:54 AM
"Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing."
ehehehe
Posted by: Cosmic Teapot | May 29, 2009 10:54 AM
So the 'F' in reproducing is silent then?
Posted by: jgregson | May 29, 2009 10:55 AM
So...he's saying, Christian logic doesn't explain Evolutionary naturalism, THEREFORE naturalism is false?
Ow. There goes my comprehension.
Oh well, easy come, easy go.
Posted by: Mozglubov | May 29, 2009 10:55 AM
One of the things he also fails to take into account is that there are other possible evolutionary forces which could shape the mind, including sexual selection. While a handsome man, Dawkins would not have quite so many ladies fawning over him were it not also for his wit, eloquence, and intelligence. To me, that hampers even his beginning arguments where he quotes Crick and Churchland.
Posted by: Rudi | May 29, 2009 10:55 AM
Another classic example of how indoctrination in Christinanity has fatally incapacited an otherwise thoughtful mind. What a waste.
Posted by: Richard Harris
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May 29, 2009 10:56 AM
It all depends upon what Platinga means by 'beliefs'. His argument is so confused, if he is talking about belief in general, that it can't be taken seriously. And if he means particular beliefs, such as metaphysical beliefs, then believing Bronze Age mythology that is obviously make-believe, can still be advantageous to the faithful, if the social circumstance permit. The social milieu might provide emotional support, business contacts, etc.
In the modern world, it becomes ever more apparent that such beliefs cannot be beneficial for humanity at large.
Posted by: m5000 | May 29, 2009 10:56 AM
"Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing."
ehehehe
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 11:00 AM
This argument (often called The Argument from Reason) comes up regularly in comments, and you've done a great job pointing out some of its major flaws. In addition to the false dichotomy (either we have 'warrant' to trust our brains completely, or anything goes), it suffers from the same problem most theistic reasoning suffers from: they can't get away from the childish idea that Like comes only from Like.
Reason, free will, life, consciousness, morals, love, you name it. If things didn't start out there, they can't get there. Nothing new comes gradually out of increasingly complex patterns and interactions. Nothing grows. Nope. We get Reason from a Reason Force which is made out of Reason and has always been and never was anything else. We get life from a Life Force. How does the brain create mind? It doesn't. There's a Mind Force which uses the brain. Morals come from a Moral Force. And so on and so forth.
You hit the nail on the head. Evolution would give us brains which would be 'good enough' for most things, but which are inclined to error. What it won't give us is a sensus divinitus -- a certain way of 'knowing' God through our intuition. That couldn't "grow." It would have to be "gifted."
I find it remarkable that theists and New Agers love to trot out evidence that our biases mislead us as part of their case against science. See, the fact that we're biased entails that science is also a bias, and therefore we can't trust it any more than we trust our intuitions. But of course, the more flawed we are, the stronger the case for our need for objective methods, which evolved over time to help us cope with the problem.
Posted by: Shamelessly Atheist | May 29, 2009 11:02 AM
I had a discussion about this article last night with a faculty member of the department of philosophy at the U of Calgary. She said it was a shame because he used to do decent work, and then the word 'senile' came up...
Posted by: JRQ | May 29, 2009 11:04 AM
Jeez we see a lot of this, don't we, where some theowanker's "criticism" of naturalism/atheism/non-god-botism just boils down some variety of all-or-none fallacy:
1. X cannot be assumed to be perfectly known/reliable/efficient/whatever
2. Therefore, X is COMPLETELY unknown/unreliable/inefficient/whatever!
Do these people perhaps just have a basic deficiency in comprehending continuous variability and sliding scales?
Posted by: Reginald Selkirk | May 29, 2009 11:04 AM
Remember when The God Delusion came out, and so many theologians accused Dawkins of being theologically and philosophically naive? So you'd think that when a philosopher steps onto the turf of science, they'd make extra effort to understand a field before commenting on it.
Posted by: Hairhead | May 29, 2009 11:07 AM
There's SO much wrong there -- and what is wrongest is the idea that "beliefs" are either "true" or "false". Most beliefs are contextual, contingent upon environment and situation. E.g. - Belief: The berries are too sour to eat. Answer: No, they are blackberries, and it's July. In August, they'll be sweet and delicious!
Why do "philosophers" spend huge amounts of intellectual energy and verbiage denying complexity; why do they seem to believe that everything can be simplified? Because it can't.
The world is a complicated place, and, woe is us! We actually have to THINK a lot of the time. And THINKING (critically, analytically, doubtfully) is what has given us most of our good stuff.
Posted by: Jason L Robinson | May 29, 2009 11:13 AM
i've seen Plantigna do this shtick before and the one redeeming quality in the middle of this muddled presuppositional appeal to solipcism is his seeming good nature.
It's a bit like a kind old papaw telling you some very very stupid things about which you can't quite bear to correct him.
I think a root problem Plantingna obscures is his definition of "truth". For him, this is some sort of eternal absolute that can only be defined in terms of reference to the christian god. You will find him at times claiming this to be a Truth, other times an a priori presupposition. Either way, it makes for terrible philosophy and it is no wonder that both creationists love him and rationalists deplore him.
Posted by: Jason L Robinson | May 29, 2009 11:15 AM
i've seen Plantigna do this shtick before and the one redeeming quality in the middle of this muddled presuppositional appeal to solipcism is his seeming good nature.
It's a bit like a kind old papaw telling you some very very stupid things about which you can't quite bear to correct him.
I think a root problem Plantingna obscures is his definition of "truth". For him, this is some sort of eternal absolute that can only be defined in terms of reference to the christian god. You will find him at times claiming this to be a Truth, other times an a priori presupposition. Either way, it makes for terrible philosophy and it is no wonder that both creationists love him and rationalists deplore him.
Posted by: RamblinDude
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May 29, 2009 11:16 AM
Sastra #13
Very nice.
Posted by: The Barefoot Bum | May 29, 2009 11:17 AM
Having read quite a bit of contemporary philosophy, it is sadly true that professional and academic philosophers seem generally innumerate and oblivious to irony.
Unfortunately, Plantinga is not the only offender; 99% of philosophers give the other 1% a bad name, and Plantinga doesn't really stand out of the crowd.
Posted by: Ben | May 29, 2009 11:19 AM
I gave up when he declared all statements of truth to be 50% reliable. He clearly has problems with empiricism.
Posted by: africangenesis | May 29, 2009 11:19 AM
Well done PZ!
"What it does mean, though, is that if there are ideas that are not amenable to empirical testing, such as "I will go to heaven when I die", those ideas have a very low probability of being true. We can think of those as being the product of random input, in some ways, and since they cannot be winnowed against reality, they are unreliable. "
Yes, but they can be reliable and/or adaptive. An understanding of a well constructed character for the wind or sea god for instance, might allow predictions that have better than 50% probability of being right. The wind god might live in the west and usually blow from there. The lighting god might hide in certain kinds of clouds, etc. Belief in heaven may charm a potential mate or earn a cushing priesthood, and denialism may mean death.
Posted by: Kingasaurus | May 29, 2009 11:19 AM
In a way, this manner of thinking is analogous to the Design Argument.
These people can't fathom the idea that non-random complexity (that does real "work" in the real world) can emerge out of the non-conscious forces of variation and selection.
They similarly don't get the corollary idea that your brain's model of the world is also non-random, in the same way the structure of your eye or your lung is.
It's a joke that Plantinga actually seems to buy into the idea that a mental model of the world that maps well onto reality most of the time has no chance of being more adaptive than a mental model that never does. Is he really saying that, or am I missing something?
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 29, 2009 11:22 AM
Actually, while on the topic of hatred and twisted logic, here's something that gives Plantinga a bad name: he recently signed a petition (along with Dembski and a number of other such types) in favour of permitting philosophy departments to exclude gays and lesbians if they felt that this violated their biblical mission. The petition along with the list of homophobes and bible-thumpers can be found here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/apa/
Needless to say, the majority of the American Philosophical Association doesn't see things their way.
As for the point that Plantinga lifts from Churchland -- viz. that we are not 'epistemic engines' but rather 'survival engines' -- yah, that's right. Our brains evolved to get things 'about right' enough of the time that we could duck a spear or outwit a predator. They didn't evolve for perfection and precision. And so (as neurophilosophers note) just how certain cognitive systems that rely essentially on precision managed to evolve and how (in detail) they work is an interesting and open issue for cognitive scientists. I have in mind here such capacities as the use of generative grammars for natural languages and our ability to track truth about intricate mathematical structures. (Apes can sort of do arithmetic, just not precise arithmetic and not reliably.) Anyone interested in the nitty gritty with regard to the first problem should check out Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The second problem still needs a bit of work. At the moment, we don't know how precision is achieved by the brain in these contexts. Newsflash: there's still something we don't know. But open metaphysical/scientific questions are the cheapest kind of objection to naturalism. No sane naturalist has ever claimed that the project was finished. As always, the thing to do is to roll up one's sleeves and get on with figuring out how the world works. Or, I suppose one could switch sides and take the other approach....
We could sit here and hope
We could call up the fucking Pope
Or go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra....
Posted by: Tom Morris | May 29, 2009 11:22 AM
Hey, I'm a philosophy grad student. And I, err, resemble - no, wait - resent these remarks. And I do know how to use a calculator.
I've had the misfortune of reading enough of Plantinga's book on warrant. He basically says that the way we should grant that something is justified if it was arrived at through a process that is functioning as per the design plan. Yes, the design plan. Just a little hint.
What I can't seem to find out is why we should accept his version of externalism rather than, say, D.M. Armstrong's version of externalism. Perhaps I'm not a very good epistemologist, but if you want to accept Plantingan externalism, why not just - in the spirit of Ockham's razor - chop the spooky "design" bits off and just have Armstrong's causal externalism (or Dretske or Alvin Goldman or whoever). I mean, there are plenty of scientific methods and tools that we use and consider reliable even though they haven't been consciously designed to be useful. It's called serendipity: just by chance, something happened to be useful. Similarly, reliable processes can just emerge socially. If you are wondering what the temperature is like out on the street, and you look out and see a whole bunch of people walk by in big winter coats, you can infer that it might be quite cold. That's a pretty reliable process. If it was like a Miami afternoon, people would take the damn coats off. Was that method of knowing the temperature designed? I have no idea what it would mean for that to be so.
Now, you want something that's a real mindfuck? Google plantinga augustinian science. If you've got Robert Pennock's book Intelligent Design Creationism And Its Critics, his piece about it is in there. Plantinga seriously thinks that there can be a distinctive "Christian science" (not the same as Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, of course), which takes Christianity as it's fundamental axioms. I try and envision what the hell it would actually mean. A bunch of chemists have a weekly departmental meeting and instead of talking about the results of their research, they cite scripture at one another. Grant applications would be refused from the Augustinian Science Research Council because the researcher is Catholic or Protestant or not the right type of Evangelical Lutheran Baptist or whatever.
Posted by: Eamon Knight | May 29, 2009 11:23 AM
Alvin Plantinga would be Exhibit A that human cognition is unreliable ;-).
Like a lot of the religious, Plantinga displays this underlying inability to distinguish between TRVTH -- absolute, eternal, completely objective, delivered from the gods on high -- and ordinary, work-a-day "truth": derived by induction, fallible but corrigible, and good enough to let us muddle through. To be fair, more than few atheists also seem to suffer this confusion. Getting your head into a thorough-going evolutionary mode of thinking, in which all organization arises bottom-up rather than top-down, and all thought is the product of mindless neurology, is a bit of a cognitive leap (and a vertiginous one at that).
Posted by: Cuttlefish, OM | May 29, 2009 11:23 AM
In Plantinga’s disaffection
For the products of selection
(In genetics or in learning), there’s a note or two that’s off—
His abuse of probability,
Which borders on hostility,
Provides his false conclusions, and convinces him to scoff.
Then his choice of false dichotomy
Which irritates a lot of me
Allows his choice of Jesus, if the science fails to pass;
But his logic and example
Give us evidence that’s ample
His conclusions, every one, are pulled directly from his ass.
Posted by: Escuerd | May 29, 2009 11:23 AM
Shorter Plantinga: "If evolution is true, then we can't know that our faculties aren't deceiving us in some subtle way."
This is utterly worthless, because we can't know that our faculties aren't deceiving us in some subtle way no matter what. All Plantinga has done is come up with an ad hoc scenario in which natural selection wouldn't favor the ability of a creature to understand reality correctly and pretend that this is some kind of new, devastating argument.
Posted by: Badger3k | May 29, 2009 11:26 AM
I was hoping for something more than the same insipid defence of his rather pathetic arguments. He's gone on this before when he tries to justify how we have this "god sense" that is basic (ie, intrinsic and entirely reliable, more or less) that let's us know that his particular religion is true.
It's been said that a stopped clock is correct twice a day. Plantiga's clock reads "apple"
Posted by: Lorkas | May 29, 2009 11:28 AM
"So the 'F' in reproducing is silent then?"
Fucking.
Posted by: TomS | May 29, 2009 11:28 AM
I fail to see how this is an argument against evolution, rather than an argument against reproduction, or against development.
Personal knowledge differs from person to person. It isn't a property a population, something which we possess in virtue of being human, something which we inherit from our ancestors.
Maybe it's an argument against the ability to learn from nature (including material objects like books, or seeing and hearing), and in favor of the direct creation of ideas in our minds by an intelligent designer?
Posted by: gman
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May 29, 2009 11:31 AM
Plantinga developed these ideas back in the nineties and I recall studying them as a grad student - we devoted an entire course to his ideas on warranted belief.
P realized that theistic belief (even throroughly revised theism) wouldn't stand the rigours of modern epistemology, so he set out to remake epistemology instead.
In a nutshell, P argues that no epistemological theory guarantees that any of our beliefs, no matter how well founded, are necessarily true. There's always (one of many possible examples) the chance that our brains are being manipulated by a mad scientist to beleive things that aren't true.
Even granted the premise of naturalism, we do no better, since:
1. On naturalistic grounds, the most plausible explanation for our existence is evolution.
2. But if the theory of evolution is true, our brains are optimised for survival and reproduction, not true belief maximization.
3. Hence, our cognitive assent to evolutionary theory does ensure its truth or even its probable truth.
4. Therefore, naturalism, if it's true, precludes any justified belief in an explanation for our origins, or any belief at all.
PZ's frustrated response that science is the way to correct our mind's unreliability misses the mark, I'm afraid, since scientists rely on their flawed minds to decide how to use scientific tools to eliminate subjective errors. Plantinga is positing a version of philosophical scepticism, and in this case "crosschecking" the brain by using the brain just won't do. It's like reading two copies of the same newspaper to double check a fact. Sorry, PZ gets a FAIL on this one.
Plantinga would not accept that if naturalism is true, then our assent that fire is hot would more likely than not would co-relate with fire actually being hot. Appealing to the scientific method won't establish the truth of metaphysical naturalism, because science already assumes the truth of metaphysical naturalism. This a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
If this sounds a lot like Descartes' sceptical arguments, I think it is. Descartes claimed that the atheist cannot even know that 2+3 = 5.
Of course, Plantinga wants you to think that since either naturalism or supernaturalism is true, and since naturalism can never be shown to be true, then supernaturalism must true, simply by process of elimination.
But this won't work, since even if supernaturalism is true, we could never know it, for reasons very similar to the ones adduced above. And this is the place to attack Plantinga.
There's no way for us to know whether the supernatural being who created us would give us reliable brains or unreliable ones. It might be a benevolent God; or it might be a deceiving evil demon. How would we know? We could philosophize about it, but in doing so we would still be implicitly assuming that the brains making these inferences were reliable. And that's exactly what is being questioned.
In this, Plantinga is exactly like the IDers who shout that evolutionary theory can't offer a detailed explanation for feature X. But when you ask them, they don't have a non-evolutionary explanation, either. So they've simply offered an objection to evolutionary theory (or naturalism, as the case may be) that counts equally forcefully against their own position.
Posted by: TomS | May 29, 2009 11:32 AM
I fail to see how this is an argument against evolution, rather than an argument against reproduction, or against development.
Personal knowledge differs from person to person. It isn't a property a population, something which we possess in virtue of being human, something which we inherit from our ancestors.
Maybe it's an argument against the ability to learn from nature (including material objects like books, or seeing and hearing), and in favor of the direct creation of ideas in our minds by an intelligent designer?
Posted by: TomS | May 29, 2009 11:32 AM
I fail to see how this is an argument against evolution, rather than an argument against reproduction, or against development.
Personal knowledge differs from person to person. It isn't a property a population, something which we possess in virtue of being human, something which we inherit from our ancestors.
Maybe it's an argument against the ability to learn from nature (including material objects like books, or seeing and hearing), and in favor of the direct creation of ideas in our minds by an intelligent designer?
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | May 29, 2009 11:32 AM
So what are the priests of evolutionary naturalism high on, and how can we get them to pass some around?
Posted by: Andrés Diplotti | May 29, 2009 11:33 AM
I believe that in the next lottery drawing, the winning number will be 42. Wow! I have a 50% chance of winning the lottery! You can't beat that!
Posted by: dave souza
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May 29, 2009 11:35 AM
The problem isn't the F in reproducing, it's the F in philosophy.
Plantinga argues that empiricism fails because evolution might make our brains unreliable, but fails to point out the problem with his theism, that revelation is only reliable if the deity is doing the revealing – how does he know it ain't the devil?
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 11:35 AM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: Badger3k | May 29, 2009 11:36 AM
#15 - the idea that if something isn't 100% accurate/true/reliable, then it is worthless can also be illustrated with biblical inerrantists, whose beliefs are so absolute, and with certain other groups (such as the "you're either with us or against us" crowd). Human brains also seem to have this idea of all or nothing wired in. Makes me wonder if anyone has done research into seeing how pervasive this concept is.
Posted by: Brain Hertz | May 29, 2009 11:37 AM
Having read the whole article, I can't get through the claimed reasoning in this paragraph:
...
math deleted
...
This seems to be a giant piece of circular reasoning obscured by math. He starts with the proposition that beliefs are unreliable, and arrives ath the conclusion that it is very unlikely that beliefs are reliable.
What's his basis for the initial assertion, and what is the universe of "beliefs" of which he speaks?
Posted by: xebecs | May 29, 2009 11:37 AM
No!!! It must be 50%. It's ALWAYS 50%.
Posted by: miller | May 29, 2009 11:38 AM
Plantinga was *the* guy who single-handedly convinced me that "sophisticated" theology is bunk. I mean, I had heard his name thrown around a lot as one of the better theologians. But when I actually bothered to look him up... his arguments may be novel, but they're so bad in so many ways, it's ridiculous. Even though I was atheist already, this was a very disillusioning experience.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 11:38 AM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: Berlo | May 29, 2009 11:39 AM
Plantinga should be prosecuted for criminal abuse of the word 'Therefore'.
I did enjoy the words 'enmeshed in a deep and bottomless skepticism'. Yes, indeed. Thank you for noticing. The paragraph that quote appeared in was so imcomprehesible that it left me giggling helplessly.
Posted by: gman
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May 29, 2009 11:40 AM
"3. Hence, our cognitive assent to evolutionary theory does ensure its truth or even its probable truth."
TYPO in my last post. This should read:
"3. Hence, our cognitive assent to evolutionary theory does NOT ensure its truth or even its probable truth."
Sheesh.
Posted by: jj | May 29, 2009 11:41 AM
Nope, I know plenty of people who believe in crazy magical things. They are called Christians.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 11:42 AM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: lose_the_woo
|
May 29, 2009 11:42 AM
Sastra @ 13 - Well done.
The concept they don't quite grasp is that as systems evolve and grow in complexity, new behaviors emerge. We need a nice piece about emergent properties and real world examples of what they are, and how they apply to Evolution. One real world example I can think of is the "caterpillar" behavior that occurs during heavy traffic congestion. It's actually described by fluid mechanics. But even things like color, or taste are emergent. I think it's a good point you make about how they perceive like coming from like. So, when can we expect the piece about emergent properties?
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 11:44 AM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: Glen Davidson | May 29, 2009 11:44 AM
Quite, he's that species of philosophical idiot the "naive realist." Apparently we see "red" in objects because those objects are indubitably, absolutely, and truly, red.
It has nothing to do with evolution, don't you know. The mere fact that genetically we can show that primate "red" evolved means nothing, because some unreliable old book tells of a god that Alvin supposes vouches completely true senses to humans--in spite of all of the known defects in sensing.
So both philosophically and scientifically it's pig-ignorant. He knows a few words to impress people, but that's about it.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Posted by: Kingasaurus | May 29, 2009 11:45 AM
I agree with whoever proposed the notion that Plantinga's issues don't disappear if you discard naturalism.
Plantinga has a "belief" that a supernatural entity either implanted "truth" in his brain, or constructed him in such a way that he perceives what is "true."
So...exactly how does Plantinga know that his belief about his god is "true" rather than merely adaptive? Especially since his next door neighbor may, for the sake of argument, believe in a non-Yahweh brand of supernaturalism?
He's stuck in his own box.
Posted by: Brain Hertz | May 29, 2009 11:46 AM
gman,
I don't understand how you get from step #3 to step #4. Can you explain that a little more?
Posted by: PZ Myers
|
May 29, 2009 11:46 AM
You're making the same philosophical error Plantinga is. If all I had was my brain, and I was cycling back and forth rechecking my conclusions, you'd be right. I'm saying something very different: we crosscheck against reality. You might argue, like a philosopher, that maybe reality doesn't exist...but then I would have to say that the scientific method allows many different brains to come to similar conclusions, which suggests empirically that there probably is something out there that we are calibrating ideas against.
Yeah, sure, bring on brains in vats. Don't care. Not very interesting, since it isn't very useful. Vat brains get chopped up by Occam's Razor, anyway, unless you've got something new to add to the discussion with them (I've read a lot of philosophy that bats about those brains, though, so I'll be very surprised if you do.)
Posted by: Tom Coward | May 29, 2009 11:48 AM
Platniga, in common with most Christian apologists, IDists, and creationsits, is addicted to "Red Queen" reasoning: "Verdict first, Trial after!" The giveaway is always the leap from some (usually trumped up) problem with naturalism or evolution or science in general, to the conclusion that "therefore god exists." (Why isn't the conclusion ever "therefore we need more data" or "therefore we don't really know"?) In an essay by Platinga that I read once and now can't lay my hand to, he explicitly started his reasoning from "What we Christians know" and ended up at "therefore evolution is false."
Why does anyone pay the slightest attention to him and his ilk?
Posted by: NewEnglandBob
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May 29, 2009 11:50 AM
Wow, what misaligned illogical thinking by this clown, Plantinga.
He tries to turn facts into feelings and beliefs into reality.
Posted by: africangenesis | May 29, 2009 11:50 AM
gman,
Yes, under philosophical skepticism, we can't know if are beliefs are true or if we can trust our senses. Naturalism is in a sense a leap of faith that at least at a basic level, we evolved to make.
We can know if our mental maps and models constructed from past sensory experience are good a predicting subsequent sensory experiences, and thus confirming our maps and models or allowing us to improve our planning, predicting and control by refining our models. Evolution is a model that does well. It is highly consistent with our experience and even has the merit of explaining our predicament vis'a'vis our dependence upon senses with known limits to infer "truth". It appears that there is some adaptive value in building models and maps that allow us to plan and predict. We reached a point where we can refine these skills with mental disciplines such as the scientific method.
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 11:52 AM
Wrong.
But you get a fail on understanding how science works. I won't ad to PZs response. If you don't understand it, then nothing will get you to acknowledge its basis in fact.
Posted by: Breakfast | May 29, 2009 11:52 AM
This is some truly dreadful amateur evolutionary psychology Plantinga's doing. Completely one-dimensional.
As though that false belief occurs in a complete vacuum of other beliefs about princes, flies, etc., and cannot be modified by observed consequences, or compared to other causal beliefs, etc., etc...
Posted by: Glen Davidson | May 29, 2009 11:55 AM
No, it's more serious than that reality might not "exist," it's the question of what "exist" could even mean.
What we share, apparently (assuming for the sake of argument that you're not all creations of my mind), is an experience of phenomena. Maybe it's all like Berkeley said, maybe something utterly beyond our comprehension as a "Ding an Sich" as Kant often suggested. Doesn't matter, if we can "intersubjectively" agree with each other (even if you are all creations of my mind), we can do science.
"Reality" can suck off for all that matters to science, then. We don't know what "reality" is, or even what it "can means." We have the phenomena, it is highly regular, and so we can deal with the evidence involved in courts, in the labs, and in nature.
Plantinga's the one who really has nothing at all that explains any reliability of his senses, since an unknown god can hardly do so. Evolution explains why our senses are reliable, but not guarantors of "truth."
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Posted by: Cosmic Teapot | May 29, 2009 11:55 AM
Lorkas @ 31
That explains it then.
Posted by: David | May 29, 2009 11:57 AM
A guy who can't multiply probabilities by himself bases his argument on badly mangled probability theory.
Posted by: Breakfast | May 29, 2009 11:57 AM
This is some really dreadful amateur evolutionary psychology Plantinga's doing.
As though that false belief occurs in a complete vacuum of other beliefs about princes, flies, etc., and cannot be modified by observed consequences, or compared to other causal beliefs, or checked with other members of one's community, etc., etc...
The arbitrary 50/50 probability assignment - and the assumption that all of the beliefs' probabilities are completely independent - is totally baseless.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 11:59 AM
Fallacy of Argument from Ignorance and Incredulity. He hasn't proved anything here. He didn't address any scientific evidence of which there are mountains of data about evolution including human evolution.
Posted by: The Barefoot Bum | May 29, 2009 12:01 PM
Having read quite a bit of contemporary philosophy, it is sadly true that professional and academic philosophers seem generally innumerate and oblivious to irony.
Unfortunately, Plantinga is not the only offender; 99% of philosophers give the other 1% a bad name, and Plantinga doesn't really stand out of the crowd.
And you have, I think, missed the point of Plantinga's critique of naturalism; your rebuttal does not address Plantinga's fundamental point, that truth and adaptive functionality are essentially distinct. You're in good company though: Stephen Law makes a similar mistake.
Plantinga is, of course, completely wrong, but I think he's wrong in a somewhat more philosophically interesting way than you believe him to be.
Posted by: breadmaker | May 29, 2009 12:02 PM
#52 Kingasaurus
on the subject of "knowing"
Plantinga is probably relying on Jesus statement 'if any man desires to do the will of my father he will know that my teaching is...'
Posted by: Breakfast | May 29, 2009 12:03 PM
(Sorry about the double post. 'Submission Error'. #59 and this should be deleted.)
Posted by: Victor
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May 29, 2009 12:04 PM
Christian creationism
I suggest we stop using the term Creationism or Christian creationism, and start referring to these folks as "Ancient Judaic Creation Mythologists". It is, after all, not Christian and no modern Jewish sects believe it.
Posted by: heliobates | May 29, 2009 12:05 PM
Exactly. It's not "brain vs. brain", it's "brains-interacting-with-public-knowledge vs. brains-interacting-with-public-knowledge". This is what Tom Clarke calls "intersubjective empiricism".
Posted by: SquidBrandon
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May 29, 2009 12:08 PM
toothpastefordinner.com tackles the topic of intelligent design.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 12:08 PM
I find it amusing how apologist's behaviors become predictable. The new behavior I noticed (new to me) are the mathematical/statistical proofs they offer.
Red Flag Alert:
- Believes in magic? (yes)
- Philosopher discussing empirical reality? (yes)
- Offers statistical tinkering to support their philosophy? (yes)
Kook check passed. Congratulations, you're a kook!
Posted by: IainW | May 29, 2009 12:10 PM
In one of his earlier (and believe it or not technical) versions of this argument, Plantinga indulges in a bizarre thought experiment in which an early hominid (named Paul, curiously enough) has a desire to be eaten by a tiger, but at the same time has a number of false beliefs that lead him to flee a tiger every time he sees one (e.g., to the effect of "This tiger won't eat me, but if I run away I might find another tiger who will").
This is supposed to illustrate how false beliefs can be adaptive, but ends up illustrating just how muddled his thinking really is.
Plantinga almost seems to think that Evolution+Naturalism requires that beliefs and desires would be shaped individually by natural selection, which given the sheer number of possible behaviour-influencing belief/desire combinations, is frankly insane. He doesn't really seem to get to grips with the idea that what natural selection shapes are the cognitive mechanisms through which beliefs are then formed, and that because natural selection can't "foresee" the individual beliefs that these mechanisms are going to end up generating, those mechanisms are going to have to be at least moderately reliable. After all, there's no point in having a belief-generating faculty (e.g., for predicting the behaviour of other agents) that leads you to run away from tigers if the same mechanism leads you to forming beliefs that cause you to run away from potential mates.
Quite apart from anything else, it's so much cheaper and simpler for evolution to produce cognitive mechanisms that model the organism's environment reliably (more or less) than to produce mechanisms that have to twist and turn to produce ad hoc beliefs that will save the organism's skin when its equally ad hoc desires lead it into Darwin Award territory.
Another point worth making is that at least Evolution+Naturalism produces an internally consistent and explanatorially rich account of cognitive error, e.g., the tendency of our agent-identification faculties to produce false positives (so that in a more realistic scenario Paul the hominid mistakes the wind rustling the bushes for an approaching tiger and so runs away). Plantinga, on the other hand, can't come up with anything better than blaming our capacity for cognitive error on "sin" - and I kid you not.
Posted by: matt | May 29, 2009 12:11 PM
His argument reminds me of the guy who said the LHC has a 50% chance of making black holes that will destroy the world. Because it will either happen or it won't. Which was beautifully rebutted by the Daily Show's John Oliver, who asked him if they were the last two people left on earth, could they try to perpetuate the species? Because that has a 50% chance of working.
Posted by: Rick | May 29, 2009 12:12 PM
I'm perfectly willing to accept that our brains and the convictions they produce are, in fact, unreliable. Breathes there the philosopher or scientist who, in some laborious Euclidean process, has deduced *every* belief and conclusion by strict logic from a limited set of axioms?
Neuroscience and psychology are showing more and more clearly that we inhabit a mental world where logic is a thin layer buttered over the hot reptile brain, or, if you prefer, a frosting of rationalization over an emotional cake that has long since set and cooled.
For some fascinating (and scary) informed-layperson reading on the topic, I recommend Dan Gardner's The Science of Fear.
If my religious brethren want to inhabit mental fairyland, I guess I can't stop them. But if we're going to make decisions about the real world, science is the best tool discovered so far to yield correct answers.
Is science emotionally unsatisfying? Frequently. Damned experimental results, they keep wrecking my pretty hypotheses! And to admit the nonexistence of the comforting, embracing arms of the benevolent supernatural is like going through adolescence all over again.
In fact, just as democracy seemed to Churchill, science is the worst system we have for finding truth...except for all the others.
Posted by: Ed White | May 29, 2009 12:12 PM
I am currently reading The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, and in one chapter, he talks about the Kung San, and their amazing tracking abilities. He points out that accounts of their tracking abilities indicate that they use a form of the scientific method in evaluating tracks for age of the track, condition of the animal that made the track, the speed at which the animal was traveling, etc., etc.
Sagan also points out that hunter gatherer societies have to have detailed knowledge of their local environment - which plants are good to eat, which are poisonous, which can be used to treat illnesses, etc. The knowledge of indigenous hunter gatherer societies about local flora and fauna can rival that of any botanist or zoologist. Just don't ask them about the flora and fauna a few hundred miles away.
What Plantinga does not discuss is that while an organism may have a 50-50 chance of making the right choice about something, they have a high chance of remembering a choice that causes them harm (such as a child that burns its hand on a fireplace). There is a great evolutionary advantage in being able to remember the good choices and the bad choices.
I would argue that this same learning process may lead to superstition and religion itself. A neutral belief that is reinforced by chance may end up as a religious belief. A hunter who prays for a meal and is successful may end up praying every time, whether or not the prayer had anything to do with it.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 12:13 PM
Of course our brains aren't perfect in the xian Plantinga way. If they were, 100% of the world's population would be xian and Moslem fanatics wouldn't be flying planes into skyscrapers. Fundie Death Cultists wouldn't be trying to destroy our Hi Tech civilization to return to the Dark Ages. George Bush would never have been elected twice.
OTOH, they are pretty damn good. If they weren't, we wouldn't have a Hi Tech civilization for some religious kooks to target. And we wouldn't have a century and a half of data about evolution and robots wouldn't be exploring Mars and Saturn.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 12:14 PM
What are the chances, if Plantinga is correct and our brains mislead is, of the overwhelming majority of scientists all reaching the same, wrong, conclusions ?
Even if there were some mechanism that means that those scientists do tend to come to the same, wrong, conclusion, howcome those conclusions prove so useful ? What does it mean to be wrong about reality if that wrong understanding of reality describes it so well ? Surely what is important about science is not the philosophical justification for it, it is the fact it simply works. If the philosophers have trouble working out a philosophical justification then that is their problem.
Posted by: drj | May 29, 2009 12:15 PM
Plantinga's whole EEAN (evolutionary argument against naturalism) is simply an argument from consequence.
The only compelling part about it is our own tendency to be uncomfortableness with the idea that we can't really know "truth".... so he swoops in and says "But don't worry, Jesus gave us reliable brains!" to calm that concern. In other words, he doesnt like the idea we might not be able to know truth, so just declares that we can and says 'goddidit'.
What Plantinga really needs to explain, is why a omnibenevolent, omnipotent god gave us such unreliable brains that really do seem incapable of ascertaining truth, when he clearly concludes that this God wants us to be able to do just that?
Posted by: dogmeatib | May 29, 2009 12:20 PM
This has all the intellectual rigor of Bob the football fan's certainty that wearing his lucky jersey makes certain that his team wins. Just like the faithful, he conjures up excuses why his team didn't win when it "should have," to explain away the reality that his shirt has nothing to do with his team's success. Fortunately Bob has never been guilty of burning heretics at the stake or hanging witches, unfortunately we can't say the same about the faithful.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 12:20 PM
At times like this, it is customary to quote Quentin Robert DeNameland, the greatest living philostopher known to mankind:
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 29, 2009 12:20 PM
What he said (@65).
Posted by: Kraid | May 29, 2009 12:21 PM
Carl Sagan had some insight about the whole 50/50 chance of whether beliefs are right or not:
This is at the core of why science trumps other ways of "knowing" things... when you can test your ideas, your odds of describing the truth increase drastically from that original 50/50.
Posted by: Rick | May 29, 2009 12:22 PM
Plantinga must assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable to make his case. But I'm perfectly willing to accept that our brains and the convictions they produce are, in fact, unreliable. Breathes there the philosopher or scientist who, in some laborious Euclidean process, has deduced *every* belief and conclusion by strict logic from a limited set of axioms? (Show your work, please.)
Neuroscience and psychology are showing more and more clearly that we inhabit a mental world where logic is a thin layer buttered over the hot reptile brain, or, if you prefer, a frosting of rationalization over an emotional cake that has long since set and cooled. All too frequently we make conclusions and decisions intuitively, and apply only enough logic -- after the fact -- to make them plausible enough to accept without undue cognitive dissonance.
For some fascinating (and scary) informed-layperson reading on the topic, I recommend Dan Gardner's The Science of Fear.
If my religious brethren want to inhabit mental fairyland, I guess I can't stop them. But if we're going to make decisions about the real world, science is the best tool discovered so far to yield correct answers.
Is science emotionally unsatisfying? Frequently. Damned experimental results, they keep wrecking my pretty hypotheses! And to give up the comforting, embracing arms of the benevolent supernatural is like going through adolescence all over again.
In fact, just as democracy seemed to Churchill, science is the worst system we have for finding truth...except for all the others.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 29, 2009 12:22 PM
You mean this one?
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 12:23 PM
For sure. It's very practical that humans have 5 senses. At a glance it wouldn't seem that way. They are expensive. They require large amounts of compute cycles, rack space (i.e. brain matter), and infrastructure (nerve networks). But it's practical because they offer our brain a way to cross-check sensory data between sources. They also provide system redundancy since they all overlap to greater or lesser degrees. It would seem scientific methodology is built into us, thanks to evolution.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 12:26 PM
I don't see how it's ultimately any more complex than “solipsism therefore Jebus”; he just uses smoke and mirrors to con us into believing that he's done something more than fashion a crude cross from a lump of “we can't reliably know anything” Play-Doh.
Posted by: Darren Garrison | May 29, 2009 12:27 PM
Commie Teapot-- it is an ancient joke. I first read it in some Carl Sagan book-- Broca's Brain, maybe?
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=%22feeding%2C+fleeing%2C+fighting+and+reproducing%22&aq=&oq=&aqi=&fp=lW3QMk8TZ5c
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 12:28 PM
And you, I think, have misunderstood what PZ has said. As I understand PZ justifies use of the scientific method on the grounds it works. When we use it we get results that are useful, and importantly, consistant. If Plantinga has a problem with that, then it is his problem, not one for PZ or scientists in general.
One has to wonder if Plantinga ever goes to see a doctor, and if so how he thinks the doctor decides on the best course of treatment for his ailment. In the rational world one hopes the doctors does based on her understanding of medicine, science and on previous experience. In Plantinga's world the doctor would seem to be nothing more than just guessing as the best course of action.
Posted by: Greg Peterson | May 29, 2009 12:28 PM
Something else a case such as Plantinga is trying to advance seems to ignore is the number of times that the Christian god in the Bible is responsible for creating delusional thinking in people. 2 Thessalonians 2:11, for example, says that the Christian god sends sinners a "strong delusion." God gave Nebuchadnezzar over to acting like a wild animal, eating grass. There's the whole tradition of demons and devils tricking and fooling people..."even the elect." And of course in Christian theology, everyone who is not a Christian--the majority of the world's population--is mistaken. So while it is hypothetically possible that a certain kind of god could give humans minds that can always discern what is factual and true, in practice we find that not only is this not the case, but that reality must force us to assume that if there is a god at all, he has not only not designed a brain that functions perfectly well, but also allows, even actively creates, obstacles to our obtaining facts and truths. When it comes to the argument from rationality, god is, once again, useless. God is useless as a source of morality, as a source of meaning, and as a source of reason. From a purely philosophical point of view, is it likely that reasoning would be better in a reality created by a reasoning creator rather than through random forces and necessity? Yes, that is a fair point. But since we do not find ourselves in a reality with anything like perfect (or even sufficient, I would argue) reasoning, this hypothetical fair point is rendered moot. Another failure.
Posted by: R.C. Moore | May 29, 2009 12:29 PM
What concerns me here is that Plantinga is considered by his peers to be a top-notch philosopher. Having just sat this spring through a series of lectures by respected philosophy professors, all from fine schools, all making the same mistakes Plantinga makes, I am left with the impression that something is very wrong with our current methodology of awarding Phd's in Philosophy.
Not a good sampling procedure, I admit. But Plantinga's stature must give one pause -- how could he get so far when his logic is demonstratively wrong by even the armchair philosopher?
Posted by: IM | May 29, 2009 12:31 PM
SPOING!
Posted by: rob | May 29, 2009 12:32 PM
he clearly has no understanding of statistics.
so if i believe in santa, i have a 50% probability of being right? 50% chance the earth is flat? 50% chance the moon landings were faked?
50% chance that his argument is crap? or is that 100%?
Posted by: Kaddath | May 29, 2009 12:32 PM
Plantinga sounds like a good candidate to name a disease.
You've got Plantinga's: The cure is surprisingly simple, yet so difficult to fix once you've been infected (meaning you've lost the ability to reason and build coherent arguments).
Posted by: David | May 29, 2009 12:33 PM
Plantinga, who needs help with multiplication, bases his argument on probability theory. Is it any wonder he gets his conclusion wrong?
Posted by: Pete UK | May 29, 2009 12:34 PM
Hanna #50
A good comment, but it's the end of a long Friday; can I just check I've understood you. You suggest Plantinga is not saying that, on average, the probability of someone believing something is .5, but that the probability of it being true is roughly .5
Which of course means everyone can believe it, although it may be false.
Do I have it?
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 12:35 PM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: E. V. | May 29, 2009 12:37 PM
Lorkas:
Isn't it funny that no state in the U.S. ends in an "a"...
Posted by: Helioprogenus | May 29, 2009 12:37 PM
Alvin Planting is a waste of cognitive faculties. I don't understand how these supposedly educated fuckers, included among them philosophers, engineers, systems analysts, programmers, and even mathematicians buy into some kind of deity controlling some aspect of their lives, whether it's with an initial input, or constant minor adjustments. It must be in the nature of their work, where one is required to apply external input to a given task to garner a workable model. But if they distance themselves from this tunnel vision, and look at the actual facts, then they need not include prime movers or prime meddlers into evolutionary theory.
You don't need directed external input to have evolutionary adapted behavior, even when an ape with mostly higher reasoning and rationalization evolved to question their role in the natural order. What these narrow-minded fools lack is a basic understanding of biology and natural selection. Natural selection is the external input that allows for adaptive change, and although some of these morons claim it's directed, the evidence to the contrary is that it's random.
Posted by: bric | May 29, 2009 12:38 PM
#25 I see my old philosophy tutor, Roger Scruton is also a signatory; at least he is consistent, he writes in 'The Meaning of Conservatism' that conservatives should be implacably opposed to equality of opportunity, and should support rank and privilege.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 12:38 PM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: Philosopher | May 29, 2009 12:39 PM
The only way Plantinga is somewhat highly regarded among the community of academic philosophers is as an epistemologist - where he doesn't spout the ridiculous nonsense he does when it comes to evolution and naturalism. Furthermore, his formaulation of the modal-ontological argument for theism is discussed often, because it appears to be perfectly logically conclusive. It isn't highly regarded as a good argument for theism - but it has served as an excellent example of a deviously logical argument where finding the exact points where it goes wrong can be quite an exercise even for the logician.
That being said, yes - Plantinga does give philosophy an undeservedly bad name. Thankfully, though, his theistic work is treated just like you would expect it among the academic philosophical community: A professional interest mixed with disregard for his blatant absurdities among the non-theistic philosophers interested in philosophy of religion, adoration from a few highly convinced theists, and informed disregard from the large majority who don't even bother to discuss such nonsense, and would rather work on real problems.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 12:40 PM
My commiserations. Did you survive his tutition relativly unscathed ?
Posted by: AestheticsBear | May 29, 2009 12:41 PM
This... "person" gives a bad name to all students of the humanities. This is like a blast of scholastics from the dark ages - I thought David Hume had weeded out these nutjobs centuries ago.
Posted by: Lobster | May 29, 2009 12:42 PM
He does come so close. The lion thing seems like he's brushing right up against the whole empiricism thing. The problem really is that he posits that all beliefs are equal in all ways, and held at random. Not only does he never support that position, but he doesn't even convincingly defend against his semi-interpretation of the objection.
But the red flag for me is his constant accusations that science is a religion, closed to any alternative interpretations and aggressively unwilling to change. Meanwhile it's possible to point to any number of scientific theories that have changed and "evolved" to fit new information over the years. The path of electrons in subatomic particles changed while I was in high school, for instance.
So basically he's saying, "I'm right, it's obvious I'm right, and the reason there's debate over this is because of a CONSPIRACY." The people who think Bush blew up the WTC say the same thing.
Of course all beliefs are equally valid and equally likely to be true... if you ignore all evidence to the contrary.
And he commits the worst "sin" with his either/or statement, that somehow Christianity (not just any religion) and science are the only two options, so if you can poke holes in one then you prove the other true. "God did it" is a very easy answer to very complicated problems but it's unfortunately difficult to support with evidence.
Posted by: Jason A.
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May 29, 2009 12:42 PM
On Truth vs adaptive behavior, who cares? So it's just adaptive behavior, and instead of discovering Truth, we're only approximating reality in a way that's useful. Umm, isn't that what we've said science is all along?
His argument, then, seems to hinge on a belief that adaptive behavior (or better, adaptive cognitive mechanisms, comment #72) cannot correct itself based on performance. In other words, he's a philosopher to the core - he thinks the only way to solve problems is to sit back in his lounge chair and just think really hard. Experimentation is utterly alien to him.
Besides, what's 'reality' if it's not what we empirically sense and correlate with others?
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 12:43 PM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: Celtic_Evolution | May 29, 2009 12:45 PM
Richard Harris touched upon this briefly in #11, but I think one only need to look at the history of our own race for Plantinga's argument to fall apart completely.
It's been said here countless times before, but religious belief as a social construct has had some evolutionary benefits regardless of their attachment to reality.
For example, we know that the Greek and Roman gods of thousands of years ago were complete myth and fabrication, with no ground whatsoever in reality, and yet those cultures, which were built in large part around those religious beliefs of the time, were wildly successful and prosperous, despite beliefs that we now know were utterly silly. The social benefits of a particular belief system (including, of course, those aspects of religion that allow for a society to keep its population under control and subservient) are far more important, from an evolutionary standpoint, than whether or not those beliefs are in any way "true".
Posted by: Holbach
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May 29, 2009 12:45 PM
Just seeing the word theologian after philosopher is enough to evaluate his opinions. He may start off in seemingly reasonable writing, but then he devolves into his true mien, discussing religious crap. So why bother to read what you already know he will puke about? Her's another one who weakens the country everytime they speak.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 12:46 PM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true are roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: bric | May 29, 2009 12:47 PM
#102 Yes, that was over 30 years ago, I think he was mellower then . . .
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 12:47 PM
One more time, Nathan — go for the record.
Posted by: Kingasaurus | May 29, 2009 12:49 PM
on the subject of "knowing"
Plantinga is probably relying on Jesus statement 'if any man desires to do the will of my father he will know that my teaching is...'
Yeah probably, but that's just Plantinga deciding to believe the Bible is correct just because he has a vested interest in doing so. Claiming you "know" because of scripture isn't an argument. "This old book tells me...", etc.
Posted by: Ric | May 29, 2009 12:50 PM
Nathan Hanna, why are you posting your comment over and over again?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 12:50 PM
With regards this 50% thing, it strikes me that Plantinga ignores that fact that humans are capable of learning, and learning not only from personal experience but from others as well. Take for example belief that fire is cold rather than hot. If one has never had any experience of fire before, then why would it be that the chances of thinking it hot are 50% and cold 50% ? You could equally think it at ambient temperture and tickles.
Of course no one is ever in that position. You may not have personally stuck you hand in the campfire, but chances are there someone you know who has, and has the scars to prove it.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 12:50 PM
Though I'm generally unsympathetic to Plantinga's arguments, I should point out that you've misconstrued his claims about probability. He hasn't argued that belief acquisition is random (e.g., that 50% of people will believe that fire is hot and 50% will believe that it is not hot). What he seems to have said is something like the following: since the adaptive processes that are responsible for our belief acquisition are not conducive to truth but rather to survival advantage, then, in the absence of further information (that is relevant to a belief's truth value) the probability of any given belief's being true is roughly 50% (this is consistent with almost everyone believing the same thing, e.g., that fire is hot). Also, there's room for confusion here about the notion of probability Plantinga's working with. See the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
Posted by: Richard | May 29, 2009 12:50 PM
#106 seems to be suggesting that we are unfair to Plantinga because Plantinga was talking about perfectly spherical cows. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow)
It is literally absurd to imagine a world where entities acquire beliefs "in absence of further information." We may as well consider spherical cows when discussing milk production.
I think it's pretty clear that Plantinga is suggesting that either something is true, or it isn't. And that gives something a 50/50 chance of being true.
Either I'll get super powers from drinking a bottle of tap water, or I won't. It's pretty cool that I have a 50% chance of getting super powers each time I drink water!
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 12:50 PM
Emmet @ #111.
I hereby issue you a LOL. I was just about to say something myself.
Posted by: Joe Fusion
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May 29, 2009 12:51 PM
Ahhhh... I get it!
His real argument is:
1. Evolution says we've been selected to understand the world.
2. I clearly don't understand the world at all.
3. Therefore, evolution is false.
Posted by: Miguel | May 29, 2009 12:51 PM
I was tempted to stop reading after "As everyone knows". Too bad I didn't.
Posted by: occam's comic | May 29, 2009 12:52 PM
Sense no one has yet mentioned it, you can always take Karl Popper's take on science --- Science is a process for finding (and weeding out) falsehoods not finding the Truth. You can test ideas and determine they are wrong even if you can never know for certain if your ideas are the "Truth".
Posted by: Jeff J | May 29, 2009 12:52 PM
If a higher power gave us all reliable and rational minds, and belief in the existence of a deity is a rational thought... then why are ther skeptical atheists???
Explain THAT one. Guess Jesus did a sloppy job.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 29, 2009 12:53 PM
Tell me: Why is it that creationists can't ever understand probability? It's like they learn the product rule and never bother with either the sum rule or the whole concept of conditional probabilities.
So, let us calculate the probability that a species will develop the capacity to discriminate between fire being hot or cold given that if they don't they will burn their peckers off. I'm guessing that for species still alive and reproducing today, we could pretty well approximate that probability as 1.
Posted by: Nusubito | May 29, 2009 12:55 PM
Okay, the world doesn't give us truth, and our senses are unreliable. From where does Plantinga's Truth come then? I'm pretty sure he learned all of it from other unreliable physical sources, like the bible and halfwit theologians. Every bit of his knowledge comes from the physical world, from an assumption, more or less, of naturalism.
"truth and adaptive functionality are essentially distinct."
-Barefoot Bum
Yes, that is a very interesting way to define truth. If by interesting, we mean it tells us nothing, and is a useless concept. This argument seems to be that even if our senses correlate very well with the world, this doesn't even attempt at the truth. In other words, truth isn't the actual state of the physical world. Well then, I'm going to have to say that there is absolutely no need for the concept of Plantingan TruthTM. The onus is on him to show that it is a necessary concept.
All I have ever meant by truth is the actual state of the world. And science does offer a way to become more and more certain of that world, to counter our unreliability. Besides, the only 'truth' our minds are unreliable about is this definition I am using here. If this isn't the definition Plantinga is using, then what the hell is his argument even about?
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 12:55 PM
Nathan Hanna reposts, therefore he is. Still.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 12:55 PM
Alex,
Yep, there's something particularly ironic about someone posting a comment on “close reading” failing the Scienceblogs basic literacy test 11 times.
Posted by: Brain Hertz | May 29, 2009 12:58 PM
FTW!
Posted by: TimG
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May 29, 2009 12:58 PM
PZ and some other respondents have done a good job in pointing out the fallacies in Plantinga's argument. But, even if, you were to acceot them (which I certainly do not) his conclusion is absurd. His final sentence is "It is evolutionary naturalism, not Christian belief, that can't rationally be accepted." Where did 'Christian' suddenly jump into the argument and not Muslim, Wiccan, Hindu, Norse ..... What is so special about his belief system. In fact the vast differences in these belief systems is another nail in his argument.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 12:59 PM
Yup Tom #34 and many others here -
Plantinga and his ilk do not get "ars longa, vita brevis" (allow me the poetic license my brain is undertaking - that that means "perfection needs a lot of time to develop painful misstep by fruitful step") but the real world in operation does and it is so bloody obvious.
The elemental inanity of thought of this Plantinga hurts my head bad. Perhaps someday I'll LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES and not subject myself to his writings.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 1:01 PM
Sorry for the (really annoying) multiple posting - I've never posted here before, kept getting a timeout notice and didn't realize the comment had actually posted.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 1:02 PM
Does anyone know how Plantinga copes with the fact evolution happens ? Does he go out into the countryside and rail against nature for failing to accord with what he has decreed is the philosophical truth ?
The scientific world if your views do not accord with nature then your views are wrong. In Plantinga is seems that it is nature that would be wrong.
Posted by: occam's comic | May 29, 2009 1:04 PM
Sense no one has yet mentioned it, you can always take Karl Popper's take on science --- Science is a process for finding (and weeding out) falsehoods not finding the Truth. You can test ideas and determine they are wrong even if you can never know for certain if your ideas are the "Truth".
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 29, 2009 1:05 PM
I do this not to criticize you in particular, but to highlight the fact that reading the error message will tell you not to repost and hoping that others will not ignore the message as well.
Please see my comment #84
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 1:07 PM
I've read enough apologetics to know that I'll probably not be reading very many more. They're all the same. They put you through mental contortions that make some sense sometimes, are absurd at other times, and confusing at other times. Then, at the end they essentially claim that it's impossible for their god to not exist. Oh, and more recently (last couple years or so of my reading) they've started introducing math to make their position look more sciency.
Posted by: Slick | May 29, 2009 1:10 PM
Wow. Notice the words used to describe Plantinga and his thought -- puke, silly, stupid, senile, theologian (he is not a theologian), nutjob, diseased, lunacy.
As the bard said, "Methinks though dost protest too much." Lunacy does not elicit such nasty responses; it elicits pity. Perhaps many of you suspect that his views are much less (fill in the blank) than you claim. Name-calling and bluster can make one feel better, can it not?
Posted by: Drosera
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May 29, 2009 1:10 PM
So, beliefs are arbitrary, independent (therefore potentially contradictory), and immutable by empirical evidence?
All true with respect to religious beliefs. Usually not true with respect to non-religious beliefs.
Posted by: Slick | May 29, 2009 1:12 PM
Wow. Notice the words used to describe Plantinga and his thought -- puke, silly, stupid, senile, theologian (he is not a theologian), nutjob, diseased, lunacy.
As the bard said, "Methinks though dost protest too much." Lunacy does not elicit such nasty responses; it elicits pity. Perhaps many of you suspect that his views are much less (fill in the blank) than you claim. Name-calling and bluster can make one feel better, can it not?
Posted by: littlejohn | May 29, 2009 1:12 PM
My gawd, he starts out coherently and then devolves into gibberish. Here's my theory: He's playing a drinking game. Every time he types a period, he gulps a shot of Jack Daniels. It explains everything.
Seriously, I studied philosophy (many years ago) at a good liberal arts school, and I've had to wade through some weirdly speculative stuff. But I had to quit halfway through that crap.
Besides, I can't trust a man who can't multiply fractions.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 1:13 PM
New here?Posted by: Jonathan | May 29, 2009 1:13 PM
PZ,
Your calculator can really tell you P(X > 75) given X ~ Bin(100,0.5)? Unless you have an incredibly fancy one, you'll be tapping a long, long time. (of course, you can transfer to X ~ N(50, 25) and use tables.)
Posted by: RamblinDude
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May 29, 2009 1:14 PM
sven,
Nathan Hanna reposts, therefore he is. Still.
Or does each reposting further dilute his essence into nothingness? Hmmm...
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 1:16 PM
I'll take that double-post as a "yes."
You think we should pity public intellectuals that spew such self-serving bullshit? Ridicule is easier than point-by-point counterphilosophical refutation, it's true. But it's also more fun.
Posted by: IainW | May 29, 2009 1:18 PM
Philosopher (#101):
It may be formally valid, given certain assumptions about modal logic, but not even Plantinga claims that it is conclusive (instead he likes to call it "victorious", which apparently translates as "capable of convincing somebody who already believes in God and so isn't going to take much convincing").
One obvious problem with it is that when defining maximal greatness (omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection in Plantinga's version) you can plug in any set of mutually consistent attributes, and so use the argument to prove that pretty much anything necessarily exists. E.g., substitute "is a velociraptor", "drinks beer" and "likes to sing" for omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection, and lo-and-behold, you've "demonstrated" that beer-swilling, singing velociraptors exist in all possible worlds. That in itself should be a clue that the argument has something badly wrong with it.
Well, it's really not that difficult to refute:
"There is a possible world in which there are no agents"
If there are no agents, there are no entities which are omniscient, omnipotent or morally perfect (since these are predicates than only be meaningfully ascribed to agents), and if there are no entities which are omniscient, omnipotent or morally perfect, then there are no entities which are maximally excellent in that possible world either. In which case, maximal greatness is impossible (since to be maximally great is to be maximally excellent in every possible world).
The trick is to work out what the necessary conditions are for something being maximally excellent, and then to ask oneself if one can, without self-contradiction, posit a possible world in which those necessary conditions do not obtain. That way it becomes a lot easier to see why Plantinga's core premise (that maximal greatness is possibly exemplified) doesn't hold water, and why his argument is not just inconclusive, but actually wrong.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 1:18 PM
I would argue no counterphilosophical refutation is required. Evolution happens. Reality trumps philosophy everytime.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 1:19 PM
TimG @#127,
I have a basic rule for evaluating apologetics — if “God” can be replaced with “The King of the Leprechauns” and/or “Bible” can be replaced with “Leabhar Gabhála Éireann” (an ancient book of Irish mythology) without substantively changing the argument, then it is bunk. I haven't yet seen an apologetic that passed the test.
Posted by: Aaron Baker | May 29, 2009 1:20 PM
I'm probably missing some philosophical profundity here, but I'll blunder in anyway:
Natural selection surely doen't care about truth; but it doesn't follow form that proposition that our minds are incapable of, say, discerning more accurate information from less accurate; AND, it seems to me, it especially doesn't follow, given that an ability to make accurate determinations about our environment often promotes survival. E.g. the organism better able to determine whether a predator is nearby, or which vegetables are toxic and which aren't, seems to have an obvious advantage in passing along its genes.
Even if we found ourselves with this faculty of discerning more rather than less accurately purely by chance, we wouldn't be justified in saying: "Gee, it seems we got this way by chance events unconcerned with truth; therefore, we can't trust our faculty, even though it's enabled us to make thousands of correct predictions, escape countless predators, have a full vegetarian banquet without poisoning ourselves, not thrust our hands into fires, and so on.
Posted by: Celtic_Evolution | May 29, 2009 1:20 PM
Not so slick @ #134
Wow. Was that serious?
Yes... the multitude of different (negative) descriptives coming from the posters here is simply a sign of our fear. Blech.
OR... since those descriptives didn't all come from the same person, one COULD assume that perhaps it's simply a similarly shared view expressed by several different people using the full breadth and width of the vastness that is the English language.
Additionally, your argument might have a shred of validity if all the commentors were doing was simply spouting off with insulting ad-homs without backing up the claims with valid argument... but since there are plenty of backing arguments following those oh-so derisive words, I think you simply fail.
Oh... and the "methinks thou dost protest too much" argument may be the stupidest, most over-used argument ever made in support of lunacy and flat out ignorance.
No... in reality, if you say something, and 100 people line up to call you stupid... instead of thinking you're really clever and on to something, you're probably better off accepting that what you said was stupid.
Posted by: Nathan Hanna | May 29, 2009 1:24 PM
Well, I'm something. Oblivious maybe.
Posted by: gman
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May 29, 2009 1:24 PM
PZ,
Thanks for responding to my post. I agree that science tells us a pretty good story about the world we live in, and I'm far more inclined to believe what scientists say (within their own discipline) than competing non-scientific claims. And I think you're right to say that science has lots of self-correcting features that (we hope) control for our numerous innate biases.
But I'm not sure any of this stands up to Plantinga's critique. Comparing our beliefs with reality or checking with results produced by other thinkers or scientists unavoidably uses the human brain, which wasn't designed (by natural selection) to do science in the first place.
It's as if Plantinga had alerted me to the fact that I'm drunk. If I think this is a real possibility, I can no longer trust my judgements. And it won't help me to ask my friends, since they're likely to be drunk too. And any test we devise to control for the effects of our drunkenness won't help either, since that test is the product of a drunken mind (or could be, at least). Of course, Plantinga is in the same position: his belief in God could be nothing more than a drunkard's dream.
Do scientists have to worry about any of this? Does this imply that I don't understand how science works? I think not, because it's a philosophical problem, not a scientific one.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 1:26 PM
Actually, said bard wrote "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." You could at least say "thou" and not "though", it would sound more like you understand the English language. Of course, the word "protest" in context at the time was in reference to affirming or promising (think protestation). Not objection denial. Comparisons make more sense when they aren't the opposite of the point you're making.
As for lunacy eliciting pity instead of scorn, that's all a matter of taste. And as far as I'm concerned, pity is not appropriate when the subject at hand is an apologist that has spent years ignoring legitimate criticism (pretending it does not exist) so he can use the same flawed arguments and hope that some minds lack enough critical thinking to see the flaws. Scorn is well-deserved.
Posted by: Andrew Moon | May 29, 2009 1:31 PM
Hello PZ,
"It's not a good start when the author is so oblivious to irony that he opens his paper with a name-calling screed in which he lambastes others for writing name-calling screeds." I didn't see any name-calling in Plantinga's opening words.
Suppose I told someone that their book was "short on reasoning" or "short on competence". It seems odd for the author of that book to say, "quit name-calling!" Does that not sound odd to you? Maybe what he said was false, but I don't think he was name-calling.
(I'm less sure about your "pretentious clown" comment.)
Maybe we have different ideas of what "name-calling" refers to.
Posted by: SteveM
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May 29, 2009 1:31 PM
Maybe not a little 4 function calculator, but we are all using computers with ready access to powerful calculations.
e.g.
http://stattrek.com/Tools/ProbabilityCalculator.aspx
specifically:
http://stattrek.com/Tables/Binomial.aspx
Posted by: RamblinDude
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May 29, 2009 1:32 PM
gman,
Are planes, computers, atom bombs and microwave ovens merely the hallucinations of a drunkard’s mind?
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 29, 2009 1:33 PM
I'm sorry was that "Though dost protest too much?"
Can you say that again, I didn't quite get it.
Yes always that is the case. When someone disagrees with another's argument vehemently and with virgin ear scalding language it means that he in secret really thinks the argument is a good one.
"Thou dost protest too much" (or more accurately "The lady doth protest too much, methinks") is one of the most misused and overused literary quotes.
Awesome stuff there slick.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 1:35 PM
Perhaps Slick is referencing Bard Simpson.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 29, 2009 1:37 PM
good point
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 29, 2009 1:38 PM
A few points in reply to what has been said:
1. (@90) Plantinga is NOT considered a top notch philosopher, as you put it. He's an outlier and a loon. See my #25 for one reason for this. His papers don't so much as make it onto the syllabi at good schools, though they might at small community colleges and universities dominated by theists (for obvious reasons). As a side note: Smart, well-trained, fresh PhD's can't get hired at such places and flush out the antiquated reading lists because the theists who hold the fort there only hire their own (as do we).
2. (@33) The argument fails in step 4. Beliefs are justified to the extent that they are generated by reliable processes. Having a justified belief does not guarantee having a true belief (as you say in step 3). But naturalism does indeed explain how we can have justified beliefs -- including justified beliefs about naturalism. (Cf. Alvin Goldman for the proper story.)
3. (@105) The issue throughout is just plain, garden variety truth. As in: it's true that you're looking at an electronic screen. Nothing remotely mysterious is at issue here. There is no special 'Truth' with a capital T. It typically takes undergraduate students weeks to get this through their heads.
3 1/2 (@131) Popper had to concede the existence of a World-3 populated by immutable mathematical facts to get his philosophy to work. Not a great move.
4. (@88,83) Plantinga's point is that truth and adaptive functionality are essentially distinct. It doesn't help to show (as several now have) that there are cases -- like scientific research or medical practise -- where the two plausibly collapse into one another. Plantinga could (I suppose) even grant you that the scientific method is reliable and that it eventually yields true results most of the time. The concession just gives us a common ground to start the discussion from.
The challenge for the naturalist at that point is to show that *all* of the mind/brain's activities can be explained as the activities of a survival engine evolved to make decent (but not perfect) judgements in response to external stimuli. The problem is that there are mental capacities that do not seem to fit this model. Combinatorial syntax, our capacity for higher mathematics and perhaps (though I hesitate to say this) our capacity for semantic search seem to be among them. Guess-work driven empiricism fails to explain each of these. And, interestingly, they are what seems to distinguish human minds from chimp minds.
So, like #65 said: "Plantinga is completely wrong, but he's wrong in a somewhat more philosophically interesting way than you believe him to be."
5. And lastly, if you're tempted to say that a typical philosopher has some property X, ask yourself whether it's true of Dan Dennett or Noam Chomsky. Those two are much more typical of the mainstream of the field (as are Akins, McGinn, Noe, Prinz, Chruchland, Pietroski, Fodor, ...) Typically, philosophers are neither innumerate, nor ignorant of the empirical literature. All that 'reality trumps philosophy' stuff is inane. Most philosophers are out to discover what reality is like just like linguists, applied mathematicians, psychologists, biologists and indeed anyone else here who engages in research (an not in 'apologetics' for the inexcusable.)
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
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May 29, 2009 1:38 PM
that bit of idiotic prudery made me laugh
Posted by: Aaron Baker | May 29, 2009 1:39 PM
To refine on my remarks a bit:
Plantings says that "the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable."
I think you're conceding too much to Plantinga here, Myers when you agree with this. I think you can hold that our brains, without being perfect in this regard, are in fact pretty good at obtaining more reliable information, especially with the help of (mind-devised) heuristics for getting at such information. Note that our understanding of the world around us vastly exceeds that of our ancestors just 30 or so thousand years ago (a mere eye-blink) in geological time. I mean, just what test of reliability our we flunking here that necessitates the kind of complete skepticism regarding our abilities (unassisted by supernatural forces) to get at some of the truth that Plantinga is pushing?
Posted by: Alyson Miers | May 29, 2009 1:40 PM
Pardon me for a little PSA:
Please do not hit the POST button more than once. If you get an error message, go back and RELOAD the page. You will probably find that your comment went through the first time.
Anyhoo. I think I can capture the difference between Plantinga's basic assumptions and ours. Plantinga assumes:
1. Our minds are perfect.
2. Naturalistic evolution cannot create perfect minds.
3. Therefore, God.
As an equation:
Perfect minds MINUS naturalistic evolution EQUALS God.
Whereas a godless scientist basically thinks something more like this:
1. Our minds are not perfect, BECAUSE
2. Naturalistic evolution cannot create perfect minds, THEREFORE,
3. Many people believe in supernatural agency.
Naturalistic evolution PLUS imperfect minds EQUALS theism.
Did I get that about right?
Posted by: Pareidolius | May 29, 2009 1:40 PM
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
May 29, 2009 1:40 PM
Gman, does science work or not? As the tee shirt says "Science, it works bitches". Why does it work? Philosophy without evidence is sophistry. Just like your argument.
Posted by: IainW | May 29, 2009 1:40 PM
Just to clear something up - Plantinga may be an ID fellow-traveller, but his argument isn't an argument against evolution as such. It's an argument that if you accept naturalism and an evolutionary account of the origins of our cognitive faculties, then you must also accept that those faculties are very probably unreliable, in which case you have no reliable basis for accepting naturalism in the first place (or evolution, for that matter, but Plantinga's actual target is naturalism).
However, if you plug God into the mix, then on Plantiga's view, you can have confidence that your cognitive faculties (and hence your beliefs) are reliable. So technically, if those cognitive faculties tell you that evolution is true, then you are warranted in accepting it, just as long as you pre-suppose God to begin with in order to fix the epistemological problem.
It's an argument which is just as compatible with theistic evolution, even the hands-off, non-tinkering variety, as it is with unadulterated creationism.
Posted by: Ditch | May 29, 2009 1:41 PM
The very first time I came across Plantiga's argument for the existence of God, I thought he had to be a medieval philosopher.
I haven't changed my view of him much since then.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 1:41 PM
PZ Myers: "We demand repeated and repeatable confirmation before we accept a conclusion, because our minds are not reliable."
If our minds are not reliable, on what basis can we trust the thoughts telling us that we've found confirmation of a belief, or that we've arrived at a valid conclusion? An unreliable mind would be just as unreliable in seeking to confirm a belief as it would be in holding that belief in the first place. On a naturalistic view of the mind, all thoughts are nothing more than mental "secretions" of the material brain induced by irrational material causes (i.e., causes lacking reason and understanding). Those thoughts might have some adaptive value, but they'd be no more likely to conform to external truths than the bile secreted by our livers.
Plantinga is right: naturalism is epistemically self-defeating. It might be true, but if it is, it wouldn't give us minds that could be trusted to know that it's true.
Posted by: Ditch | May 29, 2009 1:42 PM
The very first time I came across Plantiga's argument for the existence of God, I thought he had to be a medieval philosopher.
I haven't changed my view of him much since then.
Posted by: Anri | May 29, 2009 1:44 PM
I have to wonder if we are even allowed to be discussing this. Isn't this exactly the kind of 'sophisticated religous thought' that sceptics never, ever try to deal with?
Clearly, since we are able to dismantle it, and with apparent ease, and from a massive number of different angles, we simply ARE NOT GETTING IT!
...or so we have been told.
In response to the poster who was comparing this to Descartes (gman, I think), I agree with that aspect of what you said. P seems to want to be able to say "We can't know anything at all for sure! Um, expect for these things that we do know for sure, like God and stuff."
That's what the argument boils down to for me.
Posted by: Aaron Baker | May 29, 2009 1:45 PM
Somehow in the last posting I managed to write "our" for "are." Early senility is never pretty.
Posted by: CJO | May 29, 2009 1:46 PM
You have, I think, missed the point of Plantinga's critique of naturalism; your rebuttal does not address Plantinga's fundamental point, that truth and adaptive functionality are essentially distinct.
There are no essences; specifically, there are no "essential truths" that are wholly separable from considerations of functionality. That's where Plantinga's and all such arguments go off the rails. Intersubjectivity, mentioned by several above, is the first reason to believe that this "essential distinction" just isn't. See, we can share beliefs with others, and talk about what is "true." We are not creatures for whom the four F's are prosecuted in a solipsistic vacuum; we cooperate with each other for almost everything, often in ways distributed temporally and spacially (i.e. when you use a tool, you are "cooperating" in a real sense with the inventor and the manufacturers of the tool). So "adaptive functionality" is all wrapped up in "truth," because truth can't be determined but intersubjectively; it comes to be accepted as such because of the adaptive functionality of successfully cooperating groups, not individual minds.
Posted by: Steve_C | May 29, 2009 1:48 PM
Jim. Really? More circular thinking. Sophists chasing their tails again.
Posted by: Gotchaye | May 29, 2009 1:48 PM
I don't think PZ has gotten Platinga quite right here. Nathan pointed out one issue (that reliability doesn't mean the reliability of individual observations), but I think the larger one is that Platinga's central claim is that the truth-content of our beliefs, under naturalism, has nothing to do with the usefulness of our actions. You can't argue against Platinga by starting from some claim about how our beliefs determine our actions - that's exactly what he's denying to make his argument work. For him, our beliefs are just 'along for the ride'. I find this bizarre (I'm not sure how you account for naturalistic consciousness unless it is itself adaptive, in which case you'd think that it bears a certain relationship to our actions), but it seems to me that that's what he's saying.
He stacks the deck too. He's not comparing naturalism and no extra assumptions to supernaturalism and no extra assumptions. He's comparing naturalism and no extra assumptions to the Christian God. This lets him say that his supernatural option guarantees the reliability of our cognitive faculties. But we could as easily put forward a naturalistic system where reliable cognitive faculties are adaptive, in which case I don't see that his argument has any force.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 1:51 PM
Plantinga in a nutshell:
If you think you're fallible, then you have to admit that you might be wrong about being fallible. It's logically contradictory to insist that you are fallible.
Therefore the only consistent conclusion is that you are infallible, and that your belief that you're fallible is a mistake.
Posted by: abb3w | May 29, 2009 1:51 PM
The error is presuming that the probability will be uniform. To the extent accurate belief more probably yields correct behavior, accurate belief is favored.
Plantinga also seems to be confusing use of the word "reliable", to rather than allowing for probabilistically reliable with 0.5
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 1:52 PM
So you think it reality is subservient to philosphoy ? I think you are the one with problems, beginning with being very very stupid.
It does not matter how many philosophers argue evolution does not happen when the evidence shows it does. And if they happen to be right, and we cannot trust ourselves to know the truth, then why are they bothering to try and work out what it is ?
Posted by: Numad | May 29, 2009 1:53 PM
"In my opinion (which of course some people might claim is biased), none of these objections is successful."
Clearly, the idea that one might be biased about an argument that one has devised is preposterous!
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 1:54 PM
Oh no! Plantinga has combined with Feagletosh to form Feaglantingletosh! Ditckhins is doomed!
Wait, here comes Daniel Dennett. Ditchennetkins vs. Feaglantingletosh. It's on!
Posted by: Thuktun | May 29, 2009 1:54 PM
"...and therefore...?"
"A WITCH!"
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 1:55 PM
Wow, I'm glad I'm not the only one. It took me 4 or 5 comment threads mentioning Plantiga before I realized he was not a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas (which was my initial guess based on the form of his argumentation). Initially his argument was somewhat interesting from a historical perspective. Now it's just banal.
Posted by: Ignorabiums | May 29, 2009 1:58 PM
I dare you to go down the hall to the math department and tell them that. Maybe they will hold a vote to determine whether the generalized continuum hypothesis is intersubjectively acceptable and conducive to their successful cooperation in a group.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 1:58 PM
If science is such a poor way of understanding how the universe works (which what I understand as "truth") according to Plantinga how does he explain the extraordinary success of the scientific method ?
Also, how does he get to claim there is somekind of objective truth, when what we understand of the universe suggests there is not ?
In short how does someone with so little understand of the acheivements of science, and how science works, thinks he can say it is a load of rubbish ?
Posted by: NoGurus | May 29, 2009 1:59 PM
Beleifs are not coins with a 50 percent chance of coming up heads or tails. Beliefs are only formed after experience. The chances of a belief having a 50 percent chance of being true or not would be extremely low, and hardly ever random. In psychology, specifically cognitive therapy, this rule is expressed as: Antecedent (Activating Event) - Belief - Consequence. This rule has been demonstrated, replicated and empirically tested for more than 50 years. We can see that in the philosphor's case that the Activating event is his exposure to the Bible, the Belief is that it must be true, and the Consequence is that all contrary evidence must be twisted, ignored, rationalized and disfunctionally avoided to keep the belief. So even this philosopher, contary to his wishes, proves that his mind works the same way as all of us other foolish humans. The philisopher would in fact have no belief about the Bible at all had he not been exposed to it.
Posted by: IainW | May 29, 2009 2:00 PM
Jim (#164):
Wow. I thought Plantinga was pretty good at constructing strawman versions of evolutionary naturalism, but compared to you he's a bloody amateur.
Oh, and you also seem to have fallen for the like-can-only-cause-like fallacy that Sastra mentioned earlier.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:01 PM
The thing with mathematicians is that in their world they actually define the rules by which it works. Reality does not work that way.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 2:04 PM
Alvin Platinga is a moran, Alvin Platinga is a Philosopher, Therefore, All Philosophers are morans.
Great scientific reasoning there!
That said, I snipped this little thing from the Philosophers Lexicon [http://www.philosophicallexicon.com/#P]. It is a little dictionary of terms used affectionately to coin terms based on the traits of their peers philosophy.
alvinize, v. To stimulate protracted discussion by making a bizarre claim. "His contention that natural evil is due to Satanic agency alvinized his listeners."
Yes some philosophers do ask whether naturalistic evolution necessarily a belief generation system that favors truth. I think that is worthwhile endeavor. The argument: "look how successful we are, it must be because our beliefs are true" is as fallacious when applied to science, as it is when applied to Christianity.
That said, Platinga's conclusions do not represent the majority of philosophers that I know. Just as there are xian scientists that "see" the signatures of design in every DNA molecule, there are philosophers with deep seated religious views that bias their thinking as well.
But this comment was mainly to respond the anti-philosophy trend on this and similar posts. Don't judge us all on the basis of who gets the press. This is not a representative sample.
I am sure we wouldn't want all scientists to be judged on the basis of the later work of such scientific luminaries as Watson, Crick, and Pauling.
Posted by: heliobates | May 29, 2009 2:07 PM
@156
I'm no philosophical wonk, but why does cultural and linguistic accretion always get left out of this equation?
Do we not see "combinatorial syntax, our capacity for higher mathematics..." emerging through the history of thought? These things don't have to be present, fully-formed at the beginning of human social interaction and individual thought. Sastra touched on this in #13, above.
There's no reason to suppose that our capacity for higher mathematics didn't emerge from a few milennia of collective ratiocination. Take simple mathematical formulas, combine them, recombine them, gradually accrete layers of complexity and pretty soon we can have elaborate bodies of mathematical practice. No need to presume that our modern mathematical reasoning has just been lying dormant in us all along.
With combinatorial syntax: bird species do this. So do whales. It's indivdual capability + socialization + experimentation + time, not some genetic switch that suddenly flips in a bird's lingustic centres.
Humans aren't born being able to do higher mathematics. No one gets to do higher mathematics without absorbing the principles and practices of "lower mathematics".
If Euclid had the innate capacity to do calculus, why didn't he?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:08 PM
So utility does not matter ? The fact that science produces useful, reproducible and consistant results does not tell us anything about how valid a method it is for understand how the world works ?
Posted by: Joe Bleau | May 29, 2009 2:09 PM
Perhaps one way to roll up several of the points made on this thread so far is to characterize the controversy thus: while both PZM and AP presume "reality" (as all non-solipsists must), AP's arguments depend on radically severing the connection between the notion of reality and the notion of truth. If we are to take AP's epistemology seriously, then reality on its own has little or nothing at all to do with judgments about whether our beliefs are true.
This is only remotely tenable if, as a poster upstream pointed out, AP is conflating the idea of deep philosophical 'TRVTH' with plain old mundane truth. If you presume some magical epistemological realm where we mortals can really KNOW stuff about reality, and not just think that we know stuff about reality, then I guess it's not too insane to think that you need a God to get you there (although it's more than a little shady that the canonical form that the God of the major monotheistic Abrahamic religions takes is suspiciously similar in attributes to a sadistic early Bronze-age tyrant/king).
Personally, I'm happy to cop the the notion that knowledge or access to the TRVTH requires the supernatural (or at least, a coherent metaphysics). To me, this is precisely what makes the search for TRVTH (not to mention propositions about the Divine) so utterly pointless, if not meaningless.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:11 PM
Re #65:
But conceding this obvious point doesn't help Plantinga at all. He needs them to be completely uncorrelated (the whole point of that "50%" nonsense) which is obviously not true. If you're an antelope and you believe (as it happens, correctly) that there is a lion after you and you'd better take evasive action, your belief is BOTH adaptive and true, and adaptive BECAUSE true. A cognitive apparatus that did not tend (TEND- not assure)to produce true conclusions in such instances would NOT be adaptive. (This is the whole point of "Darwinian epistemology".)
Posted by: amphiox | May 29, 2009 2:11 PM
#164 - On the contrary the bile secreted from our livers rigidly conforms to objective truth. It must be capable of emulsifying fats! The objective reality that fats can only be emulsified in a limited number of ways determines what forms our bile secretions MUST take.
Evolution honed our thought processes to be adaptive rather than true, BUT that does not mean that the degree to which our thinking process correlates with truth (reality) versus some arbitrary non-real untruth must be 50-50!
A thought process that correlates strongly with reality is MUCH more likely to be adaptive regarding survival WITHIN THAT REALITY than one which is not. So our minds may not be one hundred percent reliable, but they are going to partly reliable, and much more likely to be reasonably reliable than completely unreliable.
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 29, 2009 2:12 PM
You'd better hope that's right or your world-view is in serious trouble. Many mathematicians in fact don't buy into this sort of formalism, so you'd better hope that they're deeply deluded about their own field.
Puzzle: if, as you suggest, mathematics (like chess and poetry) involves defining some rules and then watching them unfold then why does it often come to pass that higher math ends up being exceedingly useful to the physicist and chemist long after it has been articulated for purely formal reasons. It's almost like the mathematician is guessing at the rich, hidden structure of the empirical universe. How does she do it? And why do the poet and the chessmaster not achieve similarly impressive results?
Suggested conclusion: formalism about mathematics of the sort you're defending is false.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 2:14 PM
Another flaw in his reasoning. Our brains might be selected on the basis of survival advantage. But survival advantage for beings like ourselves that make our living by being smart tool users, has to be proficient at understanding the real world, "conducive to truth"..
So big brained survival advantage roughly = understanding objective reality.
The correlation isn't perfect but it is high. Now that there is cultural evolution, it is even higher. Societies that value truth and understanding the real world progress while societies that don't are stuck in the middle ages. That is why some highly religious societies like Afghanistan, the Xian fundies, and Texas are going nowhere while we discover new science and new technology on a daily basis
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:15 PM
Amphiox @ 188- funny that we posted the same argument at the same time. Clearly great minds do think alike! ;)
Posted by: Everbleed | May 29, 2009 2:15 PM
Hats off to PZ! He read all five pages! An astounding feat! The courage. The fortitude. The sacrifice. Seriously! I'm not kidding!
I only made it somewhere near the top of page 2. I could feel the cells dying.
I stopped at;
I don't think it's possible at all to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist;
and realized my life was ticking by... and I was reading THIS. Oh... My... Dog.
How does PZ do it? Maybe he IS an alien...
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:16 PM
You seem confused. I did not claim that no area of pure mathematics does not map to reality. I merely pointed out that mathematicians (by which I mean those doing pure maths) do not restrict themselves to constructs that exist in reality.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 2:17 PM
Apologies if this point has been made, but I could progress further in the thread without addressing this, which was really starting to grate:
"You have, I think, missed the point of Plantinga's critique of naturalism; your rebuttal does not address Plantinga's fundamental point, that truth and adaptive functionality are essentially distinct."
If this REALLY IS Plantinga's central point, then he fails here as in every other aspect of his little creed (except to the extent in which he shows solidarity with scepticism).
If we define "truth" as adults, which means considering pragmatic model-building considerations that value predictive power, inter-subjective agreement upon observable effects (e.g. This fruit doesn't kill you when you eat it), temporal ordering for causal statements, avoiding logical contradictions (e.g.,Fire is hot, so it will freeze water), and respect for empirical reproducibility (I've offered that fruit to 374 friends and they have all died), rather than "Truth" as it is known to Platonists, children and theists, then it becomes clear that there IS an adaptive relationship between "truth" and "adaptive functionality".
I should add that Plantinga needs to clarify his understanding of the word "belief", before any of his sentences become coherent, except when discussing humans. Does he mean to say that a frog has "beliefs" that cause it to trap flies? Is it possible for creatures without language to have "beliefs"? If not, then his whole essay is a red herring, because one has no way to examine natural selection of belief, since the selection steps that produced minds capable of belief were accomplished before belief emerged.
In any case, as PZ pointed out, his uncoupling of "belief" from empiricism invalidates the whole project and his failure to deal with it shows that he is not bright or rational enough to understand the most trenchant objection that naturalism has with supernaturalism.
Posted by: frog | May 29, 2009 2:17 PM
Reminds me of the DailyShow investigation on the CERN "mini-blackhole" experiment. They interviewed a high-school physics teacher about why he was terrified that the world would be destroyed.
The guy explained how either the world would be destroyed or not. That implied that the probability of the world being destroyed by the experiment was 50%.
Who gave this Plantinga guy his Ph.D? They should lose their accreditation.
Posted by: Thoughtful Guy | May 29, 2009 2:19 PM
Plantinga proposes an interesting premise but his logic fails towards the end. I don't think he truly understands science enough to do be a valid critic of either naturalistic or theistic evolution.
I could see a fairly good argument for the adaptation of accepting an irrational belief. If the majority of the members of a social group believe in something strongly enough then it is perfectly rational to just follow along; lest you become an outcast. The outcast would have a significantly lower probability of successfully reproducing.
Posted by: Nocturne | May 29, 2009 2:20 PM
Any bets on how long before Vox Day posts something defending Plantinga's mental masturbation?
Side bet 1: how many times will he personally attack PZ or his readers?
Side bet 2: will he bring up his challenge to "debate" PZ on some wingnut radio show?
Posted by: Neko-Onna | May 29, 2009 2:21 PM
Really? What if the hominids believed lions were Wrathful Gods of Death who you wouldn't dare approach? That's completely bogus, but it would keep you alive. And I'd say its a lot more probable, as beliefs go, as "hominids" wouldn't have domesticated the cat yet, and therefore would have no experience with "lovable pussycats", but they would have had a lot of experience with ferocious apex predators making snacks out of their buddies.
Religion, ironically enough, is one of the best arguments ever for adaptive biology/behavior. Even though its unprovable bullshit, religion kept people alive because it kept them in fear- fear of the wrong thing, perhaps, but the fear kept them from taking chances that would have killed them. Example: Tribe A believes in the Lightning God. Lightning God visits his wrath upon the Earth by- you guessed it- raining down lightning bolts on the land. You anger the Lightning God by showing your impertinence and going out to view the Awesome Bolts of Wrath. Rebellious Free Thinker, with a decidedly underdeveloped fear of the unknown, says "screw that", and goes out into the storm. She is killed by the tree that is knocked over in the storm. The rest of Tribe A sees this as confirmation of their beliefs, and RFT never lives to reproduce. So, tribe A produces a lot off offspring with a strong fear response to the unknown AND reinforces that fear with a strong religious belief that forbids tribe members from going out in storms. Tribe A prospers. Now, the fact that no Lightning God exists doesn't matter, only the fear of storms produced by the Lightning God matters. Therefore, the thing that gets transmitted genetically is a predisposition to fear of the unknown. What that unknown is can change, DOES change (Lightning God, Zeus, Yahweh), but the fear stays the same.
Plantinga's arguments are as crap-laden as the superstitions they are based on, but that doesn't mean they won't benefit him in some way- in certain circles, I'm sure they have boosted his credibility significantly.
And the wheel spins 'round and 'round.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:22 PM
If we look at human history I think we can take this as pretty a given. Psychological experiments would also seem to support your arguement.
Posted by: Jud | May 29, 2009 2:22 PM
If each belief has only a 50% chance of being true, then the odds against the successful functioning of anything as complex as a computer are utterly, laughably high.
So if Plantinga is correct -
You
Cannot
Be
Reading
This.
Oh, wait...
Posted by: uppity cracka | May 29, 2009 2:23 PM
excellent rebuttal. that's what we call a good, old fashioned "FACE!" of course, he pretty much walked into it. it's almost as if he only expected fundies to read it and tell him he's a genius, maybe give him some money.
Posted by: Holbach
|
May 29, 2009 2:24 PM
gman @ 33
"There is no way for us to know whether the supernatural being who created us..,"
You seem to be sure that we were created by this imaginary being. To be sure, you and the Universe will never know or will ever find out.
Posted by: CJO | May 29, 2009 2:25 PM
I dare you to go down the hall to the math department and tell them that. Maybe they will hold a vote to determine whether the generalized continuum hypothesis is intersubjectively acceptable and conducive to their successful cooperation in a group.
Did not each mathematician siiting there undergo an extensive course of study with his or her elders to arrive at the state of being a reliable assessor of mathematical truth?
Is there not peer review in the mathematics community?
If a given mathematician stubbornly held a position antithetical to the generally accepted view in his field (one held to be "untrue"), would that be conducive to successful cooperation (understood here as the furtherance of mathematical understanding)?
Basically, you're trying to hold up a highly formalized example of intersubjectivity (one, as Matt alluded to, where the formal rules are themselves rarefied abstractions and a result of a lot of temporally and spatially distributed cooperation) as a counter-example, but I maintain that, yes, mathematical truths are agreed upon as such in the same basic way that "fire is hot" and other empirical propositions are.
Posted by: K. Signal Eingang | May 29, 2009 2:26 PM
The phrase "slumbering in the shadow of Aristotle" comes to mind - Plantinga has clearly not moved beyond the Classical attitude that everything can be figured out from first principles by reason alone, with no recourse to such messy, unrefined pastimes as experimentation or testing.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:26 PM
It's not COMPLETELY bogus by a long shot, which is precisely why it will keep you alive. Plantinga's argument would require that your belief as to whether or not SOMETHING dangerous is chasing you is uncorrelated to the truth of the matter.
This smells like another confusion of garden-variety truths (e.g. something dangerous IS chasing me) with TRVTH. That right there is Plantinga's most fundamental confusion and falling into it oneself results in giving him too much credit. There is NO part of his "argument" which should not earn a D for a freshman student.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 2:27 PM
Another dumb flaw. Who says we can't know the truth?
We can. That are minds are either fallible or infallible is a false dichotomy. They are fallible but actually, work pretty well. The proof is all around us. We live in a Hi Tech world and are the dominant species on the planet.
While our minds are fallible we can through experiment, repetition, induction, deduction, cultural transmission, cooperation and other cognitive tools and techniques asymptopically approach the truth about the real world. Including that Plantinga is an idiot who doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.
Posted by: tim Rowledge | May 29, 2009 2:28 PM
It put me in mind of that lovely old cry of the (lower case)conservative "Get back to teaching kids the three Rs". Being, of course, Reading, Writing and Arithmetic..... spelling obviously didn't make the cut.Posted by: Neko-Onna | May 29, 2009 2:28 PM
Really? What if the hominids believed lions were Wrathful Gods of Death who you wouldn't dare approach? That's completely bogus, but it would keep you alive. And I'd say its a lot more probable, as beliefs go, as "hominids" wouldn't have domesticated the cat yet, and therefore would have no experience with "lovable pussycats", but they would have had a lot of experience with ferocious apex predators making snacks out of their buddies.
Religion, ironically enough, is one of the best arguments ever for adaptive biology/behavior. Even though its unprovable bullshit, religion kept people alive because it kept them in fear- fear of the wrong thing, perhaps, but the fear kept them from taking chances that would have killed them. Example: Tribe A believes in the Lightning God. Lightning God visits his wrath upon the Earth by- you guessed it- raining down lightning bolts on the land. You anger the Lightning God by showing your impertinence and going out to view the Awesome Bolts of Wrath. Rebellious Free Thinker, with a decidedly underdeveloped fear of the unknown, says "screw that", and goes out into the storm. She is killed by the tree that is knocked over in the storm. The rest of Tribe A sees this as confirmation of their beliefs, and RFT never lives to reproduce. So, tribe A produces a lot off offspring with a strong fear response to the unknown AND reinforces that fear with a strong religious belief that forbids tribe members from going out in storms.
Plantinga's arguments are as crap-laden as the supernatural beliefs they stem from, but that doesn't mean they don't benefit him in some way. Im sure in some circles, they have boosted his credibility immensely.
And the wheel spins 'round and 'round.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | May 29, 2009 2:28 PM
I have to say that I've met a lot of philosophy students and I've read quite some philosophical articles and I still think, even after reading all the remarks, and even though he's not just wrong, but completely missing the point, that he is actually quite smart for a philosopher. The fact of the matter is, there aren't many Dennetts, and even though Plantinga is more representative, that still puts philosophy in to flattering a light.
Posted by: Everbleed | May 29, 2009 2:29 PM
I'm dumbfounded!
It seems a lot of you read the whole five pages!
And here I thought the only hero here was PZ.
The room is filled with heroes!
Thank you all. But Damn. The wasted time.
Much ado about nothing.
I'm going to go read something worth the time.
I must be getting old.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:30 PM
,blockquote>Another dumb flaw. Who says we can't know the truth?
Raven,
It is a flaw in Plantinga's thinking you are calling dumb and not mine ?
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 2:30 PM
I think that British particle physicist/theologian John Polkinghorne neatly captured the gist of Plantinga's argument in this way:
"Ultimately (naturalistic reductionism) is suicidal. Not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen....The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes it to be so." (John Polkinghorne, "One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology," London: SPCK, 1986, p. 93)
Polkinghorne is mistaken that no one believes that thoughts are mere electro-chemical neural events. PZ Myers and others here (the majority, apparently) take that view of the mind, but one has to wonder why. On the naturalistic view of the mind embraced by Myers and the like, there is no reason to suppose that the thoughts secreted by one brain are in any way epistemically superior to the thoughts secreted by another brain. Nor would we have any reason for trusting that those secretions of the brain are (or even can be) oriented towards truth - especially truths that are not relevant to the Darwinian struggle for existence.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
|
May 29, 2009 2:31 PM
I think it's also worth pointing out that a reliable system can be constructed from unreliable components. It seems to be implicitly assumed by many commenters above that there is an inviolable axiom that the “unreliability” of a system cannot be mitigated or ameliorated in any way.
“Aha!”, they'll say, “but can you know that the unreliability has been ameliorated successfully when the system you use to determine success and failure is the very thing whose unreliability you seek to ameliorate! Gotcha!” — and we hop back on the merry-go-round of sophomoric solipsism again.
Posted by: Thumpalumpacus | May 29, 2009 2:32 PM
"If our minds are not reliable, on what basis can we trust the thoughts telling us that we've found confirmation of a belief, or that we've arrived at a valid conclusion?" -- Jim
Apparently you're unfamiliar with the idea of peer-review. Have you never read a news article which speaks of a scientific theory being modified due to additional observation? Certainly you're aware that there is more than one scientist in the world who performs experiments, no? As Matt Penfold in #77 above put it: "What are the chances, if Plantinga is correct and our brains mislead is, of the overwhelming majority of scientists all reaching the same, wrong, conclusions ?"
You are free to leap off the Niagara Falls in your refutation of these points. Gravity is, after all, a scientific construct.
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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May 29, 2009 2:34 PM
Here's a response I made last year to this mind-numbingly awful nonsense from Plantinga:
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:34 PM
You should try reading some A.C Grayling. He is a critic of those philosophers who go in for the philosphical equivalent of the theological arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. He also criticises those philosophers who writings are so opaque that even their colleagues have trouble understand what they are saying, let alone the average intelligent lay person.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:35 PM
Jimbulb @212:
Again we have the the same old confusion of truths with TRVTH. There may be certain problem areas like math (though I am not really convinced) but for the most part the kinds of truths about the world sought by the natural sciences are very much relevant to the Darwinian struggle for existence, which is precisely why so many people can now lead so much longer and safer lives than their ancestors did.
Posted by: Jeff Bell | May 29, 2009 2:35 PM
He makes a basic probabilistic mistake in assuming that these are all independent variables.
Suppose that I flip a coin once, and then I look at it 50 times. What are the odds that every time I look it's heads? 50%
Posted by: heliobates | May 29, 2009 2:37 PM
@CJO
[applause]
That's what I'm trying to get at. No one with any level of accomplishment in any field of human endeavour suddenly appears, de novo, as a competent individual. A 45 year-old theoretical mathematician has 45 years of neuro-linguistic-system-in-the-environment experience that can combine with natural aptitude and a measure of fortuitous coincidence to produce the ongoing ability to have a conversation about the "generalized continuum hypothesis".
Naturalistic accounts of mind account for this. Supernatural accounts of mind deliberately leave this out, as if everything observable about a subject and her beliefs is some Platonic "remembrance of things past".
Posted by: Jud | May 29, 2009 2:37 PM
Jim (#212) writes: On the naturalistic view of the mind embraced by Myers and the like, there is no reason to suppose that the thoughts secreted by one brain are in any way epistemically superior to the thoughts secreted by another brain.
No reason to suppose the thoughts of one are superior to the thoughts of another, eh? Did you happen to watch the National Spelling Bee finals last night? There is obviously a way to tell whose thoughts are superior with regard to spelling, and it is, I daresay, "as simple as A, B, C."
Posted by: Jake Fraser | May 29, 2009 2:39 PM
The real difficulty you're striking upon here isn't whether or not we can perceive truth, but what such a concept as 'truth' implies and where it originates. The people who ACTUALLY criticize science, those who do philosophy of science and are somewhat respected within an intellectual community (unlike this blowhard) will take an objection with science as designating that 1.) there is a certain transcendental form of truth to be accessed and 2.)that science can achieve it.
This is why Nietzsche calls science the last bastion of religion in our society. Research into the concept of a transcendental signified might be helpful.
http://www.answers.com/topic/transcendental-signified
The difficulty is that without a God, there actually isn't any source for meaning in the world - this is what this Plantinga guy should have gotten at, but didn't, because he's an idiot. It's not consistent to be atheist but still believe in a transcendental morality (although even claiming God is a sort of supplement in the Derridian sense - we can still claim the non-existence of truth unless we proceed from the ontology that God = Truth, although we can simply decide not to be beholden to it); this is why the real atheists are the nihilists and the post-structuralists.
Posted by: Robin | May 29, 2009 2:40 PM
Is there a convention I don't know about, or do the parentheses in "10(to the power -58)" make it look like it's been written by someone who doesn't know what it means?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:40 PM
Other than the fact some thoughts correspond with what we agree we see happeing in universe better than others, and that we can follow thoughts to logical conclusions and test those conclusions ?
Someone can think the moon is made of blue cheese, and someone can think it is made of rock. We can test which thought is better by going to the moon and checking. Guess what. We did. And the result ? Take food if you are going to the moon, and not just some crackers that go well with cheese.
Posted by: Jake Fraser | May 29, 2009 2:41 PM
The real difficulty you're striking upon here isn't whether or not we can perceive truth, but what such a concept as 'truth' implies and where it originates. The people who ACTUALLY criticize science, those who do philosophy of science and are somewhat respected within an intellectual community (unlike this blowhard) will take an objection with science as designating that 1.) there is a certain transcendental form of truth to be accessed and 2.)that science can achieve it.
This is why Nietzsche calls science the last bastion of religion in our society. Research into the concept of a transcendental signified might be helpful.
http://www.answers.com/topic/transcendental-signified
The difficulty is that without a God, there actually isn't any source for meaning in the world - this is what this Plantinga guy should have gotten at, but didn't, because he's an idiot. It's not consistent to be atheist but still believe in a transcendental morality (although even claiming God is a sort of supplement in the Derridian sense - we can still claim the non-existence of truth unless we proceed from the ontology that God = Truth, although we can simply decide not to be beholden to it); this is why the real atheists are the nihilists and the post-structuralists.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 2:42 PM
I assumed that is what Plantinga was saying. " We can't know the "truth". Well we can, have, do and will. We even pay people called scientists to do just that. That is why 2009 looks a lot different from 1009.
Another discoverd truth. Plantinga is an idiot who doesn't know what the hell he is talking about.
>
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:42 PM
Which is transparently false, since any self-aware symbol-manipulating conscious being- eg. a member of the species Homo sapiens- can create meanings (plural used advisedly). It's the misguided longing for one, universal MEANING that causes trouble.
Posted by: heliobates | May 29, 2009 2:43 PM
Jim @212
You need to get out more.
http://www.naturalism.org/plantinga.htm
http://www.naturalism.org/haught.htm
Posted by: Pen | May 29, 2009 2:44 PM
Unlike some Pharyngula readers, I rarely keel over laughing, but this did it for me. It was that bit about natural selection being unlikely to produce false beliefs. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sunbathe in the middle of the road, because I seem to believe that those things called Vay-ee-cules are moving very slowly, or even more probably, are a simple optical illusion.
Posted by: The good lookin' fat man | May 29, 2009 2:45 PM
If we are merely the material products of a purposeless system then our knowledge about the world is indeed inherently unreliable. And though PZ glorifies the scientific method as our savior from this inherent unreliability of the mind (everyone likes to worship something eh?), he is not taking into account that we can never really tell whether the scientific method as interpreted/imposed by us is anything more than the product of evolved minds reacting to stimuli, the ejaculatory result of random mutations which may or may not remain following successive mutations. Since PZ's knowledge filter (scientific method) is subject to the same limitations as his evolved mind, it is no more trustworthy than his unreliable mind. As committed materialists you can never be sure that knowledge you've gained through your senses is anything more than evolutionary fuzz, be it scientifically tested or not.
Stark materialism traps us within minds of computer code which our central processors will never be able to transcend. Meat robots can never be anything more than meat robots, least of all philosophers.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:45 PM
I am not sure this is what science says.
Science merely attempts to explain how the universe works. What is "true" in science is merely that which best conforms with what we see happening. It is true that science does rely on an axiom, in that science will only work if the universe works in a consistant manner. If the rules are arbitrary then science will not work. We are justified in making that assumption becuase of the success of science in explaining the universe.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:48 PM
Interesting how the trolls are incapable of doing anything except merely repeating bits of Plantinga's fallacious argument.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:49 PM
Well it was my understanding of what Plantinga was saying. Reading other comments, including yours, I do not think I am alone in that understanding.
Of course, you and I seem to think that "truth" is the same as "how the universe works and what has happened within it". I have no idea quite what Plantinga thinks "truth" is.
Posted by: The good lookin' fat man | May 29, 2009 2:49 PM
If we are merely the material products of a purposeless system then our knowledge about the world is indeed inherently unreliable. And though PZ glorifies the scientific method as our savior from this inherent unreliability of the mind (everyone likes to worship something eh?), he is not taking into account that we can never really tell whether the scientific method as interpreted/imposed by us is anything more than the product of evolved minds reacting to stimuli, the ejaculatory result of random mutations which may or may not remain following successive mutations. Since PZ's knowledge filter (scientific method) is subject to the same limitations as his evolved mind, it is no more trustworthy than his unreliable mind. As committed materialists you can never be sure that knowledge you've gained through your senses is anything more than evolutionary fuzz, be it scientifically tested or not.
Stark materialism traps us within minds of computer code which our central processors will never be able to transcend. Meat robots can never be anything more than meat robots, least of all philosophers.
Posted by: Jake Fraser | May 29, 2009 2:50 PM
The real difficulty you're striking upon here isn't whether or not we can perceive truth, but what such a concept as 'truth' implies and where it originates. The people who ACTUALLY criticize science, those who do philosophy of science and are somewhat respected within an intellectual community (unlike this blowhard) will take an objection with science as designating that 1.) there is a certain transcendental form of truth to be accessed and 2.)that science can achieve it.
This is why Nietzsche calls science the last bastion of religion in our society. Research into the concept of a transcendental signified might be helpful.
http://www.answers.com/topic/transcendental-signified
The difficulty is that without a God, there actually isn't any source for meaning in the world - this is what this Plantinga guy should have gotten at, but didn't, because he's an idiot. It's not consistent to be atheist but still believe in a transcendental morality. I'm not even convinced that such a concept of "God" necessitates a transcendental anything except concept - we can simply choose to ignore morality or not be beholden to it. It would be so much more fun to be an atheist in a world in which a God actually existed - then you aren't just rational, you're a rebel. Anyway, I digress - there is no truth, there's no reason for atheists to behave in one reason or another. This is why the real atheists are the nihilists and the post-structuralists.
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 29, 2009 2:50 PM
There are self-taught prodigies like Ramanujan. Anyway, this view explains transmission but doesn't touch original research. There is no original research except in fields where standards of truth are independent of expert opinion. (That's why there is no original research in theology, btw.)
No it would not. In some cases, a stubborn mathematician of this sort would be well advised to keep his mouth shut and to conceal the truth from his community. And this is why Gauss failed to publish on non-Euclidean geometry.
We now know that he was right and his contemporaries were wrong. And that only makes sense if truth and consensus are not the same.
That's a promissory note, not a theory. To make good on it you'd need to show that all mathematical concepts derive from simplifications of empirical concepts. Since we don't have a working theory of concepts, you and I are stuck at this point. But I put it to you that it's implausible that Hamilton extracted his account of quaternions from bouts of successful cooperation. The same goes for Cantor, Frege, etc.
I'm not arguing that Plantinga is right. I'm saying that certain kinds of human capacities are not explained by satisficing.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 2:50 PM
Jud: "Did you happen to watch the National Spelling Bee finals last night? There is obviously a way to tell whose thoughts are superior with regard to spelling, and it is, I daresay, 'as simple as A, B, C.'"
I agree that we have rational minds capable of discerning truth. The point of Plantinga's argument is that naturalism provides no basis for trusting that our thoughts are rational or that they can conform to external truths. Science - like all truth-seeking enterprises - is possible precisely because the naturalistic view of the mind is, in all likelihood, wrong.
It appears that virtually everyone arguing against Plantinga here has missed the point of his argument. For example, someone characterized Plantinga's argument as an argument against the possibility that science is a valid way of searching for truth about the natural world. That straw man is utterly irrelevant to the argument that Plantinga actually made.
Posted by: AJ Milne | May 29, 2009 2:53 PM
I am always amused by the contention on the part of various apologists for various superstitions that there is somehow, lurking in the heart of materialism and empiricism, some dreadfully naive assumption, repleate with the obvious hubris this would reveal, that human reason is somehow some extraordinary, flawless, perfect tool for the divining of what is real, and what is not...
Nay, my dear pathetic excuses for thinkers, I have never assumed this. I am very well aware I may well have much to learn about a great many things...
It's just that it's just as obvious that if bullshit artists like you were ever to turn out to be right about anything whatsoever, it would have to be largely accidental on your part.
Posted by: Neko-Onna | May 29, 2009 2:54 PM
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 2:56 PM
Those who criticise the scienctific method do not seem to explain why it seems to work so well.
I guess I am pragmatist at heart. If an expalantion of how something works corresponds with reality then I will grant that explanation the status of "truth", always contingent on the possiblity some better explanation may come along. If science does so poorly as explaining, as some maintain, then how come we can use the equations devised by Newton to send probes to other planets in the solar system, and have them arrive within seconds of the predicted times ? In this regard Newtonian physics is true, at least as far as objects on the scale of the solar system are concerned.
Posted by: SC, OM | May 29, 2009 2:58 PM
Rather than using this as a silly comparison, it might help you to think about the effects of actually being drunk. What's being affected by alcohol? Ehat's different about a "drunken mind"? What might this tell you about our sensory and cognitive apparatus and how it has evolved to contend with material reality?
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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May 29, 2009 2:59 PM
Wrong. They can also endlessly fail to read the message about not posting again, thus repeating their insipid nonsense over and over.
Why people not bright enough to follow the simplest instructions think that they will be mistaken for being able to think, leaves me wondering how dumb they must be.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 2:59 PM
And this argument is fallacious because it assumes, and demands, that selection cannot even produce a mild TENDENCY toward better than random correlation between our beliefs and true propositions about the world. To his credit Plantinga is actually quite clear about this- it's why he has to insist on that p = .5 gibberish. It requires only to see how silly THAT is to see that the entire "argument" is risible.
Posted by: CJO | May 29, 2009 3:01 PM
Meat robots can never be anything more than meat robots, least of all philosophers.
Bilge. You're just trying to use the term "meat robots" to poison the well. The question is, what are meat robots capable of? and you haven't even begun to address it. You merely assert that they're incapable of philosophy or of forming true beliefs. It's not at all self-evident.
Posted by: Eric MacDonald | May 29, 2009 3:02 PM
I tend towards the philosophy end of the spectrum, and I have never taken Plantinga seriously. He is simply too weird to be believed, but kudos to you, PZ, for taking him apart limb by limb. Christian "philosophers" have lately taken to using Bayesian probability to support outlandish claims. Even the ones who can do mathematics get it wrong. You're dead right, though. Plantinga has a reputation in philosophy which has lowered the tone. And no, Jim, the point of Plantinga's argument is not, as you say,
He is saying that, without the theistic assumption, there is no reason to think that our empirical beliefs are true, that is, no reason to prefer one belief over another. Of course, our thoughts do not confirm to eternal truths. There are none. There are analytic truths, perhaps, but that is a different thing.
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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May 29, 2009 3:04 PM
OT, but I thought this blurb from evolutionnews.org was more interesting than blithering trolls, so here it is:
Some of us might want to ask a question, assuming they're not censoring them. That's hardly certain.
Glen D
Posted by: Eric MacDonald | May 29, 2009 3:05 PM
I tend towards the philosophy end of the spectrum, and I have never taken Plantinga seriously. He is simply too weird to be believed, but kudos to you, PZ, for taking him apart limb by limb. Christian "philosophers" have lately taken to using Bayesian probability to support outlandish claims. Even the ones who can do mathematics get it wrong. You're dead right, though. Plantinga has a reputation in philosophy which has lowered the tone. And no, Jim, the point of Plantinga's argument is not, as you say,
He is saying that, without the theistic assumption, there is no reason to think that our empirical beliefs are true, that is, no reason to prefer one belief over another. Of course, our thoughts do not confirm to eternal truths. There are none. There are analytic truths, perhaps, but that is a different thing.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 3:06 PM
jim#236,
"The point of Plantinga's argument is that naturalism provides no basis for trusting that our thoughts are rational or that they can conform to external truths."
The trust is earned through repetitive success. Just as the tribe trusts the hunter who has repeated brought home the game, we can trust our thoughts that have formed a coherent model that has predictive success. When the same model that successfully allows us to predict and/or control future inputs of our senses in simple things, is also able to explain our existence, experience and philosophical limitations, it is not very vulnerable to breaking our trust.
So why isn't repetitive success a basis for trust of our thoughts? If our thoughts are unreliable, we may mistakenly trust them anyway. That mistaken trust may not have a basis in naturalism, but that doesn't mean one isn't possible.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 3:08 PM
My view is that “true” as an adjective applied to a particular contingent statement is a convenient short-hand for “the statement is supported by all relevant available empirical evidence”. I think the noun “truth” is worse than useless, and the reification of it as “The Truth®”, beloved of woo-mongers, is really quite stupid.
Posted by: Dave C | May 29, 2009 3:12 PM
Okay, I haven't read Plantinga in any great depth, so my ideas could be wide of the mark. Nevertheless, here is how I approach the argument. When it comes to all possible minds, it seems to be that there is continuous spectrum of truth-finding abilities. On one end, we have a mind that is completely incapable of generating "warranted" beliefs (call this the "pile of rocks" end); on the other end, we have a mind that completely capable of generating perfectly reliable ideas about reality (call this the "god-like" end). I would hope it is safe to assume that human minds lie on neither end of the spectrum, but instead fall somewhere in the middle. I would also contend--and this is probably where Plantinga would disagree--that adaptive processes are able, over time, to mold minds that also fall somewhere on that spectrum. Given that, it seems that if Plantinga's argument is to succeed, he must somehow show that the human mind lies further along the "god-like" end of the spectrum than adaptive processes are able to reach. Has he been able to show this?
Posted by: Eric MacDonald | May 29, 2009 3:13 PM
I tend towards the philosophy end of the spectrum, and I have never taken Plantinga seriously. He is simply too weird to be believed, but kudos to you, PZ, for taking him apart limb by limb. Christian "philosophers" have lately taken to using Bayesian probability to support outlandish claims. Even the ones who can do mathematics get it wrong. You're dead right, though. Plantinga has a reputation in philosophy which has lowered the tone. And no, Jim, the point of Plantinga's argument is not, as you say,
He is saying that, without the theistic assumption, there is no reason to think that our empirical beliefs are true, that is, no reason to prefer one belief over another. Of course, our thoughts do not confirm to eternal truths. There are none. There are analytic truths, perhaps, but that is a different thing.
Posted by: wonderer | May 29, 2009 3:13 PM
Ahh, I see I'm very late to the party.
I haven't begun reading through the huge list of comments here but as Plantinga's EAAN is something I've studied, I'm going to toss in my $0.02 and hope it isn't too redundant.
P.Z. Hit on the key to dismantling Plantinga's argument in his article, and that is human linguistic capability. It is likely the value of communication for members of a social species which lead to our intelligence, and it interpersonal communication combined with inherited cultural information which provides the basis for our capability to reason accurately.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 3:14 PM
If evolution cannot be "trusted" to evolve brains that can understand the world we live, why does Plantinga think that the rest of the human body, or indeed other species should evolve in ways conform with the world they live in. When we look at nature we see organisms that have adapted over billions of years to be able to survive in the type of world they inhabit. We see animals with bodies that are able to withstand the gravity we find on earth. We find plants that place roots into the soil to not only extract nutrients but also provide support from the elements. The environment these organisms have evolved to survive in is the "truth" of the nature of the world they inhabit. It strikes me that evolution is pretty good at understanding "truth".
Posted by: CJO | May 29, 2009 3:20 PM
I'm not arguing that Plantinga is right. I'm saying that certain kinds of human capacities are not explained by satisficing.
Well, it is true that an exceptional ability of the human nervous system not shared to any great degree by other animals is the performance of serial cognitive operations. The fact that we uniquely possess a grammar engine for generating and parsing valid expressions in a discrete, combinatory symbolic system probably has a lot to do with it. Is that what you're getting at?
Posted by: Joe Bleau | May 29, 2009 3:24 PM
Jim @ 236:
You say:
I bolded where the problem is. You (and Plantinga) seem to mean something by "external truths" that most atheists/scientists have no reason to believe in.
Philosophy is the search for TRVTH. Science is a way explain/predict reality. TRVTH (or even truth) != reality.
Posted by: Holbach
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May 29, 2009 3:26 PM
Jim @ 212
Ah, Polkinghorne the religionist who thinks he's a theologian(nothing) posing as a physicist, who means nothing when he says anything, except to his imaginary god.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 3:30 PM
Here I would disagree with you. Certainly I do not think there are external truths, but I would argue that truth (as opposed to TRVTH) is reality. If a scientific theory explains reality well then I see no reason why we cannot call it true, providing we always keep in mind the provisional nature of science and realise that there could be a better explanation as yet undiscovered.
Posted by: Clemens | May 29, 2009 3:30 PM
Plantinga the shorter: "If you don't know exactly where your mom is, there is a fifty-fifty chance she is either at her home or at my place making out with me".
Posted by: Hurin | May 29, 2009 3:31 PM
Reminds me of Dembski, but clearly without the mathematical ability.
But if the existence of information or our ability to use it reliably imply some sort of god, then why is the typical holy book so full of bad, erroneous information?
Posted by: Hurin | May 29, 2009 3:34 PM
Reminds me of Dembski, but clearly without the mathematical ability.
But if the existence of information or our ability to use it reliably imply some sort of god, then why is the typical holy book so full of bad, erroneous information?
Posted by: Slick | May 29, 2009 3:34 PM
Glen, yur not bein fare! I kin reed drections.
Posted by: Slick | May 29, 2009 3:36 PM
Glen, yur not bein fare! I kin reed drections.
Posted by: Alex | May 29, 2009 3:37 PM
"Hmm. It's not a good start when the author is so oblivious to irony that he opens his paper with a name-calling screed in which he lambastes others for writing name-calling screeds."
Where is the name-calling? What the FUCK are you talking about you petty little liar?What the hell are you talking about?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 3:42 PM
Jim #236
"Plantinga's argument is that naturalism provides no basis for trusting that our thoughts are rational or that they can conform to external truths."
WTF!?!
Geez -- ".. naturalism provides NO [my emphasis] basis .." !!!
Holy cow .. what part of "scientists know they cannot trust their senses and conclusions a priori; that is why they make hypotheses and test the living cacca out of them before they submit conclusions to other experts who then work extra hard to falsify their beloved conclusions and steal their thunder" do you see as constituting the least reliable of methods?
What part of scientific naturalism precludes coming up with USEFUL explanations and concepts concerning the real world?
What part of what that bogus antiquated philosopher's ramblings should replace how we launch rockets, develop racetrack computer memory, cure diseases, refine social systems to greater perfection, stay warm, stay fed, etc. presently?
The elegance of an argument speaks nothing to the quality of an argument. Plantinga gives philosophers a bad name because his arguments are useless in the real world to the max - regardless of how presented.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 3:45 PM
Yeah, I worried about what Plantinga thought the "TRUTH" was for about 5 seconds. And then decided that he probably had no idea and would spend 10 pages of bafflegab explaining that. "No I have no idea what I'm talking about."
He really needs to define his terms like truth, belief, naturalism and so on. I suspect if he did, his whole essay would be much shorter and more obviously just words strung together.
>
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 3:47 PM
Early senility is never pretty.
True, but luckily, you'll forget all about it.
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 29, 2009 3:50 PM
That's it exactly.
Now, what needs to be shown is (1) that this capacity for recursion is sufficient to explain our mathematical competence; and (2) exactly how this capacity for recursion is the product of evolution.
(1) is contentious for technical reasons. Basically, it's asking us to believe that mathematics boils down to computation. Unless I'm not seeing something this looks unlikely. (2) has been called hopeless by better thinkers than Plantinga (Wigner for one). God would solve (2) for us nicely but that would be silly. And so we're stuck with the same old standoff: the theist points to some significant lacuna of knowledge -- the naturalist replies that there's a theory that will make it all better just around the corner.
For the record: Plantinga is an scoundrel. But I wish the people on the other side stopped to appreciate the complexity of the task at hand. We might do better research if we let the theists' attacks sink in rather than calling them bilge.
Posted by: Joe Bleau | May 29, 2009 3:53 PM
Matt P @256:
I think that Emmet OM @248 has it right.
'Truth' (and for that matter, 'meaning'), is a property of sentences, not of any 'reality' (external or not). We tend to suppose that propositions that we would like to regard as 'true' have some sort of correspondence with an external reality, but we have no way of knowing this for sure, if by "knowing" we mean some sort of privileged epistemological state of "proof". Philosophy and Religion tend to occupy themselves in figuring out how to reach this privileged state of knowing, whereas many atheists and scientists couldn't possibly care less.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 3:54 PM
What complexity ? Reality just is. If philosophers have trouble coping with that, then it is their problem, not ours. If they construct a philosophical argument that conflicts with reality, then it is they, and not reality, that is wrong.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 3:54 PM
We are meat robots so we know that some meat robots can be very stupid posters like you or bad philosophers like plantinga.
How do you know what meat robots can do or not do? Article in Science, verses from the bible? Or did you just pull a dumb statement like this out of your ass with no data and no proof.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 3:58 PM
Scientists and philosophers don't work on these problems because they're worried about filling a lacuna in philosophical naturalism, they do it because they're interesting, hard problems. So attacks from the likes of Plantinga are merely irrelevant noise.
Posted by: Jud | May 29, 2009 4:01 PM
Jim writes (#236): I agree that we have rational minds capable of discerning truth. The point of Plantinga's argument is that naturalism provides no basis for trusting that our thoughts are rational or that they can conform to external truths.
Which is precisely the point on which I must disagree with Plantinga. It is trivially easy to show that "naturalism," a/k/a scientific methodology, can indeed provide such a basis. For example, I say that "The good lookin' fat man" has double-posted at #229 and #233, and I assume you will easily be able to confirm for yourself that my thought in that regard does indeed correspond to a "truth" external to me.
Of course, you might say the only reason I am able to do this is because of God, which brings me to your second point:
Science - like all truth-seeking enterprises - is possible precisely because the naturalistic view of the mind is, in all likelihood, wrong.
This formulation is rather problematic. Science is possible because the view of the mind that science has produced is incorrect - i.e., science is possible only if it is wrong?
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 29, 2009 4:03 PM
@268: Matt, you're exceptionally good at skipping all the hard stuff in posts you go after and then saying something facile. Try rereading the rest of the post slowly. Look up words and names you're not familiar with. Once you get it, ask yourself again that question: what complexity? And then, once you have an axiomatization of ZF set theory in terms of recursive functions to share with us, as well as an explanation how those very functions were selected for in us but not in bonobos, please get back to us.
Posted by: Alex Deam
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May 29, 2009 4:04 PM
What would have better to say here PZ, is that even if we are just "brains in vats", the only way we would "find that out" is empirical research. So we should just continue doing science!
Plus, if reality isn't what I/we think it is, then that also means there's no Bible and no Jesus. Plantinga still fails.
One other point: on the 50% thing, another fallacy is that he assumed that our beliefs are all independent. They're almost certainly not. For instance, if now my belief is that I'm holding my keys in my right hand, and later on my belief is that I'm holding an apple in that same hand, then it's very likely that if I was right the first time, then I'll be right the second time. Our beliefs are not independent.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 4:06 PM
Anonymous: "...why isn't repetitive success a basis for trust of our thoughts?"
Because - on a naturalistic view of the mind - the very thoughts that tell us we've achieved "repetitive success" are themselves nothing more than mental "secretions" of our brains induced by electro-chemical neural activity beyond our conscious control. If naturalism is true, rationality (i.e., the possession of reason and understanding) is at best an illusion foisted off on us by electro-chemical activity in our brains (the same is true of our sense that we exercise free will). That illusion may give us some reproductive advantage favored and perpetuated by natural selection, but naturalism gives us no basis for trusting that it is anything other than an illusion. The uncompromising naturalism of his theory caused Darwin himself to doubt human rationality. "With me," he wrote to a friend, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"
Posted by: Susannah | May 29, 2009 4:07 PM
And that's where his whole reasoning fails. But for a Christian, reliable knowledge is axiomatic; we must have Truth, certain, infallible, divinely inspired Truth to begin with, as well as the God-given ability to Understand and Believe this Truth.
The belief in the all-knowing, wise Heavenly Father is built on an unstated assumption of the infallible Self.
Posted by: Brain Hertz | May 29, 2009 4:09 PM
But your argument appearing here cannot possibly be superior to mine, unless you reject the reductionist-naturalist-electrical-engineer position that the words appearing on the web page are represented by mere soul-less transistors switching on and off.
Or you could consider the emergent properties of a large set of simple things.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 4:11 PM
Look, science just plain works. That you, and Plantinga et al cannot explain how in philisophical terms is your problem, not mine. Philosophy does not help much in working out how to deal with the parasite that causes malaria evolving resistance to the newest drugs. Science does. It not only allows us to develop new drugs, it also explains why we should expect such resistance to develop.
When you can explain how something that some (not all, not everyone is a stupid as you) philosophers claim does not work manages to to work so well come back to us. In the meantime I suggest you keep your gob shut so we do not realise quite how intellectually vacuous you are.
It will make is a simple as I can for you. Evolution happens. Therefore anyone claiming there are philosophical grounds for saying it does not must be wrong. More generally science works, therefore claims it does not are also wrong. There may well be arguments to be had over the philosophical basis for why science works, but they not alter the reality of the fact it does.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 29, 2009 4:11 PM
Anonymous #183
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 4:12 PM
Jim, the Deceitful Demon argument has never gotten anyone, including its inventor Descartes, non-fallaciously past universal skepticism. None of the moves to rebuild a foundation for knowledge beyond that zero point, from Descartes to Plantinga, hold water. If you want to remain stuck there, more power to you. The rest of us will simply proceed on non-insane assumptions, beginning with the assumption that adopting universal skepticism is a stunningly non-productive philosophical move.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 29, 2009 4:15 PM
Damn, the link in my post #278 isn't obvious.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 4:18 PM
Jud: "It is trivially easy to show that 'naturalism,' a/k/a scientific methodology, can indeed provide such a basis."
The naturalism Plantinga is discussing is a philosophical worldview, not scientific methodology. It's the view that all phenomena can be explained by natural laws and forces. It's a philosophical assumption, not a proveable statement about reality.
I think you've missed the point of Plantinga's argument.
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 4:18 PM
And then, once you have an axiomatization of ZF set theory in terms of recursive functions to share with us, as well as an explanation how those very functions were selected for in us but not in bonobos, please get back to us.
Well, let's start with a workable definition of what you consider "recursive functions" and "selected for".
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 4:19 PM
Jim just proves the statement that philosophy without evidence is sophistry. And he has no evidence.
Posted by: Joe Bleau | May 29, 2009 4:20 PM
Jim, why should 'trustworthy' mean anything other than 'tends to produce really good results' or maybe 'seems to correspond pretty darn well with reality'?
Why does the end result of rationality have to be some logically (in the Boolean sense) incontrovertible, transcendentally unassailable state of knowing?
Isn't it enough that our forbears decisively won the battle to occupy the tippy top of the food chain? Why do you assume that there is something transcendent that humans can not only strive for, but reach, that, say, a shrimp can't?
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 4:20 PM
Analogy fails. Let's analyze. You assert that a drunkard cannot be sure of his own judgments (by the way, Firefox has built in spell check). I assume this mean that he cannot trust his judgments to the same degree that a sober man can? If all entities were always drunk, perhaps they could not trust their judgments, but how would they know this? What basis of comparison is there other than a sober person?
Likewise, perhaps our judgments are not valid even when we are sober. But compared to what? You're implicitly assuming, as does Jim and Plantinga himself, that there is some point of view from which objective Truth can be verified. But why must this be so? What is truth in the first place?
You have hamstrung your own argument here. The drunk man's judgment can be shown to be in error relative to a sober man's judgment. A sober man's judgment can be shown to be in error relative the judgment of other men. What other basis of comparison is there?
You're assuming that the two are mutually exclusive which they aren't, but I'll ignore that for now. Scientists have worried about this but don't worry about it any longer because they know it's not really a problem.
Instead of assuming that there is such a thing as the real world and that there is objective Truth there to investigate, let's normalize science to a new context. Science is no longer a study of the natural world; it is now a study of the perceptions of individuals. Individuals perceive things and the question is why and what are the nature of those perceptions.
Our first scientific hypothesis is that there is a real world, and that the properties of that real world are what's true. We arrive at this hypothesis by reasoning as follows: I have a will and by exercising that will I can affect my perceptions (apparently through the intermediary of the body). However, my will does not control my perceptions -- my perceptions are constrained by some entity beyond my will. By conversing with others, I learn that the experiences of others correspond very closely to mine, and furthermore that the constraints that are outside my will are similar to the constraints on others' wills to an astonishing degree of fidelity. The simplest explanation for this state of affairs is that there is, indeed, a physical, material world in which we all live; that this world has persistent properties that are consistent no matter the properties of the observer (although those affect the properties of the observations, they do not seem to greatly affect the nature of the object of the observations itself).
One objection I can think of to this hypothesis is that perhaps the perceptions of all individuals are skewed from reality in consistent ways, such that they're all wrong, but they're all wrong for the same reason. But then, what does it mean to be wrong in this context? Again, there is no basis for comparison. But more importantly, there is no need for one -- a model of the world is true insofar as it is useful. Consider the qualia inversion problem. I claim that it is true that the sky is blue. A friend agrees, but unknown to both of us, each of us perceives blue a different way. My blue is his green and vice versa (although he calls my green blue, so that when we talk about colors we still agree). Is my friend wrong that the sky is blue (when what he sees is green)? or am I wrong that the sky is blue, since I am seeing what my friend calls green?
I would say that neither person is correct. Light traveling through the atmosphere is diffracted by an amount that is a function of their frequency. High frequency visible light is thus diffracted to a greater degree than the other frequencies of visible light, and thus the sky appears blue.
We see here that although my friend and I have mutually inconsistent internal perceptions, the outcomes of the perceptions are mutually consistent. Furthermore, by investigating the consistency that we find, we can find the source of that consistency -- the limited band of frequencies that correspond to the color blue and the impact of photons of those frequencies in the chemical dyes in our eyes. This hypothesis -- that the sensation of blue corresponds to photons of certain frequencies impinging on one's retinae -- explains the consistencies of color experience for both my friend and myself individually and explains why we can agree on what the color blue is even though our internal perceptions of that color are different. Furthermore, presumably we cleverly devised laboratory equipment to do our research into electromagnetic waves; our hypothesis about the nature of blue light is now consistent with the experience of two human beings and a piece of experimental apparatus.
Now what you guys seem to be saying is that since we cannot trust our perceptions, we cannot trust our conclusions about color and frequency of photons. However, we can still be sure that we experience color -- that experience is irreducible. Furthermore, we have to ask why other people have color vision consistent with our own (even peoples with only two color words can discriminate shades of color as well as citizens of industrial nations). The frequency interpretation of color reconciles all these facts.
Compare with the hypothesis, "God made the sky blue." This may explain myperception of the sky being blue, but it doesn't explain why that experience is consistent moment to moment or why it's consistent person to person without assuming that was the motive of this God entity. Note that we also have to posit the existence of a God entity in the first place, which wasn't necessary in the frequency interpretation.
The frequency interpretation of the color of light is in turn based on results from CED, QED, and relativity and is consistent with all those results. It is further corroborated by our application of these principles in engineering. Unlike the God hypothesis, it allows us to make predictions about the result of experiments involving color perception and the frequency of photons, which as far as I'm concerned pretty much puts the nail in the coffin. If my beliefs consistently predict future events in the real world (at, say, a better than 50% rate), then my beliefs must correspond in some strong way to the way the real world actually is. And even if they don't, how could anyone tell?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 4:22 PM
One wonders how the likes of Jim manage to get out of bed in the morning. It must take him an age to arrive at the philosophical conclusion that not only does a bed exist (as a philosphical construct) but also there is a specific instance of a bed that he is in. This is before he goes on to work out what "out" means when it comes to bed, and what the basis is for thinking that "out" is anything more than a product of his imagination.
Meanwhile the rest of us just throw back the duvet and place both feet on the floor with varying degrees of reluctance having decided that since there was bed on previous days, and there was an "out" to go into when got out of it then there is no reason to suppose it will be any different today. And besides, all that thinking is too hard before the first cup of tea/coffee.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 4:24 PM
Please define “function” without using set theory.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 4:26 PM
It is an assumption that seem to have taken us a remarkably long way. That alone is reasonable grounds for accepting it is true. Of course it is not proved to be true, anymore than it is proved that the Earth orbits the Sun, or all life on Earth share common ancestory. Science treats all knowledge as tentative. Nothing can be known for certain.
It is telling that you do understand this point.
Posted by: JBlilie | May 29, 2009 4:27 PM
@105:
"we're only approximating reality in a way that's useful."
Nice, succinct definition of our cognitive system: Senses, brain, consciousness. No one who has seriously considered it (let alone looked at the data) would contend that what we perceive as conscious reality is accurate. It's merely useful. Our models of reality are frequently caught being wrong and we shake our head, look/listen/whatever again and catch the correct approximation (optical illusions, etc.)
The conclusion that some magical critter gave us brains that can detect "truth" accurately is just nonsense on its face.
We have brains that produce a useful model of the world around us. Full-stop. There's no "why" involved. There's no "who" involved (aside from our long line of progenitors.)
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 4:28 PM
Jim: others have covered points re: your statements and the others in your camp. They have better presentations then I.
But I'll give my bottom-line again: Plantinga gives philosophers a bad name because his arguments are useless in the real world to the max - regardless of how presented.
The degree of uncertainty your/Plantinga's "philosophy" injects into understanding real world problems makes thinking and acting a dead-end activity. I mean why bother.
To me - I'll speak for myself and be blunt - you (general you) have to be insanely delusional or a god apologist grasping at straws - a purveyor of obfuscation - to even propose this worthless piece of antiquated mental gymnastics.
As Steve in 279 said: ".. adopting universal skepticism is a stunningly non-productive philosophical move."
Posted by: steve | May 29, 2009 4:40 PM
Pretty sure you can define naturalism with out reference to an invisible sky fairy. Why accept a negative definition? A quick visit to wikipedia and we get Naturalism is a philosophical position that all phenomena can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws.
Much better.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 4:43 PM
Matt: "One wonders how the likes of Jim manage to get out of bed in the morning."
Easy. Because I think naturalism is a false view of reality, I have no trouble trusting that my thoughts - such as the thought that my bed exists - can be rational (i.e. possessing reason and understanding) and valid. You, on the other hand, have no doubt that your bed exists, but you subscribe to a worldview (naturalism) that provides no basis for trusting that what you think about your bed is true. You argue for the truthfulness of naturalism, but you conduct your mental activity as if it isn't true. If it were true, there would be no "you" engaged in any mental activity; that mental activity would instead be nothing more than electro-chemical neural activity induced by material causes, all of which are irrational (i.e., lacking reason and understanding).
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 29, 2009 4:46 PM
@287: You have my point exactly.
Recall this:
Computational neuroscience is getting closer to explaining how the human nervous system performs serial cognitive operations. Let's be optimistic and say that we will soon have a working account of how arbitrarily complex recursive functions are implemented in brainware.
... and then we come to *your* question.
If ZFC describes a set of facts about the world (and many mathematicians think it does) then, unless set theory reduces to recursive functions, at that point we'll still be short of a naturalistic explanation of at least one phenomenon: the existence and abiding utility of human mathematical research. If you opt for formalism instead then you have the issues I pointed to earlier to deal with. I'm not saying I have the answers -- but it's not simple stuff.
(As an aside: there are those who think that sets of ordered pairs can stand in for functions but are not themselves functions per se. You can define a function independently of set theory by taking mappings as fundamental. See Goldblatt's Topoi for instance.)
Saying that 'science works' is no reply. That's like saying to someone back in 1750: "shut up! Newton's Principia works and so stop worrying about loadstones and amber and lightning and stuff." It's just pig ignorant and wholly unscientific.
And now I'll shut my vacuous gob just as the vulgar Mr. Penfold suggests.
Posted by: The Barefoot Bum | May 29, 2009 4:48 PM
Having read quite a bit of contemporary philosophy, it is sadly true that professional and academic philosophers seem generally innumerate and oblivious to irony.
Unfortunately, Plantinga is not the only offender; 99% of philosophers give the other 1% a bad name, and Plantinga doesn't really stand out of the crowd.
And you have, I think, missed the point of Plantinga's critique of naturalism; your rebuttal does not address Plantinga's fundamental point, that truth and adaptive functionality are essentially distinct. You're in good company though: Stephen Law makes a similar mistake.
Plantinga is, of course, completely wrong, but I think he's wrong in a somewhat more philosophically interesting way than you believe him to be.
Posted by: JBlilie | May 29, 2009 4:48 PM
I assert that there's no such thing as "absolute truth." (Just as there's no such thing as a god -- that does fit nicely.)
Even if there were such a thing, we could not know it. Because our brains are evolved to produce only a useful model of reality (not a true one) and our measurement devices all involve error.
Maybe I'm just saying that ranting on about our being unable to disprove solipsism isn't very useful (universal skepticism isn't a very useful stance.)
You scientists can't prove reality is out there: Therefore God exists and he is Jebus and I know what he wants. Not exactly logical thinking.
Philosophers may fancy themeselves interested in "truth" while we scientists and engineers are only interested in what is useful. Any wonder about who gets more done?
Reminds me of the engineering student asking a question during an exam, "Can we assume zero friction in the bearings?" and the prof answers, "no, all the zero friction bearings are kept in the physics department." (Or in the philosophy department.)
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 29, 2009 4:49 PM
Jim #281
You're misreading Plantinga, since he's not a sophist and the worldview you're describing is mere sophistry.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 4:49 PM
Jim may trust his thoughts, but he has no logical basis whatsoever for doing so. Darwinian epistemology may, or may not, be a faulty explanation for why we can (somewhat, sometimes, with careful intersubjective checking) trust our thoughts, but at least it's an attempt at an explanation. Jim has no explanation at all, just blind faith and gobbledeygook.
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 4:53 PM
Regarding the Devious Demon,
1) Assume Demon
2) Assume No Demon
3) Note that there is no practical difference to yourself, aside from the truth value of Demon vs. no Demon.
4) Note that it is, at this point, impossible to determine whether (1) or (2) is correct.
5) Ignore (1) vs. (2) until such time as they can be tested.
6) Voila - you're out of the ditch.
Alternatively,
1) Assume Demon
2) Assume No Demon
3) Establish those axioms that must be common between (1) and (2)
4) Voila - you're out of the ditch.
Or even*
1) Assume P = ¬P
2) There is no difference between 'Assume Demon' and 'Assume No Demon' - nor anything else. This is unusable, and easily established as not true in at least some cases.
3) Assume P =/= ¬P
4) Voila - you're out of the ditch.
*Ok, this last one would obviously take a lot more work than stated, but it's a potentially viable path to go down.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 4:53 PM
Jim said:
Other than past experience, the bed was there yesterday, and day before ...., and the experience of others, in that they could get into the bed with me. I have an understanding of the general concept of a bed, and I am aware that what I call my bed accords with that concept. Further other people have a concept of a bed that seems to be pretty much identical to mine, and some of those who have seen my bed do not seem to think my bed is in anyway different from their concept. Tht is why my "belief" that my bed exists is rational.
You do not allow yourself the benefit of either your previous experience, or the experience of others. Your position is simply solopsism. You cannot think a bed exists becuase you have no grounds for accepting anything at all exists.
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 4:58 PM
Jim #274 wrote:
In addition to what others have pointed out, I think there's another problem with this. In order to argue for the impossibility of reason on 'materialist reductionism,' Jim's invoking a straw-man version called "greedy reductionism" -- the belief that everything must be explainable at the level of the constituents that make it up. If thoughts are the result of neural activity, then they are "nothing more" than neural activity, and therefore you're not allowed to say anything about a thought, that you couldn't say about a neuron. Thus, the emphasis on 'electro-chemical activity' and "meat robots can never be anything more than meat robots."
Reason, evidently, ought to be made out of Reason. That's the only legitimate way to talk about it coherently. Like comes from like. Electro-chemical activity cannot produce thoughts, because that would make thoughts nothing more than electro-chemicals, and they neither think, nor reason.
Once again, it's either/or with extremes, and an inability to understand a bottom-up process.
Posted by: Tom Morris | May 29, 2009 4:58 PM
Yay. The standard selective anti-philosophical stuff is going on, and it's irritating me. The problem is that the philosophers who say sensible stuff don't get written up on blogs for saying absurd things. And so we get things like people saying that Plantinga's argument here is representative of all philosophy.
The fact is, you won't read the works of most contemporary philosophers. They are long, quite dense and technical and well hidden (the stuff with all the funny symbols doesn't get put on display in Borders Books).
One can sit and read a whole issue of Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society or Noûs and one won't encounter this kind of thing. Plantinga's article is in Christianity Today which doesn't know an existential quantifier from a magic Jesus cracker.
Rorty had it about right when he said "Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used."
Plantinga gets attention because he is pushing - for religious reasons, of course - some profoundly broken thinking. But we don't dismiss all biochemists on the basis of Michael Behe. We don't dismiss all historians on the basis of the idiots who write those right-wing "the Founding Fathers were all Pentecostal evangelical snake handlers, praise Jeeeezus!" books they hawk to dittoheads. Philip Johnson doesn't invalidate the work of all legal academics. For every Alvin Plantinga, there's a hundred other epistemologists doing well-reasoned sterling work in obscure journals. What the hell have they done wrong to be caught in this dragnet?
What pisses me off more is that everyone's perfectly happy to rag on philosophers, but then Kitzmiller happens and out trots Rob Pennock and Barbara Forrest to help save the day from the forces of stupid (hell yeah). Philosophers give for the most part, as the kids say, mad props to science (except a few wooly postmodernist twaddle-pushers, cranks and guru wannabes). Some love back would be nice. Right, I'll piss off back to my armchair.
Posted by: Slick | May 29, 2009 4:58 PM
So Plantinga is a “pretentious clown” (Myers), “senile” (#14), a “kind old pawpaw” (#18), “philosophical idiot” (#51), and “a kook” (#71).
If his argument weren’t so obviously “ludicrous,” (Myers) “stupid,” (Myers), an “indigestible muddled mess” (Myers), “confused” (Myers), “muddled lunacy” (Myers), “Very Very Stupid” (apparently, #3 has discovered a Platonic Form), “pulled directly from his ass” (#28), “utterly worthless” (#29), “bad in so many ways, its ridiculous” (#44), “incomprehensible” (#45), “left me giggling helplessly” (#45), “misaligned illogical thinking” (#56), “completely wrong” (#65), and “demonstrably wrong by even the armchair philosopher” (#90), one might wonder why all the fuss.
Shucks, don’t you people have anything important to talk about?
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 4:59 PM
In practice he ignores it because it is meaningless, irrelevant BS.
Typical morning. Get up. Spend 10 minutes deciding if the world is real or just that I think it is real. Go make a cup of coffee. Wonder whether coffee is real and will cause alertness for 15 minutes. Stick it in the microwave. Wonder if microwave ovens, as a product of fallible human minds even exist much less works. Turns on microwave. It runs. Or maybe I just think it runs. Drinks coffee. Decides the human mind and senses are an unreliable way to discern the truth of the world. Since there are no alternatives, spends the rest of the day in a catatonic trance.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 5:00 PM
It is a philosophical assumption that there is such a thing as provable statements about reality. It is itself not a provable statement. Guess you can't do philosophy any more, Jim.
Another problem you guys have is that you completely gloss over philosophical theories about mind, epistemology, etc. For instance, what does it mean for a statement to be "about" reality? In my opinion, statements such as "the cow is grazing" are actually about mental representations, in which case they are always trivially true even when the representation of a cow is really the result of seeing a horse on a dark night.
So the statement escapes (in a CS sense) to being something more like, "I perceive that the cow is grazing." The extent to which that perception is consistent with other empirical results (ask your friend, devise an experiment, etc) is the degree to which the original statement (cow is grazing) is true.
By the way, Firefox has built in spell check.
Posted by: Tiger | May 29, 2009 5:02 PM
So his argument boils down to the idea that his god gave us all perfect minds, therefore whatever we believe is true?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 5:04 PM
Jim:
Your homework assignment - Please describe the big difference between dogs and wolves and how it exemplifies (or does not) natural selection driven shifts toward higher plane mental activity.
Hint: empathy.
Additional hint: "You argue for the truthfulness of naturalism, but you conduct your mental activity as if it isn't true." I took your point as reactions to stimuli == lack of reason and understanding.
I'm not playing you Jim. I grant my assignment is not well formed as a PZ might form it. But I bet a lot here get what I am driving at very quickly.
Posted by: Harry Varty | May 29, 2009 5:05 PM
I struggle to understand why otherwise intelligent people believe in the supernatural. However, if ‘brains are reliable therefore goddidit’ is their best effort then I am not about to have a Damascene conversion.
Plantinga admits that there is no evidence for God so he has dressed up a hopeless argument with some long words to make it look like a good reason for believing in God. Still twitching but no pulse.
Are these the convoluted hoops that believers have to go through to justify their belief in a supernatural being? No wonder they are running scared of atheists and their straightforward, logical, intelligble arguments.
Posted by: Tom Morris | May 29, 2009 5:05 PM
It's pretty fucking simple: we do it for the lulz.
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 5:07 PM
Onto the more general matter:
1) Assume your rationality is perfect
2) Assume everyone else's rationality is perfect
3) Note schizophrenia
4) Note that there are many other obvious instances - mental disorders or otherwise - where rationality is flawed.
5) Note that to people of respectable sanity can come to remarkably different conclusions from the same data (eg, Phlogiston).
6) Thus, everyone else's rationality is NOT perfect.
7) Therefore, either you are the only perfectly rational human is, or you are not perfectly rational
8) Either way, those other non-perfectly rational people seem to come up with an awful lot of stuff that your possibly perfectly rational self believes to be true, without your input.
9) Therefore, Plantinga's wrong.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:07 PM
Posted by: Physis | May 29, 2009 5:10 PM
Plantinga isn't the only muddle-headed philosopher at Notre Dame; as an undergraduate I almost choked on my pot noodle to read van Inwagen (an otherwise competent metaphysician) claim that Michael Denton's 'Evolution - A Theory in Crisis' was a balanced read on the topic. Again, most philosophers aren't this foolish, but sadly a minority are.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 29, 2009 5:12 PM
Don't you have anything more important to talk about than pearl clutching whinging about those mean and nasty words?
Posted by: Physis | May 29, 2009 5:13 PM
Plantinga isn't the only muddle-headed philosopher at Notre Dame; as an undergraduate I almost choked on my pot noodle to read van Inwagen (an otherwise competent metaphysician) claim that Michael Denton's 'Evolution - A Theory in Crisis' was a balanced read on the topic. Again, most philosophers aren't this foolish, but sadly a minority are.
Posted by: Tom Morris | May 29, 2009 5:16 PM
Physis: now, that is curious. I knew Peter van Inwagen was a theist, but I had no clue he was into Michael Denton and, presumably, intelligent design or some variant thereof. That is quite sad indeed. I don't think I'll be able to read a van Inwagen paper in quite the same way anymore.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:16 PM
Philosophers who say sensible things do get written up in blogs for saying sensible things though, at least around Scienceblogs they do. PZ has written about Janet Stemwedel, John Wilkins, AC Grayling, Dan Dennet and others. He might not always have agreed with them, but has conceeded their arguments are not without merit.
I suspect that is becuase life is too short. People here tend to have a scientific mindset, and whilst what Philosophers have to say about the mind might be interesting, what the nueuro guys have to say is more imporant.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 5:19 PM
Jim @ #236
Naturalism may not give us any basis for that trusting our thoughts are rational, but neither does supernaturalism. Supernatural entities could be tricksters which endow us with flawed minds. You have no rational argument to the contrary, only faith, and that's by definition a losing argument. Faith in "benevolent magic" is not a suitable explanation for why things are the way they are, Jim. Your arguments are worse than pathetic. Seriously, do you not listen to yourself?Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 5:23 PM
Jim: "You, on the other hand, have no doubt that your bed exists, but you subscribe to a worldview (naturalism) that provides no basis for trusting that what you think about your bed is true."
Matt: "Other than past experience, the bed was there yesterday, and day before ...., and the experience of others, in that they could get into the bed with me. I have an understanding of the general concept of a bed, and I am aware that what I call my bed accords with that concept. Further other people have a concept of a bed that seems to be pretty much identical to mine, and some of those who have seen my bed do not seem to think my bed is in anyway different from their concept. Tht is why my 'belief' that my bed exists is rational."
On a naturalistic view of the mind, every thought you've mentioned - from the thought that you've previously experienced your bed to the general concept of a bed (and so on) - is nothing more than an electro-chemical neural event in your brain. For all you know, that neural event, which - on a naturalistic view of the mind - must be the product of irrational material causes, may not correspond to reality. What you describe as your previous experience of your bed may be an illusion. You think that your bed was there the day before, but - if naturalism is true - that thought is not something you consciously produced; it is instead simply an electro-chemical neural event occurring in your brain, and there's no reason to suppose that the irrational material causes giving rise to that neural event make it conform to reality.
By the way, solipsism is perhaps the least apt description of my position. I believe that reality exists outside of our minds, but I don't think that naturalism provides any assurance that our thoughts can correspond to reality. I think we simply have to take our rationality as a given, something that naturalism doesn't empower us to do. If, on the other hand, we subscribe to a worldview (such as theism) that allows us to think that our mental activity can transcend natural forces and laws, then we can assume that our thoughts can be rational and valid.
JBlilie: "I assert that there's no such thing as 'absolute truth.'"
Is that true?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:26 PM
Naturalism itself does not give us any reason for supposing our thoughts are rational, but employing naturalism in the form of the scientific method does. We we try to explain phenonoma using naturalism we come up with theories that explain not only prior observations but also have a predictive capability in that they are consistant with observations may after the theory was formulated. Supernaturalism, in the form of religion, just seems to be "goddidit", with no means of formulating the means by which "goddidit" and with no predictive powers on what god may do next.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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May 29, 2009 5:26 PM
I am not anti-philosophy. I think philosophy is a very useful (some philosophers would dislike that descriptor, I think) discipline for thinking about thinking. I certainly don't intend to bash all philosophers — that's why this post has the title it does.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 5:26 PM
No, theism does not allow you to think that your thoughts can be rational and valid. That's a baseless assertion. Pure fail.Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:31 PM
Not only in my mind on a particular instance, but in my mind over a period of time. Also in the minds of others, again not just on one instance, but repeatedly over time.
Other than the fact it works you mean ? Science explains things, invoking god does not. Saying "godditit" can be used to explain anything, and thus it explains nothing. If naturalism is so poor way of understanding the world, can you explain why it is so succesful ?
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 5:35 PM
Also, and this might be hard for some of y'all to follow without the right background knowledge*,
1) Note that bacteria exist without rationality
2) Thus, rationality is not required for existence and reproduction
3) Note that organisms which better react to/predict/manipulate their external environment may succeed better.
4) Note that a plastic system can react to/predict/manipulate more environments than a roughly equally-sized hard-coded system
5) Note that a plastic system can be easily constructed via a few simple pattern recognition, response, and conditioning routines.
6) Note that those routines are NOT required for survival and reproduction.
7) Thus, a hard-coded or non-coded system can develop a plastic component without necessarily losing fitness
8) Thus, a system with a plastic component may be better off than one without
9) Note that more plastic components may also increase fitness
10) Note that in order to be effective and increase fitness, the plastic components must be able to represent the external environment accurately
11) Note that (10) is only true in-so-far-as the affect the ability of the organism to live and reproduce
12) Note that the system is still deterministic
13) Note that the system does not require anything other than good fortune and selection to develop
14) Thus, the existence of some forms of rationality require no prior rationality.
15) Therefore Plantinga is wrong.
*Yes, I'm taking a lot of short-cuts. Full proofs are left as exercises for the readers. It helps to be familiar with biology, emergent systems, and several other areas not obviously related.
Posted by: Tom Morris | May 29, 2009 5:37 PM
PZ: Sure, I know you weren't. It's some of the overeager folks in the peanut gallery. I see a fair bit of it elsewhere too: people saying things like "philosophy is a load of cobblers" then going on to praise Dan Dennett and AC Grayling, then somehow claiming that because they don't fit their broken understanding of philosophy, that they aren't philosophers.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 5:38 PM
H.H.: "Your arguments are worse than pathetic. Seriously, do you not listen to yourself?"
I do, but I don't take seriously the things said by people who resort to adjectives rather than argument.
By the way, before I begin to ignore you altogether, I should mention that I don't believe in "benevolent magic," but I do believe that intelligence, not matter, is the ultimate reality. Thus, I have cause to think that our minds are capable of reason and understanding. As Sastra wrote: "Reason, evidently, ought to be made out of Reason. That's the only legitimate way to talk about it coherently. Like comes from like."
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 29, 2009 5:39 PM
Sorry, no. The "God" who is supposedly guaranteeing your rationality could, for all you know, actually be the deceitful demon, guaranteeing that your thoughts are 100% INcorrect. You will never find valid grounds for knowing which it is.
There is no way out of this. The reason why so much of the history of Western philosophy from the time of Descartes to the 20th century consists of attempts to improve on the arguments of Descartes, is that philosophers could see that Descartes had not actually succeeded in getting out of the trap, but mistakenly believed that his strategy- starting from the position that all our perceptions MIGHT be false, then trying to find some bit of bedrock on which one could stand in the swamp- was a useful way to do philosophy. Sadly, it isn't.
And universal skepticism is in fact closely related to solipsism. Both are logical traps- once you argue your way into one of them, there is neither any argument nor any possible observation that can validly get you out again. Any argument attempting to proceed from the supposed possibility that we could be wrong about absolutely everything can safely be ignored.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 5:40 PM
OK, can you point to an example in Goldblatt where the arrows of a category are termed “functions”, but the objects are not sets? I'm not a CT-ist, but since I happen to have a copy of Goldblatt handy and a quick scan doesn't reveal any, I thought I'd ask.
Posted by: Kingasaurus | May 29, 2009 5:41 PM
No, theism does not allow you to think that your thoughts can be rational and valid. That's a baseless assertion. Pure fail.
Correct. It presumes that this "god" makes our minds "rational and valid." Apparently justified by "because I say so," I guess.
Since "god" is a wild card who can do absolutely anything he wants to because of inscrutable motives, there's no basis for claiming that "a god exists" leads to any conclusions at all about our minds or how they work (or don't work). Jim's just making shit up.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:41 PM
If I have Jim right he think that a naturalistic world view means you cannot come to any understanding or conclusions becuase our minds cannot be trusted to understand reality correctly.
If he was talking about one person at one particular instance he would be correct. However he would have us believe that not only do we not grasp reality, there is an overwhelming consensus of our wrong grasp of reality in many areas. Further he seems to claim that any utility of our wrong understanding of reality is a figment of our imaginations. Thus it would seem not only do we have no basis for the germ theory of disease, we are also mistaken in thinking it has proven useful in allowing us to implement policies that reduce the burden of disease. I guess eradicating smallpox did not actually happen.
Posted by: CJO | May 29, 2009 5:43 PM
exactly how this capacity for recursion is the product of evolution.
Yes, that's tricky, but hardly hopeless. First, it may be that precursor structures to the dedicated left-hemisphere structures responsible for linguistic processing arose as motor-cortex adaptations to complicated serial tasks like tool making and efficient rock or spear throwing.
In parallel with this evolution could have been the enhancement of short-term memory, attention, and rudimentary serial cognition under selection pressure for navigation, cooperative hunting, knowing where certain foods could be found in certain seasons, etc. Out of this could have arisen a rudimentary "marker" system, sort of a proto-ideolect.
Now, the primary function of the structures in their derived forms is they enable communication with conspecifics, and we haven't even gotten to social interactions yet. But co-opt the above into a communication regime of increasingly discrete and complex signs comprising facial expressions and gesture (inextricable from ordinary speech even in modern humans --watch someone talk on the phone sometime) and take account of what must have been extreme selection pressure for status in the early H. sapiens social environment. I don't think we're that far from a Chomskian engine, do you?
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:44 PM
Got some evidence or is that just a baseless assertion ?
Posted by: Olorin | May 29, 2009 5:45 PM
There are basically two ways to attack an argument: It’s structure is wrong (it is invalid), or its premises are wrong (it is unsound). PZ’s post and the comments attack the soundness.
Suppose, arguendo, that Plantinga’s premises are true. Seems to me the argument is still logically invalid. He has conflated “false” with “maladaptive” in getting to “unreliable.” P’s example of the frog who, instead of a “true” belief that the fly is good to eat, grabs the fly because he thinks it is a princess who will solve all his problems. Whether true or false, the belief produces an adaptive result.
But his example of the lions jumps the rails: Here, P supposes that the humanoid’s true belief is that the llion will eat him, and that the false belief is that the lion is just a big cuddly cat. Unlike the frog, this belief causes a maladaptive behavior is it is false. A relevant false belief might be that God will smite him severely if he does not escape from the lion. In this case, like that of the frog, the false belief still produces adaptive behavior.
However, this change nullifies the logic of P’s conclusion that beliefs can’t be both false and adaptive. In that case, reliability (i.e., “Truth”) is irrelevant to evolution. I can logically believe in materialistic evolution or I can believe in creationism, and, either belief could possibly be adaptive. Which is, I think, where Plantinga started before he took a turn into the ditch..
(This is not to say that :P’s premises are correct. For example, his probabilities are nothing more than Pascal’s Wager, which has been refuted ad nauseam.)
Posted by: Alex | May 29, 2009 5:45 PM
The question is whether our being the result of evolution affects the likelihood of our cognitive faculties being reliable in discovering scientific fact.
Assuming our cognitive faculties are unlikely to be reliable in discovering scientific fact, any conclusion drawn from the truth of evolution is unlikely to be reliable, as we had to use these unlikely to be reliable cognitive faculties to conclude evolution is scientific fact.
Conversely, assuming our cognitive faculties are reliable in discovering scientific fact and we discover evolution is a scientific fact through these reliable cognitive faculties, but we reason from evolution to the conclusion that our cognitive faculties aren't reliable, then our reasoning from evolution was wrong. Otherwise, evolution must be wrong, but this contradicts the assumed reliability of our cognitive faculties in discovering the scientific fact of evolution.
This stems from the problem of using epistemological arguments to attack specific scientific theories. You either attack an aspect of the philosophy of science, or you attack specific scientific theories on empirical, scientific grounds.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 5:47 PM
Proof? You can't simply assert something like that without showing how you arrived at such a conclusion. Remember, you're the one claiming to have a way of knowing that your thoughts are rational aside from faith and guesswork. You hypocrisy on this front is the cause of the jeers against you, so addressing this inconsistency is the only way to way to remedy the situation. Well, that or realize that you started an argument you can't win and slink away.
Ok, first of all, if assumptions were capable of being a "cause to think that our minds are capable of reason and understanding," then we would just assume that and leave out the magic universal intelligence nonsense. You can't fault people for making one assumption simply by making another. Secondly, Sastra was making fun of people who think like you. It demonstrates your limitations.Posted by: Alex | May 29, 2009 5:47 PM
The question is whether our being the result of evolution affects the likelihood of our cognitive faculties being reliable in discovering scientific fact.
Assuming our cognitive faculties are unlikely to be reliable in discovering scientific fact, any conclusion drawn from the truth of evolution is unlikely to be reliable, as we had to use these unlikely to be reliable cognitive faculties to conclude evolution is scientific fact.
Conversely, assuming our cognitive faculties are reliable in discovering scientific fact and we discover evolution is a scientific fact through these reliable cognitive faculties, but we reason from evolution to the conclusion that our cognitive faculties aren't reliable, then our reasoning from evolution was wrong. Otherwise, evolution must be wrong, but this contradicts the assumed reliability of our cognitive faculties in discovering the scientific fact of evolution.
This stems from the problem of using epistemological arguments to attack specific scientific theories. You either attack an aspect of the philosophy of science, or you attack specific scientific theories on empirical, scientific grounds.
Posted by: Olorin | May 29, 2009 5:51 PM
There are basically two ways to attack an argument: It’s structure is wrong (it is invalid), or its premises are wrong (it is unsound). PZ’s post and the comments attack the soundness.
Suppose, arguendo, that Plantinga’s premises are true. Seems to me the argument is still logically invalid. He has conflated “false” with “maladaptive” in getting to “unreliable.” P’s example of the frog who, instead of a “true” belief that the fly is good to eat, grabs the fly because he thinks it is a princess who will solve all his problems. Whether true or false, the belief produces an adaptive result.
But his example of the lions jumps the rails: Here, P supposes that the humanoid’s true belief is that the llion will eat him, and that the false belief is that the lion is just a big cuddly cat. Unlike the frog, this belief causes a maladaptive behavior is it is false. A relevant false belief might be that God will smite him severely if he does not escape from the lion. In this case, like that of the frog, the false belief still produces adaptive behavior.
However, this change nullifies the logic of P’s conclusion that beliefs can’t be both false and adaptive. In that case, reliability (i.e., “Truth”) is irrelevant to evolution. I can logically believe in materialistic evolution or I can believe in creationism, and, either belief could possibly be adaptive. Which is, I think, where Plantinga started before he took a turn into the ditch..
(This is not to say that :P’s premises are correct. For example, his probabilities are nothing more than Pascal’s Wager, which has been refuted ad nauseam.)
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 5:52 PM
PZ. Please no more philosophy threads. Reading through these comments is like wading through molasses. Naked. With bugs in it. And old stained underwear. With flies buzzing all around.
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 5:53 PM
If it were true, there would be no "you" engaged in any mental activity; that mental activity would instead be nothing more than electro-chemical neural activity induced by material causes, all of which are irrational (i.e., lacking reason and understanding).
Wait, hold on. Are you really asserting that it it is impossible to form rational activity from material causes?
I do, but I don't take seriously the things said by people who resort to adjectives rather than argument.
Thanks for the spit-take. Oh noes, ADJECTIVES!
it is instead simply an electro-chemical neural event occurring in your brain, and there's no reason to suppose that the irrational material causes giving rise to that neural event make it conform to reality.
Yes there is, because they can be verified against observations independent from the observer. If you are saying that the observations cannot be trusted, this discussion is completely pointless, because you've gone off into the land of the mental circle-jerk. Red pill, blue pill.
Posted by: Tom Morris | May 29, 2009 5:55 PM
"Got some evidence or is that just a baseless assertion ?"
Neither. I don't have evidence to hand, but it's not a baseless assertion. I was speaking from experience of a fair few years of blogs and discussion boards. I could keep a file on my computer listing all the stupid things people on the Internet say that I disagree with, but I don't. I save the citation and bibliography tracking for my dissertation...
Posted by: Lurky | May 29, 2009 5:57 PM
It's funny when theists reference to scientific theories or atheism in general in religious terms, like "the high priests of evolutionary naturalism". Do they use that in a pejorative sense? As in, "atheism is just another religion"? "Evolution is just another religion"? To me it gives the impression that they claim it's just the same sort of bullshit they themselves believe in and propagate - a competitor. Like the idea is somehow worse of, demeaned, if it is thought in religious terms... oh, I think they are - subconsciously - right!
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 5:58 PM
So you withdraw your claim that people have been making anti-philosopger statements in this thread then. Good, glad we got that sorted. Might have been a bit easier had you just stayed quiet in the first place mind.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 6:03 PM
I see Jim is still passing wind. I almost see a *banned fool troll* presuppositional argument he has to believe in. There is a reason science uses evidence rather than pure thought. But Jim doesn't get it...
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 6:04 PM
Nerd,
But what if....there is no
spoontroll?Posted by: Otto | May 29, 2009 6:04 PM
What a load of mental masturbation!
Posted by: Ray | May 29, 2009 6:05 PM
@Jim
You have demonstrated that the naturalist world view has not as yet provided proof, to a degree of mathematical certainty, that rationality works. In practice, the naturalist world view pretty much just assumes that rationality works. So what you've really demonstrated is that naturalism has not proven itself to be consistent. You have not however demonstrated that naturalism is inconsistent, which is what Plantinga claims he has done.
You think your world view can be proven consistent because it asserts its own consistency, and you think it is a better world view on these grounds. Both your premise and your conclusion based on it are false. Read Godel for details.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 6:06 PM
I should have been more clear. By "you guys" I meant Jim, gman, etc. -- the resident solipsists.
I'm with you -- science as a study of the natural world at the very least places constraints on what is true, even if it cannot definitively say what is true. It's true than I cannot fly, for a trivial example. Philosophers of the mind have tried to do this, but without reference to empirical results, they're liable to say silly things. (Descartes, for an example, "proved" that his mind is separate from his body because he could imagine his mind being separate from his body. So far, my proof of having a pet dragon has not borne any fruit despite being based on an analogous line of argumentation.)
That's why Dennett has the right approach. The brain seems to constrain the imagination and not vice versa. Therefore, let's start with the constraints as we understand them and offer only positive hypotheses that are consistent with those constraints.
Qualia provide a pretty good example. Observations about EM radiation and colored light suggests that color is not an inherent property of an object, but rather a property of the mental representation of the object. So any model of the mind has to take into account that the color blue is not something which is to be modeled -- it is itself an element of the model.
@Jim:
You seem to just keep rephrasing the brain-in-a-vat over and over again. Why do you think it's such a compelling argument?
It is correct, to some extent, to say that "The true nature of the world may be hidden from us." This could mean several things, however, and you seem to assume it could only mean one thing. One possible meaning is that simply, nature is ineffable. We think mainly in words, and the true nature of the world simply can't be captured by words, so we can't truly understand the nature of the universe. But that doesn't mean that what we understand to the extent that we can understand is true.
Another possibility is that it is contingently hidden from us, i.e. we are brains in a vat, but we are able to learn that we are brains in a vat. If that is the case, then we are merely temporarily mistaken about the nature of the universe. However, this also does not invalidate materialism -- even if scientific truths are only valid within the context of the "Matrix," we still have perfectly valid description of the Matrix; to the extent that we can discover more about the world outside the vat, we again have access to truth.
Finally, there is the possibility that the true nature of the world is hidden from us fundamentally, that no matter what we do, we cannot access it. But then, what is truth? Clearly, something no human being as ever had access to or ever will. So in what sense does it even exist in the first place?
If we define "truth" as "those properties of our perceptions that can be shown to be consistent throughout a variety of contexts", then materialism is absolutely correct and supernaturalism is absolutely incorrect.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 6:06 PM
Thankfully I have not met many solopsists like Jim in real life. I would be seriously tempted to punch them, and then claim the injury was self-inflicted.
Posted by: Drosera
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May 29, 2009 6:07 PM
Plantinga for dummies:
I can prove that bumblebees can't fly, therefore, since we know that bumblebees can fly, there must be a Christian god who keeps them in the air.
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 6:09 PM
So you withdraw your claim that people have been making anti-philosopger statements in this thread then.
I have been guilty of making blanket statements about philosphy in other threads, and got called on it immediately (and rightly). I've had to amend my position to 99% of it, instead of 100% of it being pointless intellectual wanking :-)
Jim is a prime specimen: repetitive assertions, a pinch of pearl-clutching and sufficiently obtuse to quote someone who was making fun of his position as support.
Posted by: Olorin | May 29, 2009 6:10 PM
Alex: “This stems from the problem of using epistemological arguments to attack specific scientific theories..”
Indeed. Alex’s exegesis seems to be isomorphic to the old legal conundrum. Anaxagoras (this is how old the conundrum is) engaged Protagoras to teach him the law. The agreement stated that P’s fee would forgiven if A lost his first case. When A delayed starting to practice law at all, P sued for his fee. P argued that, if the judge should find for P, then his fee would be due under the judgment. But even if the judge ruled against him, then his fee would be due under the contract, for A would have won his first case. A, in defense, argued that, if the judge found for him (A), then the fee would be forgiven under the judgement. But, if the judge found in favor of P, then the fee would be forgiven under the contract, for A would have lost his first caase.
Logic and philosophy......
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 6:11 PM
More meaningless BS. This is the "No Real World or Objective Reality" assertion.
It is simply a belief, not provable or disprovable. It goes nowhere, contributes nothing but occasional delusions. I can fly, the earth is 6,000 years old.
As far as we know, intelligence has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence or not of the universe. The universe is much older than we are and has existed for 13.7 billion years without us just fine.
In practice, in real life, we all assume the world is real and exists. It certainly looks like it was set up as if what we thought about it had zero impact on it.
I
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 29, 2009 6:13 PM
I think it is worse even than that.
"I can prove that bumblebees can't fly. Therefore bumblebees can't fly and evidence to the contrary is a product of materialists' fauly minds. Therefore god exists."
Posted by: CJO | May 29, 2009 6:15 PM
I do believe that intelligence, not matter, is the ultimate reality.
Incoherent. Intelligence is a property of some systems. There's nothing "ultimate" about it. As far as we know, it's entirely contingent on a material substrate. Or can you give us an example of an observed instance of intelligence, divorced from any material phenomena?
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 29, 2009 6:15 PM
I'm sure Tom Morris has seen a lot of people make nasty, even rude comments about philosophy and philosophers. That's because of people like Plantinga who make obviously flawed arguments and yet are lauded as being first class thinkers by other philosophers. After enough instances of philosophers congratulating each other for producing bullshit, non-philosophers are going to assume that the primary product of philosophy is bullshit.
In the instances where a philosopher produces intelligible, reasonable arguments he's hailed as a non-philosopher. He or she can't be a philosopher, since they didn't produce bullshit which, as shown above, is what the major end result of philsophy.
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 29, 2009 6:15 PM
CJO@329: I think you're quite right. Your description sounds plausible. I like Pulvermuller's work on serial processes. And the fact that smart birds can apparently dance to a rhythm looks good for your story also. So something like what you suggest may work. My worry though is that it may not ultimately give us an understanding of the math faculty (pace Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch). For one: some of the math faculty is bilaterally implemented in the parietal so not anywhere near motor cortex or the language areas. But worse still, however the neuroscience goes, recursion alone may not give us all the pieces of the puzzle. Anyway, I guess we'll see. Lots of interesting work ahead.
Emmet@326: I don't have my copy of Topoi handy (it's at the office) and google books is not helping. But I think I recall the passage I had in mind well enough. It's early on in the book. He's explicit on the point of sets being surrogates for functions rather than literally being functions. I remember because it came as news to me. The main thing though is that sets are themselves defined in terms of mappings. So membership need not be taken as primitive. (Which I find a great relief!) If you really can't find it, let me know and I'll get the page numbers tomorrow when I'm back at work.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 6:16 PM
I need a new brain-vat.
Posted by: Brownian, OM
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May 29, 2009 6:16 PM
Can one, as a materialist, survive the winter?
I live in a dwelling made up of two-by-fours and gypsum, but can these constituent things be a dwelling? Let's consider them separately.
Two-by-fours are, by their very definition, 2" thick by 4" wide (less in fact, since two-by-four are the dimensions prior to planing and finishing at the mill.) Depending on where you measure, my circumference is about 44" at the greatest. We can thus assume then my width to be, on average, C/π, or about 14" (wider at the greatest, since my cross-section is more an ellipse than a circle). 14" is clearly much greater than 4" therefore a two-by-four cannot keep even the gentlest of breezes from cooling me.
Gypsum, at least in drywall form, is much larger than 14" (and in fact can be larger than my height, which is just shy of 6'), so it is plausible that gypsum might protect me from the wind. However, gypsum has a hardness of 2 on Mohs' scale, which is the second softest you can be. Softness is a vague term and in this case refers to one material's ability to scratch another material, but a more general definition of softness, a lack of resistance to deformation when force is applied, still fits. Now I weigh [ahem] about 205 pounds, which is a measure of the force I apply by virtue of my mass toward the centre of the Earth (more or less). It stands to reason that no thin collection of gypsum could withstand such a force (as many a hefty drywaller with a messy workplace has found out), and thus gypsum cannot provide the strength required to keep me from crashing through to my downstairs neighbours' dwelling, nor even the ability to hold itself up (if you doubt this latter part, just try to stand a sheet of drywall on its edge.)
Finally, we come to the key term: dwelling. While any historian or ethnographer could point out that dwellings encompass myriad shapes and forms, they do in general share the qualities of protecting one from the elements. As I've shown that neither two-by-fours nor gypsum can do this, it stands to reason that there is more to a dwelling than gypsum and two-by-fours. (And here the astute reader will undoubtedly agree, and probably point to such things as nails and glass, but these are even weaker evidence. Try walking on a drinking glass and see how long it lasts, and count the number of nails you have to cover yourself in to keep out the rain.) As in fact any constituent component of a dwelling is insufficient to consitute in itself a dwelling, the materialists' house could not be any weaker were it to be made of playing cards. I have survived at least 32 Canadian winters, therefore the materialists worldview cannot be correct.
Can I has theology PhD, plz?
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 6:21 PM
Win.
Yeah. Me too. I just soiled mine.
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 6:22 PM
Jim #324 wrote:
By claiming that "intelligence" is the ultimate reality and that "Reason ought to be made out of Reason," you're making category errors. Intelligence is a measure of abilities, and reason is a process -- they are not things, let alone active agents. Intelligence has never done anything, any more than 'speed' has gone anywhere.
Talking about "reason" as if it were an object isn't coherent. You're reifying abstractions.
"Like comes from like" is not only a cop-out explanation-wise. It's over-simplistic, and, ironically, over-literal.
Posted by: heliobates | May 29, 2009 6:25 PM
@Jim #324
That is the sound of your credibility imploding.
Posted by: J. | May 29, 2009 6:26 PM
Plantinga is generally well respected within philosophical circles, but when he starts talking about science, he really ceases to be rational.
He debated with Dennett at the APA conference a few months ago. Plantinga was trounced in front of a filled-beyond-capacity hall. Dennett pulled no punches with his Supermanism, and was generally as untactful about the whole thing as P.Z. is here. So I imagine readers here would enjoy the show.
I think this is a link to the audio, but I haven't tested it. If it's the same source as went around previously, quality is mediocre. Mercifully, no video exsists: although Dennett's slides were interesting, it was rather heartbreaking to watch Plantinga's face during Dennett's comments.
http://www.archive.org/details/PlantingaAndDennetDebateFeb.212009Apa
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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May 29, 2009 6:27 PM
Not only that, that's a misuse of Sastra's quote ("Like comes from like"). It's out of context.
Posted by: Glen Davidson
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May 29, 2009 6:28 PM
322:
Whoah, I can confidently state that biologists who study information in living systems would have a problem with that.
It's not fatal, of course, since life did start from the non-rational. Life has had effective ways of dealing rationally (at least in the broader sense of that term) with the world for most of its existence, however.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 6:29 PM
I don't think that's a good career move — with advances in point-of-sale payment technology and increasing cost displacement toward the consumer, specifically the prevalence of “self-service”, there are limited openings for gas-pump attendants.
Posted by: Ichthyic | May 29, 2009 6:29 PM
Can I has theology PhD, plz?
wow.
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 6:35 PM
Brownian: but I hold that winter is the ultimate truth!
It'll be interesting to see if Jim comes back after that one. Shit, what am I saying -- he'll probably quote you.
Posted by: Brownian, OM
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May 29, 2009 6:41 PM
I doesn't appear to be winter now, and so I wonder how we can even claim that winter exists if all we have are fallible recollections of it.
Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 6:41 PM
I think that's going a bit to far. Generally speaking, surely natural selection would make our brains generally reliable. After all, if a lion is approaching then we need to be able to recognise it. But infallible? No. Too many false positives, because our heuristic cognition software is not perfect.Though I'm reading this correctly, his argument seems to be along the line: our senses are either reliable in which case we can't trust our senses because they demonstrate evolution, or that our senses are unreliable in which case we can't trust our senses which means that we can't trust any theory on evolution. So to me he's just saying "we can't trust our senses" fullstop. Which is great, maybe he'll start questioning his beliefs and how he came to them, it's the first step in becoming a free thinker!
Posted by: Alex | May 29, 2009 6:42 PM
I find it absolutely pathetic when intellectually bankrupt twits like Plantinga try to make science look like their silly religion in an effort to make it appear false (like calling evolution a Creation myth). These people just don't get it; you don't insult another belief by taking elements of your own belief and attributing it to the belief you're opposed to. That's just fucking stupid.Posted by: Brownian, OM
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May 29, 2009 6:44 PM
Okay, beer time. See y'all later when I'm tipsy and alternatively belligerent and sentimental.
Posted by: Ichthyic | May 29, 2009 6:47 PM
I doesn't appear to be winter now
*Looks outside at a cloudy New Zealand sky*
I'd say your perceptions are biased, and therefore your entire analysis is invalid.
I said GOOD DAY, sir.
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 6:52 PM
I doesn't appear to be winter now, and so I wonder how we can even claim that winter exists if all we have are fallible recollections of it.
Well, that all depends on where you are. And your definition of winter. And your definition of definition. And your definition of fallible. And your definition of...
Wait, now I need a drink too.
Hmm, I think I've discovered the point of philosophy.
I can haz bar-tab, plz?
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 6:53 PM
"In Plantinga's imaginary materialist/naturalist world, beliefs are only the product of random chance."
PZ, it seems to me that this is where you get Plantinga fundamentally wrong. He said quite explicitly that he's even considering cases in which our beliefs are adaptive, and he considers cases in which our beliefs interlock in complex, though false, ways. He neither says nor implies that our beliefs arise 'randomly.' Adaptive beliefs aren't random, but they're also not necessarily true. Now, it's true that given some conceptions of the possible ways in which beliefs and actions are related (e.g. epiphenomenalism), our beliefs don't affect our actions, and thus cannot be adaptive. However, Plantinga doesn't in any sense limit his analysis to such cases.
"We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience."
You're begging the question here. Plantinga's argument is in essence a reductio: He's arguing that if you accept both naturalism and evolution, then you have no good reason to trust your cognitive faculties, which means you have no good reason to believe that naturalism is true. (Incidentally, the reason he focuses on naturalism is because it's a philosophical position, while evolution is a scientific one. Evolution is well evidenced; naturalism is not. Hence, his argument is intended to be a reductio against philosophic naturalism, and doesn't in any way target evolution.) Now, you can't simply assert that you can test your cognition against reality if your cognition is unreliable. This is where you're begging the question. Note too, Plantinga is not arguing that our cognitive faculties are in fact unreliable. Rather, he's arguing that the conjunction of evolution and naturalism leads to the conclusion that we can't trust our cognitive faculties (i.e. to a low or inscrutable conditional probability that they are reliable), and by implication to the conclusion that if you accept the conjunction of evolution and naturalism, you have no good reason to be a naturalist (or anything else for that matter).
"Plantinga really thinks that one of the claims he is arguing against is that materialists/naturalists assume our minds are reliable."
Of course you think that your cognitive faculties are reliable -- but not in the sense you're mistakenly attributing to Plantinga. When Plantinga says that we assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable (and note that this is a very broad conception that includes memory, perception, etc.), he doesn't mean that we assume that they simply deliver the truth about things, which is what you seem to think he means. Rather, he means exactly what you mean -- that we can use them to work our way through errors in reasoning, apparent errors in perception, misunderstandings of evidence, flawed memories, etc. to acquire true beliefs.
"He's reduced to a bogus either/or distinction. Either we are organic machines that evolved and our brains are therefore collections of random beliefs, or — and this is a leap I find unbelievable — Jesus gave us reliable minds. Seriously. That's what his argument reduces to."
This is where you go way off the rails. The conclusion of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism concerns the untenability of naturalism when conjoined with evolution. It is not, in itself, an argument for theism. At best, it does away with one of the main, live alternatives to theism. Also, at best it shows that naturalism isn't consistent with one of the best evidenced scientific theories we have. A quite separate claim, however, is that theism is consistent with it. This, however, is not part of the eaan.
In short, you find Plantinga's argument to be ridiculous because you've given it a ridiculous interpretation, which is to say you haven't properly understood it.
Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 6:55 PM
Anyone else seeing the absurdity Eric just wrote?Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 7:00 PM
Philosophy without evidence is sophistry. As Eric the philosopher proves time and time again.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 7:02 PM
Eric @ #372 wrote:
Yes, and as myself and others have already pointed out, even if you don't accept naturalism and evolution, you still have no good reason to trust your cognitive faculties, which means you have no good reason to believe that supernaturalism is true. Plantinga sets a trap that not even himself can escape, making it a senseless argument against naturalism, since supernaturalism fairs no better. Why can't any of you Plantinga supporters ever get around to addressing this?Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 7:05 PM
Which we know is silly. See this box you are sitting in front of Eric? It does more calculations per second than the entire human population combined. It was made using naturalism as a methodology. Are you going to literally sit in front of the computer and point out that the brain is unreliable through naturalism?The brain is very reliable for doing some things, we know this because it is needed to survive. Our ancestors needed to drink water, but also needed to survive being eaten. If they were too cautious they would never get a drink and die. If they were too bold, they would get attacked by a lion and die. Natural selection builds a brain capable of reliability - just as long as we recognise the possibility that the heuristic wetware makes a lot of false positives as opposed to false negatives. You mistake a shadow for a burglar but never a burglar for a shadow.
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 7:05 PM
Indeed - I'm one of them, if it's taken that way. I was trying to separate 'rationality' that Plantinga et al. seem to be talking about, that requires a brain or analogous, from pattern matching and other rational but not 'rational' systems, if you get my drift.Or, I'd like to see a bacteria rationalize why it must be made by god, but I'll certainly bet it's better at finding food than most humans.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 7:08 PM
"even if you don't accept naturalism and evolution, you still have no good reason to trust your cognitive faculties, which means you have no good reason to believe that supernaturalism is true. Plantinga sets a trap that not even himself can escape, making it a senseless argument against naturalism, since supernaturalism fairs no better."
Plantinga and his 'supporters' don't address this because it doesn't seem to make any sense: How can it be the case that a reductio against naturalism affects supernaturalism? You can make a separate case against the reliability of our cognitive faculties given supernaturalism, of course, but this wouldn't in any way amount to Plantinga setting a trap for himself. How could it, if his argument does not and cannot have any implications for the reliability of our cognitive faculties given supernaturalism? You seem to have mistakenly concluded that Plantinga is questioning the reliability of our cognitive faculties simpliciter, but he's not.
Posted by: Booger | May 29, 2009 7:10 PM
But, Dude...doesn't the presence of stripped gears and misaligned cogs and broken engines IMPLY A CREATOR!!!!!
Gotcha there ,dint I?!?!?!?!
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 7:15 PM
"See this box you are sitting in front of Eric? It does more calculations per second than the entire human population combined. It was made using naturalism as a methodology. Are you going to literally sit in front of the computer and point out that the brain is unreliable through naturalism?"
You're confusing methodological naturalism, which Plantinga isn't addressing, with metaphysical naturalism, which he is addressing. Methodological naturalism is perfectly consistent with supernaturalism; metaphysical naturalism is not.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 7:20 PM
Yawn, more sophistry from Eric.
Posted by: Stu
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May 29, 2009 7:24 PM
Eric,
In short, you find Plantinga's argument to be ridiculous because you've given it a ridiculous interpretation, which is to say you haven't properly understood it.
Come on, my man! You are SO CLOSE to the Courtier's reply! Bring it home!
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 7:24 PM
Hello Nerd of Redhead. It's not sophistry, because I'm not intentionally attempting to mislead. I may be stupid, but I'm not a sophist. However, since I'm not a sophist, I would appreciate it if you would point our just where I'm going wrong. Simply calling it sophistry doesn't help me see my errors, you know.
Posted by: Jim | May 29, 2009 7:25 PM
I keep seeing myself described here as a "solipsist," which is the least apt description I can think of for my position.
Apparently my argument hasn't been understood, but that comes as no surprise to me. I've learned from experience that Darwinian dogmatists do not make good-faith efforts to understand the views of anyone who does not believe their dogma. (Before you accuse me of name-calling, ask yourself this question: Am I willing to say that Darwinian evolutionary theory might be wrong in some rather important ways? If not, you're a Darwinian dogmatist, and an apt description is not a gratuitous insult.)
In a nutshell, my view is that the belief that human beings have been made in the image of a rational God gives me grounds for thinking that human beings are also rational, but that naturalism, which attributes all phenomena to irrational material causes, does not. To my way of thinking, it's much more rational to think that human rationality has a rational source than it is to think that human rationality emerged from irrational material causes.
I'll depart with a relevant quote from design theorist William Dembski. I'll check back in to read all the insults that are sure to fly in response to what I've said and to what Dembski says (it's a hoot to watch polemical adversaries shame and discredit themselves by wallowing in the ad hominem fallacy), but I don't see much reason to continue a dialogue with people who seem to be incapable of respectful conversation with those who don't see things their way. In any event, here's Dembski...
"Naturalism...allows no place for intelligent agency except at the end of a blind, purposeless material process. Within naturalism, any intelligence is an evolved intelligence. Moreover, the evolutionary process by which any such intelligence developed is itself blind and purposeless. As a consequence, naturalism makes intelligence not a basic creative force within nature but an evolutionary byproduct....
"Naturalism is clearly a temptation for science, and indeed many scientists have succumbed to that temptation. The temptation of naturalism is a neat and tidy world in which everything is completely understandable in terms of well-defined rules or mechanisms characterized by natural laws.
As a consequence, naturalism holds out the hope that science will provide a 'theory of everything.' Certainly this hope remains unfulfilled. The scandal of intelligent design is that it goes further, contending that the
hope is unfulfillable. It therefore offends the hubris of naturalism. It says that intelligence is a fundamental aspect to the world and that any attempt to reduce intelligence to natural mechanisms cannot succeed. Naturalism wants nature to be an open book. But intelligences are not open books; they are writers of books, creators of novel information. They are free agents, and they can violate our fondest expectations.
"There is an irony here. The naturalist's world, in which
intelligence is not fundamental and the world is not designed, is supposedly a rational world because it proceeds by unbroken natural law; that is, cause precedes effect with inviolable regularity. On the other hand, the design theorist's world, in which intelligence is fundamental and the world is designed, is supposedly not a rational world because intelligences can do things that are unexpected. To allow an unevolved intelligence a place in the world is, according to naturalism, to send the world into a tailspin. It is to exchange unbroken natural law for caprice and thereby to destroy science. Thus, for the naturalist, the world is intelligible only if it starts off without intelligence and then evolves intelligence. If it starts out with intelligence and evolves intelligence
because of a prior intelligence, then somehow the world becomes unintelligible.
"The absurdity here is palpable. Only by means of our intelligence are science and our understanding of the world even possible. And yet the naturalist clings to this argument as a last and dying friend...." (end quote)
I eagerly anticipate supercilious references to "Dumbski" and "IDiots" (and worse), which is the kind of thing that apparently passes for great wit on Pharyngula. As someone who regards the Darwinian explanation of biological complexity as an affront to reason, I'm pleased that this blog exists. Nothing can more certainly ensure that Darwinism remains accepted by only a tiny minority of Americans than the kind of rhetoric used here to defend it. As a rule, people can't be belittled into changing their minds about a theory that strikes them as ridiculous. Keep up the good work.
Posted by: cunning linguist | May 29, 2009 7:25 PM
Has no-one pointed out yet that plantinga, in the West Frisian dialect of the philosopher's father's people, means "small squirrel" or "chipmunk"?
And that he has brothers named Simon and Theodore?
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 7:26 PM
That would be great. As far as I can make out, he defines arrows/morphisms early on without sets (necessarily), but not functions. The arrows in Set (and its subcategories) are termed functions, but in that case the objects are, indeed, sets. Remember that my original question was how one can define functions without sets — I'm not convinced that Goldblatt does — at minimum, it seems like “set” and “function” are “co-defined terminology” in the sense that it appears that a category in which the objects are sets, the morphisms are termed “functions” or vice-versa. Admittedly, I could be missing something very obvious — I'm no mathematician, and CT is something I've just looked at a couple of times in fits of enthusiasm.
Posted by: Dan Graur | May 29, 2009 7:27 PM
This letter was send to Dr. Plantinga
Dear Dr. Plantiga
I was surprised to read in your "Evolution vs. Naturalism" that Francis Crick is described by you as the "co-discoverer of the genetic code." As a person who regularly pretends to understand biology, the history of science, and evolution, you should have known that Crick is the co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953. The genetic code was elucidated by Marshall Nirenberg, Heinrich J. Matthaei, Phil Leder, Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley, and Severo Ochoa. The elucidation of the universal genetic code was completed in 1964. You are not a lover of knowledge as the term "philosophy" implies, you are an ignorant demagogue perpetrating lies and misleading students.
Sincerely,
Dan Graur
John and Rebecca Moores Professor
Department of Biology & Biochemistry
University of Houston
Posted by: Dan Graur | May 29, 2009 7:29 PM
The following letter was also send to Dr. Plantinga's Notre Dame e-mail
Dear Dr. Plantiga
I was surprised to read in your "Evolution vs. Naturalism" that Francis Crick is described by you as the "co-discoverer of the genetic code." As a person who regularly pretends to understand biology, the history of science, and evolution, you should have known that Crick is the co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953. The genetic code was elucidated by Marshall Nirenberg, Heinrich J. Matthaei, Phil Leder, Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley, and Severo Ochoa. The elucidation of the universal genetic code was completed in 1964.
You are not a lover of knowledge, as the term "philosophy" implies, you are an ignorant demagogue perpetrating lies and misleading students.
Sincerely,
Dan Graur
John and Rebecca Moores Professor
Department of Biology & Biochemistry
University of Houston
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 7:30 PM
Eric #372 wrote:
PZ's argument is that, given an evolutionary explanation for brain/mind, we have no good reason to trust our cognitive faculties completely, as if they were little Truth Machines. Reliable Truth Machines would not evolve. Plantinga's right. But we don't have, and don't need, Truth Machines.
Given naturalism + evolution, we would have an explanation for why we can trust our reasoning facilities in most cases, why they make errors, what sorts of errors they make, and what we can do to correct them. Not to get to TRVTH, but pragmatic reliance.
Plantinga is basically saying that atheists can't justify rejecting radical skepticism the way he can justify rejecting radical skepticism. But it seems that when we try to explain or demonstrate why radical skepticism isn't entailed by naturalism, his supporters complain that we can't do that -- we have to start from Plantinga's premise that naturalists can't use reasonable arguments without self-contradiction. But I don't think we're the ones chasing our tails here.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 7:30 PM
And it would be nice if they very loudly laughed at him every time he tried to peddle his BS. Or simply didn't print his inane articles. If there is anger towards philosophy here, it is because on this forum, it is most commonly used as an offhand reference to defend theism, in a very snooty way. (ex: 'You disagree with me? Well, you *obviously* need to read more Aquinas.' That kind of thing.)
And it is all the more frustrating because the theistic philosophy we are directed to so often here takes six pages to say what could be summarized in a sentence, and refuted in another. It is often a waste of time to even read. I'm sick of windbags directing me to take a life course in philosophy whenever I disagree on a simple issue, that can be discussed in simple words. Science is often forced to become complex and arcane, simply because of the complexity of the systems involved, but philosophy too often goes there on its own, and revels in the useless new definitions and verbiage it spawns(this is especially true in theology, where there is nothing to discuss in the first place).
Finally, it is a truth that has been repeated to me countless times whenever I get too high horse about science: science is just philosophy that depends on evidence and empiricism. But this means that armchair philosophers like Plantinga can be said to be scientists who don't use evidence. Which is perhaps the most useless job description on the planet.
Posted by: Dan Graur | May 29, 2009 7:32 PM
The following letter was also send to Dr. Plantinga's Notre Dame e-mail
Dear Dr. Plantiga
I was surprised to read in your "Evolution vs. Naturalism" that Francis Crick is described by you as the "co-discoverer of the genetic code." As a person who regularly pretends to understand biology, the history of science, and evolution, you should have known that Crick is the co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953. The genetic code was elucidated by Marshall Nirenberg, Heinrich J. Matthaei, Phil Leder, Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley, and Severo Ochoa. The elucidation of the universal genetic code was completed in 1964.
You are not a lover of knowledge, as the term "philosophy" implies, you are an ignorant demagogue perpetrating lies and misleading students.
Sincerely,
Dan Graur
John and Rebecca Moores Professor
Department of Biology & Biochemistry
University of Houston
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 7:34 PM
"Come on, my man! You are SO CLOSE to the Courtier's reply! Bring it home!"
Here's an excellent treatment of the particular mis-use of the Courtier's Reply you're *so close* to being guilty of.
http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2009/04/moran-and-courtiers-reply-ii.html
Posted by: Jeremy Dickinson | May 29, 2009 7:34 PM
PZ,
I think you've done a pretty good job not correctly interpreting Plantinga's argument. See Nathan Hanna's post, which should alleviate your errors on Plantinga's thinking about the probabilities. Since Nathan got that point right, let me say a few things about other ways you get Plantinga wrong, which lead to errors. (Only one comment on your form: ad hominem logic pervades your piece -- this is not good.)
Somewhat small error: Plantinga is not committed to claiming that according to naturalism belief formation is exclusively random. He is assuming for argument's sake that evolution is true, so natural selection plays a crucial role in belief formation, and of course this is tied to his claim that what is crucial about belief formation, assuming evolution is true, is survival not true beliefs.
Second error (bigger this time): You write:
"Almost. So close, and yet he still doesn't get it. A large part of our behavior will be functional (not contradicting reality) and some of it will even be adaptive (better fitting us to reality), and a lot of it will be neutral (contradicting reality, perhaps, but in ways that do not affect survival), but this does not imply that our cognitive faculties are necessarily and implicitly reliable. We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience."
You wrote this in response to an intuitive objection to Plantinga's claim that if evolutionary theory is true, then the probability that our beliefs are reliable is quite low. The objection goes: evolutionary theory could well be true and yet the the probability that our beliefs are reliable is much higher because true beliefs is conducive to survival. In your passage you simply respond to the objection Plantinga puts in the mouth of a dissenter from his argument.
Third error. (This is a big one.) You write:
"To which I say…exactly! Brains are not reliable; they've been shaped by forces which, as has been clearly said, do not value Truth with a capital T. Scientists are all skeptics who do not trust their perceptions at all ... "
I think you've conceded a lot here to Plantinga. Plantinga is arguing that the probability that our beliefs (any of them) are reliably true given evolutionary theory is very low. You agree. This means that the probability of your belief that naturalism is true given evolutionary theory too is quite low. This is not good for you. The way to reply to Plantinga is to argue that evolutionary theory is in the business of getting our cognitive faculties reliably produce true beliefs. You haven't done this.
Fourth mistake (another big one): You claim Plantinga is guilty of a false dichotomy at the end of your post. He isn't. Presumably many naturalists believe it is irrational to believe in the Christian God, and as Plantinga makes clear at the outset of his paper, in a sense his paper is targeted at contemporary challengers to Christianity (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) who claim it is irrational to believe in the Christianity. So, it is fitting that at the end of his paper he end by claiming that the conjunction of beliefs in evolution and naturalism are irrational because they are self-defeating, and that belief in Christianity is not similarly irrational (self-defeating) because Christians can account for having reliably true beliefs. (God made us with cognitive faculties designed to aim at true belief production.) Naturalism and evolution cannot, and the belief in naturalism AND evolution turn out the be irrational.
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 7:35 PM
Jim:
Humans are not rational. Tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, etc. demonstrate that aptly.Posted by: prof.In
|
May 29, 2009 7:36 PM
The following letter was also send to Dr. Plantinga's Notre Dame e-mail
Dear Dr. Plantiga
I was surprised to read in your "Evolution vs. Naturalism" that Francis Crick is described by you as the "co-discoverer of the genetic code." As a person who regularly pretends to understand biology, the history of science, and evolution, you should have known that Crick is the co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953. The genetic code was elucidated by Marshall Nirenberg, Heinrich J. Matthaei, Phil Leder, Har Gobind Khorana, Robert W. Holley, and Severo Ochoa. The elucidation of the universal genetic code was completed in 1964.
You are not a lover of knowledge, as the term "philosophy" implies, you are an ignorant demagogue perpetrating lies and misleading students.
Sincerely,
Dan Graur
John and Rebecca Moores Professor
Department of Biology & Biochemistry
University of Houston
Posted by: MadScientist
|
May 29, 2009 7:36 PM
"the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2"
That's already incorrect; for random beliefs on any particular topic, the probability of believing the right one is typically far less than 0.5. For example, a coyote runs off the edge of a cliff; what happens next?
1. coyote plunges to the bottom of the cliff
2. coyote floats in the air
3. coyote sprouts wings and glides safely to earth
4. coyote lights a rocket and is propelled into a large rock
Now which of those 4 beliefs is true?
@PZ: on footnote #7, Plantinga is talking about probability of X or greater than X outcomes, which does require more thought than merely flipping a coin; you need to know the total number of outcomes and the probability of each set of outcomes which meets the criterion. Sure it's not terribly complicated, but Plantinga is just a philosopher.
As for philosophy being 'Sokaled', Thomas Aquinas was a much worshipped philosopher due largely to that mountain of bullshit he wrote in support of his religious beliefs, including Summa Theologica. I assure you, all of Aquinas' celebrated works exhibit a truly profound incompetence and inability to reason. There have also been the "relativists" (and what some people jokingly call the 'absolute relativists') who believe that objective truth depends on your own personal beliefs. But since you mention it, I'd love to see someone pull a hoax in the style of Sokal's on some pretentious philosophical journal.
Posted by: Jeremy Dickinson | May 29, 2009 7:37 PM
PZ,
I think you've done a pretty good job not correctly interpreting Plantinga's argument. See Nathan Hanna's post, which should alleviate your errors on Plantinga's thinking about the probabilities. Since Nathan got that point right, let me say a few things about other ways you get Plantinga wrong, which lead to errors. (Only one comment on your form: ad hominem logic pervades your piece -- this is not good.)
Somewhat small error: Plantinga is not committed to claiming that according to naturalism belief formation is exclusively random. He is assuming for argument's sake that evolution is true, so natural selection plays a crucial role in belief formation, and of course this is tied to his claim that what is crucial about belief formation, assuming evolution is true, is survival not true beliefs.
Second error (bigger this time): You write:
"Almost. So close, and yet he still doesn't get it. A large part of our behavior will be functional (not contradicting reality) and some of it will even be adaptive (better fitting us to reality), and a lot of it will be neutral (contradicting reality, perhaps, but in ways that do not affect survival), but this does not imply that our cognitive faculties are necessarily and implicitly reliable. We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience."
You wrote this in response to an intuitive objection to Plantinga's claim that if evolutionary theory is true, then the probability that our beliefs are reliable is quite low. The objection goes: evolutionary theory could well be true and yet the the probability that our beliefs are reliable is much higher because true beliefs is conducive to survival. In your passage you simply respond to the objection Plantinga puts in the mouth of a dissenter from his argument.
Third error. (This is a big one.) You write:
"To which I say…exactly! Brains are not reliable; they've been shaped by forces which, as has been clearly said, do not value Truth with a capital T. Scientists are all skeptics who do not trust their perceptions at all ... "
I think you've conceded a lot here to Plantinga. Plantinga is arguing that the probability that our beliefs (any of them) are reliably true given evolutionary theory is very low. You agree. This means that the probability of your belief that naturalism is true given evolutionary theory too is quite low. This is not good for you. The way to reply to Plantinga is to argue that evolutionary theory is in the business of getting our cognitive faculties reliably produce true beliefs. You haven't done this.
Fourth mistake (another big one): You claim Plantinga is guilty of a false dichotomy at the end of your post. He isn't. Presumably many naturalists believe it is irrational to believe in the Christian God, and as Plantinga makes clear at the outset of his paper, in a sense his paper is targeted at contemporary challengers to Christianity (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) who claim it is irrational to believe in the Christianity. So, it is fitting that at the end of his paper he end by claiming that the conjunction of beliefs in evolution and naturalism are irrational because they are self-defeating, and that belief in Christianity is not similarly irrational (self-defeating) because Christians can account for having reliably true beliefs. (God made us with cognitive faculties designed to aim at true belief production.) Naturalism and evolution cannot, and the belief in naturalism AND evolution turn out the be irrational.
Posted by: Zarquon | May 29, 2009 7:45 PM
Platinga's arguments are rubbish because he implicitly assumes dualism, that the capacity for belief is not behaviour and hence invisible to natural selection. Everything we know about human and animal minds contradicts this, so his philosophical conclusions are simply worthless. Another ugly theory destroyed on the altar of cold hard facts.
Posted by: Nusubito | May 29, 2009 7:50 PM
Oh my fuck. The p value of PZ holding that belief is...1. Not 'quite low'. And the 'given evolutionary theory too' clause doesn't change this. Unless you've run some simulation universes(within which evolution is true) and he actually doesn't hold this belief in most of them.
What PZ said above isn't that the p value for every belief is low. He said that we can't expect our brains to have special access to the 'Truth' from evolution. We can observe the world, and we can make our mental representations of it quite accurate. This means that we can be fairly certain of our ideas and of the truth of propositions. Plantinga observes that given evolution, we can't be 100% certain, because evolution didn't produce that kind of brain and then claims this disproves evolution, presumably because he thinks we can be absolutely certain. We can't.
To Plantinga, there is such a thing as absolute truth, that we have access to. This is bullshit. Very close is good enough, and is what our brains do.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 7:52 PM
Eric
I accept you have every right to slap me down on this. I offer you not a rigorous rebuttal and the comment will be somewhat snarky. But truly I am at a loss for words - I am aghast from your post.
You and my excursion into the mind of Plantinga has lowered my respect for philosophers by an order of magnitude.
I guess I leave it to what has been said above (forms of so WTF is your point guys): "I can prove that bumblebees can't fly, therefore, since we know that bumblebees can fly, there must be a Christian god who keeps them in the air."
You guys (Alvin, Eric, Jim, etc.) - intelligent, polished, well versed in lingo of the trade - are to me no more than purveyors of obfuscation. You must have an agenda and the advancement of useful science somehow I doubt it is. Sorry - but I've lost all respect.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 7:52 PM
@Jim,
Before you try to make any more points, maybe you should try to address some of the holes people have already poked in your arguments:
1) Fundamentally, you are constructing a strawman. You have posited the existence of some objective, Platonic Truth and now you are asserting that the ultimate goal of science is finding that Truth. Lots of people have tried to correct you on this -- science does not presuppose the existence of an objective Truth. Scientific truths are always contingent. Since you can't show me Truth, we're going to assume it doesn't exist and settle for just plain truth.
2) You commit category mistakes like it's your job. What does it mean that the true nature of the earth is "reason". But you don't define "reason." Does it even make sense to consider a world made of "reason"? Or is it like considering a world made of justice, or some other impossible proposition formed by making a category mistake? If you're going to advance a radical epistemology, you should be more rigorous about doing so.
3) You argue from assertion. You claimed that human beings are capable of things that "meat robots" are not, but failed to offer any reasons why that is. But even under your version of epistemology, we have to assume that it is possible for meat robots to do those things, as God can presumably do whatever the hell he wants.
Quoting Dembski does not invalidate any of those criticisms, and certainly isn't going ingratiate you with any of the regulars here.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 7:53 PM
"PZ's argument is that, given an evolutionary explanation for brain/mind, we have no good reason to trust our cognitive faculties completely, as if they were little Truth Machines. Reliable Truth Machines would not evolve. Plantinga's right. But we don't have, and don't need, Truth Machines."
Sastra, as I pointed out, this is a misreading of what Plantinga means when he speaks about reliable cognitive faculties. He's not in any sense talking about 'little truth machines.'
"Given naturalism + evolution, we would have an explanation for why we can trust our reasoning facilities in most cases, why they make errors, what sorts of errors they make, and what we can do to correct them. Not to get to TRVTH, but pragmatic reliance."
Is it true that they lead to pragmatic reliance? See the problem with substituting pragmatism for truth? Now, again, this is not to say that we need little truth machines if we are to conclude that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Indeed, Plantinga suggests that we could judge them reliable if the conditional probability were greater than 1/2. That's hardly a little truth machine!
"But it seems that when we try to explain or demonstrate why radical skepticism isn't entailed by naturalism, his supporters complain that we can't do that -- we have to start from Plantinga's premise that naturalists can't use reasonable arguments without self-contradiction."
If you can in fact do so, then there must be something wrong with Plantinga's argument. But in that case, why try to avoid it? There are two issues here that we can distinguish, but not treat independently: (1) Can you provide an argument to support the notion that skepticism isn't entailed by the conjunction of evolution and naturalism, and (2) Is Plantinga's argument sound? It seems to me that if (2) obtains, (1) is impossible.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 7:53 PM
Eric @ #378
What, so Plantinga isn't capable of a preparing for the inevitable counter-argument? He just lobs an objection at naturalism for being unreliable without bothering to wonder if his own worldview fairs any better on the same subject? Well, how embarrassing for him, then. I see I was giving the man far too much credit of thought.
First, the "separate case" has already been made. Why do you keep ignoring it? And Plantinga is making an objection about naturalism that equally applies to his own position, though admitted for different reasons. So you're right. Seen in the narrowest view possible, it's not a trap, just stupidly myopic.Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 7:59 PM
Jim #384 (quoting Dembski) wrote:
No, this isn't right. Because they have to build explanations from the bottom-up through trial and error, and can't trust in special abilities and ways of knowing, Naturalists expect that they will not be able to have a "neat and tidy world in which everything is completely understandable." The hope for that kind of simplicity and Ultimate Understanding is the temptation of supernaturalism, not naturalism.
No, the problem isn't that it 'breaks natural law.' An unevolved, disembodied "Intelligence" is inconsistent with what we know about minds and brains, and unnecessary to explain anything. It requires a heavy burden of proof that hasn't been met in science, and can't be met through straw-man arguments like this.
What Dembski calls "the hubris of naturalism" is really the "humility of naturalism." It's a recognition that consistency is one way to avoid error, and therefore we ought to apply Occam's Razor to unnecessary claims -- lest we give ourselves too much credit, over-extend ourselves, and fail to provide a way to find out we're wrong.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 8:00 PM
@Jim,
Forgot a big one:
4) Many commenters have tried to clue you on the fact that emergent properties are part of our existence. A house is not wood nor glass nor any particular material -- it is a system composed of various elements. Likewise, there is no reason not to think that intelligence, reason, mind, whatever is an emergent property of a system.
Another way of thinking about this: in what sense does Microsoft Windows exist? Clearly it does -- we can talk quite coherently about it, and I often do at work. But what is it. It's not a particular binary pattern, since there are different builds and versions of Windows. Any particular binary pattern corresponding to a version/build of Windows moreover only becomes Windows when run on a computer with a particular architecture -- many other architectures won't be able to interpret the binary pattern as anything but garbage. Windows exists, but it is not a thing.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 8:02 PM
Eric, in order for Plantinga's argument to mean anything, he would not only have to show that uncertainty is inherent to naturalism, but that's it's particular to naturalism. He has not done this. Nor have you.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 8:09 PM
@Eric:
How does one differentiate between a true belief and a false but pragmatic belief?
Posted by: Mark Povich | May 29, 2009 8:11 PM
Branden Fitelson and famous philosopher of biology, Elliott Sober, have an excellent refutation of Plantinga's argument here: http://fitelson.org/plant.pdf
Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 8:13 PM
I don't get the argument, how does adding God overcome this supposed problems of naturalism?
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 8:14 PM
Eric #403 wrote:
It seems to me that, stripped to basics, Plantinga's argument goes like this:
1.) If naturalism is true, and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
2.) But the reliability of our beliefs is not very low.
3.) Therefore, naturalism is not true.
Obviously, we'd be arguing against the first premise, and saying then that the form is valid, but the argument is not sound.
However, I suspect you're going to say this isn't really his argument. If so, can you break it down for me?
Posted by: PZ Myers
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May 29, 2009 8:19 PM
Oy. Anyone who read what I wrote and then claims that I'm making the argument that adapted brains are reliable sources of truth did not read what I wrote. I repeat myself:
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 8:20 PM
Still no evidence from Eric, Jim, etc. All are providing sophistry. They may not mean to mislead, but they are. Philosophy without evidence is sophistry. Show the physical evidence, or just acknowledge your error. In case you haven't noticed, none of the regulars are agreeing with you. Yawn, boring gits.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 8:21 PM
Mark Povich @ #408, thanks for linking that paper. I particularly liked the conclusion:
That's precisely what I've been trying to get into Eric's thick skull, but he seems to think playing dumb is a winning strategy.Posted by: Don Cates | May 29, 2009 8:26 PM
From http://www.philosophicallexicon.com :
alvinize, v. To stimulate protracted discussion by making a bizarre claim. "His contention that natural evil is due to Satanic agency alvinized his listeners."
and
planting, v. To use twentieth-century fertilizer to encourage new shoots from eleventh -century ideas which everyone thought had gone to seed; hence, plantinger, n. one who plantings.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 8:28 PM
Some of us don't think he is playing...Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 8:29 PM
Ahhh, the intellectualisation of Goddidit. It's amazing the amount some theists go through to not explain anything. What does God do in this case, what does it add to our knowledge about how the brain works? Does it even add anything at all? If not, then all this exercise is doing is trying to make God necessary by putting God in an absence of explanation. Though then again, that's what theology has come to.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | May 29, 2009 8:38 PM
I think Hume pretty much kicked Plantinga's ass before he was even born.
Philosophers seem desperate to try to establish that there's a way of coming to grips with a real, unfiltered, shared reality and they just can't cope with the obvious fact that every input that our brain gets is heavily filtered (and in some cases, altered or missing) Whether brains are reliable or not is irrelevant since they're only as good as their inputs. Ultimately, it seems to me that the philosophers all just want their "soul"s and sense of special-ness back. Poor little meat robots! I guess they're just programmed to be bothered by the fact that they're meat robots.
Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 8:38 PM
This is meaningless again. There is no such thing as "irrational" material causes.
He might have meant random or non-sentient material causes.
It is still wrong.
There is no reason to believe that our brains function as well as they do because they were designed by a god. There is no reason to believe that an evolved brain can't function as well as ours does either.
These are assertions without proof. What we do know is that other species have cognitive abilities that are no where near ours but similar nonetheless. And we also know we evolved over 3.7 billion years. Plantinga must have heard about H. erectus, Lucy and so on.
* This is also the old, tired fallacy, Argument from Ignorance and Incredulity. "The human brain and mind couldn't have evolved, therefore goddidit."
This is why people get fed up with bad philosophy. Ten pages to say, goddidit.
Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 8:40 PM
Please any theist, how does adding God to this equation make it any better? Does this equation necessitate God? What does putting God in there solve? Is it one of those cases (like objective morality) where belief in belief is a more parsimonious solution?
Posted by: Mark Povich | May 29, 2009 8:46 PM
H.H.@#413 No problem. Although PZ makes some good points, I agree with Aaron Baker@#158. The best reply to Plantinga is in that paper I linked (here's another link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_argument_against_naturalism). Plantinga also holds that the "evolutionary naturalist" is committed to epiphenomenalism. But, if I remember correctly, Plantinga's argument also assumes that the naturalist holds something like the identity theory of mind. Even something weaker than identity, such as various supervenience theories seem to be immune to Plantinga. The interpretationist philosophies of mind developed by Quine, Davidson, and Dennett definitely are.
SomeGuy@156 As a philosophy student I can tell you that Plantinga, along with Swinburne, van Inwagen, etc., is not considered an outlier or loon. He is well regarded in epistemology even by naturalists.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 8:47 PM
I think some philosophers don't like the success of science in explaining the world and how it works, so in a post-modernist attitude must tear it down so nobody can figure anything out with their inane input. I would suspect that a majority of those are deistically minded, and can't stand that their imaginary deity is proven unnecessary by science again and again.
Posted by: crowepps | May 29, 2009 8:52 PM
"What does putting God in there solve?" Having a Creator outside of nature is a guarantee that humans have an equivalent 'soul' which will survive biological death and 'go to a better place' where everything will be made 'fair'.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 9:02 PM
"Branden Fitelson and famous philosopher of biology, Elliott Sober, have an excellent refutation of Plantinga's argument here"
Plantinga's response to their 'refutation' (and to what is more properly categorized as the criticisms of others) can be found in 'Naturalism Defeated?'
"However, I suspect you're going to say this isn't really his argument. If so, can you break it down for me?"
Sastra, you're right -- that isn't his argument! First, I'll do something better than break it down, though -- I'll give you Plantinga himself breaking it down in the following mp3 lectures. (I know that most of you aren't interested enough in the argument to read his work on it, but perhaps you'll be willing to listen to his exposition of it.)
http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/619
http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/473
http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/354
http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/345
Now, here's my understanding of it (please, though, don't substitute my extemporaneous blog post summary of it for Plantinga's own lectures. Also, they're all similar in content, so it's not as if you have to listen to all of them. The first one I linked to is his most recent.):
If naturalism (N) is true, then our cognitive faculties are the products of unguided (note, not random) evolution (E).
E is blind with respect to our beliefs. E acts on our behavior.
Given N, there are roughly 4 ways our beliefs could be related to our behavior: (1) epiphenomenalism, (2) semantic epiphenomenalism, (3) maladaptive, (4) adaptive.
If relationship (1), (2) or (3) obtain, we have (obviously) no reason to trust our cognitive faculties. (Short explanation: If (1), then our beliefs don't in any way affect our behavior; if (2), then beliefs do affect behavior, not because of their semiotic content, but because of their physical properties, i.e. as electro-chemical activity in the brain; if (3), then beliefs affect our behavior, but are maladaptive, and we can reasonably conclude that maladaptive beliefs are not likely to be true in most cases.)
If (4) obtains, i.e. if our beliefs cause our behavior by virtue of their content and are adaptive, we still don't have good reasons to believe that they are true. Why not? First, remember that evolution acts on our behavior. Second, think about all the ways false beliefs -- whether considered in isolation, or in complex webs of belief -- could result in adaptive behaviors.
There are far, far more false belief/adaptive behavior combinations than true belief/adaptive behavior combinations (since there are countless ways for a belief to be false, and only one way for it to be true).
So, even if our beliefs cause our behavior by virtue of their semiotic content, and are adaptive, we still don't have good reasons to conclude that they're true, i.e. we don't have good reasons to trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties (R).
Now, remember that there are roughly four possible belief-cum-behavior scenarios. The probability of R on the first three is obviously low, so even if the probability of (4) is high, the overall conditional probability of R is low (or inscrutable, given the nature of the variables we're working with). However, as we've seen, the probability of R on (4) is not likely to be high.
Therefore, since the probability of R given N and E is low or inscrutable, we have no good reasons to trust the deliverances of R.
But one of the deliverances of R is N. Hence, given N and E, we have no good reason to believe that N is true. Hence, naturalism is self defeating.
Note, that was from memory, so I again caution you against taking it as a perfect presentation of Plantinga's argument. If you listen to his lectures, you'll get a much better understanding of his argument.
Posted by: SinSeeker
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May 29, 2009 9:06 PM
Pardon me if I’m misunderstanding this (I find reading Plantinga leaves a worryingly vacant feeling in my skull).
Is Plantinga basically saying that as a naturalist, my perceptions of the world are flawed, but if I convert to christianity, my perceptions of the world will become 100% accurate?
Perhaps some Plantinga supporter would care to elaborate on the neural mechanisms involved in this amazing transformation?
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 29, 2009 9:08 PM
You know, one of the things that REALLY pisses me off about this argument is that such misuses of Bayesian probability give a bad name to a very useful tool. Platinga utterly ignores one of the most important aspects of Bayesian probability--that it is iterative. We may start with a uniform probability distribution over a range of abilities to discern TRUTH. However, for this to remain the case in succeeding generations, Platinga has to assume that ability to discern TRUTH conveys no survival advantage--e.g. that TRUTH is useless. This strikes me as a perverse attitude to take. What is more, the abilitity to ascertain certain aspects of TRUTH (or reality) would be more valuable than others. Thus, not only can naturalism and evolution explain our abilities to ascertain truth, they can explain why those abilities fail for some phenomena. Why do we perceive light as either a wave or a particle, when in fact it is neither? Why are we very good at perceiving and assessing immediate threats (e.g. snakes, tigers...), but lousy at assessing more abstract and remote threats (smoking, climate change...).
Thus, Platinga's argument fails due to the same weaknesses as all arguments based on the supernatural: they can't explain why a perfect God creates such an imperfect, though good enough, creation.
Science looks for naturalistic explanations not because of an inate bias, but rather because naturalistic explanations give us maximum predictive power and control of the phenomena we investigate in the natural world. It couldn't give a damn whether there is a supernatural realm or not.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 9:11 PM
There's always some clown wearing a philostopher hat who wants to chip away at naturalism by asserting that everything is the result of intentional artifice by some Kozmik Artificer, but if everything is by definition artificial, doesn't that just make the arguments of the artificialists just another thing we must disregard since it contains nothing but artificial ingredients as well? As for me, I try to avoid breakfasts with more than 6 impossible ingredients.
Hey everybody, Rudy Rucker just posted a thirty something Zappa playlist over at Boing Boing! Too much mocking of the philostophers will only encourage them.
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 9:13 PM
Eric #423 wrote:
I haven't listened to the lectures, but from your summary of it here it seems to me that all you're doing is fleshing out -- and further explaining -- Plantinga's first premise:
1.) If naturalism is true, and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
So isn't my formulation accurate (if not detailed)?
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 9:14 PM
Eric@#423 As I said, Plantinga also holds that the "evolutionary naturalist" is committed to epiphenomenalism. But, if I remember correctly, Plantinga's argument also assumes that the naturalist holds something like the identity theory of mind. Even something weaker than identity, such as various supervenience theories seem to be immune to Plantinga. The interpretationist philosophies of mind developed by Quine, Davidson, and Dennett definitely are. Something like this point is made in Robbins, J. Wesley (1994). "Is Naturalism Irrational?". Faith and Philosophy 11 (2): 255–59. Plantinga's argument also seems to presuppose that the naturalist is an internalist about mental content.
Posted by: crowepps | May 29, 2009 9:15 PM
"Thus, Platinga's argument fails due to the same weaknesses as all arguments based on the supernatural: they can't explain why a perfect God creates such an imperfect, though good enough, creation."
I thought the explanation was that it was all the fault of Eve/Adam, etc., and that the imperfecitons in creation are therefore all the fault of people having imperfect faith and/or not being able to 'understand God's plan'. You have to admit that's the perfect circular argument. The doubts themselves are evidence that it's the doubter's fault.
Posted by: Quentin Robert DeNameland | May 29, 2009 9:23 PM
TIME IS OF AFFLICTION! This may be cause for alarm among a portion of you, as, from a certain experience, I tend to proclaim: 'THE EONS ARE CLOSING!'! Now what does this mean, precisely to the layman? Simply this: 'MOMENTARILY, THE NEED FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF NEW LIGHT WILL NO LONGER EXIST!'
Posted by: Mark Povich | May 29, 2009 9:23 PM
Sorry, that "anonymous"@#428 is me.
Eric, you seem to be well acquainted with Plantinga's work. PZ said that Plantinga was a creationist but I thought he was a theistic evolutionist. Do you know if he is or not?
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 9:24 PM
"1.) If naturalism is true, and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
So isn't my formulation accurate (if not detailed)?"
Your first premise is closer to the essence of Plantinga's argument than the formulation of the argument you originally presented:
"1.) If naturalism is true, and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
2.) But the reliability of our beliefs is not very low.
3.) Therefore, naturalism is not true."
(2) is not part of his argument at all. He's arguing that the belief that N and E are true is self defeating, not that N is false because our cognitive faculties are in fact reliable. Note, this doesn't mean, as I've repeatedly said, that he's therefore arguing that our cognitive faculties are in fact unreliable. He thinks they are reliable, but doesn't think that this belief can be sustained in addition to the belief that N and E are true. This argument is a lot more subtle and nuanced than too many here suppose.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 9:34 PM
Still no evidence other that sophistry for Plantinga. No evidence of the reality of his idea. Ergo, the idea is false. Repeating bad arguments doesn't make them better, but just shows the repeaters not to really understand them, or, more important, the need for a reality check. That is what separates good philosophy from bad philosophy. And Plantinga, in this case, is bad philosophy.
Posted by: Zetetic
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May 29, 2009 9:35 PM
crowepps said:
I thought the explanation was that it was all the fault of Eve/Adam, etc., and that the imperfecitons in creation are therefore all the fault of people having imperfect faith and/or not being able to 'understand God's plan'.
Yes...but if there were truly perfect they wouldn't have "fallen" in the first place. Not to mention, god's leaving the "fruit of knowledge" tree laying around is a bit like leaving a loaded handgun in easy reach of a small child. Especially since god (being omniscient) would have had to have known that Adam/Eve would have eaten the fruit ahead of the event occurring.
Posted by: Zetetic
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May 29, 2009 9:38 PM
damn forgot the blockquote...oh well.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 9:38 PM
PZ tends to regard "theistic evolution" as a particular flavor of creationism. He has referred to Ken Miller as a creationist (of a sort) as well.
Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 9:44 PM
The success of scepticism in understanding the world should be there for anyone with a computer to see. Hello, I'm sitting in Australia and communicating with you through a global telecommunications network. Are you honestly going to say that your senses are so unreliable that you don't believe that you have a computer in front of you and are chatting to other people globally? Or can it be established that the human mind is crafted through evolution in order to have beliefs that are practical and useful in understanding the world?
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 9:44 PM
Eric #432 wrote:
Ok, is this closer?:
1.) If Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
2.) Naturalists who believe their minds evolved from non-rational sources do not believe that the probability of that belief is very low.
3.) But Naturalists who believe that their minds evolved from non-rational sources should believe that the probability of that belief is very low. (see #1)
4.) Therefore, Naturalism is self-defeating.
If A, then B.
Naturalists believe A.
But B
Therefore, not A.
Posted by: Mark Povich | May 29, 2009 9:45 PM
Sven DiMilo@#436
Ah, right, I didn't remember that. Thanks.
Eric, I think semantic externalism can get the job done regarding Plantinga's (4), but I'm not sure; I still need to think about it.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 9:46 PM
"Yes...but if there were truly perfect they wouldn't have "fallen" in the first place. Not to mention, god's leaving the "fruit of knowledge" tree laying around is a bit like leaving a loaded handgun in easy reach of a small child."
Sorry, don't know how to do block quotes -
This is where "free will" gets dragged in - they CHOSE to fall because they weren't 'obedient'. I'm not saying that the overall scenario makes sense, but after-death survival of the individual consciousness absolutely REQUIRES there to be a supernatural God in order to justify the belief in a supernatural soul which can survive biological death.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 9:46 PM
Eric @ #432
Except it's not enough that Plantinga "believes" that our cognitive faculties are in fact unreliable through a theistic worldview, he needs to demonstrate it for his argument to mean anything. If he can't, then even if his argument against the reliability of naturalism is sound, it's an utterly pointless argument since supernaturalism is just as unsound. So why do you continue to waste everybody's time with nonsense, Eric? It doesn't make theism or supernaturalism any more intellectually defensible or respectable. It does make theists look like masters of denial and misdirection, though. Way to go!Posted by: raven | May 29, 2009 9:48 PM
Plantinga's premise is just wrong. Who says an evolved brain/mind isn't very reliable? Compared to what, a designed mind? There is no such thing right now. This is an assertion without proof and contradicted by a lot of evidence.
1. The available data shows we did evolve. This is well known science.
2. Our brains/minds aren't perfect but they are pretty damn good. We built a Hi Tech civilization and became the dominant species on the planet.
There is no reason to believe that our brains function as well as they do because they were designed by a god. There is no reason to believe that an evolved brain can't function as well as ours does either.
If I'm following this, the 5 pages reduces down to:
"Our brains/minds could not have evolved, therefore goddidit." The usual creationist fallacy.
Posted by: Mark Povich | May 29, 2009 9:51 PM
Kel@#437 Plantinga's point is that our cognitive faculties ARE, in fact, reliable and this is, according to him, what disproves "evolutionary natualism."
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 9:51 PM
If A, then B.
Naturalists believe A.
But B
Therefore, not A.
That explains it. Plantinga bwoke his widdle modus ponens, and so far all of his inductive arguments appear to be jammed at 50%. Eric, could you rummage around in the astral surplus until you can dig up a valid argument for the extinguished philostopher? There's a good sycophant.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 29, 2009 9:52 PM
So it's just the identity function?
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 9:52 PM
"Repeating bad arguments doesn't make them better, but just shows the repeaters not to really understand them, or, more important, the need for a reality check."
Feel free to help! Follow your own dictum: don't just assert that the arguments are bad, give some evidence!
"PZ said that Plantinga was a creationist but I thought he was a theistic evolutionist. Do you know if he is or not?"
Mark, Plantinga does accept an old earth, and does believe that living things have moved from relatively simple to relatively complex forms. What he doesn't believe is that this process is necessarily unguided. Also, he's expressed skepticism about a certain understanding of the common ancestry thesis. (I disagree with him on this last point.) Given all this, it seems fair to categorize him as a theistic evolutionist. However, I concede that I'm not nearly as familiar with his views on the factuality of evolution as I am with much of his other work, so I may be way off base here.
Posted by: Jason | May 29, 2009 9:54 PM
Eric,
Without engaging fully with the rest of your argument, let me just give you an example of why many of the commenters here are (in my view rightly) dismissive of Plantinga.
You write:
This is the kind of statement that only a philosopher with little to no background in mathematics or science could make. There are so many things wrong with it it's hard to know where to start. First off, how would one go about evaluating this statement? What methodology would you propose for counting true belief/adaptive behavior combinations and false belief/adaptive behavior combinations? Secondly, if we take the statement for granted, why should we attach the same probability to each of these statements? (depending on the distribution of priors, uncountably many options of type A might still be less probable than finitely many options of type B). Thirdly, how can we enumerate the "ways" in which a belief could be true or false?
I could go on, but I think the point is clear: you haven't adequately defined any of the terms you're using - and it's not just because you're summarizing Plantinga - he doesn't adequately define any of these terms either, and I doubt they could be given a definition clear enough that the questions above could be answered.
If you or Plantinga were to actually propose a model which was well-specified enough that the above questions could be answered, then the argument would be worthy of consideration. Until then, it really is just sophistry.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 9:57 PM
If A, then B.
Naturalists believe A.
But B
Therefore, not A.
Waitaminute. Is that a modus pollens or a modus tonens?
"Hey Pablo? I think he broke the philostopher!"
It's good to see the old leprechaun scam in action now and again though.
Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 9:59 PM
Which is just stupid.Posted by: crowepps | May 29, 2009 10:00 PM
"Our brains/minds could not have evolved, therefore goddidit."
I think it could be more accurately expressed as since in the face of fear of eventual mortality God is an absolute requirement, any argument that our brains/mind could have evolved must be disproved (and any sophistry is acceptable in order to do so).
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
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May 29, 2009 10:05 PM
I'm sorry, but how is this whole argument any better than facilis' annoying "but how do you KNOW?" bullshit...?
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 29, 2009 10:08 PM
Eric, by demanding you prove yourself, I am following the dictates of science. He who makes the assertion, in this case Plantinga, then you, are the ones who must show the evidence. Failure on your part. This is why science (natural philosophy) has a solid record in improving humankind, while that of philosophy itself, much, much less. Reality checks work. Try them.
Posted by: Emmet, OM
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May 29, 2009 10:10 PM
It isn't.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 10:11 PM
I'm sorry, but how is this whole argument any better than facilis' annoying "but how do you KNOW?" bullshit...?
Ostensibly, Plantinga didn't obtain his license to make new brown clouds from the Quentin Robert DeNameland school of Philostophy, but I'm assured that all we non-artificialists need to do to be certain is to flip a coin. Paging Rosencrantz and Guildenstern...
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 10:13 PM
Eric:
It seems to me that the basis for Plantinga's argument* is that are minds are reliable. This is not so - confer such things as schizophrenia. Since our minds are NOT reliable, and this is well known, wouldn't that be evidence of the opposite of what Plantinga claims?
*I could be wrong, of course
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 10:17 PM
"Ok, is this closer?:
1.) If Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
2.) Naturalists who believe their minds evolved from non-rational sources do not believe that the probability of that belief is very low.
3.) But Naturalists who believe that their minds evolved from non-rational sources should believe that the probability of that belief is very low. (see #1)
4.) Therefore, Naturalism is self-defeating.
If A, then B.
Naturalists believe A.
But B
Therefore, not A."
Certainly not! First, the form is obviously invalid. (If S is a man, then S is a mammal [If A then B]. Some believe S is a man [Naturalists believe A]. S is a mammal [B]. Therefore, S isn't a man [Therefore, not A].)
That aside, it again doesn't capture Plantinga's argument. 1 is argued for, not presented as an implication; 2 and 3 play no role in the argument at all, though if the argument is sound, 3 is true; 4 is the correct conclusion, but you haven't presented an argument for it!
"Except it's not enough that Plantinga "believes" that our cognitive faculties are in fact unreliable through a theistic worldview, he needs to demonstrate it for his argument to mean anything. If he can't, then even if his argument against the reliability of naturalism is sound, it's an utterly pointless argument since supernaturalism is just as unsound."
This makes no sense. If I present a sound argument against P, and if my alternative to P is Q, it doesn't follow that my argument against P is incomplete until I defend Q! If my argument against P is sound, P is false, whatever the status of Q. Plantinga's argument is an evolutionary argument against naturalism, not an evolutionary argument for theism. Also, note that there's quite an asymmetry between demonstrating that P is false, and between not demonstrating that Q is true. In such a situation, P is out the window, but Q is still minimally a possibility.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 10:19 PM
It's the exact same argument. Plantinga just uses bigger words. And just like facilis, Plantinga can't answer how theism solves the dilemma of uncertainty any better than naturalism, he just asserts that it does. Or he ignores the issue altogether, like Eric does, in the hopes that no one will point it out. But you can only pretend not to notice this obvious problem for so long before you look either stupid or dishonest, and Eric has long since crossed that point.Posted by: Lee Picton | May 29, 2009 10:23 PM
Since, over the course of a life now in the 6th decade, I have been able to (objectively, hopefully) conclude that I am a reasonably intelligent layman. Therefore, I should be able to read (and understand) at least moderately sophisticated arguments, whether they be in philosophy or science, and be able to render an approximately accurate judgment as to their worthiness. I admire those, who, like PZ and some of the commenters here (Sastra and those like her), who are able to render often difficult subjects in lucid prose that I have no trouble understanding. Whenever I try to tackle someone like Aquinas or Plantinga, I become hopelessly confused, get lost in the abstruse and convoluted syntax, and eventually give up in frustration. Thanks to all of you who have made it clear that it is not my fault for not always being able to recognize bullshit. I suspected it might be bullshit, but not knowing how to evaluate bullshit on the basis of my limited access to "truth" (am I getting the idea?), I am asymptotically closer to it by relying on the input of other brains. Therefore "truthiness" is close enough and behold! It's bullshit. Have I got it right?
BTW, I am too old to wade through piles of worthless crap. For no bullshit philosophy, where is a good place to start for the basics?
Posted by: crowepps | May 29, 2009 10:23 PM
If individual consciousness is purely a biological function of the brain, it's pretty clear that the individual is extinguished when the brain stops working and there is nothing to survive after biological death. I think an inability to accept that underlies not only this but a lot of other arguments proving the existence of God/gods.
Posted by: RBH | May 29, 2009 10:25 PM
gman wrote
On the contrary, in a sense the human brain was designed by natural selection to do (a species of) science. Consider two populations of critters, one whose perceptual/cognitive apparatus gives it a reasonably reliable representation of the external world and the other whose apparatus gives it an unreliable representation of that world. Who will eat whom for lunch, on average?Natural selection will select for cognitive representations of (relevant parts of) the world that are reliably associated with (relevant) properties of that world because critters whose representations are unreliable are lunch for those with more reliable representations.
Thus there is selection for critters having reliable cognitive representations, where "reliable" means "correlated with real properties of the world."
Now, whether that's Truth is a question Plantinga can fight out with Ra and Ba'al, with Zeus as referee.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 10:26 PM
"Or he ignores the issue altogether, like Eric does, in the hopes that no one will point it out. But you can only pretend not to notice this obvious problem for so long before you look either stupid or dishonest, and Eric has long since crossed that point."
I just pointed out in #457 how foolish your reasoning is with respect to this issue.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 10:26 PM
But you can only pretend not to notice this obvious problem for so long before you look either stupid or dishonest, and Eric has long since crossed that point.
Here I presume you intended to use the inclusive "or."
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 10:27 PM
Er, in #456, that is.
Posted by: Rorschach
|
May 29, 2009 10:30 PM
Ken Cope is cracking me up tonight :-)
Posted by: philosophyaintallthatbad | May 29, 2009 10:32 PM
I love reading this blog. I do. But really?
1. "Read it, and you'll wonder how a man so confused could have acquired such a high reputation; you might even think that philosophy has been Sokaled." Fair enough. But the same thing could be said of Fracins Collins and biology, right? Most philosophers don't agree with Plantinga's conclusions. They recognize that he is incredibly intelligent (or more to the point, clever), but they think that, unfortunately, "he has a tremendous amount of religious baggage." Religious baggage weighs heavily on philosophers and scientists equally.
2. Do you guys really think you are not "doing philosophy" all the time? Here's a recurrent belief, (one that I hold by the way): "Teaching creationism is wrong." Is this false? How did we figure that out? "Water freezes at 32 degrees." That's a proposition that we can test using thermometers, observation, and whatnot, and the results of our experiments confirm it. Good ol' science. But my wrongometer that measures how wrong an action is doesn't seem to be working that well today. "Torture is wrong." Of course it is. But what experiments confirm that proposition? We can conduct all the experiments we want, none of them are going to provide evidence that torture is wrong.
There are a lot of problems with Plaintinga's reasoning, but there's nothing wrong with philosophy. You have to do philosophy before you do science. Deal with it.
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 10:34 PM
I didn't say the argument was incomplete, I said it was meaningless. Plantinga is arguing against P because he prefers Q, but if he can't demonstrate Q is true then Q has no basis for being preferred. I agree that he isn't addressing the truth of Q, and that's the problem. He wants it to be correct by default. It isn't.
The status of Q is also false. That's the elephant in the room you keep ignoring. Seriously, why the act? What do you hope to accomplish by pretending this is debatable?
Except everyone knows Q is not a possibility. The arguments against Q have been presented repeatedly, in this very thread even. Continuing to like Q is still a live possibility when everyone knows that it isn't makes you look either dishonest or incompentent.Posted by: Kel | May 29, 2009 10:37 PM
This whole argument is really stupid. The mind has ways to know, and they can be established through natural selection. At the same time, those heuristic functions can and do fail which gives us reason to be sceptical of accepting the process on face value. We can see the success and failure of the mind and that fits perfectly with our understanding of a naturalistic world. Plantiga's argument is stupid, and it's by no means established that adding God would add anything to helping us solve this supposed mute dilemma.
Aztecs sacrificed to a Sun god, people still consult psychics, and we have a device sitting in front of us capable of doing billions of calculations per second. I wonder which method of knowing works...
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | May 29, 2009 10:37 PM
Because it gives Christians with pretensions of intellectual sophistication more support for their denial. I'm guessing that means that the effects of cognitive dissonance can be alleviated by the use of pseudo-philosophical arguments.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 10:38 PM
If A, then B.
Naturalists believe A.
But B
Therefore, not A."
No FCCing shirt, Sherlock... Thanks for using the counterexample method to show us what we all knew, that Plantinga's argument is a load of bollocks. Unless Eric can show us that his symbolizing foo is superior to Sastra's...
Posted by: Anonymous | May 29, 2009 10:39 PM
Well Platinga's argument is nothing new (for him), and is pretty stupid, but there have been a few silly things said in this thread too. Here's a few I noticed:
Judgement and judgment are both allowable spellings. Citing Firefox's spell check is silly because it doesn't have a catalogue of every word in the English language, and it is specifically an American English spell check, so it doesn't take into account British English and other forms of English.
This is silly because there is much philosophy that doesn't have physical evidence backing it up (being more to do with reasoning and logic alone), but that doesn't automatically make it "sophistry".
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but it does not mean that presence is false. It means it might be false, and the stronger the evidence, the more likely it is to be false, but it never means that it is definitely false.
This patently false. Most philosophers understand that our view of reality can never be shown to be 100% correct, or even that our senses are completely reliable. In fact it was philosophers that first came up with that idea, long before science understood it. Plato, Berkeley, Descartes (before he went all God on us), Godel, Hume who you mention, all had arguments against the idea that we can ever know that the reality we see is the objective reality.
Posted by: dreikin | May 29, 2009 10:41 PM
Eric:
I'm hurt, you seem to have just skipped right over me
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 10:46 PM
"I didn't say the argument was incomplete, I said it was meaningless."
Again, complete nonsense. If I show that P is false, and if my alternative to P is Q, and if I can't prove Q, it doesn't follow that P is meaningless. I can show you that a supposed proof of a particular theorem in math doesn't work, and if my argument is sound it will be a fact that it doesn't work, even if I haven't completed my alternative proof yet. The fact that I haven't completed my alternative proof, or even the fact that my proof also doesn't work, in no way renders the fact that the first proof fails meaningless. Honestly, this is pretty obvious stuff.
"Plantinga is arguing against P because he prefers Q, but if he can't demonstrate Q is true then Q has no basis for being preferred. I agree that he isn't addressing the truth of Q, and that's the problem. He wants it to be correct by default. It isn't."
Huh? Plantinga's preferences are irrelevant. He could both prefer theism to naturalism, and have presented a sound argument against naturalism. And he doesn't address theism in this argument, but for good reason -- it's not part of the argument! How difficult is that to understand? As for the notion that he doesn't address the truth of theism, and that he 'wants it to be true by default' (by which I take you to mean he considers it true if naturalism is false), well, all I can say is that it's obvious that you know next to nothing about Plantinga.
Posted by: homostoicus | May 29, 2009 10:47 PM
Interesting that this generated so much interest, don't you think? So many ways to respond. So I'll just say it's obvious that Plantinga hasn't read Shermer (much less Dennett).
PZ, did you mispell effluent? :-) Affluent works pretty well, too. (Pardon the grammatical faux pun.)
Posted by: Sastra
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May 29, 2009 10:54 PM
Eric #456 wrote:
Is this closer?
1.) If Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
2.) If the probability of a belief being reliable is very low, then one ought not to believe it.
3.) Naturalists who believe that 'Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources' believe something the probability of which is very low.
4.) Therefore, Naturalists ought not to believe in Naturalism.
5.) Therefore, Naturalism is self-defeating.
6.) Whatever is self-defeating is false.
7.) Therefore, Naturalism is false.
If A, then B
If B, then C
Not C
Not A
(?)
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
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May 29, 2009 10:57 PM
eric, the reason platinga must have good arguments for theism, or his argument against naturalism doesn't work is that this isn't an either-or situation (i.e. naturalism isn't either correct or wrong)
naturalism works well enough, and this argument merely points out a perceived weakness. however, in the real world we inhabit, a model that's good enough but has a few weaknesses is still used, unless and until another more accurate model is presented.
to point out a perceived weakness in the only functionable model we have is meaningless, unless you can present a better model that accounts for everything naturalism does, AND covers the perceived weakness. until then, it's just mental masturbation
Posted by: charley
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May 29, 2009 10:59 PM
@468
Having spent my life around people who revere P, I'd say you'd be guessing right. There is a healthy market for his brand of oily smoke among those who want to feel smart without giving up their comfy Christian community.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 11:01 PM
"It seems to me that the basis for Plantinga's argument* is that are minds are reliable."
Dreikin, sorry. I have a hard time responding to every post, especially here where I tend to be defending a position -- or, at least defending how a position is to be understood -- against multiple posters.
No, the notion that our cognitive faculties are in fact reliable plays no special role in Plantinga's argument (i.e. no more than every argument in some sense presupposes this). He does believe that they are reliable, but he defends this notion in an entirely different (and rather long and complicated) argument. See #423 for my (almost certainly inadequate) summary of Plantinga's argument against naturalism, and for links to some mp3 lectures he's given on the argument.
Posted by: Steve_C | May 29, 2009 11:02 PM
Kel, your points made me think that Plantiga's argument actually argues much more againts the reliability of people's spiritual or religious experiences. I mean look at Francis Collins. He does sound scientific work but get him on a long hike and up to a waterfall and whooosh he's having a life changing experience.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
May 29, 2009 11:06 PM
But, naturalism works, that's what the evidence says, so the whole argument is irrelevant except as an intellectual exercise (mental masturbation).
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 11:08 PM
He does sound scientific work but get him on a long hike and up to a waterfall and whooosh he's having a life changing experience.
Can Francis Collins be certain he's seeing three frozen waterfalls and not two, nor four, and is not instead, a brain in a vat created by means artificial to serve the malefic purposes of Loki? How can we tell?
Posted by: H.H. | May 29, 2009 11:13 PM
It's not. You're the one having difficulty moving past it. I'm granting you, for the sake of furthering the discussion, that Plantinga's argument against certainty in naturalism is sound. Ok? Rock solid. His arguments works. I'm trying to move onto the therefore. What conclusions are we supposed to draw from this fact? Is it that supernaturalism works better? No? Then what's the fucking point of the argument, Eric? It's a wash on all sides. Both naturalism and supernaturalism suffer from the same inadequacies. Remember the conclusion I quoted to you earlier: "The theist, like the evolutionary naturalist, is unable to construct a non-question begging argument that refutes global skepticism." If you want to make a case for theism that solves this problem, then do so. If not, please shut the fuck already.Posted by: breadmaker | May 29, 2009 11:14 PM
#??? Eric and #393 Jeremy D.
well stated comments fellas.
that was better than a strong cup of coffee.
it seems to that my thought process is more on the order of 20 grit sandpaper rather than the smoother more discerning stuff.
thanks for the thoughfulness
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 11:14 PM
I heard that Obama's first pick for NIH Director was Francis Collins's brain in a vat.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 11:19 PM
I heard that Obama's first pick for NIH Director was Francis Collins's brain in a vat.
Obama needs brains.
Posted by: James Webster | May 29, 2009 11:30 PM
I know you believe you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you herd(sic) is not what I meant
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 11:31 PM
"I'm granting you, for the sake of furthering the discussion, that Plantinga's argument against certainty in naturalism is sound. Ok? Rock solid. His arguments works. I'm trying to move onto the therefore. What conclusions are we supposed to draw from this fact? Is it that supernaturalism works better? No? Then what's the fucking point of the argument, Eric?"
You'll find it in the conclusion -- that naturalism is self defeating. That's the 'point' of the argument. Are you honestly suggesting that the notion that naturalism is in fact self defeating would not be rather important if it were shown to be true? Imagine this: let's suppose that you developed a rock solid argument against god's existence (I'm not suggesting that Plantinga's argument is rock solid; I'm merely following you here). Would it honestly matter if you had no good arguments for naturalism? (Note, naturalism is broader than atheism -- you can be an atheist and not a naturalist, but you can't be a naturalist and not an atheist.) Would it be a 'wash'? *Of course not*. You would've settled one of the most fundamental questions human beings ask. You're ignoring the asymmetry I referred to earlier (i.e. between showing that something is false, and not being able to show that something is true). Or, think about it this way: In science, is it the case that the fact that a particular theory is falsified rendered 'meaningless' (or, to take your new suggestion, 'pointless') if the scientist who falsifies it has no good alternative theory? Again, *of course not*. Would it be better to both falsify a theory and propose a great alternative theory? Sure, but the lack of an alternative theory doesn't render the falsification meaningless (pointless).
"Both naturalism and supernaturalism suffer from the same inadequacies."
Do you have an argument against supernaturalism? I haven't seen you present one yet. You keep asserting that Plantinga is no better off, yet (1) you've never read his warrant trilogy, and (2) you've presented no arguments against supernaturalism. Since you're not going to work your way through three dense books in the next few minutes, would you care to present your argument against supernaturalism?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 11:31 PM
Lee 458 - you and I both!!!
Eric and similar: you are full of eloquent shit.
Just tell me in simple terms what do I do with what you and Alvin so desperately cling to. Let me assume for sake of discussion you are logically right (I think you all are full of shit as others have pointed out in detail and you've ignored - e.g. the misuse of probability; see a_ray_in_dilbert_space for example - but let's assume you have it down). SO WHAT? WTF CHANGES? WHAT METHOD OF SCIENCE CHANGES? WHAT CHECKED AND RECHECKED EVIDENCE DO WE IGNORE? WHAT LAW OF PHYSICS OR CHEMISTRY DO WE ABANDON?
Philosophy that is sophistry means nothing to the real world. You haven't proved god and you haven't advanced useful knowledge or offered useful alternative discovery methods (as opposed to science). You haven't done one USEFUL thing. And that is why I think people here like me are just totally frustrated.
Not only are your ideas built on sophistry shit but your ideas for all practical purposes that advance civilizations are useless. You prove no alternative and offer no paradigm shift. Good grief - you guys waste air.
Posted by: Zetetic
|
May 29, 2009 11:33 PM
Anonymous @ #440 said:
Correction...this is where apologists use "free will" to excuse god's behavior that is at best extremely negligent, and by all accounts a deliberate and manipulative frame job.
That's why I mentioned the utter negligence (or malice) required for an omniscient being to create such a situation in the first place.
First, if they were "perfect" then Adam and Eve wouldn't have made the mistake of defying god's orders and being tricked by temptation. That they made a mistake makes them fallible, and not perfect.
Second, if god is "all knowing" then he/she/it have known that the "serpent" would succeed in tempting them and that they would "fall from grace".
Third, if a parent had left a live hand grenade or a loaded gun near a small child (within easy reach), and just said "don't touch" then walked away until the nearly inevitable tragedy occurs. Would the parent saying "Well I said: Don't Touch!" be considered a reasonable defense anywhere outside of religion? Of course it wouldn't.
As you said it doesn't make any sense, but that's why such excuse mongering to rationalize the whole garden of Eden myth shouldn't go unchallenged.
BTW you can make a blockquote by placing the chevrons for "less than" and "greater than"(usually above the "," and the "." keys) around the word "blockquote" and "/blockquote" (to close it).
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 11:41 PM
"SO WHAT? WTF CHANGES? WHAT METHOD OF SCIENCE CHANGES? WHAT CHECKED AND RECHECKED EVIDENCE DO WE IGNORE? WHAT LAW OF PHYSICS OR CHEMISTRY DO WE ABANDON?"
You've completely missed the distinction between methodological naturalism, which is what science makes use of, and which is what Plantinga's argument says nothing about, and metaphysical naturalism, which has nothing to do with science, and which Plantinga's argument addresses.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 11:44 PM
Do you have an argument against supernaturalism?
There is nature, and the claim that everything in nature is fake; artificial even. Oh, dear. How shall we nature lovers, dancing sky-clad (and it's not just a privilege, it's a rite!) in the ancient groves, ever defend ourselves from the argument from superfluousness?
If you've got some supernatural, well then, don't keep us all waiting. Whip it out! My guess is, eight inches or less.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 11:45 PM
Eric - cut the shit. "Do you have an argument against supernaturalism? I haven't seen you present one yet. You keep asserting that Plantinga is no better off, yet (1) you've never read his warrant trilogy, and (2) you've presented no arguments against supernaturalism. Since you're not going to work your way through three dense books in the next few minutes, would you care to present your argument against supernaturalism?"
You are asking us to prove a negative - to falsify the non-falsifiable. GET REAL AND FOLLOW SOME RULES. YOU PROVE THE POSITIVE OF YOUR ASSERTIONS. FOR NOW WE'LL STICK WITH WHAT FUCKING WORKS AND WORKS WELL! What you all do not understand is there IS NO GOD IN SCIENCE. Science stops at goddiit - PERIOD. And scientists - even believers - cannot allow that to be their end point in scientific pursuits.
Again your arguments are a useless waste of air Eric to me.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 29, 2009 11:49 PM
Brown shoes
don't make it.
Posted by: Zetetic
|
May 29, 2009 11:50 PM
That's a rather interesting comment since evolutionary theory (which is being addressed by Plantinga's argument) is a product of science, and therefore methodological naturalism. Perhaps it's Plantinga that is missing the distinction?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 29, 2009 11:50 PM
Eric I accept your 489 as a useful "criticism" and look into that. If my ignorance is showing I'll gladly stand corrected. I'll try to understand that angle better.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 11:51 PM
Concernedjoe, I was responding to H.H., who wrote:
"It's a wash on all sides. Both naturalism and supernaturalism suffer from the same inadequacies."
Given this claim, my request was perfectly reasonable. Please, keep the context of a post in mind before you respond.
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
|
May 29, 2009 11:52 PM
except that that conclusion doesn't follow from the argument. at best, it's a strawman, but in any case it's not a conclusion that can be drawn from the argument that human brains aren't 100% reliable according to naturalism. there's a whole bunch of steps there you've missed. not to mention that you're still treating this as if naturalism could only be 100% right, or 100% wrong. in reality, the best conclusion we can craw is that naturalism has a very small chance of being true; for this to matter, you'd have to show that there's a method that works more reliably than that;
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 11:52 PM
Quit school
Why fake it?
Posted by: Tuomo Hamalainen | May 29, 2009 11:55 PM
I think this is mostly "old stuff from Descartes". Plantinga's error, i think, is that he is counting propabilities only for naturalism, but not in theism. If other is more propable, that is better.
If evolution "gives" us way to generate many opnions/beliefs (or do it one at time), God must do the same. There might be God's that are not so nice, and we have errand ideas. And then we can not be "warranted". And of course, He must give option about himself too. Not just that he gives us way to find empiric truths. There is allways possibilities that even Nice god give us warrant only in natural world. So this God which tells truth about Himself too, is actually telling more opnions. And that makes propability smaller.
And of course it is circular to say that "I have perfect senses and logic because of God" and "I know God because i have clear sense about it". It is actually just the same stuff which he is saying, when he is talking about "you can not test your brain reliability with your brain - it is just like looking that newspaper is right in looking the newspaper". It is actually so obvious. And it is his own logic.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 29, 2009 11:57 PM
naturalism could only be 100% right, or 100% wrong
Plantinga's coin is no less a sucker's bet than Pascal's Wager, just ask Two Face.
Posted by: chgo_liz
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May 29, 2009 11:58 PM
Wow, Eric, your arguments are so illogical that even a non-scientist AND non-philosopher like me can punch holes through every paragraph you've written. Congratulations. You should win some sort of prize for that.
It's nice to know I'm not the dumbest person reading this blog.
Posted by: Eric | May 29, 2009 11:59 PM
"That's a rather interesting comment since evolutionary theory (which is being addressed by Plantinga's argument) is a product of science, and therefore methodological naturalism. Perhaps it's Plantinga that is missing the distinction?"
Not at all. Plantinga isn't arguing against evolution, but against (metaphysical) naturalism.
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
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May 30, 2009 12:00 AM
actually, metaphysical naturalism is supported by methodological naturalism; thus the only way to disprove the former is to disprove the latter (or replace it with a more effective way to determine reality); anything else is pointless sophistry
Posted by: InfraredEyes
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May 30, 2009 12:01 AM
Eric, forgive me for barging in late with a stupid question, but where does this bold assertion come from? Do you have any conception of the timescale of evolution? Do you realize how many unreliable beliefs have been eliminated along the way? Do you understand that over time, an iterative process that rejects false results can actually increase an initially small probability?
No, seriously.
Posted by: Sastra
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May 30, 2009 12:03 AM
Eric #403 wrote:
Ok, here is my formulation at #474:
1.) If Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
2.) If the probability of a belief being reliable is very low, then one ought not to believe it.
3.) Naturalists who believe that 'Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources' believe something the probability of which is very low.
4.) Therefore, Naturalists ought not to believe in Naturalism.
5.) Therefore, Naturalism is self-defeating.
6.) Whatever is self-defeating is false.
7.) Therefore, Naturalism is false.
Everything depends on that first premise. The entire argument about "Naturalism being self-defeating" can't and won't work without that first premise. And that's where the meat of the disagreement lies.
I'm not going to argue against the first premise now, because it's late and others are doing that. But when you said that, if Plantinga's argument is sound, then one cannot refute his first premise, you're not really saying anything significant. Of course, if an argument is sound, then the premises have not been refuted, and the conclusion follows logically.
As far as I can tell, there's nothing special being brought in to jolt the Naturalist with an unexpected implication of "being self-defeating" -- unless he accepts that first premise. Which is the weakest spot.
Posted by: EW | May 30, 2009 12:03 AM
WOW! What a great discusion. I read the first 200+ posts at work and was busting out to comment but couldn't till now so I apologize in advance if I rehash others observations.
I am of the opinion that we evolved as support systems for colonies of single cell creatures and have become self aware in the process.
These colonies evolved to protect their hosts, including our brains, which have a high degree of programming potential. Human brains can be programed by other humans to think or do anything physically possible.
This is new (in the evolutionary time scale) and why we have religous humans blowing themselves up in middle east police stations while at the same time we build space stations.
The ability to pass/control large amounts of information down to succesive generations has acclerated since the invention of paper.
Our brains have evolved to where we can forward large amounts of information to our kids without using DNA.
This is new on the evolutionary time line.
The above is my current opinion as a layman. Poke holes in it and I will adjust as I love science.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 12:07 AM
Not at all. Plantinga isn't arguing against evolution, but against (metaphysical) naturalism.
Don't forget to be mildly amused, as the mighty philostophers slap the imaginary corpse of metaphysical naturalism well-nigh into non-existence with their diminutive (looks like one, only smaller) collective penis! Don't worry, it's not necrophilia if it was never alive to begin with.
Posted by: H.H. | May 30, 2009 12:08 AM
But Plantinga hasn't shown that "naturalism" is self-defeating, he's only shown that our cognitive faculties are unreliable, which they are. But they remain unreliable whether one assumes naturalism or not. We can't ever know anything with certainty. That's a fact of the human condition and isn't particular to naturalism. He's proven that our our cognitive faculties are unreliable under one particular scenario, when in fact they are actually unreliable in all scenarios. So, yes, that's a wash. And his conclusion that naturalism *specifically* has been defeated is false. The only thing he's managed to defeat is the notion that absolute truth is accessible to human minds.
Except that isn't what happened here. He hasn't shown that naturalism is self-defeating. He's merely demonstrated that any argument which relies on the certainty that our cognitive faculties are infallible is self-defeating, and is thus a sterile line of inquiry. The issue of naturalism vs. supernaturalism is thus left unresolved by his argument.
I've been asking you to explain how supernaturalism poses a solution to unreliability of our cognitive faculties for abut a dozen posts now. You really want an argument against it before you present it? Fine. It's not hard: the Magic Men who gave us our cognitive faculties could be fucking with us. Who's to say? To use a Magic Man familiar to all of us, even Yahweh got pissed when Adam and Eve tried to eat the fruit of Eternal Life and become like gods themselves. Maybe he purposely skewed our cognitive faculties, made them intentionally unreliable so we wouldn't pose a threat to his omnipotence ever again. That's the thing about Magic Men, they be invoked to do absolutely anything.Posted by: Zetetic
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May 30, 2009 12:10 AM
Eric said:
Then why even bring evolution into the discussion at all? Evolution is rooted in methodological naturalism, it has no stance on the supernatural, it simply doesn't invoke it as an explanatory mechanism.
It seems to me the Plantinga wants to bring evolution into the discussion rather than just focus on metaphysical naturalism.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 12:12 AM
How does adding God stop naturalism from being self-defeating? Does the computer not work unless there is a God? Does gravity not work unless there is a God? What does positing God do to add to an understanding of the universe?Posted by: Tuomo Hamalainen | May 30, 2009 12:13 AM
And actually spiritual world is more dangerous than purely natural one. Plantinga says that if evolution is true, it is not perhaps a true belief. It is only helping us survive. In spiritual world we have not warrant on that either. There might allways be a version of evil or joking god, which gives us just that way to act stupidly. (And we count the propabilities to these just the same way which "Plantinga Himself teach us". Perhaps it is shit in purest form, but main point is that Planginga beliefs it so he must take it seriously.) So there is not just "is it logical" -part. There is too "is it safe" -part. Naturalism and evolution gives us the second. Supernaturalism just gives us nothing.
PS: Can we trust the results of Plangingas argument if our logic is flawed. Perhaps this is just the one belief which is not right? If logic is flawed, Plantingas argument is flawed too. He is just referring his own magazines.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 12:16 AM
1 + 1 = 2. 2 + 2 = 4. 1+1+1+1=4... Shit, it works.
It must mean God exists because naturalism cannot explain that we can trust our minds without it.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 12:21 AM
1.) If Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
I'm certain that Sastra knows better, but since she is attempting to symbolize (or at least translate into English without obfuscation, which confounds both Plantinga and his mini-boss wannabe Eric) Plantinga's argument, only Eric would fault Sastra for noticing that the fault in Plantinga is that at the very least, it isn't good manners to pretend that your argument is deductive, when your first premise relies upon induction.
This thread needs more bacon.
Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 12:31 AM
"1.) If Naturalism is true and our minds evolved from non-rational sources, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low...Everything depends on that first premise"
Sastra, what you've formulated as the first premise is in fact a very rough encapsulation of nearly the entire argument (sans the corollary that if our cognitive faculties are unreliable given N and E, we have a defeater for N). It simply won't do to summarize nearly the entire argument as an implication and call it a premise, and to criticize it as a premise.
"But Plantinga hasn't shown that "naturalism" is self-defeating, he's only shown that our cognitive faculties are unreliable, which they are."
No, no, no! He hasn't shown that our cognitive faculties are unreliable. This is an all too common, but nonetheless mistaken understanding of the argument. If you think that he's shown, or that he's attempting to show that our cognitive faculties are in fact unreliable, then you've completely missed the point of the entire argument.
"He's merely demonstrated that any argument which relies on the certainty that our cognitive faculties are infallible is self-defeating, and is thus a sterile line of inquiry."
He nowhere supposes, relies upon or even considers the infallibility of our cognitive faculties. You have no idea what you're talking about.
"You really want an argument against it before you present it? Fine. It's not hard: the Magic Men who gave us our cognitive faculties could be fucking with us."
Let me get this straight: you're resting an argument against the supernatural on a premise that assumes the supernatural(the Magic Men)?!
Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 12:36 AM
Let me modify that last remark:
"Let me get this straight: you're resting an argument (that's not a reductio) against the supernatural on a premise that assumes the supernatural(the Magic Men)?!
Posted by: Joshua Fisher | May 30, 2009 12:37 AM
BREAKING NEWS: Repeated attempts to collide evolution atoms with those of "naturalism" have, as of yet, failed to produce the hypothetical "Creation" element, say senior researchers at the Quixote Institute.
Alvin Platinga, a fellow (and patient) at the institute, interviewed aboard a flying carpet, is still hopeful:
[expletives deleted]
Posted by: TheVirginian | May 30, 2009 12:45 AM
Years ago, I reviewed a book of essays on the philosophy of religion. Plantinga's essay was one of the worst offenders against reason. I won't try to critique his new argument here, but rather point out one sleight of hand he pulls off here.
It's similar to the problem with Pascal's Wager, which has 2 parts. The first is the famous wager that it's safer to believe in God and be wrong than not believe and be wrong. The second part, usually ignored, argues that it is best and smartest to believe specifically in the Christian god. But even if you concede the first part, the second does not follow as people have worshipped tens of thousands of gods, any one of which might be real if the first part is true. If you believe in worship the Christian deity in the Christian way, and it's Allah or Yahweh or Krishna or Osiris or Zeus, etc. waiting for you to visit, then you'll pay for your error.
Plantinga does the same thing: He argues there must be a god, and assumes it must be the Christian deity. It's also similar to the God of the Gaps argument - if we don't know/can't explain something, then it must be the Christian god at work. Likewise, Plantinga in effect says that if naturalism is false or at least improbable, then the only alternative is the Christian god. Even if you accept that naturalism is wrong, that doesn't prove it's his god.
In the essay of his I critiqued, he makes similar arguments that essentially beg the question: He assumes his god exists and then tries to argue that we cannot trust our senses/knowledge to the contrary. He even argues that Christians can simply choose to believe what they want and don't have to answer to atheists, that Christians can believe in their god because such belief is "basic," whereas belief in the Great Pumpkin is not "basic." Mere intellectual sleight of hand, as he fails to address belief in Krishna, Manitou, Allah, Amaterasu, etc.
Beyond that, Christians certainly are free to believe what they want, but they don't stop with belief - they act on beliefs. If you're going to torture or kill someone for not believing in your god or believing in the wrong god, you owe people a better argument than just saying we can believe what we want.
Plantinga is not an idiot; he's simply dishonest.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 12:46 AM
Let me get this straight: you're resting an argument against the supernatural on a premise that assumes the supernatural(the Magic Men)?!
Even Sastra must be powerless against the might of the semi-interrobang.
He nowhere supposes, relies upon or even considers the infallibility of our cognitive faculties. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Plantinga claims that knows what he's talking about because the Magic Men made Plantinga's cognitive faculties less fallible than nature would have left them. Eric, of course, is left to fend for himself, the vacuum of his intellect being abhorred by nature and by anything distinguishable from a script by an execrable hack.
Posted by: Zetetic
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May 30, 2009 12:53 AM
@ Joshua Fisher:
ROFMAO! :-D
@ Eric:
I believe that he's trying to point out that even if a supernatural entity exists that created the human "mind", that there is no reason to conclude that it would necessarily give us an accurate perception of reality or correct beliefs. Therefore, to conclude that our reason/beliefs/perception would be more accurate if it has a supernatural basis is an unwarranted assumption on top of the assumption that such an entity(ies) exist in the first place.
Posted by: H.H. | May 30, 2009 12:54 AM
He's trying to say that if naturalism and evolution are true, then our cognitive faculties are unreliable (don't select for true beliefs) and thus our beliefs (including naturalism) can't be considered trustworthy. I realize that Plantinga doesn't think our cognitive faculties are unreliable if we don't assume naturalism, and I'm telling you that's where he (and you) are mistaken.
He faults evolution and NS for not necessarily selecting true beliefs, i.e. for their fallibility.
No, this is not an argument against the supernatural. To reiterate, it's an argument against the idea that supernaturalism poses a solution to unreliability of our cognitive faculties. Gee, for a smart philosopher dude, you really seem to have trouble keeping the thread of the most simple discussions. Still waiting for you to provide the promised argument in favor of this, by the way.Posted by: TheVirginian | May 30, 2009 12:54 AM
Years ago, I reviewed a book of essays on the philosophy of religion. Plantinga's essay was one of the worst offenders against reason. I won't try to critique his new argument here, but rather point out one sleight of hand he pulls off here.
It's similar to the problem with Pascal's Wager, which has 2 parts. The first is the famous wager that it's safer to believe in God and be wrong than not believe and be wrong. The second part, usually ignored, argues that it is best and smartest to believe specifically in the Christian god. But even if you concede the first part, the second does not follow as people have worshipped tens of thousands of gods, any one of which might be real if the first part is true. If you believe in worship the Christian deity in the Christian way, and it's Allah or Yahweh or Krishna or Osiris or Zeus, etc. waiting for you to visit, then you'll pay for your error.
Plantinga does the same thing: He argues there must be a god, and assumes it must be the Christian deity. It's also similar to the God of the Gaps argument - if we don't know/can't explain something, then it must be the Christian god at work. Likewise, Plantinga in effect says that if naturalism is false or at least improbable, then the only alternative is the Christian god. Even if you accept that naturalism is wrong, that doesn't prove it's his god.
In the essay of his I critiqued, he makes similar arguments that essentially beg the question: He assumes his god exists and then tries to argue that we cannot trust our senses/knowledge to the contrary. He even argues that Christians can simply choose to believe what they want and don't have to answer to atheists, that Christians can believe in their god because such belief is "basic," whereas belief in the Great Pumpkin is not "basic." Mere intellectual sleight of hand, as he fails to address belief in Krishna, Manitou, Allah, Amaterasu, etc.
Beyond that, Christians certainly are free to believe what they want, but they don't stop with belief - they act on beliefs. If you're going to torture or kill someone for not believing in your god or believing in the wrong god, you owe people a better argument than just saying we can believe what we want.
Plantinga is not an idiot; he's simply dishonest.
Posted by: 386sx | May 30, 2009 12:56 AM
If you think that he's shown, or that he's attempting to show that our cognitive faculties are in fact unreliable, then you've completely missed the point of the entire argument.
Yeah obviously Platinga is trying to show that our our cognitive faculties are reliable because they have angel birdies flying around up in there or something. But what he tries to show, and what he does show, don't necessarily have to be the same thing. (He could be trying to show something, but in the process he actually shows something else of which he is unaware.)
Posted by: TheVirginian | May 30, 2009 12:57 AM
Years ago, I reviewed a book of essays on the philosophy of religion. Plantinga's essay was one of the worst offenders against reason. I won't try to critique his new argument here, but rather point out one sleight of hand he pulls off here.
It's similar to the problem with Pascal's Wager, which has 2 parts. The first is the famous wager that it's safer to believe in God and be wrong than not believe and be wrong. The second part, usually ignored, argues that it is best and smartest to believe specifically in the Christian god. But even if you concede the first part, the second does not follow as people have worshipped tens of thousands of gods, any one of which might be real if the first part is true. If you believe in worship the Christian deity in the Christian way, and it's Allah or Yahweh or Krishna or Osiris or Zeus, etc. waiting for you to visit, then you'll pay for your error.
Plantinga does the same thing: He argues there must be a god, and assumes it must be the Christian deity. It's also similar to the God of the Gaps argument - if we don't know/can't explain something, then it must be the Christian god at work. Likewise, Plantinga in effect says that if naturalism is false or at least improbable, then the only alternative is the Christian god. Even if you accept that naturalism is wrong, that doesn't prove it's his god.
In the essay of his I critiqued, he makes similar arguments that essentially beg the question: He assumes his god exists and then tries to argue that we cannot trust our senses/knowledge to the contrary. He even argues that Christians can simply choose to believe what they want and don't have to answer to atheists, that Christians can believe in their god because such belief is "basic," whereas belief in the Great Pumpkin is not "basic." Mere intellectual sleight of hand, as he fails to address belief in Krishna, Manitou, Allah, Amaterasu, etc.
Beyond that, Christians certainly are free to believe what they want, but they don't stop with belief - they act on beliefs. If you're going to torture or kill someone for not believing in your god or believing in the wrong god, you owe people a better argument than just saying we can believe what we want.
Plantinga is not an idiot; he's simply dishonest.
Posted by: Tuomo Hamalainen | May 30, 2009 1:01 AM
And the question of asymmetry of knowledge is actually important and intresting thing. But in "pro Alvin" there seems to be great misunderstanding.
Asymmetry means simply like that:
(Take Hume and read). Believe that you are a chicken. Why not indeed? Every morning you hear footsteps. And every day there comes farmer. And every day he throws seeds to you. Yummy seeds. And you generate inducition. And you believe that in next day it is just the same. But not today. Today farmer brings an axe with him and cuts yours head of. (And becouse he is from muthbuster you got freezed and shot with bazooka. And when you fly through the air, you just not only fly over the road. You are an lethal object too!)
So not any proof makes induction true. But one case can crumble the whole induction! So there is the asymmetry. But this is only in falsifiable inductions. If there is unfalsifiable induction, you can not disprove it. (That's exactly why it is unfalsifiable.) So to claim that you don't need to disprove god and you don't have to prove it, you are claiming that God is falsifiable. I really want to hear about that experiment! (There is none. God is unfalsifiable.)
And secondly. It is comical to hear same time that you can not just prove things. But you have warrant that you can prove things and gain absolute truth about things. So there is actually claim that you can prove things. So there is no asymmetry after all?
Posted by: H.H. | May 30, 2009 1:02 AM
See, Zetetic can follow the argument just fine. So, Eric, are you really this slow on the uptake or just stalling?Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 1:03 AM
What about evolution means that a mind cannot build to a suitable level in which to understand the world. Even goldfish have memory, while there are problem-solving apes and crows. Not to mention tool-using and forward planning animals as well. And these happen on far inferior minds to our own - so why would we accept that the brain is not reliable when it comes to knowledge?
It's not infallible, it can go wrong and be fooled. But would anyone actually argue that our brains and the brains of other animals can't be tuned through the forces of natural selection to be able to understand the environment around them? Futhermore, how does putting God into the equation demonstrate a superior means of knowing? All it does is put God there.
Posted by: melior | May 30, 2009 1:22 AM
This is perhaps the single best argument I have seen for the proposition that everyone should be required to take and pass Probablility and Statistics 101, even (perhaps especially) philosophy majors.
Posted by: NeuroGuy | May 30, 2009 1:23 AM
I'm late to the party obviously, but I'll just point out that philosophical arguments involving skepticism are inherently self-contradictory. None can be made for the simple reason that to even make the argument the philosopher must assume he and his readers comprehend the argument, which is the very thing that can be called into doubt by the skepticism being argued for.
Plantinga's position appears to be:
1) If naturalism and evolution are true, then our cognitive faculties are highly unreliable, such that every one of our beliefs is most likely false.
2) Therefore if we believe N & E to be true, from 1) we should believe them to be false, and hence the belief cannot be supported.
I do not grant premise 1), but it would take much discussion and argument to show the likelihood of natural selection favoring cognition that really reflects reality.
But in fact there exist much simpler refutations. For starters, given 1), the belief that there is actually a philosopher called Alvin Plantinga who has published an article somewhere and is actually making this argument is most likely false. Why should we believe there even exists an argument to answer?
Moreover, the belief that every one of our beliefs is most likely false is itself most likely false, given 1). Which, as you can see, makes the premise self-refuting.
Posted by: Dan L. | May 30, 2009 1:27 AM
Eric:
Of course. Assume that the proposition is true, find a contradiction, and conclude that the proposition must be false.
In this case, assume that the Hindu religion is the correct one. But how can we verify that it's really the Hindu religion and not some other entity creating the illusion that the Hindu religion is correct?
We can't, because supernatural claims by definition don't have any meaningful relationship with the real world. Any number of supernatural claims could be posited with the same empirical results and there is no way to determine which is correct.
This is a completely valid argument against supernaturalism proceeding from the assumption of supernatural claims.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 1:29 AM
Even goldfish have memory, while there are problem-solving apes and crows. Not to mention tool-using and forward planning animals as well.
I used to step outside the office, full of Parasols of Progress shrouding the Black Project of the VR Labs at Imagineering, to smoke. In Glendale, walnut trees were everywhere, and it was fun to watch the competitive strategies of crows; those who would prize nuts from the trees, flying high enough to drop them so they would plunge to the parking lot's asphalt and smash open, vs. the crows who only had to wait and scavenge the prize before those who had done all the work could profit from their labor. I couldn't tell whether there was any cooperative turn-taking involved, or whether it was all opportunistic, but walnut-eating for Glendale corvids also provided the spandrel of the pleasure of watching co-workers' cars occasionally get dinged.
Posted by: 386sx | May 30, 2009 1:46 AM
We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2.
Something tells me his probabilities aren't exactly very "scientifical". Usually when you see something like that, it's coming from somewhere out of kooksville city, if you know what I'm saying...
Posted by: 386sx | May 30, 2009 1:57 AM
We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2.
I wonder what the probabilities are of how many people on the planet "believe" in the right religion? I'm just curious about what the probabilities of that are on the real planet, as opposed to Platinga's hypothetical planet. Just curious.
I would guess that the probability that they would be the same or that they would be different would be about in the neighborhood of 1/2, since either they would be the sanme or they would be different. Lol.
Posted by: Zetetic
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May 30, 2009 2:13 AM
@ 386sx:
Heh... that line reminds me of the Daily Show where they visited the Large Hadron Collider and also interviewed Walter Wagner.
April 30, 2009: Large Hadron Collider
If you haven't seen it yet be sure to check out the clips with Walter Wagner where he estimates the probability of the Earth being destroyed by a black hole! ROFLMAO!
;-)
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 2:15 AM
386sx @531, apparently, to more highly-tuned minds*, each member of an arbitrarily large set of mutually-independent beliefs has a 50% probability of being true.
--
* apologies to Douglas Adams.
Posted by: Teleprompter
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May 30, 2009 2:24 AM
Brownian, OM @ 356 wins this thread.
I am using his shelter analogy from now on. Excellent dismantlement of Jim's arguments. Hehe, I'd like to see him refute that. Excellent takedown, sir.
By the way, here is my Plantinga-style Christian Argument Against God-Belief (CAAG).
Given Christianity, we cannot know about a God, because we are depending upon our knowledge of Christianity to tell us about a god-belief. Therefore, Christianity is self-defeating.
What now?
Posted by: 386sx | May 30, 2009 2:40 AM
Heh... that line reminds me of the Daily Show where they visited the Large Hadron Collider and also interviewed Walter Wagner.
Looks like pretty much the same thought process as Platinga to me! Just ignore all data and boil everything down to 1/2. (Or just take all the numbers and multiply everything in sight. If you see a number somewhere, just take it and freakin multiply the living heck out of it.) They must both be from "kookytown", if you catch my drift.
Posted by: Rorschach
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May 30, 2009 3:14 AM
TheVirginian @ 522,
someone but that man a beer ! Excellent post.
Posted by: Meat Robot | May 30, 2009 3:14 AM
For those interested, Plantinga makes the same arguments in a very recent debate with Dan Dennett at the last APA meeting in Chicago (Feb '09). The debate was enormously popular and electrified the meeting. It's available here as an MP3:
http://drop.io/plantingadennet/asset/plantinga-mp3
Warnings: 1) Poor audio quality; 2) 1h 47m in length
That said, I found it extremely interesting. Neither Plantinga nor Dennett are idiots, and though I ultimately side with Dennett, it was great hearing two philosophers go mano-a-mano at the top of their game.
Posted by: Rorschach
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May 30, 2009 3:16 AM
buy even.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | May 30, 2009 3:31 AM
LOL! I actually thought the exact same thing. I love John Oliver's response: "I'm not sure that's how probability works".
To be fair there is something in probability called the 'prnciple of indifference' (also known as Laplace's principle) which states given n possibilities, and no prior information about them, then we should assign each an equal probability of 1/n. For example, in flipping a coin we have no reason to assume heads is more likely than tails (and vice versa) so each get assigned a probability of 1/2.
However, in Wagner's case, we do have prior information. As the physicist in the video mentioned the earth had been bombarded with particles of much higher energies than the ones they were creating at the LHC and it obviously hasn't been swallowed by a black hole.
Similarly, Plantiga's argument fails.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 3:45 AM
Same. Maybe Plantinga should walk off the Empire State Building. After all, there's a 1 in 2 chance he won't fall... and it's only those evil gravityists who ignore the obvious intelligent falling in the universe who say that a blind force can act without will.Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 4:05 AM
But but but, that relies on you having a reliable way of gauging information. And as Plantinga argues, unless you say Goddidit then your giant monkey brain is useless. So it really is a 1 in 2 change, because it's a matter of science - which is self-refuting because science practices methodological naturalism. And Eric said naturalism is self-refuting so it must be so.Posted by: Cath the Canberra Cook | May 30, 2009 4:49 AM
"Plantinga is not committed to claiming that according to naturalism belief formation is exclusively random."
ORLY? Then why, in his calculation, is he assuming that every belief is independent of every other? If the beliefs were interdependent - or in any way systematically related - the probability calculation would be incorrect.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 5:04 AM
"Naturalism is the idea that there is no such person as God or anything like God"
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 5:59 AM
Wouldn't calling God a person or likening God to a person exclude there from there being such a being by definition alone?Posted by: astrounit | May 30, 2009 6:02 AM
Human "minds" (that operational product of human "brains") are unreliable and their conceptions cannot be confirmed unless they consult physical reality in the form of material nature.
Believer #1: "Fire is harmless and cannot harm me. Watch, I'll prove it by walking right into that forest fire, you'll see!"
[To be filed under "Famous Last Words".] The truth of that belief (a "scientific hypothesis" no matter how mundane or dumb) is demonstrable through experience ("supporting evidence") from natural reality, not from any philosophical rumination ("making things up").
Alas, believer #1 shall not leave any subsequent progeny because his belief was falsified by nature. Believer #1 however DID (bravely, if stupidly) manage to conduct an experiment on his falsifiable belief. His sacrifice was witnessed by tribal cohorts, and many of them canonized him as being a hero for being a major teacher of estimable worth, since he provided them with very important data.
Believer #2: "Fire is hot, hurts when you touch it, and can be dangerous or fatal if you aren't careful around it, so that if one burns to death you cannot live to produce subsequent progeny."
The truth of that belief (a "scientific hypothesis") is demonstrable through experience ("supporting evidence") from natural reality (say, from observing the demise of Believer #1), not from any philosophical rumination ("making things up"). Believer #2 may continue to reproduce repeatedly. Maybe even raise kids who are more likely to reject beliefs such as "fire is harmless" without checking to make sure whether they are true or not.
Believer #3: "Fire contains a radiant being one can petition to allow complete immolation without harm so as to obtain ecstatic bliss and divine insight - as long as one is perfectly pure and sincere in heart and spirit, the fire spirit shall not harm thee!"
Skeptic: "Ok, prove it."
Believer #3: "Are you crazy? I'm not perfect! Nobody is! But you can't DISPROVE it, sucker!"
Have we arrived at a "truth" here? Yes? No? Who gets it? Believer #3 or the skeptic?
1. Every notion, premise, conceptual model, hypothesis, theory or belief that the fallible human mind has ever entertained that has ever been discovered to be "true" has been so corroborated by the material world of nature, just BECAUSE they COULD be checked against nature.
2. Every notion, premise, conceptual model, hypothesis, theory or belief that the fallible human mind has ever entertained that could NOT be checked with nature has NEVER been discovered to be either true or false.
Every human mind that "believes" these two points are capable of discarding false beliefs and replacing them with truthful ones. They have a practical, materially real-world handle on what "truth" actually means. Their habit of skepticism of the fallible human mind is effectively well augmented with an attention placed on nature (all that stuff that goes on OUTSIDE of human mental conceptualization, known and unknown) and are likely to remain on stable ground to live long and prosper and reproduce. (Not only themselves, but their way of thinking they pass on to their kids).
Every mind that doesn't believe those two points steadily fills itself up with junk notions that inspire the illusion of truth without any corroborative consultation with the material world. The illusion inspires this bit of junk-belief too: that SINCE their beliefs cannot be disproven, it "proves" it: "If it can't be disproven, there MUST be something to it!"
One particular innumerate philosopher "KNOWS" this elementary principle that eludes so many thinkers of considerably lesser capacity.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 30, 2009 6:07 AM
Well Eric and other Alvin fans, I studied more (see 494) and read the new posts and some earlier ones again. Here are my conclusions (hey I gave you a shot and now I want to give you my admittedly layperson's opinion):
* Nothing you all say resonates in the end. It's all smoke and mirrors, all passe formulations and assumptions, all in the end designed for an agenda that you knowingly or unknowingly seek regardless of the means.
* Further you have not adequately addressed the most important compound question in my business mind "SO WHAT? WTF CHANGES? WHAT METHOD OF SCIENCE CHANGES? WHAT CHECKED AND RECHECKED EVIDENCE DO WE IGNORE? WHAT LAW OF PHYSICS OR CHEMISTRY DO WE ABANDON?" in other more professional words "where is your value add?" You tried to deflect the question by saying I have the wrong Naturalism. Or worse you made some lame statements imploring us to want to know [your version of] Naturalism should somehow be replaced. OK - I entertained your "criticisms" and came up again feeling the word pulsing in my head: OBFUSCATION for agenda's sake.
* Agendas have no place in honest science or philosophy. Honest scientists have experiment objectives, and if leaders overall motivation for a line of scientific pursuit. But they should not have agendas and should be put in the penalty box if they do hold one in their work. Agendas drive things like wasteful wars, or the dumbing down of America. They drive dishonesty, but to be kind, at best they justify sloppy methods and selective reasoning and evidence gathering. It is OBVIOUS- you all have an agenda.
* This whole discussion has been enlightening - I learned. Thanks to all including the Erics. But I also go away sad that sometimes good minds because of agendas at best do not produce useful stuff and worse often are dangerous.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it!! Unless new evidence presents and can conclude differently :-) .
Posted by: astrounit | May 30, 2009 6:35 AM
A little (fictional) tale...Time: ~30,000 (give or take) years ago (maybe later, but I wouldn't be surprised if evidence eventually pushes something like horse domestication this far back).
Scene: After the seasonal horse hunt. A group of hunters have just felled a horse. One young hunter bites out a chunk of the horse's heart he and his fellows have passed around amongst themselves.
While slurping back a dribble of blood, he remarks, "Man, that's really delicious! You know, I wish we could have more horse more often. I'm really tired! These guys really run fast, and I'm sick of having to chase them down with you guys over the cliff! Every year it's the same thing. We have to wait until they come over here in their migrations. There must be a better way!"
2nd hunter, the experienced lead hunter, replies, "What are you talking about? Don't be silly. That's how we get 'em. That's the only way we can get 'em. It works."
1st hunter: "Yeah, but I bet I can jump on the back of one of those guys and run faster on them without getting as tired."
2nd hunter: "Are you crazy? You can't do that! Remember what happened when that nut Og decided to jump on the back of that last woolly mammoth? Oh, I suppose not - you were just a kid then. Not many of those around anymore. But I was there. That monster threw him farther than I can throw a rock. Broke his neck. And last year a horse stomped poor Iggy to death. You remember THAT one, surely! That was your first hunt. Remember? We all thought that stallion was dead already, but it got up and nailed him. We learned from that to approach a fallen horse with extra caution. You never know when shit might happen."
1st hunter: "But I had a dream that I was on a horse's back and it was running really really fast and I could keep up with other horses and spear them anytime I wanted to. It was a great dream, you should have been there."
2nd hunter: "Hah! If we all sat around dreaming up silly ideas, we'd all get killed. We have to stick to tradition, what we know works. That's the only way we can survive. Don't you understand that the Great Mother doesn't take kindly to disrespecting Her?"
1st hunter: "Yeah, maybe you're right. I was just sayin'..."
2nd hunter: "Enough of this idle chatter! Come on! Let's get this beast cut up and get it back to our women and children before half of it spoils. We've been gone over half a moonth already and it will take us over 3 suns to get back! They must have berries coming out of their ears by now!"
1st hunter: "Hey, look over there. A little one! Can I take it back with us?"
2nd hunter: "Sure, if you can nab it. The meat is tender. Here's my spear, go ahead. But make it quick."
1st hunter: "No, i mean I want to take it back alive."
2nd hunter: "Are you NUTS??? Oh, yeah, that's right. Og was your uncle, wasn't he? How are you going to catch that thing? He runs faster than you do! I run faster than you do!"
1st hunter: "But look: it isn't running away. We killed its mother. It's sticking around...No, I don't need your spear. Say, you still got those leather chords from that last hunt on you? Good! Give 'em to me...let me see if...wait!" (And he cuts off a teat from the fallen mother horse). "I'll be right back..."
2nd hunter, watching 1st hunter slowly walk toward the pony: "That boy will get us all killed. The Great Mother will not like this...Youth! Bah! No respect! Not at all like in MY sun! We knew how to respect our elders and our tradition!"
The 1st hunter reaches the skittish pony. Amazingly it reaches forward toward the scent of the teat from it's mother which the hunter holds out to him...and the hunter deftly loops the leather chord around its neck in one quick move. The pony is suddenly alarmed and jumps about frantically, the 1st hunter hangs on...
3rd hunter, a choice chunk of meat dropping out of his bloody mouth as he rose to his feet, uttered in hushed amazement: "Why, of all the...will you lookitthat!"
Five seasons later the tribe is feasting on all kinds of fresh game all year round - led by the new chief hunter who showed what was permissable by the "Great Mother" - by hunting and even moving belongings on horseback. Innovations on how to improve the control and care over their valuable horses spur additional progress. The tribe's birth rate doubles. Life is good.
The Great Mother didn't seem to mind a teat...
Postscript: 2nd hunter, who had become increasingly jealous of 1st hunter's impious meddling in the tribe's traditions, was killed three seasons earlier when he attempted to put a stop to that nonsense by assassinating the young upstart. 1st hunter's new friend and devotee, 3rd hunter came riding up behind him on his OWN horse and stomped him to death before he could throw his spear...
Moral: Be wary of those who insist "science" is only a new-fangled contraption only several centuries years old. See Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" - where he makes the case for a kind of scientific enterprise in human hunters who pay attention to "sign" - that is, tracks of game. Then be wary of those who insist there isn't any correlation between an adept imagination brought to bear on the interpretation of such sign, and the evolution of the brain's capacity to determine the "truth" of reality...which we are ALL condemned to "know" no better than by conception.
Posted by: astrounit | May 30, 2009 7:02 AM
Eric #403: "There are two issues here that we can distinguish, but not treat independently: (1) Can you provide an argument to support the notion that skepticism isn't entailed by the conjunction of evolution and naturalism, and (2) Is Plantinga's argument sound? It seems to me that if (2) obtains, (1) is impossible."
That statement elevates you to Error 404.
'Nuff said.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 7:13 AM
What about understanding the universe cannot be explained through a naturally evolved mind? Does a chimpanzee not know that it can crack hard shells by smashing it with a rock? Did the Japanese macaque which threw sweet potato into the ocean to clean off the sand not know that it could do so in the future - not to mention all the other macaques who copied her? Similarly does a human not know that when they press keys on the keyboard when using this blog that corresponding input will be displayed on screen?
The whole argument is mute, who is to say that a naturally selected brain couldn't be reliable for a lot of situations? I would argue that the brain has been fine tuned by natural selection over millions of years to be a very good means of processing information. But of course with any heuristic system, it has limitations and can spring false positives. But for fucks sake, if you drop something it will fall. Do we need to say God exists to know this, or can we just accept that the brain can be shown to be adaptive whereby the processes by which we use to gauge the world around us are present in brains of all kinds through the animal kingdom? This whole topic seems a real non-issue.
Posted by: Christophe Thill | May 30, 2009 7:14 AM
This is asinine. This is not what probability is about. Paging Dr Chu-Caroll, stat!!!
In Plantinga's world, there isn't 50% of believers in cold fire. There's a population among which a majoriry believes that fire is cold, and as he doesn't know whether they're right or wring, he considers that they have a 50% probability to be right.
Unfortunately, it's not a matter of probability, but of deterministic logic. Fire is hot, whatever you believe about it. The probability to be right, for a "cold-firist", is 0.
Of course, concerning supernatural beings (including deities) things are not so clear, and you don't have a simple test available, as in the case of fire. Worse still: if there was one, the deity (if it existed) would be able to cheat, so the test would be worthless. Still, you can't calculate probabilities in such a crazy way.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 7:37 AM
Jim,
"If naturalism is true, rationality (i.e., the possession of reason and understanding) is at best an illusion foisted off on us by electro-chemical activity in our brains (the same is true of our sense that we exercise free will). That illusion may give us some reproductive advantage favored and perpetuated by natural selection, but naturalism gives us no basis for trusting that it is anything other than an illusion. "
It is not unreasonable that in a universe with reproducible responses that an intelligence selected for its capability of producing maps and models that can predict the universes response, would also be capable of what passes for rationality in that universe. How much we use that rationality is up to us. Even in cultures where sharing false beliefs has adaptive value, a rational mind should be able to figure that out.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 7:43 AM
I remember a number of years ago I had a small Jack Russell. Now this dog used to tear apart any ball that he found, so we tried our best to keep the ball away from him. One day, thinking he was clever, my brother put the ball in the computer desk drawer so the dog could not get to it. The dog got under the desk, pushed the drawer from the back to open it, then came around the front and put its head in there to grab the ball.
The point of the tale to demonstrate is thus: the dog isn't born with ball and drawer wired into its brain. The dog has to learn how to handle both of them. Yet this small-brained canine was able to understand enough of the world in order to use its body in order to solve the problem presented. No-one had ever shown the dog that the drawer could be opened by pushing it at the back. This small mammal of little intelligence with its evolved brain had the capacity to understand the world well enough in order to act in that manner.
Yet Plantinga is positing that such a brain could not have evolved, that it requires God. Yet so many animals in the animal kingdom rely on such wetware at varying degrees of accuracy. Why would a chimpanzee be able to use such tooling if it weren't for its brain? What about other mammals and birds that display problem-solving capabilities? When Chimpanzees can hunt in complex social instructions where each individual plays a different role in order to make the hunt successful, shouldn't that be a sign that the human brain is fully capable of being evolved? It would seem that the concession needs to be made that a brain cannot do that at all, and that all animals with complex behaviours leading to interacting in an ever-changing environment? To say that natural selection couldn't build heuristic tools is to cast doubt on all of nature - not just humanity. And by doing so, it appeals to the ignorance that can only come with Intellectualising Goddidit. Appealing to God does nothing to further our understanding of nature, yet this is all that theists aspire to - look for as smart a way as possible to be stupid.
Posted by: RM | May 30, 2009 7:48 AM
What a great thread this has been for me. It is funny that some of us come here to learn, some come here to share what they have learned, and some drop by to say goddidit without ever offering an ounce of evidence.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 30, 2009 8:09 AM
Platinga's argument doesn't even rise to the level of fallacy. If an 11th grader made such an argument in a logic class, I'd flunk him. First, he makes no specification of what kinds of creatures he was talking about. Are they amoebas, in which case we don't expect much of a belief structure. A creature like a dog or even a rat has beliefs in the sense of prior expectations formed by experience or instinct. The former certainly are not random and the latter are not a problem for evolution and naturalism. It is only with humans that we have evidence of complex belief structures formed independently of experience and instinct--and these clearly are reliable only to the extent that they are confirmed by experience. Platinga's example of whether fire is not or cold is not even an example of such a belief, but rather an inference from many empirical observations. Belief or nonbelief in God or gods is not based on empirical observation. It is not "reliable". It is a choice.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 30, 2009 8:11 AM
I'd like to thank Eric, Jim and especially Alvin Plantinga for proving that much of philosophy consists of manufacturing and justifying bullshit.
Incidentally, a pragmatist believes in the 50/50/90 rule. If given a 50/50 chance of being right, you'll be wrong 90% of the time.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 30, 2009 8:11 AM
Kel - 552
back in #306 I clumsily posited a question (challenge) - it was ignored - I don't take offense - again it was clumsy.
But my point was like yours. And spoke to the force of natural (even with artificial drivers)selection to shape mental and psychological character. You only have to look at the animal world and dogs are a glaring example.
In a nutshell: wolves do not have the same rapport with humans that dogs do. A person must act very much like a wolf to be accepted by a wolf, and a wolf (or wolf behavior) predominates the the course of interaction.
Dogs on the other hand - while still canines with wolf in them - have additional power to relate to humans when humans are being human - and to be even human like in their communication with humans. They were selectively breed from wolves to join into as real members of a human pack. Their minds because capable of a form of communication that actually is more human that wolf to a significant extent.
To me this simple example speaks volumes. Minds evolve - genetically so to speak and empirically. They may not reach perfection but they reach a statis with the environment - and that is good enough. Malleable and once trained to be critical correct enough to survive. And even in the case of dogs - even if primitive - to love and want and need love back. The evolution of the mind precludes nothing - shortcomings we'll figure out - and I for the life of me fail to see god in any of it.
Posted by: Michael | May 30, 2009 8:18 AM
matt (#73), I just saw a good philosophy blog post that rips Plantinga apart AND makes the same connection to the Daily Show. Right on!
http://rustbeltphilosophy.blogspot.com/2009/05/plantinga-vs-daily-show.html
Posted by: africangenesis | May 30, 2009 8:28 AM
anonymous 551 and 247 are me. apologies
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 10:04 AM
Actually it's not too surprising that he needed a mathematician's help with the numbers. As he set the problem up the resulting probability would be derived from the Poisson distribution. This form of the Poisson distribution would give us a probability of getting 3/4 or better of true beliefs when each has only 0.5 probability of being correct as the sum over 3n/4 to n of (1/2)^(n) * n!/((n-i)!i!) where "i" is the index variable. For n=100 this is 8.3368e-07, Plantinga's math geek rounded up to 1e-06. The second object with the factorials is also known as "N-choose-R" and can help you gamble if that's your thing :)
Now I have a degree in Math but I didn't really need it to know that Plantinga is full of shit. It's a testament to how far out in intergalactic space the man is that he thinks that guessing randomly about the universe would even give you a 1/2 probability of being right. Let's see, I'll try a "remote viewing" exercise: There's a dude in a blue jacket standing at the bus stop (which I can't see from here) down the hill from where I live right now. Am I right? Probably only about a 1/100 chance that I am. - 12thM
Posted by: IainW | May 30, 2009 10:32 AM
Sastra (#504):
As I understand it, Plantinga's argument isn't about the truth or falsity of naturalism as such - what he's getting at is something more like this:
(1) If naturalism is true and our minds evolved by natural selection, then the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low.
(2) If the probability of our beliefs being reliable is very low, then our beliefs that naturalism is true and that our minds evolved by natural selection cannot be relied on.
(3) It is irrational to hold beliefs which cannot be relied on.
(4) Therefore it is irrational to believe that naturalism is true and that our minds evolved by natural selection.
Basically, he's arguing that Evolution+Naturalism is self-defeating because the combination of the two undermines any reasonable confidence in the reliability of our beliefs, including our beliefs in Evolution+Naturalism. Nowt to do with truth or falsity as such, but everything to do with epistemic justification.
Strickly speaking, we could resolve the dilemma by rejecting evolution by natural selection, since the argument applies to the conjunction of evolution and naturalism, but that would leave naturalism without any account of the origins of our cognitive faculties, and it's not immediately obvious that any other naturalistic alternative would fare any better (although equally it's not obvious that it wouldn't). So if we decline to explore that particular avenue, then we would be forced (if Plantinga were right) to admit that our belief that naturalism is true was irrational.
To put it another way, Plantinga is trying to argue that you cannot simultaneously hold the following three positions: (a) that naturalism is true; (b) that our minds evolved by natural selection; and (c) that our beliefs are reliable. But if you reject (c), you've admitted that you can't rationally justify holding on to both (a) and (b). Something has to go, and Plantinga thinks it ought to be (a).
Posted by: IainW | May 30, 2009 10:46 AM
Jim (#384):
(1) You're still making the category mistake of refering to "material causes" as "irrational". They are no more "irrational" than they are "humourless", "unimaginative", "narrow-minded" or "slow on the uptake". The word you are probably looking for is "non-rational", which at least encompasses the meaning "not the kind of thing to which rationality (or irrationality) can be meaningfully ascribed".
(2) You're overlooking the possibility that a rational deity might well create human beings with systematically unreliable cognitive faculties. A malignant deity might get off on watching us bumble about cluelessly, while a benevolent deity might want to protect us from a reality which would drive us insane if we could comprehend it properly.
(3) Like Plantinga, you're going out of your way to give theism an unfair advantage. Naturalism is only allowed its basic assumptions, but you and Plantinga are allowed not only to assume an intelligent creator, but to make additional ad hoc assumptions about its intentions and personality as well. But pare theism back to its essentials (a very powerful, very knowledgeable intelligent creator), and it's in no better shape than naturalism.
(4) You also have the same problem as Plantinga does in providing an account of cognitive error. Human beings are notoriously irrational (note usage in correct context) a lot of the time, and their cognitive mechanisms often have biases which lead them to misleading conclusions. If we're created in the image of a rational God, how is this possible?
Maybe we really are created in the image of God, and God himself is irrational in the same way we are (not too implausible a suggestion, given that the God of the bible does not appear to be playing with a full deck). Alternatively, a theistic evolutionist of the non-interventionist variety might argue that God allowed the contingencies of evolution to shape our cognitive faculties, hence their imperfections - but then if Plantinga's argument is sound, it tells against this kind of theism as well. Maybe God intervened in the process to tweak our brains to make them more reliable than they would otherwise have been, but then that raises the question of why he didn't tweak them to make them more reliable than they actually are. And if he created us fully-formed, then he's directly responsible for our cognitive failings, and the whole idea that a rational creator would be expected to create rational beings starts to unravel. After all, if God created us irrational and prone to cognitive bias (or allowed us to develop in such a manner) in some respects, what grounds do we have to suppose that he didn't do so in others? Evolutionary naturalism can at least give an internally consistent account of how and why our cognitive faculties can sometimes give misleading results. The question is, can theism do any better (or even just as well)?
Plantinga's only answer to this problem is "sin". Now one might make a plausible case that consistently behaving in a particular manner might tend to reinforce patterns of thought and cognition in unreliable directions, but this is applicable to many forms of behaviour, not merely those which would traditionally be deemed sinful (the tendency of collective religious ritual to reinforce group-think springs to mind). One might even be able to argue that if "sinful" behaviour is common in a society, then it warps the cognitive developmental environment in which children grow up, so that nearly everybody is affected, irespective of their personal "sinfulness". But again, it's far from clear that "sinful" behaviour is the only (or primary) kind of behaviour that might have this effect.
And in any case, one would still expect to find some degree of positive correlation between "sinfulness" and cognitive error, at either an individual or a group level. I'm not aware offhand of any relevant studies, but suppose we did find such a correlation. Does that show that Plantinga is on to something? No, because it might just as easily show that a propensity for cognitive error is more likely to lead to a disregard for social and/or religious norms - i.e., Plantinga might still have cause and effect back to front.
But where the "sin leads to cognitive error" hypothesis really falls down is that it seems that many of our cognitive biases are inbuilt - they're not due to our own behaviour or the behaviour of others affecting our cognitive environment. If we disregard the incoherent notion of heritary moral culpability (i.e., original sin as commonly conceived), then it seems that the only way one can explain inbuilt cognitive bias is by invoking some bizarre Lamarckian mechanism by which an individual's behaviour somehow modifies their genes so as to influence the brain development of their descendents in a remarkably precise and specific way. Since this doesn't really fit in with what we know about genetics (even allowing for known epigenetic mechanisms), this doesn't seem very plausible.
So Jim, here's a challenge for you: How can theism give an adequate and plausible account of cognitive error?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 30, 2009 10:47 AM
IainW #560
Eppur si muove!
Enough epistemological masturbation; now let science get back to work until an alternative rigorous method that produces testable results that lead to reliable ENOUGH conclusions that can be used in further work to produce actual useful things is available.
Epistemological masturbation designed with the agenda of sometime inserting goddidit.. geez it stinks.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 10:58 AM
ConcernedJoe #562, you nailed it.
Posted by: Steve LaBonne | May 30, 2009 11:07 AM
And just to reiterate, the fatal flaw of this argument is that it proves too much, because if our cognitive apparatus is COMPLETELY unreliable (i.e. if you adopt global skepticism), then NO belief is rationally justifiable. And "Goddidit" doesn't help one bit (how can you know that it's God giving you correct beliefs rather than the deceitful demon giving you false ones?). Global skepticism is the roach motel of epistemology- you can check in, but you can't check out.
On the other hand, once you allow even a little bit of correlation between our beliefs and external reality, there is no longer any reason to suppose that natural selection couldn't act on and strengthen that capability, because it's easy to show that Plantinga is completely out to lunch in supposing (as his argument requires him to) that there is NO correlation between the truth and the survival value of our beliefs. And that error in turn comes from an extremely muddy conception of truth, which focuses on the phantom of global metaphysical "TRVTH" craved by the religious mind but tacitly leaves out such homely "truths" such as the truth that if you jump off a high cliff you'll fall to your death.
Posted by: Silver Fox | May 30, 2009 11:11 AM
" I really cannot take Alvin Plantinga seriously, ever"
I guess reading a five page summary of Plantinga's body of work does limit one's analysis.
For a more balanced treatment of Plantinga by an atheist writer, try Quentin Smith. In particular, read "Time was created by a timeless point". While Smith is no fan of Plantinga, he does understand Plantinga and treats his work seriously.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 11:15 AM
Silver Fox likes Plantinga. No wonder he has such bad arguments that tend toward presupposition.
Posted by: Lowell | May 30, 2009 11:19 AM
Failosophy.
Posted by: IainW | May 30, 2009 11:21 AM
ConcernedJoe (#562):
Well, there's right ways of performing epistemological masturbation and wrong ways of performing it. And now I'm going to be stuck with the less-than-edifying mental image of Alvin Plantinga rubbing his foreskin raw whilst failing to achieve orgasm ...
Posted by: Silver Fox | May 30, 2009 11:39 AM
"Silver Fox likes Plantinga. No wonder he has such bad arguments that tend toward presupposition."
The point of my post was that there are atheist writers who treat serious philosophy seriously and not have to resort to the typical PZ us versus them mentality.
Posted by: IainW | May 30, 2009 11:40 AM
Steve LaBonne (#564):
Ah, but don't forget that unlike us poor naturalists, Plantinga is allowed to make any additional assumptions he likes in order to justify his belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable.
There's a reason why Ronald de Sousa once described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net". Plantinga and his acolytes are only obliged to play by the rules when it suits them.
Which reminds me ...
Silver Fox (#565):
Surprised you didn't show up earlier. But do us a favour and don't bother regurgitating any of your usual semi-understood arguments this time round. I can't be the only one who's getting tired of crafting counter-arguments which you then ignore.
Posted by: Silver Fox | May 30, 2009 12:07 PM
Iain:
"I can't be the only one who's getting tired of crafting counter-arguments which you then ignore."
"Craft a counter-argument"?
Please don't craft a counter-argument. I asked you to read an articulate atheist writer who treats serious philosophy seriously. Read Smith's work, particularly "Time was Created by a Timeless Point" since he treats Plantinga's work there. He has already created the counter argument to what you get here, i.e. us versus them mentality.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 12:14 PM
#532: I remember that show. Wagner is obviously a student of the science of Plantingability. It's like probability except that all the answers are 1/2.
Posted by: Míl Espáine | May 30, 2009 12:25 PM
The probability that you and others who have posted likewise are pretentious morons is 1, except possibly on a set of Lebesgue measure 0.
Plantinga is using a noninformative prior. I would recommend that you and the other occupants of the pharyngula clown car read up on it but it appears that you all lack the native intelligence to understand statistics.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 12:25 PM
Silver Fox, if you present something for us to read, we know it is trash. We presume your taste in books is as good as your arguments.
Posted by: Jim | May 30, 2009 12:32 PM
Teleprompter: "I am using (Brownian's) shelter analogy from now on. Excellent dismantlement of Jim's arguments."
He dismantled an argument I didn't make. What's so impressive about that? If this were a scored debate, he'd lose points for resorting to the straw-man fallacy.
I've noticed a lot of self-congratulation on the part of those who took issue with what I've posted to this thread, but I've seen few posters take issue with what I actually said (or with what Plantinga actually said). It seems that the regulars here are too busy trying to be cute or competing to see who can be the biggest ass (give it up, folks - PZ wins that contest hands down) to make an effort to understand the postings of those who drop in for a chat and then leave in disgust.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 30, 2009 12:36 PM
Actually I think you will find we know he is doing that. The problem lies in the fact that when he does that, he is talking bollocks. If he really think humans arive at beliefs totally ignoring their own, and others', prior experience then the man is a total fuckwit. If he think that he can prove science does not work using philisophical arguments, when there is ample evidence of the huge success of science as method of understanding the universe then, again, he is a fuckwit. He is a bit like a sad intellectual poseur who sits in a windowless room and logically concludes the sky is not blue. It does not matter how well the argument he makes is formed, it is going to be a load of crap becuase it ignores reality.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 12:37 PM
Aah, poor Jim feels unappreciated. Just another concern troll with that attitude.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 12:46 PM
Nerd of Redhead
"Silver Fox, if you present something for us to read, we know it is trash. We presume your taste in books is as good as your arguments"
You must have Ph.D. in Ad Hominem
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 30, 2009 12:54 PM
I also need to add that is we assume no prior knowledge of a phenonoma then we do get a simple 50/50 probality. If someone really did know nothing about the nature of fire, why would they think there is a 50/50 chance of fire being hot or cold ? Why would they associate fire with temperature at all ? Knowing fire has a relationship with temperature is prior knowledge, which you say Plantinga is not allowing. Absent prior knowledge, either learnt through your own experience, or that of others, or inate knowledge resulting from evolutionary pressures then we can say nothing about the nature of fire. It is not 50/50 the fire is hot or cold, it is 100% we do not have slightest idea about fire.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 12:54 PM
It's hard to take anyone seriously if they think that a) that natural selection hasn't shaped our mind, or b) that positing God to a supposed problem offers anything of a solution. This whole exercise is intellectualising a non-answer, it doesn't tell us anything about the universe - it's just that people who want to believe that this entire cosmos was created for one species of billions on one planet because they learnt to take rock crushing and complex pack hunting to the next level. It astounds me the amount of effort that people put into not saying anything of value.
Posted by: ivo | May 30, 2009 12:58 PM
gman, with time I get ever more intolerant of such sophistry. Sure, naturalism will never be proved to be the True Correct Metaphysics (TM). We all know our Hume, thanks very much. But then neither will any other philosophical position, precisely for the same reasons. (Unless you want to apply double standards, of course.)
On the other hand, naturalistic materialism and the empyrical method employed by science actually work. But this is an understatement: one could successfully argue that everything we know today for sure, all the real knowledge we have gained about the world, has been obtained by the scientific method and turns out to corroborate a materialistic worldview. Every time a problem has been solved, magic was NOT the answer and the supernatural explanation has been proved wrong, or at least extravagantly unnecessary.
It didn't have to be this way -- but that's what has been found, again and again. This must surely count for something? If not, what else?
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 1:00 PM
SF, you don't get ad hominem. I explained why. Besides, if you don't want to be insulted, you have one option available to you. Quit posting here. I, and probably half of the regulars, recommend you do so.
Posted by: IainW | May 30, 2009 1:04 PM
Silver Fox (#571):
Yes, it's something that people do. Not that you'd know, since you usually bail on a thread once people start producing them.
Except Smith's paper doesn't concern Plantinga's argument against naturalism. It looks interesting enough, but it's about cosmology, so not really relevant to the topic at hand.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 1:52 PM
#573: Plantinga is using a noninformative prior. I would recommend that you and the other occupants of the pharyngula clown car read up on it but it appears that you all lack the native intelligence to understand statistics.
As Matt Penfold says upthread, we do know that - we just don't care. It's a fundamentally stupid premise to assume that people pick beliefs about the world out of their asses at random. Since the premise is garbage so is everything that follows. Now go climb a high cliff, flip a coin and jump if it's heads.
Posted by: Teleprompter
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May 30, 2009 2:25 PM
Jim,
Brownian's analogy was not a straw-man.
You claimed that since material causes are irrational, they cannot become a rational mind, right?
Brownian explained how emergent properties develop, which is what I felt debunked your argument. If one understands how emergent properties develop, one can understand how material causes could lead to a rational mind.
How do you not understand this?
Posted by: Míl Espáine | May 30, 2009 2:29 PM
No you don't, you stupid pos.
Posted by: Míl Espáine | May 30, 2009 2:38 PM
I find it amusing that you'd take an example some dim bulb pharyngulite (redundant, I know) cooked up and then pretend that Plantinga used it. Plantinga would probably say that a human who has not encountered fire before would assign a prior probability of .5 to the event that it is harmful to the touch, not that it is hold or cold.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 30, 2009 2:39 PM
Míl Espáine,
Making an assumption that beliefs are formed without any prior knowledge may sense in some branches of philosophy. However such assumptions breakdown when one looks at reality, and any philosophical arguments based upon such an assumption will also be invalid when looking at reality.
A person's knowledge of a phenonoma may well be incomplete, but that does not mean a person knows nothing. I suspect most people living in areas where snakebite is a serious risk to health do not understand the physiological actions of snake venoms on the human body. However they do not need to know how snake venom damages the body to have learnt that being bitten by a snake is not a good thing. If fact one does even need to be human to know that. Chimpanzees also avoid close proximity to snakes. Even chimpazees that have been bred in captivty and have never before encountered a snake will avoid snakes. Interstingly though their fear seems to somewhat less that chimps born in wild, suggesting there is both an inate and learned fear of snakes.
Posted by: Míl Espáine | May 30, 2009 2:53 PM
Matt P,
I agree that certain innate knowledge probably exists in at least some creatures. In fact, I believe I have observed innate fear in my rat. He seems to be agitated in rooms the cat has frequented, even though the cat is not in the room at the same time and he has had no contact with a cat. (Not to mention his fear of water.)
I do not necessarily endorse this particular argument of Plantinga but in any event I have little tolerance for the largely brain dead responses to it I've witnessed in this thread.
Posted by: Alex Deam
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May 30, 2009 2:59 PM
There are atheists in the Vista foxhole.
You mean binomial distribution?
Posted by: Anri | May 30, 2009 3:01 PM
My understanding of P's argument against evolution producing a reliable cognitive ability is that evolution does not directly select for a mind that creates accurate models of the world around it - it only selects for minds that are more likely to result in numerous progeny.
Fair enough.
So, next step - does having a cognitive ability that makes accurate world models assist with reproducing? Is the ability to accurately recognize prey, predators, rivals, dangerous environmental conditions and potential mates a survival trait?
Has anyone bother checking with P to see if he thinks perceiving the world accurately (to the extent that we can, and always keeping in mind that 'good enough' is, well, good enough) might just increase reproductive success?
I will be happy to grant the premise that an evolved mind cannot be assumed to be inherently infallible, if the other side considers for at least a bit if an evolved mind is likely become more accurate as it evolves.
(BTW, I see several people tossing around the term 'supernatural'. Have we gotten a satisfactory definition for that term yet? I ask because the only definition I ever seem to come across is: Stuff that doesn't exist that does exist.)
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 30, 2009 3:02 PM
Since this particular argument is central to his whole case, then I will take it that you reject the whole argument.
As regards the braindead comments. Yes they are pain. Jim and others really are stupid. Sadly it seems you are as well. I trust this means you will not say anything further.
Posted by: Matt Penfold | May 30, 2009 3:02 PM
Since this particular argument is central to his whole case, then I will take it that you reject the whole argument.
As regards the braindead comments. Yes they are pain. Jim and others really are stupid. Sadly it seems you are as well. I trust this means you will not say anything further.
Posted by: Míl Espáine | May 30, 2009 3:08 PM
I was referring to the entirety of the argument PZ and his vapid hangers-on are attempting to criticize.
Posted by: windy | May 30, 2009 3:46 PM
Eric #423:
This scheme is silly. See Hairhead #17:
There's no way of evolving cognitive faculties that are capable of only adaptive belies, and evolution (naturalistic or not) does not decide the content of individual beliefs. It seems that Plantinga has actually constructed a defeater for learning, not naturalistic evolution. As TomS #32 and Nusubito #123 point out - beliefs come from physical sources both under theistic and naturalistic evolution, unless Plantinga thinks that God beams all beliefs directly into our brains.
Posted by: Jim | May 30, 2009 3:49 PM
Teleprompter: "Brownian explained how emergent properties develop, which is what I felt debunked your argument."
Brownian showed that an intelligent agent could build a shelter out of wood, drywall, etc. In what way did he show "how emergent properties develop"? In particular, how did he show that human rationality could have "emerged" in the human brain as an effect of material causes, all of which lack reason and understanding? We don't expect material causes to program our computers to carry out accurate calculations. Why should we expect that material causes programmed the human brain to produce thoughts that can correlate with external realities?
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 3:54 PM
Milie boy shat out: No you don't, you stupid pos.
Snicker. Yes, we do asshole. Like I said we don't give a shit since the premise is shit.
So you've started a name calling session. This should be fun. So you couldn't find a cliff or a coin eh shithead? Too bad. Got a revolver and three bullets? Same game and works in the flat country too.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 3:58 PM
Alex: You mean binomial distribution?
Yeah, sorry about that. Poisson is the limiting case of the binomial.
Posted by: Gonorrhea | May 30, 2009 4:14 PM
Creationists never seem to understand the basic idea of natural selection: the concept that some criteria is used as a razor edge to winnow out the bad and keep the good. But the process applies not only to the traits and expressed characteristics found in the biological world, but also equally to the concepts and ideas found within the metaphysical one. A scientist constantly tests his ideas to see if they are fit enough to survive and prosper or if they cannot stand the pressure of evidence based assessment. Plantiga illuminates once again the crucial juncture which creationists fail to grasp.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 4:29 PM
Gonorrhea: Damn, you beat me to it. Jim above is using a common bit of intellectual slight of hand. See what's happened. "Material causes" have replaced the more appropriate term "natual selection". And of course natural selection routinely produces brains that hold many beliefs that do not correlate well with reality. Those brains generally don't leave many offspring while the ones that do generally are more fertile. That was the gist of my crack above about the cliff to our pompous but retarded friend Mil.
Posted by: Teleprompter
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May 30, 2009 4:44 PM
Jim @ 596,
"Brownian showed that an intelligent agent could build a shelter out of wood, drywall, etc. In what way did he show "how emergent properties develop"? In particular, how did he show that human rationality could have "emerged" in the human brain as an effect of material causes, all of which lack reason and understanding? We don't expect material causes to program our computers to carry out accurate calculations. Why should we expect that material causes programmed the human brain to produce thoughts that can correlate with external realities?"
Okay, I am going to try and explain this to you...
Brownian showed that while drywall and wood alone are not good enough to build a structure, together they posses the emergent properties which make a usable dwelling.
Your critique of naturalism suggested that since material causes alone are not enough to build a rational mind, it cannot be done. Brownian demonstrated the illogic of thinking, "well, each of the material causes alone cannot build a rational mind, therefore it cannot be done" by showing you that the collection of individual causes is more formidable than any of the individual causes itself.
You are myopically focusing on "material causes" and ignoring any possibility that human rationality could have emerged from the human mind similar to how a livable dwelling emerges from wood and drywall.
You originally argued that "material causes" are insufficient, and Brownian showed why this line of reasoning is a fallacy. Are we any clearer now?
Posted by: windy | May 30, 2009 4:45 PM
Noninformative prior for what PARAMETER, you stupid ass? Are you and Plantinga claiming that the 1000 independent beliefs are different values of the same parameter? Or are they perhaps 1000 different parameters of the model? For fuck's sake.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 30, 2009 5:05 PM
Actually, come to think of it, there's a really long history of Christians using bogus probabilistic arguments, extending back at least to Pascal's Wager. The fallacy here is that Pascal would have us believe that the possible wagers are Boolean--God or no God. In fact, there are many different Gods mooted by human religions and many different ways of worshiping God within each religion. So rather than the flip of a coin, it's a lottery ticket with lots of possible numbers to be drawn and only one prize. Betting on 0 (# of Gods) has as good a payoff as anything, since if a putative God is not tolerant, we're all f*cked.
Platinga pretends to be using Bayesian probability, but utterly ignores the iterative character of it--it's Bayesian probability without Bayes' Theorem. Behe et al. keep constructing probability arguments where they utterly ignore correlations and conditionals. What is it about Christianity that seems to utterly shut down the quantitative reasoning portion of the brain.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 5:48 PM
a_ray_in_dilbert_space: You're not the only one to notice this. There's a long and stupid history of people educated in math, engineering and computers turning to various forms of fundamentalism. It's not too surprising really given that these tend to be "axiomatic" disciplines where laying out some set of basic premises gets you very far down the road while in more "earthy" sciences like biology or even chemistry if you just reason from first principles all the time you can easily get physically hurt or at the very least fail scientifically because of the many exceptions to every rule. Fundamentalisms are basically just made up axiom sets detached from reality so it's not too surprising that some correlation exists. It's called the Salem Hypothesis
Posted by: Alex Deam
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May 30, 2009 5:55 PM
What are you talking about?
Posted by: Barry Sweezey | May 30, 2009 5:55 PM
Cuttlefish is a genius.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 6:06 PM
Here's a little gem I just pulled outta my ass (that's all this thread is about after all)
The Monkey's Proof that is positively no Gob
Axioms:
1) There must be some particular finite number of God(s)
2) If we assume this number is greater than zero and since we have no data on which to go, following the mighty human earth philosopher Plantinga we conclude that the likelihood that there is any *given* number of gods is 1/n where n is the possible number of gods.
3) The limit of 1/n as n-->infinity is zero.
4) There clearly *could* be infinitely many gods. Thus the probability of there being any *specific* number of them (greater than zero) is zero.
5) Since all things that exist must have the property of quantity and God(s) do not if they do, there are either no gods or the number of gods is quantified the only way it can be - by excluding all values of n>0. Thus there are no gods. Q.E.D.
Wow, I'm running low on lube and my hand hurts.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 6:21 PM
Alex: What are you talking about?
I thought it was pretty clear but I'll expand on it. I meant that not as much follows (or can follow) from basic principles in biology and chemistry as in math or computer science. In theory a computer simulation of a protein could be perfect if you just used the Schrödinger wave equation and solved it analytically for the system in question. In practice this isn't possible so you use lots of ad hoc rules and still the results aren't guaranteed to match reality. The systems under consideration are less predictable overall and rife with exceptions to the "rules".
Posted by: Alex Deam
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May 30, 2009 6:37 PM
What ad hoc rules are we talking about, and what does any of that have to do with being "physically hurt"?
Posted by: Stephen Gordon | May 30, 2009 6:40 PM
Oh dear Mr Myers, do I detect a bit of professional jealousy on your part. You mention Plantinga's reputation,humm. It is cowardly to attempt, even in your childish fashion, the trashing of a very lucid piece of text, from a distance. While not a philosopher myself, I try to maintain a certain admiration for those who obviously are. You are certainly outside this category.
Posted by: the heat | May 30, 2009 6:41 PM
@607
Premises 1 & 4 contradict each other. Not an auspicious way to begin a logical argument.
Posted by: Stephen Gordon | May 30, 2009 6:44 PM
Oh dear, Mr Myers, do I detect a bit of professional jealousy on your part. You mention Plantinga's reputation, humm. It is cowardly to attempt, even in your childish fashion, the trashing of a very lucid piece of text, from a distance. While not a philosopher myself, I try to maintain a certain admiration for those who obviously are. You are certainly outside this category.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 30, 2009 6:55 PM
A connoisseur of bullshit.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 7:01 PM
Alex: What ad hoc rules are we talking about
Example: different amino acids like to interact in certain ways. The hydrophobic ones want to stay with other hydrophobic ones and avoid water. The hydrophilic ones want to stay with other hydrophilic ones or with water. Those rules get you a good way to working out the way a protein folds - except when they don't. Then you look at X-ray crystallographic data to see what's really happening in the real world.
Physically hurt? Are you kidding? People routinely hurt themselves in chemistry and biology labs because they haven't thought through some obscure chain of reactions or didn't memorize the fact that while most strains of a certain bacterium are harmless, this one is dangerous and we don't know quite why.
Posted by: Soren | May 30, 2009 7:02 PM
I agree with some of the commenters that PZ was just a little of the mark with AP.
The fault in AP's claim as I see it is that in his argument a false belief "This tiger will help me" might be adaptive if it leads to behaviour that is adaptive "To show my respect for friendly tiger, I will avoid it all cost, and gather hunters from my village to kill it on sight", he misses the mark.
An example.
I once heard of an experiment where cat were kept in rooms with stroboscopic lights. When they were adult they were put in rooms with normal light. But they were unable to catch or even follow moving targets. Their brains had not learned to understand moving objects.
Use the interpretation of moving objects as an example. We do it all the time, and we are good at it (though not as good as even the most lazy house cat). I would argue that tracking movement is a function of our mind.
This cognitive faculty is highly adaptive. It is extremely basic, and though you can imagine scenarios were false beliefs about the rules of motion are wrong, in macroscopic life, if you do not foresee that the boulder is heading towards you, you are flattened.
The same is true for other basic beliefs. Is the world still there when I look away? When I sleep? etc.
But the further you remove yourself from such basic principles, the more possibility for mistake. Mathematics is a good exmple. Our brain is piss poor at maths. We have to train for a considerable number of years to be able to understand advanced math. As half a mathematician myself, I know just how bad people are at math.
Now look at religion. All evidence point to the conclusion that we are terrible at reasoning about religion. Even people of the same faith living in the same age, same city, of equal age and educational level will disagree strongly about religious faith.
If we use our faculties to evaluate our faculties we see the pattern we would expect to see if our faculties were developed by evolution.
We are good at direct empirical knowledge (though not perfect), as a rule rather bad at abstract thought, and useless in religious questions.
Since naturalism usually reies on the scientific method, which relies heavily on our senses, which in turn have high reliability, naturalism + evolution makes sense.
The idea that a benevolent god designed our faculties to be reliable seem however to be refuted by our observations.
1. God designed us to have reliable faculties
2. Gods wants us to be saved
Conclusion: Our faculties must be designed to be reliable when thinking about God.
Observed: We are piss poor at religious faculties.
Contradiction, 1. or 2. must be false
Posted by: Stephen Gordon | May 30, 2009 7:09 PM
Thank you, your language displays the inner workings of your 'mind.'
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 7:13 PM
the heat: Premises 1 & 4 contradict each other. Not an auspicious way to begin a logical argument.
Scintillating. You've spotted one of the many logical flaws in my argument. Now you might also want to note that the whole thing was created as a work of what one might call "Bullshitsmanship" as a deliberate piece of crap on a par with the arguments marshalled here by the humourless Plantinganist faction.
Oh you thought it was serious. I'm so sorry. Boo fuckme hoo.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 7:40 PM
#617 was me. Yeah, sure my attempts to reason about the gods with math are lame. So are everyone else's. It's just that at least I know when I'm laying down a big steaming pile.
Posted by: windy | May 30, 2009 8:15 PM
No offense, but I think that critics of Plantinga often feel that other critics are off the mark in large part because there are too many things wrong with Plantinga's argument. It's impossible to find "the" fault in it.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 8:24 PM
Stephen Gordon: very lucid piece of text, from a distance
It's lucidity being demonstrated by its notion that ideas about the world, not matter how daft or random, have about a 0.5 probability or being correct.
from a distance
PZ is just being careful here. He doesn't want to be hit by flying shrapnel or body parts from those who make their decisions about how to act in the world by flipping coins. Personally I would recommend a 400 meter radius around any religious fundy. That's about how far the average piece of car bomb shrapnel can kill you from.
Oh did I say that? Gomer Pyle! I've sinned again. Make that 500 meters.
Posted by: RamblinDude
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May 30, 2009 8:25 PM
Windy,
LOL! Good observattion.
Posted by: heliobates | May 30, 2009 8:30 PM
No. You're projecting that motivation on to him.
The EAN isn't new. It's not the first go-around for either our blog host or for most fo the commenters here. Plantinga is the author of his own misfortune for dressing up presuppositionalism.
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 8:32 PM
Windy: No offense, but I think that critics of Plantinga often feel that other critics are off the mark in large part because there are too many things wrong with Plantinga's argument. It's impossible to find "the" fault in it.
Agreed. It like being asked - what part of shit is it that stinks? By the time you've looked up and enumerated all the various compounds and precisely why they stink someone has buried you in shit and you have that sinking feeling - this was all a delaying tactic to make me a part of their compost heap.
Yep!
Posted by: Tassie Devil | May 30, 2009 8:49 PM
I like the idea of philosophy - it seems a noble thing to try and come to understanding by a route other than science, but still firmly based in reason. However, what puts me off is that it is full of kooks like Plantinga, and despite some philosophers trying to distance themselves from him, this kind of metaphysical thinking is bound into a large percentage of current thinking.
To wit:
'Some cosmologists like to speculate that the universe is designed to be the home of life, to which some biologists might add "yes, and not onlythat but we have a pretty shrewd idea of what was on the cards" [we need to ask] if some of our predecessors who saw their religious failth either ebb or haemorrhage were both misinformed and overpessimistic, and to enquire whether some common ground can be regained.'
Simon Conway Morris
The improbability of the universe being suitable for life by chance is so startling that it becomes perverse to talk of our presence as due to chance.
Freeman Dyson
Doing science means figuring out what is going on in the world - what the universe is up to, what it is about. If it isn't about anything then there would be no reason to embark on the scientific quest in the first place...
Paul Davies
If the universe has already been shown to be pointless, how can it be meaningful to study its workings? What is this meaning that researchers are looking for? Why are they doing science at all? [wanders off into the justification that scientists actually have a metaphysical belief in purpose, else why would they bother]
Mary Midgley
Why can't these people grasp that the universe is fascinating even though (1) it doesn't have a purpose and (2) we are not important in it?
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 30, 2009 8:55 PM
Stephen Gordon #616
Your sanctimony displays the inner workings of yours.
Just for curiosity's sake, Stevie*, do you honestly think that Plantinga was producing anything besides bovine feces? Did you detect one iota of rational thought in his morass of fallacies, special pleading, and muddled thinking?
*I hope you don't mind me calling you Stevie. We're all pals together here. Plus you being a pompous prig means that I'm automatically superior to you, so I can call you anything I damn well please.
Posted by: the heat | May 30, 2009 8:57 PM
@ 618
It's also a fallacy to make a universal generalization from a singular statement. Or to generalize from a single data-point.
Or was post 618 also a parody?
Posted by: Dave M | May 30, 2009 9:11 PM
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Jerry Fodor, who said some similar things (e.g. that the evolutionary advantage of a belief doesn't guarantee its truth) in an LRB article a while back (didn't I read about that here? or was it at Rosenhouse's place?). So it isn't just religious woo to blame here. (Don't get me started on what *is* to blame, as I respect Fodor even less than I do Plantinga.)
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 30, 2009 9:14 PM
#626: Oh goodie. You really are a humourless Plantinganist. I had almot fear'd that you were a sensible person who just didn't get the joke. Well now all the data points you guys marshal seem to be big steaming piles so I guess it's a reasonable assumption that anything further you say is likewise garbage but please enlighten us thou great creationist mofo. Show us where our logic hath failed us amd correct our ways.
Praise be to Jebus and L. Ron Hubbard. Amen
Posted by: SinSeeker
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May 30, 2009 9:21 PM
Mil (#594) “entirety of the argument.”
This reminds me of a meeting held at an institution I (thankfully) no longer work, where the manager put up a change proposal with a whole lot of supporting arguments. These were thoroughly picked apart (and rejected) by the staff, which led to the manager concluding that: “while there may be problems with specific parts of the proposal, taken as a whole I think it’s still viable.” The collective jaw drop after this statement registered on local seismographs.
My understanding of (decent) philosophical argument is that premises are posited and conclusions are drawn from those premises. A philosophical argument can be challenged by disputing both the premises and the logical steps leading to the conclusion. Plantinga’s argument fails on both these steps – the premise (“exceedingly unlikely that their cognitive faculties are reliable”) and the conclusion (“evolutionary naturalism, not Christian belief, that can't rationally be accepted”).
I think the “vapid hangers-on” have made a pretty good “attempt” at demolishing Plantinga’s argument. Care to respond to their criticisms rather than resorting to name-calling?
Posted by: Anonymous | May 30, 2009 9:22 PM
@ 624
3 of those 4 individuals don't have postings in philosophy departments. Those quotes aren't really representative of most philosophical work. You might want to look at someone like e.g. Sahotra Sarkar instead.
You're first sentence suggested (I think) that philosophy is an alternative to science. This is an unfortunate impression. The best philosophy (most philosophy which I've been exposed to) considers scientific results to be crucially relevant to understanding the world. And science has always incorporated philosophical elements. Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg all felt philosophy was relevant to their revolutionary work.
Posted by: Tassie Devil | May 30, 2009 9:34 PM
I wasn't aware that to be a philosopher you had to have a posting in a philosophy department.
Thank you for correcting me - now excuse me, it seems that half the classic philosophy texts on my shelf need to be thrown out. I'm going to be busy for a while.
Posted by: Malcolm
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May 30, 2009 9:40 PM
To me, the saddest part about this is that this is one of the guys that creotards always point to when they whine, "Why don't you take on the serious Creationist arguments?"
Posted by: the heat | May 30, 2009 9:45 PM
@ 628
ok, sorry. I regret my last post. I don't mean to defend Plantinga or attack naturalism. I bristled a bit at the mental masturbation image because I think it's too blunt a tool. But it's probably fair to apply it to Plantinga and arguments trying to prove the existence of God.
Anyway, I think you're little "gem" is kind of clever even if (intentionally!) superficial.
Posted by: Ineffable | May 30, 2009 10:01 PM
Alvin Plantinga totally pwned naturalism.
I remember when he pwned Dawkins in his book review too.
PZ doesn't know what he's talking about. He needs to pick up a copy of "Warrant and Proper Function".
"We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience."
How the heck are you going to do this in a non question-begging way? You basically just checking your cognitive faculties with your coghnitive faculties.
Posted by: the heat | May 30, 2009 10:05 PM
Tassie,
Well, you characterized philosophy as "full of kooks". I didn't think that you provided a particularly representative list. But maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to show.
I don't suppose that there are hard and fast rules for what constitutes a philosopher. But I think that generalizations about philosophy should take into account the arguments made in academic philosophy journals and books.
I am curious what books you'd have to throw out. Most of the important historical philosophers who I can think of had academic postings (maybe something equivalent in ancient Greece). I'm probably overlooking a good many obvious people. But who?
Posted by: Ineffable | May 30, 2009 10:07 PM
"Does anyone know how Plantinga copes with the fact evolution happens ? Does he go out into the countryside and rail against nature for failing to accord with what he has decreed is the philosophical truth ?"
If the evidence was sufficiently convincing to Plantinga he could accept theistic evolution. (Many Chruistian Philosophers like Bill Hasker do).
Posted by: Ineffable | May 30, 2009 10:11 PM
Another good arguent I was Robert Koon's argument against scientific realism and naturalism.
Naturalism is on hard times nowadays.
Posted by: Ineffable | May 30, 2009 10:13 PM
"But it's probably fair to apply it to Plantinga and arguments trying to prove the existence of God. "
He isn't trying to prove God. He is trying to disprove naturalism
Posted by: the heat | May 30, 2009 10:19 PM
@638
Insert an "also" between "and arguments".
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 30, 2009 10:19 PM
Ineffable,
An evolutionary perspective can not only explain why we have an ability to accurately discern some "truth," it also explains why we fail to accurately assess other truths. Take the example of risk--we often over-respond to threats perceived as immediate (e.g. terrorism) while ignoring potentially more serious threats (e.g smoking related illness, climate change, obesity...). I would think that Platinga would have a hard time explaining such things without positing a sadistic prick of a deity.
Likewise, why do we perceive light as either a particle or a wave when in fact it is neither. Why are concepts such as those in probabiltiy counter to our intuition? (They certainly are to Platinga--his use of probability is abysmal).
Sorry, dude, Platinga's thinking on this is not particularly deep or correct.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 10:26 PM
Ineffable
Well, he failed at both due to faulty premises and logic. So far, no evidence for god has been presented that stands skeptical scrutiny. I wonder why. Maybe you god doesn't exist?Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 10:26 PM
I really would like my criticism answered - that the natural world provides countless examples of animals adapting and learning to their environment through products of brain heuristics. How does it not follow that if a chimpanzee can learn to use a rock to crack nuts that we can't understand the basic relationships in the world with an evolved brain?There's no reason that an evolved brain shouldn't be sufficiently capable of guiding the agent it controls through the world it's in. But again this is an attempt to justify that this whole cosmos was made so God for us because some bronze-age book of mythology says so.
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 10:28 PM
Ineffable:
Really.Isn't that another way of saying he's trying to prove supernaturalism? If not, what's the alternative to naturalism?
Heh.
Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 10:29 PM
a-ray-in-dilbert-space, the fact that you don't even know what the man's name is (posts 425, 554, 603, 640) -- it's PlaNtinga, not Platinga -- doesn't give me any confidence that your familiarity with his arguments extends beyond PZ's post (which, as many of us who have actually studied Plantinga have pointed out, gets the eaan fundamentally wrong at nearly every step).
Posted by: Ignorabimus | May 30, 2009 10:32 PM
Dear Emmet (@386) the suggestion that an alternative foundation for mathematics which does not bottom out on sets first occurs on page 3. The inadequacies of the set theoretic representation of functions comes up on pages 18-20. Like you, I'm an enthusiastic amateur in these waters. But I don't think I'm getting this wrong. (If I am, please do let me know.)
Best wishes!
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 10:34 PM
Even IF PZ gets Plantinga's argument wrong, Plantinga's argument is still fucking retarded. If he honestly thinks that an evolved brain can't make sense of the environment he is in, then he's truly misinformed about how nature works. Defend him all you like, but his argument presented there is quite simply moronic. It's an imbecilic understanding of nature of the same vein of a creationist talking about the complexity of the body.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 30, 2009 10:34 PM
Eric, Nor am I likely to read the arguments of a man who makes a pretense of understanding probability without understanding the first thing about it.
If you are familiar with his arguments, perhaps you can explain how he addresses the situations where our abilities to discern truth in beliefs fails. I do not see how a creationist can address this without drawing some rather unpalatable conclusions about the designer/creator. It poses no such problems for naturalism.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 10:35 PM
Eric, if all you can complain about is spelling, what does that say about your logic...
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 10:39 PM
Eric, you should look at the content of ARIDS' posts, not the spelling therewithin, to determine your confidence regarding the comprehension of the arguments exhibited therein. Nor is it an established fact that the name is unknown to the poster - that's a hasty conclusion. Furthermore, that one specific aspect does not give you confidence does not entail that there aren't other aspects that should.
In short, I see you as trying to poison the well, in this case being a true ad hominem.
Posted by: InEffable | May 30, 2009 10:40 PM
@John Morales
"Really.
Isn't that another way of saying he's trying to prove supernaturalism? If not, what's the alternative to naturalism?"
Well it would prove "Supernaturalism" but necessarily God.
@Redhead
"So far, no evidence for god has been presented that stands skeptical scrutiny"
I think there is lots of evidence for God . Check out Richard Swinburne's "The Existence of God". (If you guys liked Plantinga you'll love Swinburne. He's a philosopher of science from Oxford and gives lots of rigourous arguments for God)
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 10:48 PM
InEffable:
Indeed, were it sustainable.I note that science is based on naturalism, and it has achieved so very much in the last couple of hundreds of years - this in contrast to non-naturalism (dualism?), which has achieved... umm...
Well, just look at parapsychology's endless achievements!
It's akin to 'proving' bees cannot fly, the evidence notwithstanding. Quite an achievement :)
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 10:50 PM
Sorry Ineffable, present the physical evidence for your imaginary god here. Evidence that can pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers, as being of divine, and not natural, origin. Philosophical "proofs" are sophistry. So if you have REAL evidence, present it. Otherwise, by Occam's Razor, your god is fiction.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | May 30, 2009 10:53 PM
Ineffable,
Anyone else here suspect Ineffable is facilis? I remember (and searching the archives confirms this) that Facilis was obsessed with Plantiga, Dawkins, philosophy (or his twisted version of it) and occasionally used the term "pwned".
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 10:53 PM
A chimpanzee can crack open nuts by smashing them with either a rock or heavy stick while using a tree root as a fulcrum. Therefore Plantinga is full of shit. QED
Posted by: Tassie Devil | May 30, 2009 10:56 PM
I'm not going to derail the thread with a long list of philosophers who did not work in university philosophy departments (or their equivalents). Half an hour with Wikipaedia will turn up dozens. It's not where they wrote/thought that's important, it's what they actually said. I'll just throw out an obvious one: Spinoza.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | May 30, 2009 11:02 PM
Upon further searching the archives I see that Glen Davidson and Owlmirror already beat me to the Ineffable=facilis hypothesis.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
May 30, 2009 11:04 PM
Feynmanic, that is the prevailing theory. Both are very short on logic and reason, and very tall on presuppositionalist BS.
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 11:04 PM
Feynmaniac,
Yeah, but suspect only. So far, ineffable seems more cogent; OTOH, Facilis is a known sock-puppetteer.No matter, we address the substance of the posts regardless.
Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 11:08 PM
"Eric, if all you can complain about is spelling, what does that say about your logic..."
NoR, I drew an inference from the misspelling. It seems to me that it's safe to conclude that you probably haven't read much of an author if you can't even spell his name, and if his name isn't particularly hard to spell (If we were talking about Schleiermarcher I probably wouldn't have mentioned it). Imagine If I littered four posts with commentary on the works of 'Dahwin.' You'd be all over me, and you know it.
"If you are familiar with his arguments, perhaps you can explain how he addresses the situations where our abilities to discern truth in beliefs fails. I do not see how a creationist can address this without drawing some rather unpalatable conclusions about the designer/creator. It poses no such problems for naturalism."
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the eaan.
That aside, I must say that I've never heard it suggested that the fact that our cognitive faculties aren't infallible counts as evidence against theism. I seriously doubt that such an argument can be sustained.
Now, somewhat along the lines of your question, Plantinga does argue that if theism is true, then the belief that theism is true is likely to have warrant. Given that theists believe in a personal, creator god who seeks a relationship with us, it follows that if theism is true, it's more than reasonable to suppose that we would have a reliable means to know that god exists (i.e. that theism is true). Now, naturalism doesn't enjoy this advantage, i.e. it's not the case that one can say that if naturalism is true, then the belief that naturalism is true is likely to have warrant. This notion also has implications for debates about god's existence. If theism is true, then theistic belief is rational. (Again, the same isn't true of naturalism; naturalism could be both true and the belief that naturalism is true unwarranted). Therefore, to show that theistic belief isn't rational, you have to provide arguments against god's existence (the de facto question). If you focus on the rationality of theistic belief (the de jure question), you'll be begging the question (since, again, if theism is true, the belief that it's true is warranted; hence, the issue is whether it's true, not whether it's rational). That was a sketch of a sketch of that particular line of reasoning, so please don't treat it as if it's complete. Plantinga is an extremely rigorous philosopher, and his arguments are developed at great length and with tremendous complexity.
The upshot of Plantinga's eaan (not its conclusion, but where we are if we accept it) is that metaphysical naturalism isn't consistent with science. In other words, the eaan turns the common claim of the naturalist, i.e. that there's a conflict between religion and science, on its head: the conflict is in fact (if the argument succeeds) between naturalism and science.
Posted by: Tim | May 30, 2009 11:09 PM
First off, I probably share around 99% of the views expressed on this blog. But I disagree with you about Plantinga. He is a highly respectable philosopher who makes technically sophisticated arguments, publishes in the best philosophy journals, teaches in one of the best philosophy departments in the world, held his own against Daniel Dennett in a debate on God's existence this past December, and so on. He is far out of the league of the people you generally criticize here. Also, you need some training in modal logic and other staples of the kind of analytic philosophy Plantinga does before you are qualified to give anything more than a cursory response to his arguments.
Posted by: Tim | May 30, 2009 11:12 PM
First off, I probably share around 99% of the views expressed on this blog. But I disagree with you about Plantinga. He is a highly respectable philosopher who makes technically sophisticated arguments, publishes in the best philosophy journals, teaches in one of the best philosophy departments in the world, held his own against Daniel Dennett in a debate on God's existence this past December, and so on. He is far out of the league of the people you generally criticize here. Also, you need some training in modal logic and other staples of the kind of analytic philosophy Plantinga does before you are qualified to give anything more than a cursory response to his arguments.
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 30, 2009 11:12 PM
I wasn't going to bother, but here goes:
Objections:
(a) While premise 1 is right if we consider all possible worlds and assume that beliefs are formed more or less randomly, in the actual world the probability of our beliefs being reliable is exactly 1. And that's of course because the probability of any actual state of affairs is 1.
Circular you say? Not exactly. (But even if it were, circular arguments are formally valid since they have the form A therefore A. So we'd have a draw.) Anyway, here's why it's not circular:
(b) If you are about to ascribe a set of beliefs to anyone (including yourself) that are wildly irrational and largely unreliable then, by Davidson's principle of charity, you really ought to select another set of beliefs to ascribe. To be a set of beliefs just is to be largely true and reliable. Read: On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. Also read Dennett's True Believers, an exceptionally good piece of writing that I'd recommend to anyone.
(c) Oh, and just for good measure: the existence of the supernatural is inconsistent with the physical conservation laws. But we know that every physical event is fully causally determined by an antecedent physical cause. So everything, including the human mind/brain obeys conservation laws. If you don't believe me, learn how an fMRI works. So you see, even if there are supernatural entities, they play no role whatsoever in our world. They don't write books, influence people, or indeed do anything else. If there is a god, you cannot so much as form a concept that refers to him. Your god concept picks out an imaginary chimaera concocted out of wholly pedestrian parts. Done.
Posted by: Tim | May 30, 2009 11:17 PM
First off, I probably share around 99% of the views expressed on this blog. But I disagree with you about Plantinga. He is a highly respectable philosopher who makes technically sophisticated arguments, publishes in the best philosophy journals, teaches in one of the best philosophy departments in the world, held his own against Daniel Dennett in a debate on God's existence this past December, and so on. He is far out of the league of the people you generally criticize here. Also, you need some training in modal logic, philosophy of science, and other staples of the kind of analytic philosophy Plantinga does before you are qualified to give anything more than a cursory response to his arguments.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 11:17 PM
Yawn, Eric, you and the evidence, as has been pointed out time and time again, are at odds. Why continue to argue your point of sophistry in the face of physical evidence to the contrary? Science went to the back end of the argument, looked at conclusion and the evidence, and said bullshit. What philosophy says is irrelevant in the face of evidence.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 11:20 PM
But the argument is centred around biology, aren't you going to complain that Plantinga grossly misunderstands science and should spend time learning about evolutionary development of the brain? maybe about how neuroscience shapes thoughts and beliefs and how that works in both humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom? I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't suggest that, instead you complain that an argument centred around biology should be solved by philosophers instead of scientists...Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 11:21 PM
John @ #649, see #647. Apparently, the conclusion of my rather reasonable *inference* was spot on.
Posted by: africangenesis | May 30, 2009 11:24 PM
Tim#661,
"Also, you need some training in modal logic and other staples of the kind of analytic philosophy Plantinga does before you are qualified to give anything more than a cursory response to his arguments."
Expertise is overrated, especially when it conflicts with the evidence. Yes, deduction can't get you past the mind-body problem, but we've learned to live with what we can "know" via disciplined inference from the evidence of our senses.
Posted by: MTran | May 30, 2009 11:26 PM
[A]s many of us who have actually studied Plantinga have pointed out,
getsthe eaan is fundamentally wrong at nearly every step.There. It's fixed now.
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 30, 2009 11:27 PM
Nerd (@664): we're on the same side here. And I usually enjoy reading your comments. But this time I disagree with you. I have a great deal of faith in the capacity of reason to lead us to the right answers. I find slow, clear thinking an invaluable guide when trying to sort out hard empirical and theoretical issues. (If I gave up on trusting reason, I'd not know how to assess rival hypotheses or form new ones.)
Here's one of my favourite quotes (from a great logician and atheist):
The good news is that the godbots' arguments considered on their own merits blow. And rather than using reason to guide us, they use it to confuse and obfuscate. That's their way of respecting 'do not bear false witness', I suppose.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 11:27 PM
Anytime philosophy rubs up against the physical world science can check the conclusions of philosophy, as in this case. Often, as in this case, philosophy is at odds with the evidence. Guess who/what scientists believe, sophist philosophers or the evidence? For the philosophers out there, the answer is the evidence every time...Posted by: Anri | May 30, 2009 11:29 PM
Eric sez (in part):
"Given that theists believe in a personal, creator god who seeks a relationship with us, it follows that if theism is true, it's more than reasonable to suppose that we would have a reliable means to know that god exists (i.e. that theism is true)"
But, given that theists believe in a personal, creator god who seeks a relationship with us (maybe Zeus), it follows that if theism is *not* true (Zeus does not exist), it's perfectly reasonable to assume people would believe in god anyway (seeing as we're taking that as a given already), yes?
In other words, belief in god (Zeus) has no bearing on the existence of god (Zeus) at all, given that our minds are unreliable. Am I following along?
Also:
"If theism is true, then theistic belief is rational."
Let me see if I understand. If Yahweh exists (theism is true), belief in Apollo (theistic belief) is rational.
Yes? Or did I miss something?
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 11:30 PM
I can't believe anyone would actually suggest this, this is seriously fucking retarded. Science relies on methodological naturalism, and we can see the results. Again, does the computer only work because God exists? Was the computer even built on the assumption that God exists? No, it was built purely on a naturalistic process where the organisms that built it were naturalistic and the mental processes that bore it were naturalistic.Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 11:32 PM
"Anytime philosophy rubs up against the physical world science can check the conclusions of philosophy, as in this case."
It's simply false to construe the eaan as an argument that is in any way in conflict with science. It's an argument against a metaphysical position, not a scientific one.
Posted by: Kel | May 30, 2009 11:35 PM
It has consequences in the natural world. He's arguing that the mind is crafted by God, how is that not a scientific position?Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 11:38 PM
What the FCC value is added if we adulterate science with goddidit? FCCall, that's what. If Plantinga kept his piehole shut for all his life, we'd none of us be less stupid.
Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 11:38 PM
"I can't believe anyone would actually suggest this, this is seriously fucking retarded. Science relies on methodological naturalism"
I write 'metaphysical naturalism,' and you respond with 'methodological naturalism.' No wonder you don't get it!
"But, given that theists believe in a personal, creator god who seeks a relationship with us (maybe Zeus), it follows that if theism is *not* true (Zeus does not exist), it's perfectly reasonable to assume people would believe in god anyway (seeing as we're taking that as a given already), yes?"
Sure, but that's not at all relevant to the point I was making about the relationship between theism and warrant on the one hand, and naturalism and warrant on the other.
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 11:38 PM
Eric @666, I was referring to the basis for your inference, not to its truth-value or otherwise, and I suspect you know this.
re:
An interesting claim, given science is based upon methodological naturalism, and you presumably don't dispute the efficacy thereof.If the former is indeed false, whence the success of the latter? That's something that needs explanation, if you want to sustain the claim.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 30, 2009 11:39 PM
Eric, metaphysical = imaginary Physical (science) = real. You can belief all the imaginary stuff you want off line. You come here, to a science blog, you will be expected to produce physical evidence. What part of that don't you understand?
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 30, 2009 11:42 PM
The quaint notion that metaphysics has any doctrines or special methods of inquiry to offer us that are distinct from natural science ran into a brick wall in the Critique of Pure Reason. The lesson took a while to sink in. But good metaphysics is wholly continuous with natural science. There is no other game in town. If you think you can somehow do metaphysics without also doing serious empirical work, you're dreaming (and you have somehow missed the past 200 years of philosophy). That's what the scientists here have been trying to point out to you in fairly stark terms. So wake the fuck up and do something useful with your life.
If you're a non-naturalist philosopher, you can start the detox by reading this:
http://www.lps.uci.edu/home/fac-staff/faculty/maddy/2ndphilosophy.pdf
Posted by: Eric | May 30, 2009 11:43 PM
"He's arguing that the mind is crafted by God, how is that not a scientific position?"
You'll find no such thing anywhere in the eaan, which is what we're discussing. I think you need to find a link to Plantinga's treatment of the argument (or to an exposition of it by some competent philosopher) and actually read it if you want to discuss it intelligently. As things stand, you're getting almost everything about it wrong. I tried to summarize (both words are important: 'tried' and 'summarize') the argument in post #423, and also linked to some lectures by Plantinga on the argument.
Posted by: Tim | May 30, 2009 11:43 PM
"But the argument is centred around biology, aren't you going to complain that Plantinga grossly misunderstands science and should spend time learning about evolutionary development of the brain? maybe about how neuroscience shapes thoughts and beliefs and how that works in both humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom? I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't suggest that, instead you complain that an argument centred around biology should be solved by philosophers instead of scientists... "
I'm all for Plantinga (and other philosophers) learning more about evolutionary theory! I'm also in favor of biologists who are interested in some of the current philosophical debates learning more about philosophy of science, evolutionary epistemology, and other issues involved in Plantinga's argument. (The best site for information on any of these issues is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu) For the record, I think Plantinga is wrong, but it's worth getting at the right reasons for why he's wrong. To do this you need some further grounding in some of the main issues; it seemed to me that Prof. Myers' post lacked any such grounding.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 11:45 PM
I write 'metaphysical naturalism,' and you respond with 'methodological naturalism.' No wonder you don't get it!
Methodological naturalism is a continually validated hypothesis, and metaphysical naturalism never more than a provisional conclusion, which lying creotard philostomy bags like Eric dishonestly mischaracterize as a premise, in order to encourage stupid people to reject science.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 11:48 PM
I'm also in favor of biologists who are interested in some of the current philosophical debates learning more about philosophy of science, evolutionary epistemology, and other issues involved in Plantinga's argument.
What a FCCing waste of a biologist's time that would be.
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 11:49 PM
Anri @671,
Good one!Take a bow.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 30, 2009 11:50 PM
If this was true, then why is Plantinga throwing around terms like neurophysiology, neurophysiology, natural selection and adaptive behavior? Why does he bring in an outside mathematician to make false arguments about probability? If he tosses sciency words around and makes sneers at science, then it would appear that he's actually making arguments about science.
I could be wrong, of course. I'm not edjumacted enough in manufacturing and justifying bullshit to be a philosopher.
Posted by: John Morales | May 30, 2009 11:52 PM
Anri,
Take a bow!Good one.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 30, 2009 11:58 PM
Having presented his flatulent "evolutionary argument against naturalism" with what are we to be as productive and accurate in our modeling and predictions regarding nature? What does Plantinga propose to displace naturalism, and how are we to tell?
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 31, 2009 12:02 AM
Is this another philosopher using the Courtier's Reply? Are you arguing that since PZ and most of the rest of us here aren't paid up members of the Philosophers' Guild, we're unqualified to make philosophical arguments and any arguments we make are automatically wrong?
Tim, instead of whining about what a great philosopher Plantinga is and the rest of us aren't fit to lick his boots, how about explaining how and why the numerous refutations given to Plantinga are wrong. Let's start with an easy one. Plantinga says that naturalism is faulty and the fault is fixed by his pet deity. Explain why Yahweh is the default and not Vishnu, Odin or Huitzilopochtli.
Posted by: Anri | May 31, 2009 12:05 AM
Eric quoted me and responded:
(Me):"But, given that theists believe in a personal, creator god who seeks a relationship with us (maybe Zeus), it follows that if theism is *not* true (Zeus does not exist), it's perfectly reasonable to assume people would believe in god anyway (seeing as we're taking that as a given already), yes?"
(Eric):Sure, but that's not at all relevant to the point I was making about the relationship between theism and warrant on the one hand, and naturalism and warrant on the other.
Apparently I am still not seeing how the assumption of god increases the likelihood that our thoughts about anything, god included, must accurate.
Assuming that a caring, loving god exists and wants us to have a positive relationship with him, (and has therefore lovingly crafted our minds to perceive his holy light) seems no more likely than assuming a dark and evil god who want us to perceive him as good and twists our perceptions to fit, or an indifferent god who wants to be left alone and twists our perceptions to miss him altogether.
Posted by: Ichthyic | May 31, 2009 12:05 AM
Eric @666
I knew it!
Eric is the anti-christ.
mystery solved.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 12:07 AM
Almost everything about it? So Plantinga is not arguing against the notion that evolution can produce a capable mind? Please show me where I'm wrong Eric, and please demonstrate why the computer is a testament to God as opposed to the naturalistic worldview? Come on, demonstrate that the computer is anything other than a triumph of naturalism. Show that science and naturalism are incompatible, come on. Do it! Show that the chimpanzee using a rock to smash a nut cannot really know that a rock would do such thing unless there is a God. Show that there is ANYTHING in the universe at all that demonstrates that there is such thing as an interventionist God. Come on Eric, show some fucking evidence and stop pretending that a methodology that is exclusively naturalistic disproves naturalism.Posted by: Ichthyic | May 31, 2009 12:09 AM
If Plantinga kept his piehole shut for all his life, we'd none of us be less stupid.
Threadwinner.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 12:09 AM
Assuming that a caring, loving god exists and wants us to have a positive relationship with him, (and has therefore lovingly crafted our minds to perceive his holy light) seems no more likely than assuming a dark and evil god who want us to perceive him as good and twists our perceptions to fit, or an indifferent god who wants to be left alone and twists our perceptions to miss him altogether.
Everybody knows by now that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook. If God existed, wouldn't he have already wished Eric into the cornfield by now?
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 31, 2009 12:15 AM
Wtf? It was you guys that laid out your reading of the argument in #560. I offered objections in #662. Unless there's something wrong with those objections, or unless the original reconstruction is flawed, the argument fails and we're done.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 12:16 AM
Okay, eric. Just so we are on the same page here:
Do you agree that there is nothing about the human body (which includes the mind) that cannot be explained by evolution? If not, show evidence.
Do you agree that an interventionist god would be measurable in our universe?
Do you agree that the scientific method can work to observing this universe, including any supposed interface between the natural world and the supernatural one?
Do you agree that in order to support the existence of an interventionist god then it must be shown that such intervention actually happens? If not, why not?
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 12:18 AM
"Explain why Yahweh is the default and not Vishnu, Odin or Huitzilopochtli."
Uh, he doesn't really mention any "Yahweh" in the paper Prof. Myers is talking about. I'm not suggesting you join a guild, but it's at least worth taking a look at the work you are criticizing:
http://books.google.com/books?id=p40tc_T7-rMC&dq=evolutionart+argument+against+naturalism&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=T6Xrbvo2Gm&sig=8XhsOeQDkrXFqOW5RCoj_JZxjgU&hl=en&ei=tQQiSsDVGNmMtge94MXGBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA1,M1
Posted by: H.H. | May 31, 2009 12:20 AM
So Eric's back, still without any argument or defense of the idea that the supernatural solves the global skpeticism problem. The closest he comes is with this gem:
Did Plantinga manage to say that with a straight face? My lord, if that's the best this wizard of theological philosophy can muster, there isn't much to worry about. Please, tell me, Eric, you weren't impressed by this piss-poor argument, were you? A child could sniff the special pleading a mile away. A deeper question to ponder would be, "why does faith turn even bright minds into slobbering idiots willing to accept any trash that supports their emotional needs?" Eric, I expect that you can speak from first-hand experience.Posted by: Eric | May 31, 2009 12:22 AM
"An interesting claim, given science is based upon methodological naturalism, and you presumably don't dispute the efficacy thereof.
If the former is indeed false, whence the success of the latter? That's something that needs explanation, if you want to sustain the claim."
It would only need explanation if methodological naturalism fit better with metaphysical naturalism than with any of its alternatives, e.g. theism. However, that's not the case.
"You come here, to a science blog, you will be expected to produce physical evidence. What part of that don't you understand?"
Um, PZ wrote this post about a philosophic argument, not about a scientific one. If I ever begin commenting on a properly scientific thread without adducing scientific evidence, then feel free to smack me down. Until then, it's you who aren't getting the context here. 'This is a science blog' doesn't entail that every post must deal with science. Just look at the most recent post about Donahue.
"But good metaphysics is wholly continuous with natural science. There is no other game in town. If you think you can somehow do metaphysics without also doing serious empirical work, you're dreaming (and you have somehow missed the past 200 years of philosophy)."
I would love to hear just what you think the distinction is between metaphysics and science. I also get the sense that you've read next to nothing of the serious work in metaphysics that's been published since the demise of the Vienna Circle, particularly concerning (the following is a partial list from Leiter Reports: 'metaphysics' comprises sundry topics of specialization, and no one is an expert in all of them) meta-metaphysics, dispositions and accounts of other things in terms of them, modality-time, persistence, identity, tense, realism vs. anti-realism, mereology, composition, coincidence, the nature of metaphysical explanation, supervenience, metametaphysics (metaontology), the nature of properties, especially quidditism, pure powers, etc., the nature of laws, especially contingentism vs. necessitariansim, essentialism, de re necessity sans possible worlds, fictionalism, meta-ontology, non-Quinean theories of ontological commitment, truthmaker theories, fundamentality, the epistemology of modality, and the relationship between different modalities (epistemic, physical, metaphysical, 'conceptual'). Now, I think it's abvious from that partial list that we're not dealing with 'serious *empirical* work' here (think about it: what empirical work can you do with realism/anti-realism and the like?).
Posted by: Anri | May 31, 2009 12:23 AM
Ken sez:
"Everybody knows by now that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook. If God existed, wouldn't he have already wished Eric into the cornfield by now?"
Ken, I still think we can explain this via the 'evil god' hypothesis...
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 12:25 AM
"Explain why Yahweh is the default and not Vishnu, Odin or Huitzilopochtli."
Uh, he doesn't really mention any "Yahweh" in the paper Prof. Myers is talking about. I'm not suggesting you join a guild, but it's at least worth taking a look at the work you are criticizing:
So, I did, and did a search term for "God" and within the first screen, found him discussing a God who created man in his own image, and then found a link to that FCCtard Thomas Aquinas, so do I get my gods damned philostomy degree now, asshat? Are you trying to convince us that Plantinga is some sort of syncretist from Esalen? Don't dribble down your pants leg and call that pissing.
Posted by: John Morales | May 31, 2009 12:26 AM
Tim @696, 'Tis Himself was addressing you, not Plantinga.
If you don't care to engage your interlocutor, that's fine - but it's evasion.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 12:34 AM
Ken, I still think we can explain this via the 'evil god' hypothesis...
Certainly. And how are we to tell the difference between a good god and an evil one, especially in the complete and total absence of evidence for either?
Posted by: John Morales | May 31, 2009 12:37 AM
Eric:
WTF?Um, Eric, metaphysical naturalism is definitionally antithetical to theism.
Cripes!
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 12:37 AM
Nice, 700. Though if I do a search for "God" and "Aquinas" on your post, I get the same results as you got from Plantinga! Aren't term searches fun?
Posted by: Eric | May 31, 2009 12:39 AM
"Um, Eric, metaphysical naturalism is definitionally antithetical to theism.
Cripes!"
Er, hence my calling them alternatives.
Posted by: Ichthyic | May 31, 2009 12:44 AM
Er, hence my calling them alternatives.
NO, moron.
you claiming that methodological naturalism would fit as well with theism as metaphysical naturalism is what he was pointing out you were being a fucktard about.
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 31, 2009 12:48 AM
I stand by what I said about Kant. Anyone who thinks that philosophers have some magic method of getting at the truth via pure reason has not read the Critique. And that includes anyone who thinks that so-called possible worlds are anything but a blend of imaginary phantasms and a bad gloss on modal logic. At best, philosophers can assess whether arguments are valid and ideas coherent. They can't tell us about soundness. The hard work of the experimental scientists does that.
The demise of philosophers, like the Vienna Circle, but also Sellars, Popper, Quine and many others, who were interested in making a serious contribution to our understanding of the world has opened up a vacuum. That vacuum has been filled mostly with opportunists. A great deal of what gets published in philosophy exists to justify the existence of journals and to give faculty the right number of notches on the totem pole so as to get tenure. It's not read by anyone at all after a year or two.
If as you say the philosophers you know spend their time discussing arguments and ideas that are coherent but have no bearing on reality, so much the worse for them. Given the state of the economy, this in my view is a powerful argument for cutting funding to philosophy departments and channeling resources to reality based initiatives. I'm sure the coffee houses will still be there for the idle to engage in debates wholly unglued the world.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 12:50 AM
Nice, 700. Though if I do a search for "God" and "Aquinas" on your post, I get the same results as you got from Plantinga! Aren't term searches fun?
Man, Woman, Child, all are up against the wall of Philostomy!
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 12:54 AM
I'm sure the coffee houses will still be there for the idle to engage in debates wholly unglued the world.
Have you no respect for overpriced stale coffee?
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 12:57 AM
Fair enough, 708. Good luck, and may you follow your term-searching wheresoever it leads you.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 12:59 AM
Are you honestly going to suggest that theism fits better with methodological naturalism than philosophical naturalism? Okay, show your evidence. Show that there's an interventionist deity who puts physical will into the universe and cares about this particular species. Hell, just show that there's an interventionist deity fullstop. It doesn't even have to care about the human race.Posted by: John Morales | May 31, 2009 1:02 AM
Eric is an epitome of the Dunning-Kruger effect, at least in the field of philosophy.
Here, Eric: antithesis.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 1:06 AM
So, Tim @710, thanks for leaving such a paper trail of sliming dishonesty, in trying to claim we don't know what we're talking about when asking why Plantinga talks only about a mainstream Christian conception of God. If we're full of shit for accusing Plantinga of selling only Christian theism without any proper warrant, what flavor of snake-oil is he selling instead? What kind of Kozmik Debris is Plantinga trying to jive us with?
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 1:08 AM
"But of course we can't just assume that they are in the same cognitive situation we think we are in. For example, we assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. We can't sensibly assume that about this population; after all, the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable."How is that not scientific?!?
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 1:14 AM
"the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable."
In this thread alone we have seen it demonstrated time and again, that those who advance this position have nothing better to offer in support of their position than the demonstration of the utter incompetence and unreliability of their cognitive faculties, leaving the rest of us to reflect on mere truisms, like the one that has it that you can't argue with a sick mind.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | May 31, 2009 1:15 AM
Tim,
He doesn't say "Yahweh" but he does say:
He then says:
Implying the God in question is the Christian God (without giving any arguments for that at all). Oh and also, this article was written for the site ChristianityToday.com.Posted by: Ichthyic | May 31, 2009 1:18 AM
Are you honestly going to suggest that theism fits better with methodological naturalism than philosophical naturalism?
the only even remotely sane thing I could predict the antichrist saying in response is that what he meant by that was to say that ALL metaphysical philosophy (theism/deism, etc.) is just as irrelevant to methodological naturalism.
I don't agree, but at least it would be a place to start.
somehow, though, knowing eric...
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 1:19 AM
I got the contents of yer philostomy bag right here, pal:
http://badgods.com/forumville-proof.html
Posted by: windy | May 31, 2009 1:21 AM
eric wrote:
and
It's there. Plantinga is arguing that the outcome of evolution is different under naturalism (unreliable cognitive faculties) and theistic evolution (reliable cognitive faculties). As Fitelson and Sober point out, the probability of reliable faculties evolving should be identical under both hypotheses, unless God intervenes in the evolutionary process.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 1:29 AM
Which of course invalidates the entire topic of discussion. When Plantinga talks on the likes of: "The obvious conclusion, so it seems to me, is that evolutionary naturalism can't sensibly be accepted. The high priests of evolutionary naturalism loudly proclaim that Christian and even theistic belief is bankrupt and foolish. The fact, however, is that the shoe is on the other foot. "So much effort put into saying Goddidit. And the use of "high priests of evolutionary naturalism", a great touch by Plantinga.
Posted by: SinSeeker
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May 31, 2009 1:34 AM
For a good dose of logic as applied to theism, I highly recommend Nicholas Everitt (2004). The Non-existence of God: An Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-30107-6
Everitt is a philosopher, and has done a very good job of pointing out the logical problems of theism. For example, the problems a deity who is “eternal” or “outside time” would have in operating in (and even understanding) a universe with time as a parameter.
Everitt devotes a chapter to demolishing Plantinga’s argument regarding reformed epistemology.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 1:51 AM
Everitt devotes a chapter to demolishing Plantinga’s argument regarding reformed epistemology.
Wow. A whole chapter. He must have been paid by the word.
Posted by: H.H. | May 31, 2009 2:42 AM
Eric wrote:
Oh, it's there? I fear we might be getting closer to the argument we've all been waiting for. Please, Eric, tell us how theistic evolution leads to reliable cognitive faculties. I think you can no longer deny this plank of the argument is key to the success of the whole. It's way past time time to spell it out.Posted by: SinSeeker
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May 31, 2009 2:43 AM
Apparently that’s all it takes. How long does it take to demolish a “goddidit therefore goddidit” argument?
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 3:02 AM
How is this not a scientific position? By your own words you are saying that Plantinga is arguing science and not metaphysics.Cut the philosophical weaselling Eric and show some intellectual honesty on the matter. Don't think that if you show us a pig wearing lipstick that we won't think it a pig.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 31, 2009 3:41 AM
the heat (#626): Wow, you've truly found me out. All my tricks are laid bare. I attempted to claim that indeed all mathematical god bothering is garbage. You must know of the eldritch wisdom that shows that if there are infinitely many primes then Jesus rose from the dead and the gays are bound for hell. Damn, we godless types try to put one over on you and you find us out every time. But seriously, tell us of the numerate god botheringness that will show us the light. I have a new bottle of lube and the swelling in my hand has gone down.
Posted by: Zetetic
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May 31, 2009 3:46 AM
@ Kel and 'Tis Himself (#685):
I made the same observation to Eric at #493.
Still haven't seen an explanation yet.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 3:59 AM
Eric will persist in saying it's not science while defending an argument by which the author wrote to say that Goddidit. It's clear as fucking day that Plantinga is arguing for Goddidit - and that is a scientific concept. It doesn't matter how much he tries to dress up such an argument as metaphysics, the simple fact is that Plantinga is arguing that in the history of life on this planet, a force external to the universe has guided life on earth.
Posted by: windy | May 31, 2009 4:22 AM
H.H. @723 and Kel @725, you are quoting me disagreeing with eric, not eric himself...
Posted by: matt | May 31, 2009 5:17 AM
Isn't this just the argument from reason?
Give this piece of Richard Carrier's work a read if your interested.
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 31, 2009 5:20 AM
windy #729: You shouldn't be too upset. You see Gobdidit. So in a way you are H.H. and Kel and Eric. Koo koo ka choo. I am the Walrus and the Walrus was Paul. See how much clearer things are now.
Posted by: SinSeeker
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May 31, 2009 5:42 AM
Perhaps a Plantingist can clear up this confusion for me? Apologies if it has been raised before....
If we accept (for the sake of discussion) that Plantinga’s premise of his argument is true - humans have “cognitive faculties [that] are reliable” because they were given to us by god, how do we explain all the scientific findings over the last few centuries relating to the age of the earth, the size of the universe, the evolution of species (including humans), etc.
If our cognitive faculties are reliable, aren’t these scientific findings also reliable?
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 5:48 AM
Whoops, my mistake.
Posted by: John Morales | May 31, 2009 5:58 AM
SinSeeker,
Bah, that's easy.<idiot mode>
Only scientific findings by theist scientists are reliable, entirely unlike those of atheist scientists.
</idiot mode>
Posted by: john l | May 31, 2009 6:53 AM
Wow. Can't say I agree with Plantinga's argument, but it's absolutely mind-boggling to see how many of you resort to name-calling, even as you appeal to rational scientific discourse. I mean, is -- to take one of scores of examples -- "fucking retarded" a term of art, here?
This is what happens when you have a group that's almost perfectly homogeneous. It starts to look like a mob very quickly, shouting out imprecations, lighting up the torches, pulling out the pitchforks, tying the nooses -- like the villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Suddenly -- since everyone already agrees on the basics -- it becomes a competition to see who can hurl the most strident insult. Mr. Myers, since you set this tone, I hold you responsible for it.
Posted by: John Morales | May 31, 2009 7:23 AM
Well, I'll just put down the torch, the pitchfork, let the noose go, step away from the near-homogeneous mob and momentarily pause my strident insult-hurling to say:
john l, you're not that shabby at hyperbolic invective yourself - but you do look kinda funny, boggling like that.
Now, where did I leave my impedimenta?
[Picks up and hurries to catch up with the mob]
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 31, 2009 7:38 AM
Hey campers still at it I see.
Well I do say the defenders of the rational and real have performed splendidly - what an education.
But the other team - well here's what comes to mind: remember the kids blowup clown toy with the sand in the bottom. Yup - the one you or your kids could absolutely thoroughly thrash with fists or bat that just popped up for more thrashing - seemingly unaffected by your obvious superior power. Yup - those clowns - impervious because they were dumb as plastic and air and phony as real talented clowns too.
But I should not be snarky. I'll end positively: your blows and skills were awesome - magnificent - champions you'd be in the ring with real people. Knock them all out - and they the defeated in post-interview would say - "I was beat fair and square." But against phony clowns breed to be impervious - well on points maybe you'd win - but even there - without a knockout the judges might be UNreliable.
Thanks guys for the fun at least.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 7:52 AM
You call that resorting to name calling? See the long posts explaining just why it is "fucking retarded" as opposed to singling out the insult. I've written many posts in this thread all directly related to the argument and you single out my use of "fucking retarded" as an example of not discussing the topic at hand?Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 8:02 AM
The context:
For justifications of this, see: #376, #525, #549, #552
Again it comes down to the fact that it doesn't matter what your argument is, that if you use a naughty word then people will hang up on that in absence of criticising the argument presented.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 31, 2009 8:14 AM
Tim,
You're absolutely right, Plantinga never once used the name "Yahweh" in his paper. However, he did use the word "God" several times. Considering that Plantinga is a Protestant and is John A. O'Brien Professor of Religious Philosophy at Notre Dame, and that the paper in question was published in Christianity Today, it's a safe bet that the particular "God" he's referring to is "Yahweh."
I used the name "Yahweh" because I mentioned several other gods in my post #688 and I didn't want you to be confused. Obviously I failed in my endeavor. You were confused. I apologize for this. I attribute my failure to not being a properly trained philosopher and therefore not cognizant of the proper jargon. I request that, in your metaphysical heart, you can find a way to forgive my failing.
Now that we've got that all sorted out, let's go back to my original question posed back in #688. Can you explain why Plantinga can justify one particular deity as the true God, accept no substitutes rather than some other deities?
Posted by: IainW | May 31, 2009 8:38 AM
Eric (#659):
Well, if you assume that there is a creator god (or even just a demiurge) and which has the attributes of personhood and which wants to have a relationship with us and which wants us to have a reliable means to know that it exists (as opposed to, for example, having to make a leap of faith), then yes, it's more than reasonable to suppose that we would have a reliable means to know that god exists.
If naturalism doesn't enjoy this advantage, then it's because the advantage is an artificial one. Naturalism's assertions about what is the case are fairly minimal and general in nature. Theism, however, seems to be allowed to pile ad hoc assumption upon ad hoc assumption until it gets to the conclusion it wants. Well, then if theism is allowed to do this, why can't naturalism? Getting back to Plantinga's original argument, if a basic theistic position plus additional assumptions gives us reasonable grounds for confidence in our cognitive faculties, why can't a basic naturalistic position plus additional assumptions?
As has been pointed out several times in this thread, Plantinga (and you, and Jim) go out of your way to stack the decks in favour of theism, to the point where the comparison between theism and naturalism is no longer comparing like with like.
Posted by: Malcolm | May 31, 2009 9:10 AM
Sinseeker@721
If Plantinga is right:
If evolution and materialism are true, we can't trust our cognitive faculties.
If evolution +God is true, we can trust our cognitive faculties.
I'm sometimes mistaken, therefore I can't trust my cognitive faculties.
Therefore, Plantinga is talking out of his arse. QED.
How on Earth do you pad that out to a whole chapter?
Posted by: IainW | May 31, 2009 9:11 AM
Jim (#575):
Which, it would appear, somehow absolves you of any need to respond to those who did.
Posted by: john l | May 31, 2009 9:28 AM
Wow. Can't say I agree with Plantinga's argument, but it's absolutely mind-boggling to see how many of you resort to name-calling, even as you appeal to rational scientific discourse. I mean, is -- to take one of scores of examples -- "fucking retarded" a term of art, here?
This is what happens when you have a group that's almost perfectly homogeneous. It starts to look like a mob very quickly, shouting out imprecations, lighting up the torches, pulling out the pitchforks, tying the nooses -- like the villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Suddenly -- since everyone already agrees on the basics -- it becomes a competition to see who can hurl the most strident insult. Mr. Myers, since you set this tone, I hold you responsible for it.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 31, 2009 9:38 AM
Eric, for your point to be valid, I would first have to give a rat's ass about metaphysical naturalism. I don't. Neither does science. Metaphysics is fun but not particularly useful. Where I take issue with PlaNtinga (there, happy?) is in his assertions that:
1)human reason/intuition (or ability to distinguish "TRUTH") is reliable outside of the realms of usual human experience
2)that there is no naturalistic/evolutionary explanation for the validity of human reason
If the human brain evolved, we would expect those tasks in which it excels to be the very ones that confer a survival advantage. Indeed, it does excel in those very tasks. It also fails badly at many tasks--e.g. risk assessment for immediate vs. long-term threats, intuition about the quantum realm, etc.. A "designed" brain either has these flaws designed into it, or they have to be the result of an "oversight"--not what one would expect from an omnipotent, omnsicient designer. And certainly, given the diversity, inconsistency and incompatibility of human opinion on matters of theology, it is hard to argue that this is an area where human reason works well.
Naturalism doesn't even have any problem with explaining the impulse to believe in God. See:
http://www.tmt.missouri.edu/
So, actually, it seems that a naturalistic explanation does a better job at explaining brain function than a theistic one.
Of course, none of this has any bearing on the existence or nonexistence of any particular deity, a hypothesis that is by unverifiable. It does, however, mean that we don't have to posit a deity who gives a flying f*ck about whether we believe in him or not--that always seemed a bit far-fetched to me.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | May 31, 2009 10:44 AM
Again brave warriors of reality - the clown will unfortunately pop back up oblivious to your mighty and skilled punches. And if you, in righteous frustration, stab it out of its misery - well then you'd be nothing more than ignoramuses will say the Courtiers, or others, and them perhaps, will call thee commie bastard dangerous baby-eating sinful liberal-licking tree-hugging bleeding-heart so-angry atheist evilutionists. And the MSM will applaud and give them venue to vent.
So goes the world after the dumb-down.
Corollary to host of "proofs": Alvin etc. does not have you all as audience. You (real world experts) used in discussions and submissions are entertained and courted to make credentials so that the faithful can say .. "distinguished ... presented at ... " and the MSM has motivation to entertain them.
Corollary to corollary: of people with agendas, never underestimate the effective cleverness or willingness to bend or ignore "truth".
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 11:34 AM
As a first-time commenter, I'm surprised by all the anti-intellectualism on this thread--something I never have noticed in Prof. Myer's posts. None of you seem to "give a rat's ass" about understanding, much less taking a look at, the stuff you're attacking. E.g. it's enough for 745 to reject "metaphysical naturalism" because it has the word "metaphysical" in it. (Never mind that it's the position held by both Dennett and Dawkins.) Do you people read books? Maybe some of you are closeted creationists?
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 31, 2009 11:45 AM
Tim, not everyone here has had training in philosophy. In college, for example, I took math courses instead. So, some of us don't worry about splitting fine hairs, and look at the bigger picture, including the final result and compare it to the evidence (I am a scientist). And guess what. It sounds and looks suspicious to us. Metaphysical naturalism? Sounds like new age woo to me, nothing real about it.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 12:06 PM
Daniel Dennett:
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 31, 2009 12:49 PM
Tim, If you want to go all metaphysical on us, fine. I just have never found that much to be gained by speculating on "the essence" of things. I don't know of a metaphysical argument that has cured a disease, housed a family or fed a hungry man. In fact, I don't know of a metaphysical argument that I've found compelling or comforting.
I'll take physics over metaphysics. I know quantum mechanics works. I don't need to know whether the reason is as envisioned by the Copenhagen School or the Many-Worlds school.
However, when a "philosopher" strays over onto my turf and starts totally butchering a concept like Bayesian probability of the second law or thermo, bitchslapping him thoroughly is a responsibility, lest he give people the misimpression that such concepts really are that impercise and meaningless.
So, like I say, you want to get all metaphysical, great. You want to believe in God? Super. You want to look at the glory of the Universe and wonder at what God hath wrought? Go for it. However, if you start telling me that science justifies your point of view to the exclusion of others including naturalism, I'm down your throat.
Frankly, I'm tired of poseurs like you who equate intellectualism with mental wanking.
Posted by: H.H. | May 31, 2009 1:17 PM
H.H. @723 you are quoting me disagreeing with eric, not eric himself...
Ah, so I was. My apologies, windy. I blame the that error on the lateness of the hour and my great desire to see Eric finally say something of substance. I guess I jumped the gun. Well, that means Eric hasn't made any progress after all. I shouldn't be surprised. I still wonder how Eric can manage to fool himself, though, since he's clearly unable to articulate any arguments which could remotely support his conclusion.
I'm reminded of my conversations with other religious apologists. They have a script in their mind of how particular arguments should be handled and they cling to it like a life raft. If they get asked any questions or points are raised which go off the script, they don't know how to respond. You aren't "doing it right." You aren't allowing their argument to lead you to the conclusion they want you to make. It's not supposed to happen that way, you aren't supposed to ask that question, etc. So they get lost and find themselves unable to continue, because they don't really have any interest in thinking things through. They just want you to arrive at the conclusion they already know to be true by faith. So in short, they end up acting identically to Eric--deny, deflect, claim that the other person doesn't understand the answers being given... And when all else fails--vanish until the storm passes and you can pop up later spouting the same bullshit.
Posted by: Anri | May 31, 2009 1:27 PM
Ken Cope sez:
"Certainly. And how are we to tell the difference between a good god and an evil one, especially in the complete and total absence of evidence for either?"
Well, a good god would have made eric understand our point long ago. An indifferent god would have smashed the server with a lightning bolt out of sheer boredom.
Only an evil god, surely, could have allowed this argument to continue.
(Yes, I'm kidding here. P's argument seems to leap straight from 'Evolution doesn't create perfect minds' to 'Jesus was the only sinless man' with very little inbetween.)
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 2:23 PM
748: That's what I mean. If you simply took 20 seconds to look up "metaphysical naturalism" you would find that it is a position shared by most working scientists and philosophers of science, and probably by you yourself as well. But you don't, because you're content with your ignorant stereotypes. That's what I find surprising: I expect that from creationists, but I always assumed readers of this blog were better than that.
749: Glad to see you're reading Dennett!
750: You assume anyone who challenges you to back up your baseless assertions is a backwards God-believing creationist? See my first comment above, where I say that I agree with 99% of what Prof. Myers writes on this blog. Secondly, if you investigate "applied ontology" you'll find that a number of philosophers are using their metaphysical training to fix the kinks in biomedical classification systems, and thereby save lives in the long term (one of them at my graduate school got a 2 million dollar grant from the German government to do so, if that's the sort of thing that impresses you). But then again, maybe you're just content with your stereotypes too.
Finally, I guess I get a little irked as well when people with no background in logic or training in analysis of arguments attempt to take down someone like Plantinga. (Never mind that none of you seem to have read his work.) Like I said above, I think he is wrong too, but you guys here don't have the slightest clue why, because you don't take the time to understand his argument, but just react in a knee-jerk fashion to whatever it is you think he is saying. It's pathetic.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 2:33 PM
I see no reason to take seriously anybody whose opening gambit is "Do you people read books? Maybe some of you are closeted creationists?"
Posted by: IainW | May 31, 2009 2:43 PM
Tim (#753):
I won't blame you too much if you lack the time or the stamina, but if you'll take the time to actually read through the thread, I think you'll find that your sweeping generalisations here neatly illustrate the problem of induction.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 31, 2009 2:56 PM
Tim, it appears you and Eric have different definitions of metaphysical naturalism. Maybe you philosophical types need to get together and compare notes...offline. And if it does refer to science, then then science, not philosophy is used to determine the validity of the argument, by comparing it to the evidence. And science fails the argument since it doesn't back the evidence. Now, what is your problem, that science fails the argument due to evidence?
Posted by: IainW | May 31, 2009 3:29 PM
Tim (#753):
Also, this refrain ("You don't understand the argument, but I do, and I think it's wrong too") would sound an awful lot better if you (and most of the others singing it) had actually cared to set out your criticisms of Plantinga. The thread's pretty dead, so there's probably not much point now, but where were you when you could have made a useful and informative contribution to it?
Posted by: Zetetic
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May 31, 2009 3:54 PM
@ Tim #747:
With all due respect if you read more carefully (and keep the context in mind) I think that you'll find that the attitude isn't one of anti-intellectualism per se (at least not that I've noticed). Rather it's an opposition to the appearance of intellectualism being used by some to make disingenuous arguments against science and in support of theism, in in Plantiga's case apparently to support a specific deity.
Yes there has been some potshots at the current state of philosophy, but it's mostly been confined to how philosophy is being used (by some) to push an anti-rational agenda.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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May 31, 2009 4:15 PM
To Tim the philosopher: Can I get fries with that?
Maybe if you spent a little less time jerking your mind off and a little more reading the history of arguments like Plantinga's, you'd see the central problem: Plantinga isn't really proposing anything new. It is the usual Christian proof by tautology: Let's start of by assuming something that implies God exists and then sho that it implies he exists. QED.
As near as I can tell, Plantinga merely posits that humans have some "ability" to discern truth independent of any survival advantage such discernment provides. Well, it certainly doesn't work wrt religion, since the divergence of irreconcilable opinions is the stuff of wars. This really doesn't help his case, does it? Maybe you'd like to show us how it's all done and take down Plantinga. We're all waiting, Tim. Or if that philosophy diploma isn't worth anything, maybe you can give it to me. These fries are a little greasy.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 31, 2009 4:31 PM
Tim #753
So I was right. Your objection to our arguments against Plantinga isn't that we're necessarily wrong, it's because we don't have a Philosophers Union card.
I read Plantinga's paper. I am not a philosopher nor am I a scientist. I'm an economist with a graduate degree and years of experience. So I know how to read a paper. I noticed several errors of logic, misuse of mathematics (in my work I use probability a lot, so I don't need an outside mathematician to do my sums for me), and a great big serving of special pleading. I have a calibrated bullshit detector and it pegged when I read Plantinga's paper. However, I don't know the special philosopher code, aka jargon, so I fall into your despised grouping of "people with no background in logic or training in analysis of arguments."
Guess what, Tim. I don't care if you're irked at me or not. I figure that's your problem, not mine.
Posted by: Knockgoats | May 31, 2009 5:43 PM
Since Plantinga has provided us with his own summary of his argument, and since this was what PZ’s post referred to, I’m going to show that this argument not only fails to establish what is claimed, but is full of lacunae and absurd errors that throw doubt on his good faith.
The problem... is that naturalism, or evolutionary naturalism, seems to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism. It leads to the conclusion that our cognitive or belief-producing faculties—memory, perception, logical insight, etc.—are unreliable and cannot be trusted to produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false."
OK, let’s start by asking what “a preponderance of true beliefs over false” could possibly mean. Notice that Plantinga does not say “preponderance of true mutually logically independent beliefs…”, or “preponderance of true beliefs about the empirical world…”, or anything of that sort. I think there is a reason for that – once we start thinking about these kinds of distinctions, Plantinga’s in trouble. But for now, let’s ask how many true beliefs I have? Let’s see:
I believe 0 + 1 = 1.
I believe 1 + 1 = 2.
I believe 2 + 1 = 3.
…
I believe 206789 + 1 = 206790
I believe 206790 + 1 = 206791
…
I believe 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890 + 1 = 123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567891
…
It’s obvious that the number of true beliefs I have is in fact infinite – or, if you insist (wrongly) that I must actually have uttered a belief to have that belief, limited only by the speed at which I can speak, write, type or (if we allow covert utterance) think, my patience, and my lifespan. Beliefs are not psychological or neurophysiological states. Whether any completely satisfactory analysis of the concept of “belief” has been formulated, I don’t know, but at least a large part of what we want to say about them can be said if we regard them as involving behavioural dispositions: tendencies to behave in particular ways in particular circumstances. This analysis has the advantage that it allows us to talk about the beliefs of non-linguistic organisms, and note that even in the case of linguistically competent humans, we are not limited to what people say in assessing what they believe. (Note also that assenting to a proposition verbally or in writing is itself behaviour.) However, if beliefs are, at least in part, behavioural dispositions, the logical relationship between belief and behaviour is much closer than Plantinga would like us to think. I suspect that’s one reason why he doesn’t encourage us to start thinking about what beliefs are.
The first thing to see is that naturalists are also always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self. We just are our bodies, or perhaps some part of our bodies
I can only think that this is deliberate misrepresentation: the notion that we are our bodies, or some part of our bodies, is only one possible materialist view. Another is that we are our memories and behavioural dispositions; another that we are the structured interaction between our body and the external world; another that the self is an illusion, so in a sense “we” do not exist; another that there is no unique right answer to the question “what are we?” – that the most accurate answer depends on context.
According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neurophysiology, by what goes on in the brain and nervous system.
Simply false. Beliefs (or at least, that aspect of them analysable as behavioural dispositions) are caused or determined by the interaction of the brain and nervous system with the rest of the body and the external world, over time. Plantinga might say he only meant that a person’s neurophysiological state at time t uniquely determines their beliefs at time t. This can be disputed by a materialist (I would argue that the mind’s “hardware” does not have any precise or fixed boundary); but if we accept it for the sake of argument, what exactly is the non-materialist alternative?
Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn't, as such, care a fig about true belief.
The first sentence, as noted, is false. The rest (allowing for the personification of “natural selection”, which metaphysical naturalists also do) is OK.
Consider a frog sitting on a lily pad. A fly passes by; the frog flicks out its tongue to capture it. Perhaps the neurophysiology that causes it to do so, also causes beliefs. As far as survival and reproduction is concerned, it won't matter at all what these beliefs are: if that adaptive neurophysiology causes true belief (e.g., those little black things are good to eat), fine. But if it causes false belief (e.g., if I catch the right one, I'll turn into a prince), that's fine too.
I know this kind of laboured facetiousness is something of a philosophical tradition, but in this case, it’s at best ill-advised: the evolution of cognitive capabilities is central to the argument, and if the mechanisms enabling frogs to catch flies are said to involve beliefs at all (IIRC, the sensory-motor link is pretty much direct, with practically no intermediate processing, but I’m happy to say it involves a belief), and if we insist on verbalizing that belief, “small flying things are usually edible” or similar is the only plausible way of doing so: frogs have no beliefs about princes i.e. none of their behavioural dispositions are in any way contingent on royal blood.
What we learn from Crick and Churchland (and what is in any event obvious) is this: the fact that our hypothetical creatures have survived doesn't tell us anything at all about the truth of their beliefs or the reliability of their cognitive faculties.
That isn’t what Crick and Churchland say in the quotations Plantinga gives, and if it were, it would be rubbish. The fact that natural selection “rewards adaptive behaviour” in terms of increased survival and reproduction (this is logically necessary given what “natural selection” means) tells us nothing about the truth of our beliefs or the reliability of our cognitive apparatus only if there is no reason to believe that our beliefs, and the processes by which we arrive at them, have no adaptive consequences. However, there are such reasons.
This can be made clear by considering what sort of beliefs chimpanzees (for example) have (the last common human-chimpanzee ancestor presumably had similar capabilities). Being non-linguistic, they will not have beliefs about gods, metaphysical naturalism or evolution. What they will have are beliefs about what is edible and what is dangerous; where and when certain things (food items, potential predators, rivals, mates, hiding places, etc) are likely to be encountered; the social status and allegiances of other members of their social group; and beliefs (we now have empirical evidence for this) about the beliefs of other members of their social group. It is no mystery how these beliefs (and the behavioural dispositions that are non-contingently linked to them, if not identical with them) are acquired: either by individual experience (often drawing on the behaviour of other members of the social group as clues), or innately (innate beliefs, in evolutionary terms, can be seen as direct outcomes of the operation of natural selection, individually acquired beliefs as its indirect outcomes, via the cognitive capacities selected for). It is simply absurd to claim that the ability to learn and remember such things accurately (that is, to tend to acquire true beliefs about them rather than false ones) is not adaptive.
Beliefs acquired by experience can also be changed by later experience. Note that acquiring beliefs from experience, even for chimpanzees, is likely to require a capacity for inference. If a young chimpanzee sees A beating up B, and later sees B beating up C, it will rightly conclude that in any confrontation between A and C, A will probably come out on top. Again, chimpanzees able to make this inference will generally fare better than those who make the opposite inference, or no inference at all.
As our ancestors evolved their linguistic capabilities, the range of beliefs they could hold, and the kinds of inference they could draw, expanded – although initially, it is plausible that these remained closely linked to behaviour relating to food, predation and other risks, and social interactions. Again, it would have been highly adaptive for early linguistic hominids to acquire true beliefs, discover and abandon false ones, and notice when two or more of their current beliefs were logically incompatible: if A believes that B is his friend and that C tells the truth, then if C tells A she knows that B is planning to kill him, it is highly adaptive to be able to realise that at least one of the two beliefs must be false. As the ability to hold beliefs less immediately linked to survival evolved, the link between true and adaptive beliefs would certainly have weakened in some cases – but at the same time, new ways of testing the truth of beliefs, and their compatibility with each other, would have become available – initially through biological evolution, then through the use of artificial aids. As long as these new capabilities produce adaptive advantages often enough (as they would when used in acquiring information directly useful to survival or reproduction), they would tend to be preserved, and thus also be available for use in other contexts: proto-mathematical, proto-scientific and proto-philosophical ones in particular (note that modern evolutionary theory does not require that every characteristic of an organism be adaptive - many are simply by-products of characteristics that are selected for).
An interesting psychological experiment indicates that our reasoning capabilities are in fact better in adaptively relevant contexts than in entirely abstract ones. Suppose I show you four cards, and give you as guaranteed information that each has a letter A or B on one side, and a number 1 or 2 on the other. What you can see is: A, B, 1, 2.
I now present you with the hypothesis: “If a card has A on one side, it has 1 on the other”, and ask you which cards you have to turn over to test the hypothesis. The correct answer is cards A and 2, but many people who have not encountered the problem before (including professors of logic) get it wrong – usually naming A and 1. However, if the problem is embedded in a context of social norms, the proportion getting it wrong falls dramatically. (For example, present it as a problem about items to be mailed and stamps, specifying that a sealed letter must have a more expensive stamp than an unsealed one, requiring the subject to turn over the sealed letter and the letter with the less expensive stamp to check that the rules have been obeyed.) Hence, the further away we get from cases where true beliefs are directly adaptive, the more we will need to rely on artificial aids: logical formalisms, peer review, etc. Note that it will also be adaptive to gain a reputation as an individual able to observe and reason correctly: such individuals will be right more often in cases where this matters, and so will be more highly valued as social and sexual partners. Hence it will be adaptive to value reaching true conclusions in general, and to be good at devising ways to reach them – such as general principles of logical reasoning.
I contend that this kind of account (which is of course somewhat sketchy and speculative, but can be elaborated and in parts tested) shows that it is simply false to claim that evolutionary naturalism gives us no reason to believe that our cognitive processes are, to some extent, reliable. Moreover, this account, unlike “Goddidit”, points us to where we would expect them to be more and where less reliable. Furthermore, the observable fact that science succeeds (specifically, enables us to construct complex machines that work, predict astronomical and biological phenomena, etc.) shows that the artificial aids we have devised to assist our by no means entirely reliable cognition do indeed work rather well, in areas where we can check our conclusions against experience.
Bizarrely, Plantinga actually admits that ability to acquire true beliefs about predators are indeed directly adaptive:
This is indeed a natural objection, in particular given the way we think about our own mental life. Of course you are more likely to achieve your goals, and of course you are more likely to survive and reproduce if your beliefs are mostly true. You are a prehistoric hominid living on the plains of Serengeti; clearly you won't last long if you believe lions are lovable overgrown pussycats who like nothing better than to be petted. So, if we assume that these hypothetical creatures are in the same kind of cognitive situation we ordinarily think we are, then certainly they would have been much more likely to survive if their cognitive faculties were reliable than if they were not.
But then tries to withdraw this recognition that his case has collapsed:
But of course we can't just assume that they [his hypothetical organisms evolved in a naturalistic world] are in the same cognitive situation we think we are in. For example, we assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. We can't sensibly assume that about this population; after all, the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable.
But of course, we don’t need to assume this reliability. Rather, we can argue that for any evolving population of social, behaviourally flexible but (initially) non-linguistic organisms, reliability of cognition in relation to food, danger, and social interaction will indeed be an adaptive advantage, and that if a linguistic capacity then evolves, this advantage will generalise to more abstract spheres – without any need for godly interference.
Finally, it's worth considering the situation of a metaphysical naturalist prior to the development of evolutionary theory. They would still be in the situation that, observationally, they did have reason to believe that our cognitive faculties are (to an extent varying with context) reliable - even though they would have no good explanation for this - since, contrary to Plantinga's claims, beliefs and behaviour are non-contingently linked.
I certainly shan’t be wasting my time reading or listening to anything more produced by someone capable of such putrid drivel; and if this sort of stuff is indeed taken seriously by other metaphysicians, so much the worse for metaphysics.
Posted by: SinSeeker
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May 31, 2009 7:14 PM
Malcolm @ #742 “How on Earth do you pad that out to a whole chapter?”
To be fair to Everitt, he addresses Plantinga’s arguments regarding reformed epistemology, about which Plantinga has written extensively, not just the five-page scree we are discussing here. The argument is embedded in the broader philosophical debate regarding the nature of knowledge, which has been going on for several millennia. It’s reasonably easy to write a whole chapter on this.
Knockgoats @ #761 – excellent post. Thanks for putting in the time.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 31, 2009 8:26 PM
I'd like to add one thing to Knockgoats' excellent critique of Plantigna's screed. Plantigna writes:
This is a case of special pleading. Without any justification, Plantigna says that the Christian god is the fix for the problem. How does he know Jebus is the answer? He doesn't show any evidence for his pet deity being the default, he assumes it.
As I've said several times, Plantigna is just bullshitting. Sorry, philosophy types, but your boy is Exhibit A in the argument that a whole bunch of what's passing for philosophy is bovine feces.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 8:33 PM
Thanks, Knockgoats. For all the FCCtards (I just write it that way to confuse anybody who thinks I meant to write "fucking retarded" in order to be mistaken for Kel) and for those who think that philosophy trumps science, you don't even know how far away your are from where the action is, let alone how much you're missing. If you're attempting to abuse philosophy in order to discount science, your typically Thomist credentials won't even get you anywhere near the bar, let alone the dance floor.
When contrasted with science, the problem for philosophy is self-proclaimed philosophers who insist that everybody defer to theists, like Plantinga, who abuse philosophy by skanking about in fan-fic Mary Sue wank-fests over supernatural objects of obsession that nobody with even the slightest narrative sophistication could be bothered to countenance, let alone suspend disbelief over. Stories that eschew observation and evidence had better deliver a ripping yarn worth the sacrifice of reason and the surrender of credulity, if they wish to be regarded as better than mere grifters and purveyors of snake-oil. As for the the rest of you who deride us for refusing to be suckered by the con, well, your status as marks is clear to anybody with half a brain.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 8:41 PM
Stories that eschew should be Storytellers who eschew
Posted by: Anonymous | May 31, 2009 8:43 PM
Wow...i'm not a big fan of Plantigna, but dude, you have ALOT of hate for people who disagree with you.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 9:00 PM
There's no reason to hold back, those who focus on such comments show themselves to be vapid intellectually as they substitute outrage in place of countering substance. It didn't matter that I had made several lengthy posts on why such an argument is stupid, as soon as I said "fucking retarded" I can be dismissed without having to ever consider what I wrote. It just goes to show, people care more about style than substance - that presentation matters more than content - that one can judge a book by it's cover.Showing outrage over the use of profanity or insults is only serves to distract from having to actually counter. Despite the hundreds of lengthy argument rebuttals here, there are those who choose to dismiss it all because I chose to use the words "fucking retarded" in response to an argument that thinks that brains wired for survival cannot be reliable in understanding truth - even when survival in a lot of cases depends on truth?
Posted by: 12th Monkey | May 31, 2009 9:09 PM
Kel: It's a common ploy I've seen over and over again. God botherers with nothing of substance to say often resort to "I'm shocked, shocked! to discover that profanity is going on here!".
Fuck em :)
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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May 31, 2009 9:12 PM
Nobody here hates Plantigna or Tim or Jim or any of Plantigna's fans. What we hate are vapid logical fallacies masquerading as serious thought. Plantigna is supposed to be a first rank, highly regarded, crème de la crème philosopher. If so, then modern philosophy is in deep shit, because Plantigna's screed is a pile of manure.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 9:27 PM
Again, another means of dismissal without arguing substance. Characterise the opponent's argument as an appeal to emotion (you have a lot of hate for people who disagree with you) and there you have another means of dismissing an argument without having to counter what is in it.
http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2009/05/myers-on-plantinga-and-concept-hatred.html
Posted by: SomeGuy | May 31, 2009 10:35 PM
Nothing of the kind. As I pointed out earlier, his papers don't so much as make it onto the syllabi at good schools, though they might at small community colleges and universities dominated by theists (for obvious reasons). He has also recently pissed off the vast majority of American philosophers by signing his name to this piece of homophobic horseshit:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/apa/
In brief, it's a petition in favour of allowing philosophy departments to exclude gays and lesbians if they felt that this violated their biblical mission. So no, he's nothing like a top notch philosopher. And he's not very highly regarded.
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 10:53 PM
Y'all are a bunch of amateurs. Here's how I can tell:
(1) You accuse Plantinga of making mistakes that an eighth grader would be embarrassed to make. You don't realize that a person doesn't get to a job at one of the best universities in the country, as well as several books with OUP, by making the type of elementary mistakes you accuse him of. You are used to dealing with the Answers in Genesis guy, I guess, so you assume anyone else who disagrees with you does so out of like ignorance. Plantinga is out of your league though; maybe you should leave him to the big kids.
(2) None of you quote specific passages from Plantinga's work, which shows you haven't really read it. The most I've seen is a few things from a summary he wrote. In comment 696 I give you a link to a technical introduction to the argument mentioned in the original post. I challenge you to read this work on your own, and not just rely on hearsay.
(3) Instead of criticisms that confront the details of Plantinga's argument, there's a lot of vague whining about "philosophy" here. (Many of you apparently even think Plantinga does metaphysics, which is laughable for anyone remotely familiar with the debate.) This just changes the subject to something that can't be refuted.
The dean at my university loves us in the philosophy department, because "someone needs to teach critical thinking to the biology majors." Now I see what he means.
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 11:16 PM
"someone needs to teach critical thinking to the biology majors."
The English and Speech departments are stuck with inculcating critical thinking. The closest the philosophy department gets to teaching a remotely useful skill is in the subject of Symbolic Logic, which is merely a subset of quantitative reasoning.
The dean at Tim's university is an administrator, clearly of the sort that can be impressed by the machine that goes "ping." By virtue of all the quantitative and critical thinking demonstrated here by Tim, he must be employed by his university to lick ashtrays in the dorms.
Posted by: Tim | May 31, 2009 11:21 PM
773 fits perfectly into category (3) I just mentioned: vague whining about philosophy!
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 11:25 PM
If Tim doesn't like the status of philosophy, he shouldn't continue to degrade it by pretending to speak for it. Nobody here has a problem with philosophy that is even remotely equivalent to the annoyance of self-proclaimed philosophers.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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May 31, 2009 11:28 PM
Tim, hardly a bunch of amateurs. Many of us are or were academics. So your elitism bores us to tears.
You didn't address my point either. If philosophy strays into realm of science, which you indicated it did, science, with evidence, should be the final arbiter rather than the mental masturbation of philosophy. Without evidence, one can prove that the moon is made of green cheese with right premises and fast talking. Which is why science is grounded in evidence. And science need no metaphysical (imaginary) anything, especially imaginary deities. Which is where Plantinga was headed. Duh. We've had a lot of experience here with folks trying to philosophically prove god. They all fail.
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 11:36 PM
You want a philosopher's reply on this? Fine. Here's Russell Blackford:
Our brains may use sorts of heuristics that are misleading outside the contexts in which we evolved, but any organism will do better if, for example, it uses induction when it models its environment. If a small predator makes the mistake of attacking a large predator, gets mauled in the process, and barely escapes with its life, it will be in big trouble if its brain models reality by the equivalent of an argument that it's "due" for success next time. There is an indefinitely vast range of circumstances in which it's better for any organism to model the local environment on the basis of ordinary cogent ways of reasoning.
P.Z. Myers emphasises the limited part. Our capacity to discover the truth about the world is not Godlike, but very constrained. It takes great effort to get robust findings about how the world works, once we step out of the most everyday observational level. That's correct, of course, and I should add that what we actually find when we gradually build up knowledge of the past, the very small, and the very distant, for example, may end up being highly counterintuitive. Indeed, over-active agent-recognition heuristics that would have evolutionary advantages might partly explain the popularity and persistence of beliefs about supernatural intelligences. The human brain is far from being a perfect truth detector. It's so imperfect that it looks far more like the product of evolution than like the design of a benevolent god.
The simple fact is Alvin Plantinga argued that demons can affect childhood development. That is something an 8th grader should be embarrassed to say, hell, that is something embarrassing that a 8 year old should be embarrassed to say. Yes, he's a philosopher at a top university, but that doesn't mean that his arguments don't have glaring errors - especially when talking outside the field. Perhaps we should argue that Dawkins was at a top university therefore any criticism of his position on topics not related to biology can be diffused.
Posted by: Ichthyic | May 31, 2009 11:44 PM
By virtue of all the quantitative and critical thinking demonstrated here by Tim, he must be employed by his university to lick ashtrays in the dorms.
LOL
You don't realize that a person doesn't get to a job at one of the best universities in the country, as well as several books with OUP, by making the type of elementary mistakes you accuse him of.
an argument from authority? From a supposed expert on philosophy?
shocker.
here's one for ya:
Michael Egnor.
How does one become a respected professor of neurosurgery at Stonybrook, home also of Futuyma (who writes the most used textbook on evolutionary biology in the world), and still be able say the most inane crap imaginable?
He makes "mistakes" that are beyond elementary. So how did he get to be a professor of neurosurgery, pray tell?
Posted by: Kel | May 31, 2009 11:44 PM
Only from The simple fact is Alvin Plantinga argued that demons can affect childhood development. on is mine, science blogs stuffed up my blockquote.
You may complain that we aren't showing respect to Plantinga, but really is that a substitute for how we are misrepresenting his argument? What about his argument is valid - do you think a tree-dwelling monkey would benefit from being able to contend with gravity? Do you think that a gazelle might be able to benefit from seeing the approaching cheetah? If so, then why is it so absurd that a survival-oriented selection can't shape in at least some limited capacity an ability to understand the world?
Posted by: Ken Cope | May 31, 2009 11:52 PM
Tim is merely trying to defend Plantinga and his demon-haunted world by employing the argument from authority. Let us know, "Tim" when you tire from running repeatedly into our collectively outstretched fist, since it is hardly worth the trouble to bother striking you.
Posted by: SomeGuy | June 1, 2009 12:36 AM
So he does a bit of metaphysics and and bit of epistemology and a bit of sophistry. So what? What kind of an argument is this? You want to enforce some sort of disciplinary hygiene? Who cares?
Guilty as charged (apart form the 5 pages this whole thing started with). I avoid engaging with theist philosophers like I avoid the fucking plague. If they lived a few hundred years ago, they have an excuse. Otherwise, at best they are to be scoured for good moves and interesting ideas. But I'm always wary because a theist is damaged goods.
Time is short Tim. Some of us believe in actual research -- you know, the kind that yields new insights into how the fucking world works. If I wasted my time debating with the deluded (clever or otherwise) or those philosophers who work on issues wholly unconnected with reality, I'd never get anything done. Reading a modern day theist is like playing with tar - best not to start. They have a political agenda. And the longer they can keep you talking the less progress you actually make.
Ariel Sharon once said that he loved the Mid-East Peace Process so much that he hoped it would last for a thousand years. In a similar vein, the theist philosopher loves to debate because it keeps the rest of us from getting on with our work. He has no work to do so it's all the same to him. Let the 'conversation' continue forever so long as the natural philosopher and the scientist are kept distracted! No thanks.
Plantinga lifts one of the central points -- that we are not epistemic engines but survival engines -- from the Churchlands. That's an important insight. But rather than debate with a fan of the sky zombie who's intent on promulgating an evil social agenda, why not just get on with trying to sort out how a mass of recurrent neural maps like the human brain manages sometimes to manipulate crisp, precise, and RELIABLE representations?
Notice that, unlike real neurophilosophers, Plantinga is happy to keep talking about 'beliefs'. That's sheer sophistry. If you want a proper story about the reliability of neurophysiological systems, you don't work with beliefs. You work with the details. You need to look at the behaviour of the neuronal maps to see what goes on there. If you are somehow in love with beliefs (perhaps because you buy into some cognitive model that requires them) then you can subsequently try to see how "having beliefs" (so called) bottoms out on lower level stuff. Whatever. In either case, Plantaniga is not interested in any of that. All he's interested in doing is tugging on the coat-tails of those who do real research and theory-building. (I guess that makes him a big boy in your estimation.)
Obviously, to make progress on Churchland's problem, theorists need to provisionally presuppose our best science, including evolution, conservation of physical quantities, computation, etc. No news there. Does Plantaniga have an alternative suggestion for how we ought to proceed? Let's hear it? If not then (like the ID people) he should save his cleverness for origami.
So, in sum: time is short and mucking about with the deluded is hopeless. They sometimes point out real problems that we have not yet addressed. Congratulations to Plantaniga -- he managed to locate such a problem (all thanks to Crick and Churchland). Bravo! Now he can stand aside and let us try to solve it. I'll just thank his kind not to shoot us, torture us or burn us at the stake as we do.
Posted by: windy | June 1, 2009 2:25 AM
Tim:
I have read some of his work, unfortunately enough...
Let's take that 'technical introduction' as an example. He manages to go off the rails on the first page.
"I am not attacking the theory of evolution... I am instead attacking the conjunction of naturalism with the view that human beings have evolved in that way."
And which way is that? As I pointed out to Eric, Plantinga's theory requires that human beings would evolve in one way under naturalism, and in a different way under theism! This is a blatant intelligent design argument. Plantinga is either too confused to notice it himself or too dishonest to admit it.
Posted by: windy | June 1, 2009 3:04 AM
And Plantinga's weak objection - that God could have "orchestrated the mutations" in a way that's consistent with ToE and theism - doesn't solve the problem. If reliable cognitive abilities are beneficial and the mutations for them are selected for, they clearly could have been selected for under naturalism, as well! If these traits are neutral, Plantinga's theory does not explain why they can't be replaced by drift, regardless of whether God "orchestrated" the original mutations.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 3:57 AM
God could have orchestrated the mutations, or God put his giant foot down to squash animals and act selector. But really now, Plantinga's evolutionary objection could be answered with one simple point. Can understanding the environment better than competitors be advantageous to an organism? If the answer is no, then Plantinga wins. But if the answer is yes, the Plantinga's object goes the way of Behe's Irreducible Complexity in that a proposed evolution killer turns out to be nothing more than an intellectual defence of Goddidit.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 4:55 AM
Perhaps God put in the spandrels that allowed for such brain power, that being able to understand the environment can be advantageous - it's just that to get to a level whereby such tools are useful cannot come about by naturalistic means...Bending over backwards to support the Goddidit hypothesis of nature.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | June 1, 2009 5:32 AM
Guys you are being brilliant. PZ should edit and package this blog post as a formal primer on (because I lack first coffee allow a dull stab at a label and hope you get the point) "Sophistry vs. Useful Honest Thinking."
I just keep learning here - really nice. Even the thomistics add value in their offerings - as ignition sources for more thought at best or contrast at least.
I could cite many comments here for distinction but don't dare because I'd miss publicly recognizing all I'd want. Time and space.
Thanks - excellent job - and although the plastic clown (my #737) will pop back up a worthy and useful effort. I appreciate the education old washed up fart I am.
For those that think PZ's blog is a mutual love fest among the "rationalists" stop being presumptuous. I read to learn from ALL - prompts me to research and keep my mind and knowledge fresher. I've been beat down by a fellow traveler in posts, I've been offended by sometimes the lack of gentleness and let that be known, I've argued with those I've agreed with a lot, I've said it when I thought PZ was out of line. My point - at least said for me - I'm here to think and learn and broader my old self.
I cannot help it if reality and hard work to come to real answers trumps 13th century logic and beliefs time and time again.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 5:32 AM
Kel,
Plantinga is an expert in philosophy. You can't expect his argument to be so easily dismissed by a layman such as you. But if you do know better, please demonstrate this by arguing it in academic circles instead of on a biology blog. Otherwise it comes off as the arrogance of ignorance.
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | June 1, 2009 5:46 AM
Africangenesis must have skipped all the real certified philosophers that have critiqued Plantinga herein referenced and under separate cover. At least that is what I gather from his Courtier's Reply.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 5:57 AM
African genesis,
I realise that Plantinga is an expert in Philosophy, and I'm not arguing him on philosophical terms. My contention is that he has biology wrong - that his science is off the mark. At no point have I attacked the philosophy.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 6:00 AM
ConcernedJoe,
"Africangenesis must have skipped all the real certified philosophers that have critiqued Plantinga herein referenced and under separate cover. At least that is what I gather from his Courtier's Reply"
Kel hasn't shown any familiarity with the peer review literature, nor has he cited any.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 6:08 AM
Next I suppose you are going to say that I can't dismiss Behe's argument of irreducible complexity because I'm not a biochemist.
Again, I quote Russell Blackford, philosopher:
Our brains may use sorts of heuristics that are misleading outside the contexts in which we evolved, but any organism will do better if, for example, it uses induction when it models its environment. If a small predator makes the mistake of attacking a large predator, gets mauled in the process, and barely escapes with its life, it will be in big trouble if its brain models reality by the equivalent of an argument that it's "due" for success next time. There is an indefinitely vast range of circumstances in which it's better for any organism to model the local environment on the basis of ordinary cogent ways of reasoning.
P.Z. Myers emphasises the limited part. Our capacity to discover the truth about the world is not Godlike, but very constrained. It takes great effort to get robust findings about how the world works, once we step out of the most everyday observational level. That's correct, of course, and I should add that what we actually find when we gradually build up knowledge of the past, the very small, and the very distant, for example, may end up being highly counterintuitive. Indeed, over-active agent-recognition heuristics that would have evolutionary advantages might partly explain the popularity and persistence of beliefs about supernatural intelligences. The human brain is far from being a perfect truth detector. It's so imperfect that it looks far more like the product of evolution than like the design of a benevolent god.
You are right, I am a layman. I've never denied it and never pretended otherwise.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 6:16 AM
I hope after this, you are not going to ever talk about global warming ever again.
You're right, I guess all points made are void because I haven't cited any peer review literature. I just hope that in the future, all comments you make are backed up by primary peer review literature.Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 6:24 AM
African Genesis, can you show me anywhere in any of my posts where I'm saying anything that is out of step with the scientific community? Where have I made a glaring error in my understanding of biology that demonstrates that my counterargument is false? How is my argument different to many of those who have also posted similar claims such as Sastra and Knockgoats? How is it even any different to PZ's argument?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | June 1, 2009 6:50 AM
Yeah I'm a layperson too (but not a wholly uneducated inexperienced one).
So beat me with a wet noodle but I just keep concluding that, no matter how I try to see it the other way, reality and hard work to come to real answers trumps 13th century logic and beliefs time and time again.
This is my fault that the real world screams answers at me? Or that I am foolish to trust the real world - you know the one dedicated honest experts can test - more than the one that is hidden and unfalsifiable? And all this is a fatal flaw in my critical thinking?
If such is I guess I am hopeless stupid.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 7:15 AM
When it comes down to it, my career relies on two things: the scientific method and my ability to use logic. Each day I have to apply logic and problem solving skills in order to program a device that the scientific method has brought. I program computers, and to do my job, it has meant spending years of my life learning how to apply logic.
So yes, I'm neither a philosopher or scientist. My sources of information have always been second hand: magazines like Scientific American, pop-science books, and many television documentaries. I don't read primary peer reviewed literature. I am not a domain expert, nor do I pretend to be.
One of the reasons I like posting here is that it is increasing my domain knowledge. When I talk shit, someone corrects me and I learn from it. Same goes from writing my blog - I've found my knowledge has increase immensely from having to try to explain my arguments to others. This process is a learning process for me, I don't mind being wrong because when I am I get corrected and I learn something from the whole experience.
Which brings me to the arguments I presented. Where in my arguments have I misrepresented either the scientific consensus on biology as it is observed in nature or my fundamental understanding of the processes behind it? My entire argument hinges on the notion that selection for the environment can produce truths because operating within the environment is a selecting agent and it pays to be able to understand the world around you. I cited many different animal behaviours that are observed and I assumed to be common knowledge, such as tool usage by chimpanzees.
Now it could be that I am horribly wrong, I probably am wrong in at least some aspects of what I said at the very least. But I'm not going to find out whether my understanding is correct unless I push my arguments out there. Is the way I understand natural selection to be false? Is the way I understand Plantinga's argument false? I'm not going to find these out unless I test my knowledge on the matter - just as I do every fucking day in my job. I test by writing out a solution, if that solution is incorrect then my peers, superiors or clients tell me my fundamental understanding is wrong, and I go back and do it again. It's how I learn, it's how I grow as a human being.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 7:33 AM
Kel,
"Which brings me to the arguments I presented. Where in my arguments have I misrepresented either the scientific consensus on biology as it is observed in nature or my fundamental understanding of the processes behind it?"
Take it easy. I'm just pulling your chain because of comments you made on the Idiot America thread:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/idiot_america_new_and_expanded.php#comment-1657865
I don't pretend to be as ignorant of literature as you are. I regularly read the peer review literature and frequently cite it. Recall that on that thread, at no place did I misrepresent the scientific evidence. No one disputed that the models had the errors I cite, nor did anyone dispute the nonlinear dyanamic nature of the system.
What are a thousand "opinions" of scientists in the face of undisputed facts and the basic nature of the system. The emperor has no clothes, does he?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe | June 1, 2009 7:33 AM
Kel don't apologize or doubt your method per se.
You know sophists in your profession too - they are analogous. The people that force you to say: the code was elegant to the max - it executed flawlessly - it was tight and efficient. It just did not do what the client wanted or NEEDED. It was a masturbation for self gratification and/or an agenda.
You know that shit and know it when you see it. And you see it in the arguments of the Plantingas. Perhaps defenders of philosophical forms wish our bullshit and useless misleading stuff detectors be less refined and accurate.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 1, 2009 7:46 AM
WRONG! A_Ray_In_Dilbert_Space regularly caught you misrepresenting the literature. And kept handing you your ass on a platter for it. So quit lying to yourself. Then quit lying to us.Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 7:58 AM
Anonymous,
You are obviously an expert on this, so should be able to cite chapter and verse...but over on that thread. -- regards
Posted by: Tim | June 1, 2009 8:02 AM
Forget about the peer review literature! Just read PLANTINGA'S ACTUAL WORK before you attack him. Otherwise it is a just a hatchet job. I noticed 782 cites the first page of the technical introduction I linked to (in 696)-- I'll assume this means he read the whole thing very carefully, but only found the first page to be quote-worthy. I'm waiting to here back from the rest of you. Here's your chance to exercise some autonomy and investigate for yourselves. Or do you prefer to rely on hearsay and slander?
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 8:05 AM
AG says, "Plantinga is an expert in philosophy. You can't expect his argument to be so easily dismissed by a layman such as you."
Oooh! Appeal to authority. We all quake at your amazing mastery of sophistry.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 1, 2009 8:08 AM
Tim, still not addressing the point of Plantinga wandering into sciences domain, where evidence, which does not support Plantinga, rules. Why don't you go and read a 700 page textbook on general biology. One where the text without pictures is that long. I'm sure PZ could refer you to an appropriate one. Then get back to us on where the biology is wrong. A little tit for tat. If you won't read, don't expect us to.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 8:12 AM
a ray in dilbert space,
"Oooh! Appeal to authority. We all quake at your amazing mastery of sophistry."
Such disdain for expertise, such anti-intellectualism...you must be an ... American!
Posted by: Anonymous | June 1, 2009 8:15 AM
Better yet, I'll cut/paste and bring them over here. Read what ARIDS said. I'll have time this afternoon for the cut/pastePosted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 8:22 AM
anonymous,
"Better yet, I'll cut/paste and bring them over here. Read what ARIDS said. I'll have time this afternoon for the cut/paste"
That should allow you to be selective and avoid any complicating context. Keep in mind that ARIDS, was much better at responding to his strawman characterizations than what I had actually said and used the evidence for.
I still think the converstation is better in that other thread where it is on topic. I don't know why you want to hijack this thread, other than perhaps the assessment that the audience in this thread is really interested in climate science.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 8:30 AM
anonymous, assuming you are kel,
You've already admitted that you are unfamiliar with the literature and won't be understanding what you will be cutting and pasting. Even though you shouldn't overestimate ARIDS, keep in mind you are unlikely to be ablee to do better with his responses than he did. You will essentially be spamming this thread.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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June 1, 2009 8:37 AM
Wait...africangenesis is accusing someone else of spamming the thread?
You don't get to act as the traffic cop here, AG. You are here on my sufferance.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 8:42 AM
PZ,
If your OK with it, that it all the go ahead we need. Just trying to respect your wishes.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 8:45 AM
Okay, I've read Plantinga's argument as linked in post #696. I wouldn't change a thing in my counter-argument tbh. It overstates the case for beliefs leading to adaptive behaviours and understates the evolutionary development of the brain whereby creatures didn't act on rational beliefs, yet developed the organs and most of the processes we have now before rationality was there. We have cognitive processes that are trained to understand the world, and in a pure Darwinian sense this should seem inevitable - as agents we interact with the environment around us so being more adept at functioning within constitutes a survival advantage.
There's no reason that such a system couldn't evolve, nor does it mean that it is impossible that we can recognise it as such. If a chimpanzee can smash nuts with a rock on a tree root in order to feed itself, then it follows that we can observe the natural world and use those observations to our advantage. And this, to me, is where the scientific method is so successful. It relies on counting the misses as well as the hits, and the results are there for all to see.
Yet at the same time, there are those who think that the universe is 6000 years old and that people once lived with dinosaurs. We can see many who believe they are psychic or have the ability to see into the future. There are many who feel they can talk to their respective deities or of long-dead ancestors. There are just so many ways we can show that the human brain is unreliable at times, because the claims simply do not match what can be shown to be reliable. By linking belief to predictive pragmatic outcome, the reliability of such a belief increases. Just look at gravity, I don't need to be told that if I jump off the empire state building that I would fall.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 8:50 AM
If I were anonymous, I would fucking say so! Stop trying to character assassinate me.Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 8:53 AM
Tim,
I am basing my opinion of Plantinga on WHAT HE WROTE in hils little Xtianity Today screed. Based on that, I am unlikely to read more.
In the first place, I am fundamentally suspicious of any argument structured according to assertions that Group A believes X that then proceeds to refute X. I am also fundamentally suspicious of "probabilistic" arguments about anything as complicated as belief that presume all events are independent. In Bayesian probability, all beliefs are to some extent conditional. In Frequentist probability, it doesn't even make sense to assign a probability to a belief.
Perhaps most annoying of all, though, was Plantinga's vagueness--treating all beliefs as equivalent in an evolutionary sense. This is pure, unadulterated bull puckey. The ability to form accurate beliefs about snakes, elephants, cliffs, etc. clearly have more significant evolutionary import than do beliefs about the tooth fairy or God for that matter. The only way in which this is not true is if you believe that an ability to form a more accurate perception of TRUTH confers no advantage for responding to known threats and generalizing appropriately for unfamiliar threats. This last is extremely important. Moreover, as I pointed out above, there are some areas where our ability to form beliefs is inherently suspect--e.g. in the quantum realm of matter, assessment of long-term risks, etc.. Since such realms do not usually affect ability to survive until after procreation, these are precisely where evolution would predict that our faculties would be unreliable. A belief in supernaturalism would have to answer the question of why an omnipotent and omniscient designer would design in such faults.
Where the piece veered completely off the real axis, though, was by utterly ignoring the role of evidence in modifying belief. This is certainly a desirable trait from the evolutionary perspective, as it is necessary to develop appropriate responses to an environment where threats do not do not always have lethal consequences but occur repeatedly. It is just such a faculty that leads ultimately to scientific reasoning and to the ability to form trustworthy beliefs given repeated evidence.
In short, I found the Xtianity Today piece rather shallow. It certainly didn't leave me thirsting for more insights from Dr. Plantinga. Now if you have an example of his reasoning that is less fatuous, let us know.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 8:54 AM
anonymous,
My bad for assuming you were kel. You may well be able to make better use of ARIDS responses than he did. Apologies and regards,
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 8:57 AM
Anonymous, It would be better to leave the climate stuff over on the Idiot America thread, as it would be off topic here and I suspect there are many here who would not be interested.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 8:58 AM
Fuck you AIG. Are you actually going to point out where I'm wrong or just snipe without substance?
Posted by: Anonymous | June 1, 2009 9:07 AM
Kel,
I actually agree with you. I basically made the same points at 247, 551, and 667. I was just struck by your flexibility and hubris, in taking on an "expert", as you are a mere layman, after the statements you interjected in the other thread.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 9:09 AM
I claim anonymous#815
Posted by: Tim | June 1, 2009 9:14 AM
802: Since I am not attacking anything in a biology textbook (and neither is Plantinga, which you'd know if you'd read him), I don't feel any particular burden to quote from one. Since you are attacking Plantinga, however, one might expect that you had actually read his work.
811: Of course a piece written for a popular magazine is going to be shallow in comparison to someone's actual scholarly work. Yet the fact that you have never read the latter doesn't stop you from slandering and defaming a respected academic. Don't you have higher standards than that?
It turns out that when pressed, none of you will actually quote a sample of Plantinga's published scholarly work (there's one linked in 696) and say what's wrong with it. The challenge is still on!
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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June 1, 2009 9:24 AM
Tim, why should we read anyone who seems to be of the concept: "If I can't dazzle them with brilliance, I'll baffle them with bullshit." If you want me to read any Plantinga, you can do my lab work and I'll wade through the BS. You get paid to read it. I don't.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 10:10 AM
Okay, while I can't copy / paste the text, I'll do my best.
On page 9 where Plantinga gives that account of the person running away from a hungry tiger, he is quite correct in the way he argues it. It doesn't matter one bit whether a belief is true as long as it leads to behaviour that survival. But what I feel he does is use the end-product to argue about the process, thus setting up one elaborate straw-man against naturalism. It's important to remember that rationality evolved, we didn't begin with it, and that adaptive behaviour for the vast majority of our ancestry had little-to-nothing to do with belief, but had to do with our survival. We developed the sensory systems a long time ago, long before we adapted rationality.
And this is the core of the argument as I see it, that we have evolved a capacity by which to see the world, and that forms at the very core of our beliefs. The fact is that through evolution our ancestors were able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch the environment around them without even the slightest bit of rationality. And while now the balance between behaviour and belief has shifted, it's hard to deny that a behavioural-based adaptation to the environment could bring about the physical characteristics required in understanding the environment to a certain extent. And in this limited capacity, we have the foundations in order to understand the world.
And that to me is the problem with the argument, it's an argument about where we came from by using the properties that we have now. This is the whole point of evolutionary theory - it describes how animals developed such behaviours, so to talk about beliefs over behaviour when talking about our distant ancestors who had no beliefs is absurd. The name of the game is survival, but by all accounts, being better adapted to your environment gives a survival advantage. So natural selection can build ways to measure the world because measuring the world constitutes a survival advantage in the absence of beliefs to guide behaviour. As it stands now, for humans it matters not whether one helps out another because it feels good or that they believe in heaven. Behaviourally it is the same. But our distant ancestors didn't have such beliefs, so there is the difference for me.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 10:11 AM
Tim, I asked specifically if you had a (short) example that better reflects Plantinga's "brilliance". What I do expect, even in a popularized work is sufficient intellectual rigor to avoid straw-man arguments, absurdly implausible and trivial probability arguments, arguments so vaguely vacuous that they cannot be refuted and complete lack of understanding of the positions of ones opponents. By all these criteria, Plantinga failed. Life is short. I don't have time for bullshitters.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 10:11 AM
Tim,
In looking at the paper (essay?) you reference, note that Planitinga's argument begins with certain doubts about the reliability of our cognitive facilities. But he is going to rely upon those facilities for the persuasiveness of his arguments. Those doubts are themselves a naturalistic hypothesis, based on the order we have made of our sensory experience. With mental and methodological discipline there is no reason to think we can't reduce those doubts.
The Plantinga defines philosophical naturalism is also a problem. It doesn't have to be the belief that there are no supernatural entities. It can just be the belief that our senses haven't provided any evidence that there are supernatural entities. Of course, if our senses did provide evidence of them, would they really be "supernatural".
He asks whether it is likely that we would have evolved a reliable cognition? We appear to have done well enough to developed disciplines and methods that improve the reliability of our higher level mental processes. But because we happened doesn't mean that we were "likely". What does it matter whether we were "likely" or not, we are here. Perhaps sometime we will figure out how likely evolution is to have produced symbolic intelligence elsewhere.
Hmmm, next he goes off into his "defeaters", the cartesian deciever, the alien experient, etc. We can't trust our senses. This is the mind body problem, nothing more. But these don't matter, yes we have internal experience, and we have senses, but our sense ARE our reality. So far the "defeaters" haven't behaved inconsistently with our naturalistic hypotheses, except at the limits of our current progress (inflation, dark energy, dark matter). So we have this mind-body predicament, we can't prove that we aren't being decieved by our senses. But we can know that so far, our senses have been consistent with naturalism and not only that, naturalism is complete enough to explain the our mind-body predicment. Any cognitive entity unable to directly sense reality, but instead reliant upon sensory input for information, will be in a similar predicament. God doesn't enter into things without evidence, unless one isn't disciplined.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 10:22 AM
The argument about the response to a tiger is a classic example of the vacuity I object to in the little I've read of Plantinga. OK, let's say one develops a belief that tigers are dangerous because of their stripes. Such a belief is false, but leads to an adaptive response to tigers. Now if one wanders out onto the savannah, one will run from zebras, but not from lions. Clearly, there is value in the ability to modify correctly one's beliefs in response to new evidence. Plantinga utterly ignores this, positing beliefs as static and either "true" or "false". There is no great feat in slaying a straw man.
Posted by: Daniel | June 1, 2009 10:53 AM
This seems to be a fairly common problem among theistic writers in my experience. I'm struggling through C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" right now after a couple christians of my acquaintance pointed to it as a golden light refuting all atheistic claims.
My respect for C.S. Lewis went from minimal after reading Narnia to less than nothing after Mere Christianity. His titanic leaps of illogic leave me torn between laughing at the absurdity and mourning my friends who accept it. On sterling example goes:
"If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - no more than an architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?"
"Mere Christianity" is a discredit to Christianity and Lewis, while Lewis is himself a discredit to all theism in general.
Posted by: Daniel | June 1, 2009 10:56 AM
This seems to be a fairly common problem among theistic writers in my experience. I'm struggling through C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christianity" right now after a couple christians of my acquaintance pointed to it as a golden light refuting all atheistic claims.
My respect for C.S. Lewis went from minimal after reading Narnia to less than nothing after Mere Christianity. His titanic leaps of illogic leave me torn between laughing at the absurdity and mourning my friends who accept it. One sterling example goes:
"If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - no more than an architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?"
"Mere Christianity" is a discredit to Christianity and Lewis, while Lewis is himself a discredit to all theism in general.
Posted by: Tim | June 1, 2009 12:22 PM
Thanks, 819, 821, and 822 (though 822, it looks like you're still just reading other people's summaries). This is what real criticisms of Plantinga look like. I'm thrilled that by the 800th comment or so someone actually went and read Plantinga's scholarly work and addressed specific parts of his argument. Good for all of you!
Posted by: Ken Cope | June 1, 2009 12:37 PM
I'm thrilled that by the 800th comment or so someone actually went and read Plantinga's scholarly work and addressed specific parts of his argument. Good for all of you!
Thank you. Fuck you, too, Tim. Plantinga's fatuous theology in philosophy drag was always a transparent assault on science, which was apparent to anybody with half a brain from the start. I'm not enough of a masochist to subject myself to more of Plantinga than I already have, which reports and abstracts and eviscerations of his nonsense from trusted and reliable sources confirm. Thanks also, for demonstrating that you, Tim are not a reliable source for anything more valuable than a target for snark.
Posted by: windy | June 1, 2009 12:44 PM
Tim #800
If Plantinga is unable to summarize his work in a magazine article without bollocksing it up so bad that apologists are now claiming it's not even his "ACTUAL WORK", maybe that's Plantinga's problem.
Maybe it means that I find Plantinga's premises erroneous and that's a natural place to start criticizing an argument? And you don't need to hear from everyone else before you address my criticism, coward. (For future reference, I'm not a 'he')
Which one would the Christianity Today article be?
#817
Is your memory really short, or are you just dishonest?
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 12:50 PM
Tim the philosopher says: "I'm thrilled that by the 800th comment or so someone actually went and read Plantinga's scholarly work and addressed specific parts of his argument. Good for all of you!"
And, (quel surprise!) it was still bogus, fatuous, vacuous and risible. Those burgers done yet?
Posted by: Ken Cope | June 1, 2009 1:15 PM
That's your cue, Tim, to ask if ARIDS would like fries with that burger.
Posted by: anti-supernaturalist | June 1, 2009 1:39 PM
** Theology gives philosophy a bad rep **
Plantinga is an updated version of Thomas Aquinas -- God comes first, bad arguments afterward.
Your disdain of "philosophy" as a whole is under-educated pride. Ever talk to an historian or philosopher of science at your own hallowed institution? They are as godless as you are -- probably more so.
The de-deification of "Nature" (western culture's ideas of nature -- including all the sciences) is our task for the next 100 years.
PZ . . . pick up Kaufmann's translation of Nietzsche's Gay Science -- paras 108-127. You know -- get a grad student gofer to get it. And read!
anti-supernaturalist
Posted by: Tim | June 1, 2009 1:46 PM
Imagine a bunch of creationists were savaging a basic introduction to evolutionary theory on their creationist blog: calling its author dirty names, taking bits and pieces out of context from the rest of the work and holding them up for ridicule, coming up with irrelevant counterexamples and non sequiturs, and all the while claiming it was in the service of reasonable dialogue. Now suppose you were someone who knew a lot about evolution, you'd seen the author of the piece at several conferences and knew him to be quite respectable, you were familiar with his other work, etc. You'd probably want to tell them, in good faith, "Listen, people, it's not really like that at all. This author isn't after you or your most dearly held beliefs. In fact, if you would take the time to learn more about the context of what he's talking about, you'd see that it's really more nuanced and interesting then you've been led to believe." And then let's imagine that a lot of them just called you and the author more dirty names, and the rest continued to take bits and pieces of the original introduction out of its context and hold it up for ridicule, come up with irrelevant counterexamples, etc., because that was easier than taking the time to really learn what the issue was all about by going and learning more about evolution. Possibly you'd grow a little frustrated.
827: Sorry for my short memory--there are a lot of things to be cleared up here. At 782 it seems to me that you missed the main point of P's argument. He is not arguing FOR anything about theism, much less intelligent design. He is arguing AGAINST the conjunction of evolutionary theory and naturalism, like part you quote says. It's irrelevant to the assessment of this argument whether or not Plantinga secretly believes in intelligent design, or creationism, or ghosts, or whatever. (And for the record, while I am a coward, that's irrelevant to the assessment of Plantinga's argument too!)
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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June 1, 2009 1:48 PM
Talk about someone without a clue. UMM is an undergraduate school. Care to take on the job yourself, or is it beneath your dignity?Posted by: Tim | June 1, 2009 1:57 PM
P.S. That's my last post. You can get back to the personal attacks on authors you haven't read now.
Posted by: Tulse | June 1, 2009 2:09 PM
Did I miss something, or did Tim just leave in a huff without providing a single substantive response to the arguments made against Plantinga?
Talk about Courtier's Reply...
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 2:20 PM
Uh, Tim, we're going by what Plantinga wrote. I don't see where we've taken what he wrote out of context. Are we interpreting his argument incorrectly? Is he not saying that approximation or truth of a belief will be uncorrelated to survival advantage it confers? Because if he is saying that, he's full of fetid dingo's kidneys. The ability to generalize from belief to assess correctly a new threat is definitely going to increase chances of survival.
Has he not spent more of his essay telling us what materialists and "naturalists" believe than he has defining his own position? Has he not applied absurdly simple probabilistic reasoning that utterly ignores the ability to modify belief in the face of new evicence--in other words, Baysian probability without Bayes' Theorem?
Here's a clue, Tim. Vague does not equal deep.
Posted by: africangenesis | June 1, 2009 2:29 PM
Tim,
"P.S. That's my last post. You can get back to the personal attacks on authors you haven't read now."
It won't do to paint with such a broad brush. Focus on the substance and not the personal attacks, and consider the source.
Posted by: windy | June 1, 2009 2:42 PM
Very slowly: Plantinga's argument REQUIRES intelligent design, so it's not irrelevant. He may THINK he's arguing only against some "conjunction" but that contradicts the details of his argument.
IDiots:
Intelligent designer + evolution = flagellum
No designer + evolution = no flagellum
Plantinga:
God + evolution = reliable cognitive faculties
No God + evolution = no reliable cognitive faculties
It's the same argument!
Posted by: Zetetic
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June 1, 2009 3:56 PM
Tim seems to produce a lot of heat, but no light.
Tim, rather than telling the people that have been quoting Plantinga, to read him, why don't you tell us this brilliant insight that we're all missing?
How about we start with something that should be simple for someone a clearly brilliant as you? Lets start with an explanation of how exactly Plantinga arrives at the conclusion that his non-naturalistic entity must be the god of Christianity? Surely you can explain something so simple to us poor idiots, yes?
/sarcasm
Posted by: Faithless | June 1, 2009 4:23 PM
Whether Plantinga's arguments are 'more nuanced' or not is irrelevant. Since it is brain-meltingly obvious that there are no supernatural beings - to all but those infected with the Magic Kingdom of Krist mental disease, and similar defects - then his arguments are bollocks.
Somebody arguing vigorously that the earth is flat can make his arguments as sophisticated and nuanced as any arguments have ever been - that isn't going to make them worth a second glance.
Posted by: H.H. | June 1, 2009 5:42 PM
Funny how Tim picked up Eric's game of obstinate obfuscation as soon as Eric exited the thread. Not that I think they're the same person, just that's it's extremely revealing that no Plantinga apologist is capable of mustering any defense of substance. Here are the steps:
1) Claim that not a single critical commentator in this thread remotely understands Plantinga's argument, but refuse to clearly state what that argument might be.
2) Pretend the problem of global skepticism is only problematic for naturalism.
3) Furthermore, tautologically insist that Plantinga's failure to address the global skepticism issue in the context of theism doesn't matter since Plantinga didn't address the global skepticism issue in the context of theism--despite the fact that disproving the viability of naturalism necessarily depends on demonstrating that the antipodal stance of theism isn't self-defeating in exactly the same manner.
4) Pretend not to understand any questions being asked. Answer questions you prefer to answer instead.
5) Appeal to authority. Insist that Plantinga's arguments are so rarefied and esoteric that it's impossible not only to formally address them, but to even understand them, without a PhD in philosophy.
6) Keep up this delaying tactic of misdirection until people lose patience and hurl insults.
7) Claim victory and leave.
Posted by: Kel | June 1, 2009 6:19 PM
hmmm, this sets a dangerous precedent. Next I expect that IDiots will want me to read Michael Behe as opposed to the biologists who destroy his arguments instead.
When the criticisms came in after reading Plantinga, he had the chance to show us why we are wrong in our understanding.Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 7:12 PM
"1) Claim that not a single critical commentator in this thread remotely understands Plantinga's argument, but refuse to clearly state what that argument might be."
Um, I did provide an outline of my understanding of the argument in #423.
"2) Pretend the problem of global skepticism is only problematic for naturalism."
I 'pretended' no such thing. I pointed out that whether it's an issue for theism is *irrelevant* as far as the eaan is concerned. This is simple to prove -- just ask if there's a contradiction in the following proposition: The eaan is sound, and I have no idea whether theism can deal with the problem of global skepticism. See? No contradiction. Now, I did advert to Plantinga's argument about the intrinsic warrant of theism, if theism is true -- an advantage naturalism doesn't enjoy. But first, Plantinga isn't 'pretending' anything here: he's presenting an argument for his claim. (And if you think it amounts to special pleading, then you don't know what special pleading is.) However, as I've said time and time again, it's not relevant to the eaan. The eaan could be sound, and his argument for the intrinsic warrant of theism either sound, fallacious or undetermined. Again, it's a separate issue.
"3) Furthermore, tautologically insist that Plantinga's failure to address the global skepticism issue in the context of theism doesn't matter since Plantinga didn't address the global skepticism issue in the context of theism--despite the fact that disproving the viability of naturalism necessarily depends on demonstrating that the antipodal stance of theism isn't self-defeating in exactly the same manner."
Okay, you've screwed a couple of things up here. First, the claim isn't that Plantinga has failed to address the skepticism issue in the context of theism, but in the context of the eaan. Big difference. Second, if naturalism is 'disproved,' it's disproved -- period. If Plantinga has shown that metaphysical naturalism is self defeating, then metaphysical naturalism cannot be true, and whether anyone can show that theism isn't self defeating is *irrelevant* as far as the eaan goes. Let's say that the question of whether theism is similarly self defeating remains an open question. Does this change the fact that naturalism is self defeating? Does this change the fact that if a proposition is self defeating, it's necessarily false?
"4) Pretend not to understand any questions being asked. Answer questions you prefer to answer instead."
I didn't avoid any questions. In fact, when someone above complained that I had missed his/her question, I responded immediately.
"5) Appeal to authority. Insist that Plantinga's arguments are so rarefied and esoteric that it's impossible not only to formally address them, but to even understand them, without a PhD in philosophy."
I never appealed to Plantinga's authority. I pointed out the fact that his arguments are extremely complex and subtle -- which they are -- but I never appealed to his position or to his prominence.
"6) Keep up this delaying tactic of misdirection until people lose patience and hurl insults."
I was insulted after my first post.
"7) Claim victory and leave."
I never declared victory, but I did leave. Life and all. I apologize for not spending all day, every day on this blog.
I haven't read through the 150 or so posts since my last response yet, but when (if?) I get a chance to, I'll try to respond to what seem to me to be the best criticisms.
Posted by: Ichthyic | June 1, 2009 7:22 PM
I never appealed to Plantinga's authority. I pointed out the fact that his arguments are extremely complex and subtle -- which they are -- but I never appealed to his position or to his prominence.
yes, you did.
with the argument about how we should suppose he became a professor of philosophy with such simplistic arguments line, to which I asked you how you supposed Michael Egnor became a professor of neurosurgery (778)?
Your argument was an argument from authority; or at least it would be, if Plantinga himself made it.
Yours is more like a "brown nosing authority" argument.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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June 1, 2009 7:30 PM
Yawn, Eric still thinks he is the philosophy guru of Pharyngula? What a crock of *insert your vile choice for insult*. I'll let Rev. BDC tell him why...
Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 7:32 PM
"yes, you did."
Um, no, I didn't.
A quick ctrl/f search of 'OUP' will bring you to post 772. which was written by Tim, not by me.
Posted by: Ichthyic | June 1, 2009 7:35 PM
A quick ctrl/f search of 'OUP' will bring you to post 772. which was written by Tim, not by me.
absolutely correct, my bad for confusing you two.
Not that it's an obvious distinction, or anything.
Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 7:36 PM
Nerd of Redhead, you should have that chronic 'yawn' of yours checked out -- it could indicate thyroid problems. Hey, I'm just concerend for your health.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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June 1, 2009 7:41 PM
Fuck you, Tim. Back in post #763 I quoted Plantinga and showed that there was a logical fallacy (special pleading) in the paragraph I quoted. We have been reading Plantinga. That's how we know that he's written a pile of bullshit.
Posted by: Reecey-Boy | June 1, 2009 7:42 PM
Yeah, Alvin here was always one of the worst for these massive leaps in logic that just leave you going 'how the hell did you get to there from that?'.
And those are a constant problem in Religious Studies, they start off so well; they usually make sense even though you know there's a foundational assumption that doesn't quite hold water. But somewhere along the way there is always this huge leap that makes you reread the entire page in order to try and find the three paragraphs you think you must have missed.
But no, you haven't missed anything. The most important part of the entire piece, linking the premise to the conclusion, doesn't exist and probably never did in the first place.
It's just shameful, these are professional philosophers and they can't even formulate an argument properly.
Alvin can say whatever he likes about Dawkins, but at least he links his premise to his conclusion and brings some evidence along for the ride.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
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June 1, 2009 7:51 PM
Eric, I'm having a mini-physical at work this week. You, on the otherhand, need to see a shrink about delusions of adequacy.Posted by: Ken Cope | June 1, 2009 7:53 PM
which was written by Tim, not by me.
I've no doubt everybody here would acknowledge that Eric has demonstrated that he is marginally more intelligent than Tim, and occasionally actually defends his position. At least we know in Eric that we have a thomist theist who behaves as if his position were defensible.Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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June 1, 2009 7:58 PM
This is a prime example of damning with faint praise.
Posted by: H.H. | June 1, 2009 8:07 PM
Eric, let me explain this really slowly one last time for you. If there were many available options, you would be correct. Proving one theory incorrect does not necessitate proving that another is correct. But in this instance, there are only two possible options: naturalism or supernaturalism. Therefore, declaring that Plantinga has "disproven" one of them can only be true if the opposite position cannot be similarly disproven. If both positions can be "disproven" on the same grounds, then we're either left to conclude that both are wrong--an impossibility--or that the grounds upon which the arguments rest are actually insufficient for disproof.Also, as I've repeatedly pointed out now, the question of whether theism is similarly self defeating is not an open question. You would have a point if, and only if, it were still an open question. (You have been endlessly invited to argue otherwise, but have been insistent in your refusal to address the criticisms already presented.) However, since we know that it isn't the case, that theism does suffer from the same problem of global skepticism, Plantinga's "disproof" can not be anything of the sort.
Posted by: Ken Cope | June 1, 2009 8:47 PM
This strikes me as a suitable thread in which to announce that I just learned from my instructor that I was given grade of "C" in Symbolic Logic, in a course that transfers to Berkeley, titled "12A" which just happens to be the number on the door for M. Python's "Argument Clinic" sketch. The numbering system is after Berkeley's, so obviously somebody there hasn't missed an appropriate cultural reference.
I'm as happy about the grade as I was about my A's in astronomy and anatomy/physiology. Had I gotten a better grade, I'd have been nervous that my reasoning skills were less quantitative, and more philosophical. Once I obtain a degree in Cinema, with an emphasis on Animation, I'll be qualified to teach the craft in which I've made my living since the seventies, to students in public schools.
Posted by: H.H. | June 1, 2009 8:54 PM
By the way, I love to point out that this stellar "disproof" isn't even original to Plantinga. He just uses more words.
"If evolution is true, you could not know that it’s true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that." --Kent Hovind.
Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 8:57 PM
H.H., let's take an actual case. Consider these two contradictory propositions: (1) There is a highest prime number (there is such a person as god, i.e. theism is true), and (2) there is no highest prime number (there is no such person as god, i.e. naturalism is true). Now, we can in fact prove (2), and we can do so even though we lack a formula for yielding all the prime numbers. Question: Once we have a proof of (2), do we have any further obligations with respect to the contradictory of (2), viz. (1)? It seems to me that we don't. So, why is it the case that *if* we've shown naturalism to be self defeating, we have any further obligations with respect to the contradictory of naturalism? It seems to me that you're unable to deal with Plantinga's argument, so you insist on changing the subject.
Now for something I agree with:
"Therefore, declaring that Plantinga has "disproven" one of them can only be true if the opposite position cannot be similarly disproven. If both positions can be "disproven" on the same grounds, then we're either left to conclude that both are wrong--an impossibility--or that the grounds upon which the arguments rest are actually insufficient for disproof."
I seem to remember asking you for your analogous argument against supernaturalism. I also remember that you balked and only succeeded in stammering out this extremely weak response: "the Magic Men who gave us our cognitive faculties could be fucking with us. Who's to say?" Plantinga has presented us with an argument that at least purports to demonstrate the self defeating nature of the conjunction of N&E, and when asked for a similar argument against supernaturalism -- one which you seem confident can be made -- the best you can do is, "Probably X; Who's to say?" I think it's obvious that you have a lot more work to do there.
Now let's consider (1) and (2) above. Suppose you're presented with the proof for (2). What would your math teacher say if you responded with, "Hey, probably there is a highest prime. Who's to say? Maybe you're reasoning for (2) is fallacious. After all, it can't be the case that both (1) and (2) are false. Until you've given an analogous argument for (1), I can't accept your so-called proof for (2)."
What would your teacher say? I think you know the answer to *that* question! She would say exactly what I'm saying: either provide your argument for (1), or show me where (2)goes wrong. So, either let's see your analogous argument against supernaturalism, or let's see why Plantinga's argument fails.
(If you don't like the math example, take any scientific theory T and it's contradictory not-T. If T is falsified, do you have any further obligations with respect to not-T?)
Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 9:00 PM
Sorry, *this* is the only part I agreed with (I quoted one sentence too many):
"If both positions can be "disproven" on the same grounds, then we're either left to conclude that both are wrong--an impossibility--or that the grounds upon which the arguments rest are actually insufficient for disproof."
Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 9:25 PM
"By the way, I love to point out that this stellar "disproof" isn't even original to Plantinga. He just uses more words.
"If evolution is true, you could not know that it’s true because your brain is nothing but chemicals. Think about that." --Kent Hovind."
Again, if you think that this is the same argument, only less verbose, then you simply don't understand Plantinga's argument. Hovind is arguing *against evolution*; Plantinga is *accepting evolution* and arguing against the conjunction of evolution and naturalism, which he claims results in a defeater for naturalism.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space
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June 1, 2009 9:29 PM
The thing is that our perceptions and intuitions are demonstrably unreliable in realms far from the sorts of experiences we encounter in quotidien life--e.g. the quantum realm, long-term risks. It is only by rigorous analysis that we can draw correct conclusions about such phenomena. Naturalism has no trouble explaining why this is so--it is outside the realm in which our perceiving and reasoning apparatus evoloved. If, however, there is a supernatural agent that is responsible for the correctness of our ability to ascertain TRUTH, then why did they not also give us the ability to perceive accurately the quantum realm, or to assess long-term risks like smoking?
Doesn't such selectivity necessarily create doubt about other aspects of our ability to ascertain TRUTH? Indeed, it would seem that given this selectivity, we must be more skeptical of a "designed" faculty of belief than of a naturalistic, evolved faculty, since the latter was at least shaped by the environment about which it is reasoning.
Hey, look, guys, I'm a philosopher! And I used a lot fewer words than Plantinga.
Posted by: Eric | June 1, 2009 9:44 PM
"**Naturalism** has no trouble explaining why this is so--it is outside the realm in which our perceiving and reasoning apparatus **evolved**. If, however, there is a supernatural agent that is responsible for the correctness of