"And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

I respectfully disagree with Mr. Plantinga's, or anyone else's, assertion that in evolutionary terms the truth of a belief is irrelevant. This is only true for the individual belief of an individual thinker. What matters, however, are the interlocking fabric of beliefs over time. A system of analysis which on average seeks out and uses the most accurate truth to be found is the most natural that evolution would tend towards.

Nevertheless, I agree with him and you that evolutionary naturalism is utterly incorrect. God uses what tools he pleases, and strive as we will, we are, 150 years later, only a little farther than Darwin in our thinking, and still infinitely far from the full truth. God has given us a wonderful universe. Satan, by revealing pieces of the truth to those with no faith, leads them to despair. "Replay the tape a million times,” writes S.J. Gould, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again." What is hard to see from our perspective, trapped as we are in time and space and of limited wisdom, is that both evolution and creation are true.

Godspeed

The argument seems to suffer from just the confusion Miss Anscombe exposed in her famous debate with C S Lewis.

Basically, no one has come up with a really satisfactory answer to the question, “What is the connection between grounds [for believing something] and the actual occurrence of the belief?” Worse, no one has really explained what kind of answer we are looking for. Is it one expressed in terms of causality, or one expressed in terms of logical implication? Can the two kinds of explanation be connected and, if so, how?

“Whether his conclusions are rational or irrational, says Miss Anscombe “is settled by considering the chain of reasoning that he gives and whether his conclusions follow from it. When we are giving a causal account of this thought, e.g. an account of the physiological processes which issue in the utterance of his reasoning, we are not considering his utterances from the point of view of evidence, reasoning, valid argument, truth, at all; we are considering them merely as events. Just because that is how we are considering them, our description has in itself no bearing on the question of “valid”, invalid”, “rational”, “irrational”, and so on.”

Again, “giving one’s reasons for thinking something is like giving one’s motives for doing something. You might ask me: “why did you half-turn towards the door?” and I explain that I thought I saw a friend coming in, and then realized it was someone else. This may be the explanation although I did not at the time say to myself “Hello! There’s so-and-so; I’ll go and speak to him; oh no, it’s someone else.” So when I give the explanation it is not by way of observing two events and the causal relation between them.”

Wittgenstein is right, when he says "Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking.” Indeed, but, as Anscombe remarks, although the concept of 'thought' is one that we all possess, it is difficult to give a satisfactory account of it and no one as yet has, although not for lack of trying.

**Evolutionary naturalism assumes that our noetic equipment developed as it did because it had some survival value or reproductive advantage. **

Well no. It is wrong to say that our noetic equipment developed BECAUSE it has survival value. The best our evolutionary theorists can say is that our noetic equipment emerged “randomly,” “mutatively” (that is magically to you and me) and will either survive within nature or not. Natural selection is not a cause of any emergent form of life although it does condition which emergent forms will survive to generate. Natural selection is like a filtering system: it extracts and distills, but it in no way contributes to what is originally given. So the sequence of evolutionary forms that culminate in man is already given in the first form of the sequence, i.e. the first form of life already performs all subsequent forms that may emerge. How this form arose cannot be explained theoretically, for theory always supposes a starting point and you cannot have a theory of a starting point. This is why we have the myth of Genesis.

May I refer you to Eric Voegelin (again)? http://voegelinview.com/ev/evolution_and_kant.html

@ Michael,

The situation vis-a-vis Lewis and Anscombe is rather more complex, if you will be consult her collected papers with Blackwell or Victor Reppert's account of the back and forth and reconstruction of Lewis's argument. The argument of Miracles that folks buy today is from a second edition of the work. And Anscombe herself says that the revised argument is a philosophically respectable one. Moreover, while the Plantinga argument is akin to the Lewis argument, it would be foolish to say that it's the same argument suffering from the same criticism. In fact, the Plantinga argument is entirely immune to the Anscombe criticism. Moreover, Anscombe's purported defeat of Lewis at the debate was not even apparent to all present. Anscombe's own husband, a first rate analytic philosopher in his own right, appears to have sided with Lewis's argument against his wife's criticism--or at least with some variant of the Lewis argument. And notable analytic philosophers have since presented other variants of this argument also immune to the Anscombe critique--you can find such arguments, for instance, in Hasker's volume The Emergent Self with Cornell University Press. Finally, to critique the Plantinga argument, I think you'll actually have to learn some Bayesian probability first--and learn it sufficiently to understand why Anscombe's critique of Lewis's first draft doesn't apply to the argument.

But again, by Anscombe's own admission, her critique of Lewis's first draft of the argument doesn't apply to the revised version. I would think that would matter to anyone interested in the argument or in its history.

Let me add to the foregoing that I hold that the Ansombe critique of the first draft of the Lewis argument was on target. But I agree with her that the revised argument was philosophically respectable. And I don't see how her particular criticism applies to the Plantinga argument, especially when his argument is framed in Bayesian terms (and taking the whole of his argument into account). But I didn't intend to simply reject Ansombe above. In fact, I think she has one of the best and most interesting treatments of rights (and their relation to moral necessity) in Volume 3 of her collected papers.

Paul

The kernel of Anscombe's criticism really does apply, namely,
“What is the connection between grounds [for believing something] and the actual occurrence of the belief?”
which she repeats in the introduction to Volume II of the Collected Papers.

The remarks I quoted from her really do no more than illustrate this.

Lewis did go some way to addressing the problem in his analysis of "Because," in the Ground:Consequent and in the Cause:Effect senses.

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. ~ J.B.S. Haldane

**Again, “giving one’s reasons for thinking something is like giving one’s motives for doing something. You might ask me: “why did you half-turn towards the door?” and I explain that I thought I saw a friend coming in, and then realized it was someone else. This may be the explanation although I did not at the time say to myself “Hello! There’s so-and-so; I’ll go and speak to him; oh no, it’s someone else.” So when I give the explanation it is not by way of observing two events and the causal relation between them.”**

I think, or believe, or perhaps judge, that the above implicitly conflates the notions of thinking and judging and this renders the conclusion false.
I can think propositionally and then separately judge the validity (yes or no) of that thinking. But I don’t need to think in order to judge something. I see a man pull a gun on me. I duck. Asked to explain why I ducked, I could say: “I judged the man pulled a gun to shoot me and I further judged that I did not want to be shot at and still further judged that I should duck to avoid the possibility.” It is true that I did not explicitly think this through at the time, but it is also true that I did judge this at the time. For each event is experienced not only as a physical event, but as an act of judgment (the experienced event is always an interpreted event); neither event is neutral with respect to my judgment; he pulled a gun …to shoot me; I ducked…to avoid being shot. The two events are mutually causally grounded because they both occur within the same ambit of judgment. Some judgments can be rendered certain through logic, but most must settle for at best what Newman called certitude: a convergence of probabilities based on past (judged) experience and future expectations.


**Option #3: Beliefs that are caused by and cause behaviors but don't help Zed survive. For example, he could develop a belief that letting a sabertooth bite his brain will make the animal happy—which leads him to constantly be putting his head in the mouths of the great cats.**

Hardly. Zed would never have reached a position to develop this belief, for any such tendency towards it would have been eradicated at an instinctual level in a life form preceding Zed’s in the same evolutionary sequence. Animals can’t “think,” or “believe,” but they do make judgments, and those who judge to put their heads in mouths that will chew them don’t get to belong to a sequence of life forms that extend beyond them.

"The comments on this thread are good but Plantinga's argument hasn't improved at all since I first encountered it" is true if and only if the comments on this thread are good but Plantinga's argument hasn't improved at all since I first encountered it.

“But can a strictly materialistic, non-teleological, evolutionary process produce such reliable equipment?”

Every phenomenon can be explained by matter in motion. This is an inescapable corollary to the naturalist position. But what does it even mean for “matter in motion” to “know”?


“Unguided evolution does not select for belief except insofar as the belief improves the chances of survival. The truth of a belief is irrelevant, as long as it produces an evolutionary advantage.”

Indeed, most evolutionary psychologists affirmatively assert that for the vast majority of humans (all non-atheists) evolution has selected for belief in a false proposition, i.e., that theistic religion is true.

My own answer in detail is here. An excerpt:

It's critical to the argument that it be more likely, or at least as likely, that a false belief will be at least as useful as a true one. But is this really the
case?

David Gerrold, the science fiction author, addressed a related issue in one of his novels. In it, a character is discussing how maps, even our mental ones, are not the territory they represent, and can never be. (This is called "the map-territory
problem" in philosophy.) As he points out, "We don't necessarily want accurate maps, we want useful ones. But accuracy is extraordinarily useful."

That's a critical point. The more accurate a map is, the more likely it is to be useful. A map of New York's subway system will usually be quite abstract and hide a lot of detail - but the details it does show had best be correct. For example, it might not be accurate as to scale, and not show the true distances between the stops, but for many purposes this isn't important. Now, if it shows a nonexistent stop - or hides an existing one - by that very fact it becomes dramatically less useful than an accurate map for the purpose of navigating around New York by subway.

By the same token, the more accurate our mental "maps" of the universe around us are, the more likely they are to be useful. And that does have evolutionary consequences. We would expect that, at least for the environments we've evolved for, our mental maps would tend to be pretty useful... and accuracy and usefulness are strongly correlated.

While it is certainly fun to argue that evolutionary naturalism undercusts the reliability of all human reasoning, including the theory of evolutionary naturalism, I would think that one rebuttal argument would be that thinking is basically foresight or hindsight, the capacity to imagine something happening in the past or future as if we were presently observing it. The capacity to exercise imagination, to see things that aren't before our eyes, is the essence of planning, incuding setting a trap for an animal, or accumulating resources in preparation for winter or seasonal migration, or gathering resources in order to create something that is not readily at hand. Imagination clearly would have survival value, and the degree to which imagination corresponds to reality, as it eventually plays out, will affect the value of that imagination. Accurate imagination about reality that is not being currently observed therefore could be something that is enhanced by natural selection.

That is not to say that naturalistic evolution offers an explanation as to how an accurate imagination arose in the first place. Nevertheless, there is evidence from the tool-making and tool-using behavior of both chimpanzees and crows that a basic form of imagination is available to many animals who are far short of what we would consider human consciousness and intelligence.

The debate about extinction of megafauna in North and South America and Australia rages on, but there is evidence that the human ancestors of 50,000 years ago (Australia) and of 10,000 years ago (Americas) played a major role in that extinction. If so, the intelligence of humans was a far greater survival advantage than size, speed, fangs and claws. And there is no obvious reason to impugn the imagination and intelligence of those human ancestors by saying it was not a trustworthy reflection of reality. I would argue that the only meaningful measure of intelligence is precisely the degree to which it accurately predicts and reflects reality.

Ray Ingles writes: “We would expect that, at least for the environments we've evolved for, our mental maps would tend to be pretty useful . . . and accuracy and usefulness are strongly correlated.”

Perhaps accuracy and usefulness are strongly correlated, but you miss Joe’s point. The question Joe is asking (translated into the terms you use) is whether usefulness is necessarily correlated with accuracy. If there is no one-to-one correlation between usefulness and accuracy, then Joe’s point stands: The truth of the belief is only coincidental and therefore there is no reason to suppose that any given belief is trustworthy. And as my religion example above demonstrates, evolutionary naturalists insist that there is NOT a one-to-one correlation between true beliefs and useful beliefs. They say religious belief has been evolutionary useful (as they must, otherwise it would not have been selected for and would not exist). At the same time they say that religious belief is false.

What is the likelihood that evolutionary naturalism has produced in us cognitive equipment able to reliably form true beliefs and know that they are true?

Well, put aside the knowing they are true part.

The chance that our cognitive equipment evolved to form reliably true beliefs is the about the same as that our digestive equipment evolved to exploit nutrients in the environment. The best way to survive under changing situations is to accurately represent them. A plant doesn't have to represent the sun to benefit from it because it either gets enough sun where it is or it dies. Mobile human beings who have to locate food, avoid prey, etc, need to represent their situation, and this representation will not be adaptive unless it is true. Therefore, it is most likely that our cognitive apparatus has evolved to depict the way the world really is, for the most part.

By the way, Descartes raises the idea that we have defective cognitive equipment in his Meditations. It is one of the last skeptical steps he makes before his claim that he knows he exists because he thinks. Then comes an argument that God exists and isn't a deceiver that leads him to conclude that the real world exists much as I think it is.

@ Michael,

Suppose you're right about Lewis's revised argument--we disagree about that (I've come to the conclusion that the Anscombe criticism doesn't hit what Lewis was trying to get at square on the head--mostly because Lewis lacked the terminology and the analytical tools to give his point just the right shape), but suppose you're right. Even so, the Anscombe critique wouldn't seem to touch Plantinga's argument at all. In fact, I think the Plantinga argument, rather by design, evades the criticism. Or put another way, it takes the criticism entirely into account--thus the Bayesian probability argument.

As well, why do we have to give a full account of thinking for these arguments to go. It seems we must know that there are cognitive faculties and something about what it would take for them to be reliable. But that doesn't seem to entail anything about knowing much (or perhaps anything at all) about just what goes on when we think. And, at any rate, I think the Plantinga argument, elaborated over his trilogy with Oxford press and in other chapters, takes more into account than your comments would suggest.

Put another way, there may no be philosophical accounts of the life of the mind or the functioning of our cognitive faculties that render the Anscombe comment anachronistic when applied to our present situation. I think that is the case. What is the evidence that it's not?

Final point--Anscombe's defenders seem to think that if you just read Anscombe you'll think Lewis was wrong. But I've read Lewis, Anscombe, and several much more analytic accounts and I side more or less with Lewis, rightly understood. And I'm not alone. Folks like Plantinga are aware of Anscombe's argument. Plantinga is every bit as learned and brilliant as Anscombe. And he simply disagrees with her concerning the possibility of an argument of this sort. And so did Anscombe's own gifted and equally intelligent husband. It's not that we're unaware of Anscombe. It's that while we know her argument and see her point, we also disagree with her in certain respects--inasmuch as we think there's a valid version of the argument. This isn't a result of a failure of Plantinga et. al. to understand Anscombe or a result of Plantinga et. al. being stupider than her. These aren't the case at all.

Sorry to interrupt the party, but PZ Myers took Planting's argument to the woodshed a few years ago.

And for us scientists and science advocates,
The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, one of the greatest thinkers of our era, thinks the answer is “no.” means nothing. When he hasn't performed a single experiment, less still produced a scientific paper, his thoughts are, OK I will put it politely, he is entitled to his opinion and nothing else.

There's very interesting work going on in brain science, Plantinga (or for that matter Discovery Institute's expert Michael Egnor) are non-entities in the field. We are better advised to read up on the works of Vilayanur Ramachandran.

@thurgood ***Sorry to interrupt the party, but PZ Myers took Planting's argument to the woodshed a few years ago.***

Oh, please. PZ is a mediocre scientist who has never done anything to distinguish himself in his field, so he spends his time ranting about everything else.

I doubt PZ is able to follow Plantinga's argument, much less "take it to the woodshed." If he really did that then whey didn't he submit it to a philosophy journal? Surely if it were that damning it would have been worth publishing.

***hen he hasn't performed a single experiment, less still produced a scientific paper, his thoughts are, OK I will put it politely, he is entitled to his opinion and nothing else.***

Oh my. Surely you recognize the difference between philosophy and science? If Plantinga's claims are true, then how would any experiments be relevant? Experiments rely on the reliability of our noetic equipment. But if its not reliable then how can the results of the experiment be trustworthy?

Joe,

Plantinga's argument is important and influential-- though very controversial-- and well worth calling attention to. I think you may, at certain points, overstate his intended conclusion. It's not that we have "no reason" to believe naturalism if unguided evolution is true, or that evolution and naturalism are "incompatible." The conclusion is somewhat weaker: we can have at the most low confidence in believing naturalism, assuming unguided evolution, meaning that evolution and naturalism are strictly speaking compatible. The conjunction of unguided evolution and naturalism is not a contradiction; rather, it implies (according to Plantinga) that we only have so much reason to trust our cognitive faculties.

For what it's worth, Plantinga and Daniel Dennett had a lively exchange on this issue at a Chicago meeting of the American Philosophical Association this February. You can read about it here: http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2009/02/an-opinionated.html

@Matt ***I think you may, at certain points, overstate his intended conclusion.***

I probably should have clarified that Plantinga's conclusion is less dogmatic that my opinion of it. I think it is much more forceful than Plantinga admits. True, his conclusions are only probabilistic. But there is also the chance—however slight—that our beliefs are controlled by tiny demons in our head.

There is no reason to believe *that*, of course, but neither is there much reason to believe evolutionary naturalism either. Anyone who was not already predisposed to naturalism would have no reason to think it was likely. And even most biologists and philosophers of mind would concede that unguided evolution has nothing to do with producing reliable cognitive faculties.

Naturalism and unguided evolution are certainly not incompatible. But I would say the conjunction of naturalism, unguided evolution, and confidence in the reliability of our cognitive faculties is incompatible.

***For what it's worth, Plantinga and Daniel Dennett had a lively exchange on this issue at a Chicago meeting of the American Philosophical Association this February.***

I read that when it first came out (I'm a big fan of the Prosblogion blog) and read it again just now. I'm always struck by how Dennett is struck as such a brilliant thinker when he never really offers substantive arguments. He completely ignores Plantinga's argument (I suspect he doesn't think its worth taking seriously) and yet thinks he came out ahead in the debate. I suspect that in 50 years from now, people will still be reading Plantinga while Dennett will long have been forgotten.

Well, moderation removed the link to the essay I wrote in response to Plantinga, so I've put the URL above; click on my name to see it.

Barry - "And as my religion example above demonstrates, evolutionary naturalists insist that there is NOT a one-to-one correlation between true beliefs and useful beliefs."

Not one-to-one, but a correlation nonetheless. And a biased correlation, in fact. Another bit from my essay: "Moreover, you can easily imagine arbitrarily complex chains of 'false beliefs that have useful consequences', such as the fancies
Plantinga describes above [much like Carter's 'Zed'], but evolution must economize. Resources are finite and the more complex the system the harder and more expensive it is to develop (and the more ways development can go wrong)."

Regarding beliefs that are useful but false:

The second problem (at least, for a theist) with the EAAN is that it's actually true - so far as it really goes.

The first part of (my biased paraphrase of) the EAAN is correct - if a belief is useful (at least in the typical environment an organism encounters), it will be selected for regardless of its accuracy. As we've established, accurate ideas are more likely to be useful than false ones, but by no means is that a guarantee. Another science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, put this well: "Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth."

We have plenty of examples of 'naturally warped' thinking in our own experience. For example, this strange, incomprehensible delusion - common among the majority of women - that men are somehow sexually attractive and women are not. ( :-> ) Of course, the utility of such attitudes is fairly obvious. So we would expect a certain amount of irrational (or, at least, non-rational) thinking just because it's so useful in propagating the species. But that's only part of the story. The human body is a remarkable machine, but it's far from perfect and has structural flaws and weaknesses. Should we expect the human mind to be dramatically different?

The thing is, people really are generally bad at thinking logically. People routinely, in large numbers, completely fail to correctly assess the risks associated with various dangers. They buy into superstition and magical thinking, they follow fads, horrific practices, witch hunts, claptrap, and so on.

It takes effort for people to think logically about the world and to carefully examine it while putting aside preconceptions. And when we do, we find things that we didn't expect - things that strike us as really weird. (I can recommend Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World for a discussion both of the human tendency to fallacy and the ways to counteract it.) This is kind of a problem for the people who try to put forth this argument, if you ponder it for a moment. They are the ones claiming that our reasoning processes are deliberately designed and fashioned by (at least) one master craftsthing, so the fact that our thinking is so easily derailed is kind of a sticking point. By their own lights, our thinking ought to be substantially clearer and better.

Of course, the actual case is more-or-less what we'd expect from an evolutionary origin of humanity: A mind that's flexible enough to learn and correct errors - good enough for day-to-day operations in the kind of environments we've lived in - but nevertheless prone to fallacies and illogic when tired, excited, or careless.

Joe Carter's reply to Thurgood concerning PZ Myers is to the point. Moreover, Al Plantinga's argument is about naturalism and therefore about metaphysics, an area of expertise beyond the cognizance of natural scientists and so, quite obviously, beyond their competence.

"What is the likelihood that evolutionary naturalism has produced in us cognitive equipment able to reliably form true beliefs and know that they are true? Extremely low."

The problem with summations of the argument in informal terms is that they don't say anything very informative about likelihood or probability at all. And the idea that evolutionary naturalists need to produce some "necessary" connection between truth and survival value, which emerges at a few key points in the post, is ridiculous. It might be in order if we were never wrong, but in fact we make mistakes all the time. No, scratch that, it would be in order if we were never wrong now and had very seldom been wrong at any point in our evolutionary history. Plantinga is very clear that what's at stake is a question of probability.

But the summation does mirror the original argument in one respect. I'm most definitely not in the camp that takes philosophy to be a mere mopping-up job after the scientists have done all the work. But if one is going to suppose that contemporary evolutionary theory is true, and then assess the probability of something on that assumption, one has incurred a responsibility (I think) to make the assessment with some attention to what evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized about the matter, rather than to carry out a probabilistic analysis by counting the possible variations of thought experiments. I'm not so familiar with Plantinga's presentation of the argument as to say that he has not done this at all, but I think it's pretty clear he has not done this in much detail.

Mr Carter, we don't know how prehistoric Zed would have treated the tiger — paraphrasing Chesterton's famous paragraph in his Everlasting Man, the problem with the professor of prehistory is that he cannot scrap his scrap...

However, there is an excellent description of how a primitive people has actually treated the tiger. I am referring to one of my favorite all-time books Dersu the Hunter written by V. K. Arseniev, which was made in 1975 into an award winning movie by Akira Kurosawa:

http://www.longitudebooks.com/find/p/1695/mcms.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dersu_Uzala_(1975_film)

An excellent analysis of what the tiger meant to these people can be found here:

http://partners.nytimes.com/books/first/m/matthiessen-tigers.html

I am having a little bit of trouble putting Dersu's beliefs into one your 4 categories, but if you care to expand the topic I would be interested in your response.

'The dragon spewed a torrent of water after the woman to sweep her away but the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the river ' - mysterious Spirit infused words in Book of Rev. ...and reading some of the above thoughts make one recognise the breadth and depth of those flood waters ..

Unable to fathom what makes it so hard to accept that man was closer to the divine than to the monkey once he recieved the breath of God , in The Garden ...and that an agent of disorder set in motion the rebellion and discord in nature that muddles thinking ... may be not just of man but even of the monkey ..

Still struggling to get the fuller meaning of those words -of the earth that opened its mouth, to swallow up the river ...? a call to spend more time in The Word , than in the flood waters !

Joe Carter: Excellent article! I find Plantinga's argument valid. The problem, as i see it, is, in this debate, that, has grown rather tiresome, of "evolution vs. religion'', is we have two polar opposites: The New Atheists, on the one hand, who argue, that evolutionary theory NECESSARILY refutes the existence of God, and those on the other end, who argue, essentially, that, one cannot believe in evolution, if one believes in God. Both groups, conclude that, belief in God, and belief in evolutionary theory, are incompatible. Both groups are wrong.

If one accepts either of these extremes, one cannot account for the counter arguments, that can be raised, to either extreme. For the "New Atheists'', their argument, cannot respond adequately, to the positon of Plantinga, that knowledge is, inherently unreliable, if we assume that humans arose, from a purely random, naturalistic process. But, those on the antievolutionary side, cannot adequately answer the plethora of empirical evidence, for evolutionary theory.


How to extricate ourselves, from this mess? Accept Theist evolution, which effectively solves these problems.

.

Is it not passing strange that each generation seems to find the answers to these questions among its contemporaries? Joe Carter finds alvin Plantinga's view "all but incontrovertible." Others cite the prior generation of Anscombe and Lewis. And yet the problem continues down the ages with reformulations and new jargon. A century from now there will be new names and new fine phrases, but still the same debate without any ultimate resolution.

[[Oh, please. PZ is a mediocre scientist who has never done anything to distinguish himself in his field, so he spends his time ranting about everything else.]]

Well he is a scientist who teaches and does research in developmental biology, and is successful enough to attract research funding, and have an asteroid named after him! We can here at First Things rail all we want against Myers, but it matters tuppence. Astronomers and scientific organizations don't look up this magazine for information on scientists.

[[I doubt PZ is able to follow Plantinga's argument, much less "take it to the woodshed." If he really did that then whey didn't he submit it to a philosophy journal? Surely if it were that damning it would have been worth publishing.]]

Myers didn't just take the argument to the woodshed he fileted it mercilessly. As for why didn't he submit it to a philosophy journal, are you serious? Here's a non-scientist one, Alvin Plantinga, with no scientific credentials or accomplishments holding forth on a scientific matter? And you want Myers to refute that in a learned journal? That's like demanding that NASA publish a refutation of the thesis "moon landings were faked" in a cranks journal or even in some science journal. That's why we have blogs where poorly informed and argued assertions are taken apart.

BTW we scientists and science advocates don't accept or insist our brains are reliable. That's why we repeatedly experiment, confer, test, argue and then conclude. Plantinga seems to have a problem with that.

Evolutionary biology is a teddy bear to creationism, compared to the neurosciences grizzly. Materialism is today better established than it ever was. Of course to one such as myself who follows Vaisesika and Mimamsa and the earliest atomists, Kanaada, Udayana, Vacaspati and Yaska this is logically old hat. Indian atomism was fully developed by the time of Democritus and had already diverged into three distinct schools.

Given the very well established logical basis for materialism which is over 3000 years old in India and about 2500 from Greece and the modern theories from science we have all bases covered.

Bret - "The New Atheists, on the one hand, who argue, that evolutionary theory NECESSARILY refutes the existence of God..."

Really? Can you produce some quotes of them actually saying that? For example, I've read Dawkins note that evolution counts against the "argument from design" in biology, and acts as a "consciousness-raiser" to make arguments about order needing an Orderer in other areas like cosmology questionable. His main line has been not the proof that God doesn't exist so much as the lack of proof for God.

"Sorry to interrupt the party, but PZ Myers took Planting's argument to the woodshed a few years ago."

Rrrrigghtt.

"[Myers had ] an asteroid named after him!"

Oh. I didn't know that. So Myers wins the philosophical debate!! Yay for Myers!!!

But, more seriously, it's really quite simple. If thinking is not an actual cause over and above the physics of the nervous system, then it is completely irrelevant whether thoughts are in accord with reality as far as "Natural Selection" is concerned. Hell, it would then be a complete mystery why thinking and consciousness should bother to exist at all, given that physics gets the job done on its own. Don't you think?

Ray Ingles: Perhaps the word "necessarily'' was too strong. But it's fair to say, that the New Atheists, believe that evolutionary biology has made belief in God unlikely. It's really quite niave, to assume that random mutations, are enough to create all of the rich order that exists, in our world. I beleive that evolution occurred, but I think that it was guided by God. That's enough to put me in the doghouse with the New atheists, and the antievolutionists, but oh well, the evidence indicates that believe in God, and evolution is necessary. Dawkins, once asserted to the philosopher, A.J. Ayers, that evolution, has made it possible, to be "an intellectually satisfied atheist''.



Hmm. Dawkins is a great evolutionary biologist, but he's rather niave, as a philosopher.

MacGabhann

The illustration is designed to show that “‘Causes,’ in the scientific sense in which this word is used when we speak of causal laws, is to be explained in terms of observed regularities: but the declaration of one’s reasons or motives is not founded on observation of regularities. ‘Reasons’ and ‘motives’ are what is elicited from someone whom we ask to explain himself.”

A causal explanation might well ignore these reasons or motives entirely.

Wow! Where to start? Plantinga has "proven" that humans are not infallible. I think Feynman beat him to it in 1974. See his 1974 Caltech commencement address, where he said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool."

Of course, Feynman was perhaps the 100 millionth person to figure this out, but he also gave us some ideas on how to check our ideas and improve our accuracy. See the same commencement address.

Plantinga's argument has at least three fatal problems:

1) It is an observable fact that the product of human minds is often untrustworthy, often in well-studied and well-explained ways.

2) Natural selection does not require a "place in the causal chain leading to behavior", merely a correlation with behaviour.

3) In any case, for "beliefs ... [to] have no place in the causal chain leading to behavior" requires presuppositions about the mind-body question that naturalists don't share. (So at best he is demonstrating that, from a theist's point of view, naturalists are irrational.)


Additionally...

"According to Plantinga, we have no reason to believe that it is necessary for a belief to be true in order to be advantageous."

According to me, Plantinga is being disingenuous. Whilst it is not "necessary for a belief to be true in order to be advantageous", the probability that a true belief will lead to to advantageous behaviour is far greater than the probability that a false belief will. You are far more likely to run away from a tiger if you think its going to eat you than you are if you think its your friend. Given that natural selection works probabilistically, what is "necessary" is irrelevant.

Bret - "It's really quite niave, to assume that random mutations, are enough to create all of the rich order that exists, in our world."

You are absolutely correct. Random mutations aren't enough.

Thankfully there's also natural selection. (And I've actually seen mutation+natural selection produce improved designs and new innovations that I didn't program in. Click on my name above this comment for a link to my results.)

So few people seem to want to address evolution as a whole - including Plantinga. They love to focus on the 'random mutation' part and minimize - or completely ignore - the sorting and ordering effect of natural selection. It's like focusing on the random Brownian motion of water, and claiming "Someone must have carefully arranged the water in that puddle to so perfectly match the outline of the depression it's in! Mere random molecules bouncing around couldn't take and hold such a specific shape!"

Joe Carter - "I doubt PZ is able to follow Plantinga's argument, much less 'take it to the woodshed.' If he really did that then whey didn't he submit it to a philosophy journal? Surely if it were that damning it would have been worth publishing."

Well, it can't hurt to link to what Myers wrote, can it? If he's wrong, it'll be amusing, and if he's right, you can encourage him to submit it to a philosophy journal.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/alvin_plantinga_gives_philosop.php

Ray: Natural selection is the process, where genes randomly change; some are conducive to the survival of the organism, who possesses those genes, and some are not. Those who do not believe in God, believe that this unguided, entirely natural process, is enough for all of life to emerge, including beings, with complex nervous systems, who can discuss such issues. Call me a heretic, but I simply don't have enough faith, to believe that.


Perhaps, Ray, you could elaborate, as to what more is involved here?

@ Thurgood,

Oh please. Materialism is philosophical and not a scientific proposition. Moreover, there is no argument for it in the east or west that establishes it as the necessary inference from a deductive syllogism. And one can never arrive at certainly true propositions inductively. In fact, given materialism, inductive argumentation is the only sort available in favor of materialism. But the only sort of inductive argument that can even be given for materialism is question begging (of the sort--well, when I study material phenomena, I observe only material phenomena . . .). You seem to be making basic category mistakes--suggesting materialism possesses just the sort of standing it could not have, given materialism. Moreover, materialism is an article of faith--and not in the sense of reasoned trust but in the sense of fideism. If you think folks like Democritus actually gave an argument for ontological materialism, then you should read them again. It is commonly assumed that Greek atomists and others gave arguments for materialism. But the case is rather different--they taught a doctrine of materialism and its implications. Moreover, materialism doesn't have quite the sound standing you let on. You should see the lambasting it takes in Koons and Bealer (eds.) The Waning of Materialism (Oxford University Press). Many first rate scholars in the United States refuse to take the fideistic leap materialism requires. Many find it to be incoherent.

Interesting discussion. One point about the argument: as Joe Carter says, the version he discusses proposes 4 possibilities for the connection between belief content and behavior. The 4th possibility is the one we commonsensically take to be the correct one: belief enters the causal chain leading to behavior by virtue of its content as well as by virtue of its neurophysiological properties. Several commentators seem to be pointing out that on that possibility (together with N&E), the probability of R (our faculties' being reliable) is high.

Perhaps that's right. But that probability could be as high as you please without in any way compromising the argument. That's because the probability of the first two possibilities, given materialism, is much greater than that of the 4th possibility, given materialism, and the probability of R given either of the first two possibilities (together with N&E) is low. And of course what we are looking at is the probability of R on N&E, where we are taking materialism about human beings to be included in N.

There is a revised and in some ways better version of the argument in my contribution to the online book Paul Draper and I wrote--I believe it's on the internet infidels site.

Alvin Plantinga

Bret - "Natural selection is the process, where genes randomly change..."

No, that's exactly wrong. Sorry, there's no other way to say it. Mutation is the process where genes randomly change. Natural selection, on the other hand, is the process where genes are non-randomly selected and sorted - genes that have a non-random effect on survival tend to propogate themselves much better than neutral or deleterious genes. (There are other factors like genetic drift and such, but there's no point in worring about those until we've got the basics settled.)

I'd like to diffidently suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone"; it's well-written, covers a wide range of topics in an accessible fashion, and should address several of your concerns. Perhaps if you had a better handle on how evolution works, you might find it less incredible.

Bret - "Natural selection is the process, where genes randomly change..."

No, that's exactly wrong. Sorry, there's no other way to say it. Mutation is the process where genes randomly change. Natural selection, on the other hand, is the process where genes are non-randomly selected and sorted - genes that have a non-random effect on survival tend to propogate themselves much better than neutral or deleterious genes. (There are other factors like genetic drift and such, but there's no point in worring about those until we've got the basics settled.)

I'd like to diffidently suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone"; it's well-written, covers a wide range of topics in an accessible fashion, and should address several of your concerns. Perhaps if you had a better handle on how evolution works, you might find it less incredible.

Paul - Materialism is philosophical and not a scientific proposition.

Well... yes and no. From a philosophical, Occam's Razor perspective, materialism is to be preferred, until and unless it's shown to be inadequate.

As to it being purely an article of faith... I know you don't like inductive arguments, but I'm struck by the fact that, over human history, a whole lot of things have moved from the 'explained supernaturally' column to the 'explained materialistically' column... but I'm not aware of a single example of anything moving the other way.

It's also interesting that a whole lot of things have been confidently declared to be impossible to explain in material terms... only to later be accounted for in decidedly non-supernatural ways. I call this "Haldane's Error" after my favorite example here: http://ingles.homeunix.net/rants/atheism/haldane.html

@Hrafn,

Plantinga is quite capable of defending himself. But from a strictly philosophical point of view, I don't see how the three propositions you enumerate constitute fatal flaws for his argument. You assert that they do. But you don't demonstrate the assertion. And the third assertion is clearly in inapt depiction of his argument--which is an argument that metaphysical naturalism (or the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism and Evolution) is self-referentially incoherent. The argument for metaphysical naturalism's (together with Evolution) self-referential incoherence is an argument that the position is incoherent on its own terms. To maintain that an proposition (metaphysical naturalism or N & E) is most certainly NOT to maintain that the position is incoherent from a point of view other than the position itself. So Plantinga is not rightly understood as saying that metaphysical naturalism (or N & E) is self-referentially incoherent given theism (of course he thinks that). Such an argument wouldn't come to much. He thinks that metaphysical naturalism (or N & E) is coherent given metaphysical naturalism (or given the conjunction of Naturalism and Evolution)--incoherent on its own terms. Your assessment of his work, then, seems NOT to be based upon an understanding of Plantinga's argument on its own terms.

Alvin Plantinga - "That's because the probability of the first two possibilities, given materialism, is much greater than that of the 4th possibility, given materialism..."

Um... why? I assume you develop that in more detail somewhere, but can you give even a nutshell summary here? I'm simply not seeing why this would be the case.

Also, do you address the observed unreliability of human cognition anywhere?

@Ray Ingles ***but can you give even a nutshell summary here? I'm simply not seeing why this would be the case.***

I think you inadvertently answered your own question when you said, "From a philosophical, Occam's Razor perspective, materialism is to be preferred, until and unless it's shown to be inadequate." If this is true, then you should also accept the position that results when materialists apply Occam's Razor to our cognitive faculties—epiphenomonalism.

If materialism is true, there is no need to add an additional layer of of non-materiality to cognitive faculties. That is a conclusion that most naturalist philosophers and scientists would agree with. (I've always found it curious that the advocates of naturalism on the internet almost never want to follow the logic as far as the scientists and philosophers who they purportedly are in agreement with.)

I think one of the reasons that naturalists fail to understand Plantinga's argument is because they almost always beg the question in favor of naturalism. They believe that since naturalism is true, anything that exists or was developed by evolutionary processes must be consistent with naturalism.

For example, you refer to Occam's Razor. But to use that principle requires a number of assumptions to first be true—mainly that we can form true beliefs. That, of course, is exactly what we are arguing. We must first determine the probability that if naturalism is true, it is able to account for reliable cognitive faculties. When we do that, we discover that naturalism has a very low probability of accomplishing this function. So low, in fact, that we have to give up either the idea that naturalism is true or that we can reliably form true beliefs.

@ Ray Ingles,

I don't "dislike" inductive arguments. I disagree with the materialist tendency to treat their position as possessing the sort of certainty that could follow at best only from a deductive syllogism even though the only sort of argument that could be made for materialism (if indeed such an argument can be made) is essentially inductive. In short, I think there's a logical equivocation and sleight of hand in the claims of philosophical materialists. When it comes to making arguments I recognize the validity of deductive, inductive, and abductive arguments as well as of inferences to the best explanation. In fact, I've written a book that includes a chapter that elaborates a model for applying inference to the best explanation to constitutional theory. My problem is that materialists claim much more for their position than the sort of argument they must make for it (if indeed they can make one) would allow.

I think you and I may disagree about the movement of history and causal explanations. And if one were to reply that the history one has in view is the history of science--then the claim borders on tautology. Or so I would argue.

Paul,

Ray has put it better than I can. Occam's razor apart, the advance of the sciences have raised the bar. Mere argumentation won't do any longer. I also looked up your reference on Amazon,

[[Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defenses of materialism.]]

So goes the blurb for The Waning of Materialism Robert C. Koons (Editor), George Bealer (Editor). This is a book by philosophers talking philosophy, thankfully not science! Not at all useful to our discussion.

I am willing to go with terms like thought and consciousness as placeholders, even reduce them to some operational entity although that would make them unrecognizable.

As for the implications of materialism may I suggest the work of Stephen Phillips, Rob Koons's colleague at UT-Austin? Epistemology of Perception: Gangesa's Tattvacintamani, Vol. I, pratyaksa-khanda, introduction, translation, and commentary (Phillips and Tatacharya). Gangesa is a late 14th century proponent of the Navya Nyaya (or New Logic) school of Indian thought. Phillips disagrees (if I may oversimplify his ideas) with what we would call materialism, but his work shows you that there are different issues involved.

Returning to the original quotation from Darwin, he might have takensome solace from a remark of his contemporary, Bl John Henry Newman

“Sometimes our trust in our powers of reasoning and memory, that is, our implicit assent to their telling truly, is treated as a first principle; but we cannot properly be said to have any trust in them as faculties. At most we trust in particular acts of memory and reasoning. We are sure there was a yesterday, and that we did this or that in it; we are sure that three times six is eighteen, and that the diagonal of a square is longer than the side. So far as this we may be said to trust the mental act, by which the object of our assent is verified; but, in doing so, we imply no recognition of a general power or faculty, or of any capability or affection of our minds, over and above the particular act. We know indeed that we have a faculty by which we remember, as we know we have a faculty by which we breathe; but we gain this knowledge by abstraction or inference from its particular acts, not by direct experience. Nor do we trust in the faculty of memory or reasoning as such, even after that we have inferred its existence; for its acts are often inaccurate, nor do we invariably assent to them.”

@Thurgood,

Merely reading the blurb won't do. This is the kind of sloppy thinking in logical matters that is earns scientists a bad reputation with respect to logical thinking (I seem to recall Barr once claiming something to the effect that scientists generally speaking aren't well trained in logic; he's right; because they ignore or revile philosophy they must bypass that great part of philosophy which is logic). When scientists turn to matters of philosophy, history, and religion, fallacies such as the ad hominem fallacy, the genetic fallacy, begging the question, the fallacy of composition, and begging the question abound. I suggest in addition to actually reading Waning, that you read Barr's book as well. And there's a rather good essay by Plantinga--Against Materialism. Of course, you'll have to read the whole thing. Getting a paragraph summary from someone won't pass for scholarly investigation of the argument.

Again, materialism is a metaphysic and so a philosophical rather than a scientific position. And to say that the observation of material phenomena leads to the conclusion of materialism is to commit the logical fallacy of begging the question. Scientists aren't trained in the canons of logic much anymore. But I would think they could still recognize begging the question when it shows up. Moreover, not all scientists are materialists. Noted physicist Stephen Barr, who, in contrast to many scientists is competent in philosophy (i.e., the art of thinking logically), is most certainly not a materialist. But it would be a logical error of the first order, even if all scientists were materialists (as they manifestly are not), to infer that science entails materialism. Talk about a non sequitur.

Finally, will someone please present an argument as to why anyone ought to accept Ockham's razor (it would also be nice if the proper spelling for Ockham was used, but that's probably too high an expectation). Ockham's razor is not undeniable (i.e., denying it does not involve one in a contradiction). Nor is it incorrigible. Nor is it deducible from anything that is. Nor is Ockham's razor something that is empirically observable. Nor is it, strictly speaking, falsifiable. It seems to be a fideistic article of faith--a kind of shibboleth for many contemporary scientists. Suppose that Thurgood maintains that it's a methodologically useful presupposition. So what? Propositions that are methodological usefulness would seem to have no ontological significance. One cannot infer anything about reality from the usefulness of Ockham's razor. So doing would, again, be begging the question. There's about as much warrant for Ockham's razor as there is for another proposition: The most absurd description of reality is the correct one.

Joe - "If materialism is true, there is no need to add an additional layer of of non-materiality to cognitive faculties."

Yes, but...

Why must cognitive faculties be non-material to affect behavior? (Option 1 above.)

Why must cognitive faculties be non-material to allow beliefs to correspond to reality? (Option 2 above.) If beliefs affect behavior (grant me option 1 for the moment) then behavior has consequences, which feed back into beliefs. This happpens in individuals (we call it "learning"), societies, and even (via evolution) species (we have inbuilt talents for physics in one gravity and an atmosphere, for example). False beliefs that happen to work in an envirionment can perisist... but the environment changes, and people explore new environments. True beliefs have wider applicability than false ones. (As I noted above, evolution must economize...)

I'll point out - again - the UNreliability of human cognition. Most of what people have believed about the world has, in fact, been false. The history of science - of learning in every field - has been a process of becoming less wrong. A round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, atomic theory, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics - all big, counterintuitive surprises. I'd say this history fits an evolutionary model much better, actually...

Is Ray Ingles suggesting that any educated person ever believed the world was flat? If so, he's fallen for the Enlightenment reinvention of the past (something one finds with great frequency in the work philosophes and in folks like Gibbons).

Also, if human cognitive faculties are generally unreliable in the production of beliefs, then wouldn't they be unreliable in the production of the belief that human cognitive faculties are generally unreliable? To assert some claim or other, cognitive in essence (as this is), on the basis of the general unreliability of human is self-referentially incoherent in the worst possible way. It's not the sort of argument to which one can accede and remain rational at the same time.

@Paul Very well said, sir.

@Ray Ingles ***Why must cognitive faculties be non-material to affect behavior? (Option 1 above.)***

They aren't. Materialism assumes that the physical/material (and their related properties) is all that exists. The first option is merely saying that while beliefs could be an "effect"—essentially an emergent property of behavior-causing neuronal activity—it cannot turn around and affect the matter that created it. In other words, the emergent property only goes one way. It's like how a fire can cause heat, but the heat doesn't fuel the fire.

***Why must cognitive faculties be non-material to allow beliefs to correspond to reality? (Option 2 above.) ***

Again, we're presuming a materialistic world, so option 2 is similar to one except that their can be an semantic relationship between the belief and the behavior. (Plantinga discusses this in the paper I link to above, “Naturalism Defeated.”)

***True beliefs have wider applicability than false ones.***

Again, you’re begging the question. If we don’t know whether our brains can produce reliable true beliefs, then we have no way of knowing whether your claim is true or not.

If you really believe your statement then you have, as Plantinga argues, a defeater for naturalism. You are providing a reason for you to give up your belief in materialism.

***A round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, atomic theory, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics - all big, counterintuitive surprises. I'd say this history fits an evolutionary model much better, actually... ***

I hate to keep belaboring the point, but you are stacking up question-begging premises like firewood. You say that most of what we have believed about the world has been false. If this is true, then how do we know that what is believed about evolution and naturalism is also false. the theory of evolution can’t be excluded from its own process. In fact, that is the whole point of this article.

(By the way, I don't get to indulge in epistemology too often on FT, but I have a related blog post that you might be interested in: Is Your Neighbor a Zombie? — Physicalism and the Mind/Body Problem
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/02/17/is-your-neighbor-a-zombie-%E2%80%94-physicalism-and-the-mindbody-problem/

Paul:

I am more than happy to further substantiate my points.

1) Plantinga's argument relies on the (purported) inability of evolutionary mechanisms to explain why the convictions of humans are trustworthy. It therefore contains as a premise that human convictions are trustworthy. However, modern science shows that these convictions are frequently untrustworthy, from such simple examples as optical illusions (ones senses playing tricks on one's brain), to the studies finding that 'healthy' people have a less accurate worldview and the Dunning–Kruger effect. The argument therefore relies on an invalid premise.

If you want to demonstrate that this is non-fatal, then please demonstrate how Plantinga's argument deals with stochastic, rather than deterministic, trustworthiness.

2) Plantinga's argument relies on analysis of how beliefs fit into the causal chain leading to behaviour, the contention being that if they don't causally affect behaviour that they cannot be selected for. This contention is however false. There is a large body of scientific literature demonstrating that features can experience positive selectionary pressure simply because they are correlated to other features that yield a positive survival benefit. Such features are known as evolutionary byproducts. One prominent example is sickle-cell anaemia (a recessive trait) surviving as a byproduct because it is correlated to an increased natural resistance to malaria. It would, I think be considerably more difficult to argue that true beliefs is not at least correlated to adaptive behaviours, and as far as I know, this is not an argument that anybody has attempted.

If you want to demonstrate that this is non-fatal, then please demonstrate how Plantinga's argument deals with the fact that correlated features can be subjected to selection pressures.

3) Options 1-3 would appear to be strawmen, as they do not reflect a philosophy of mind that a naturalist would subscribe to (and would appear to be far more compatible with some sort of supernaturalist view, such as theism, rather than with naturalism). This leaves only option 4 as a a credible representation of a naturalist's views. The argument given for depreciating it is invalid, as there is no justification for demanding that "it is necessary for a belief to be true in order to be advantageous" is order for it to be subject to (direct) selection pressure, only that it is more probable that a belief is true (the strength of the selection pressure would however depend on the probability that the belief was true, all other things being equal).

I would further suggest that it is "incoherent" (and more than a little deceptive) to steer readers towards worldviews ('options') that do not reflect worldviews of naturalists, when trying to present naturalists' worldviews as "incoherent".

If you want to demonstrate that this is non-fatal, then please demonstrate how (i) the first three options are congruent with philosophies of mind espoused by a significant proportion of naturalists, (ii) an argument against the fourth option that works if natural selection only requires that it is more probable for a belief to be true in order to be advantageous, and/or (iii) that true beliefs are no more likely to be advantageous than false ones.

Paul - I'm quite aware of just how long ago it was that humanity realized the Earth wasn't flat - it certainly predated Christianity. But it was nevertheless a surprise, which was my actual point. (I could add things like most of physiology and the germ theory of disease as further examples.)

Secondly, I come from an engineering perspective, so I know that it's quite possible to build reliable systems from unreliable parts. Redundancy and feedback loops are important tools for such purposes, and they are common at both the individual level as well as almost every organization composed of humans. (Some do it better than others, of course.)

In other words, a system that's unreliable in the production of beliefs can nevertheless be competent in the testing, winnowing, and retention of beliefs.

So noting that human cognition isn't very reliable in no way precludes the ability, over time, of humans to become less wrong. For an illustration of this - which uses the curvature of the Earth as an example, even - see here: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

@ Ray Ingles,

I come at it from the perspective of one trained in logic. Folks like Rob Koons and Al Plantinga come it as logicians trained in the most complex maneuvers of symbolic logic.

And, as to your last point, well, it has nothing to do, one way or the other, with Plantinga's argument. But that aside, even if it didn't preclude the ability of humans over time to become less wrong, it would preclude their ability to tell that the were.

By the way--please point to that era in which folks thought the earth was flat by citing some sources or pointing us to some writings that so indicate . . . I suspect your elliptical reference was to pre-history. But then you're really making an argument based on your own or someone else's non-evidential narrative.

Joe - "The first option is merely saying that while beliefs could be an 'effect'—essentially an emergent property of behavior-causing neuronal activity—it cannot turn around and affect the matter that created it."

But Plantinga said "the probability of the first two possibilities, given materialism, is much greater than that of the 4th possibility..." And I don't see the justification for that probability estimate. On what does that rest?

"If we don’t know whether our brains can produce reliable true beliefs, then we have no way of knowing whether your claim is true or not."

Another reason I posted the link at the end of my above response to Paul was for your benefit. I don't think humans have a way to directly apprehend Truth. All we can do is build models and test them against reality. Technically, we don't get to say that our models are true; what we can say is that they are less wrong than any other model we've tested.

If we assume from the outset that humans can't know anything, it's self-defeating. As Woody Allen put it, "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?" We have to assume that we can at least work toward knowledge, or we might as well retreat into solipsism. Fortunately, such an assumption is testable. If none of our models worked, we'd have good reason to believe we were intellectually screwed.

But that doesn't seem to be the case. We've been able to build models of wider and wider range and applicability, and we have reasons within those models to account for why that's so. Our models probably are false (e.g. Relativity and QM, which make conflicting predictions in areas we can't test yet, like near black holes - at least one and probably both are wrong) and yet the degree to which they are false seems to be decreasing. (E.g. Newtonian vs. Relativistic mechanics - NASA still uses mostly Newtonian dynamics to steer their craft, because it works well enough even if it's technically false.)

Colloquially and practically, there are things that have been so confirmed that there's no practical, day-to-day reason to assume they're they're wrong to any significant degree - and such things we term 'true'. In principle they could be disproved - even in mathematics, flaws are found in proofs from time to time - but actively worrying about them is, well, perverse. Heliocentrism, for example.

"You say that most of what we have believed about the world has been false. If this is true, then how do we know that what is believed about evolution and naturalism is also false. the theory of evolution can’t be excluded from its own process."

Exactly! Surely some of what we currently believe about evolution will turn out to be wrong. I'm entirely okay with working toward being less wrong, and history seems to bear that approach out. Similarly, we might find a high-order correction to orbital mechanics that affects a few decimal point of a heliocentric model, but so what? Would that mean heliocentrism was false in any practical sense?

Paul - "I come at it from the perspective of one trained in logic. Folks like Rob Koons and Al Plantinga come it as logicians trained in the most complex maneuvers of symbolic logic."

...and the fact that complex maneuvers of symbolic logic are not instinctive, but instead require extensive training, doesn't suggest anything to you? Huh.

"...even if it didn't preclude the ability of humans over time to become less wrong, it would preclude their ability to tell that the were."

You're going to need to elaborate the complex maneuvers of symbolic logic that make that necessary. As I said, I've seen reliable systems made out of unreliable parts, so, well, "E pur si muove!"

"By the way--please point to that era in which folks thought the earth was flat by citing some sources or pointing us to some writings that so indicate . . . I suspect your elliptical reference was to pre-history."

We have writings and drawings from the Sumerians which shows that their cosmogony involved a flat Earth surmounted by the dome of heaven. You can start with Wikipedia and work your way through the references, if you like. (Technically, since literate people wrote those verses, they must have been 'educated', no?)

Ray: you're missing my point. I don't dispute what you've stated. I what I said did not in any way, contradict what you said. My point, is that the natural selection process, is, in your view, and the New Atheists view, a result of purely naturalistic processes. It's my view that natural processes, are insufficient, to account for the richness, and diversity of life. Of course, I'm repeating myself, I said this in earlier posts.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I know evolution very well, thank you. my guess is I've been studying it longer than, or it least as long as you.

@ Ray,

And you know the Sumerian drawings are literal rather than metaphorical how? I think most antique historians will tell you that it's more different than you let on to say much for sure about the thought (or even daily life) of ancient Sumeria.

By the way, I wouldn't commend Wikipedia so easily. The entry for St. Augustine at leased used to conflate St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and St. Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury (about 4 centuries apart). I once read an article that conflated Richard and Thomas Hooker. Wikipedia is roughly that reliable. I don't think I'm along among the professoriate of the nation in precluding my students from citing Wikipedia in their course papers (or course, there are plagiarism problems as well--given that most Wikipedia content, that is reliable, is ripped off other sites without permission).

Don't think I need to reply to your second riposte at all. You need to show the means by which folks with errant cognitive faculties could tell that they were getting more and more reliable. The "systems analogy" won't work--because it's not really an analogy at all. For an analogical argument to work, you need, well, an analogy. But we seem to be talking past each other. I wonder whether you know what it means for a position or an argument to be self-referentially incoherent? If not, that might explain why you seem to be responding to an argument other than the one I made in response to your post.

Meanwhile, I suppose you think that heliocentrism was the only thing going until Copernicus. You might try reading astrophysicist Hugh Ross (Ph.D., Toronto) on this. Perhaps The Fingerprint of God. Copernicus himself got his ideas mainly from Pre-Socratics. But I feel here like I'm compelled to reply to an argument still not to the point. The Plantinga reply above, however, is. I've seen the talk. I've seen him work through the probabilities. It's utterly brilliant. Most of his scientistic critics, however, haven't even bothered to read him--something anti-intellectual to the extreme. Indeed, so many of a scientific bent seem willing to throw the spirit of scientific inquiry under the bus when it comes to philosophy and logic. How anyone who doesn't understand Plantinga's argument or Bayesian probability (esp. as applied in this argument) is beyond me.

I am curious as to why a set of people, generally supernaturalists, are so insistent on attributing to naturalists an a priori belief in the pervasive reliability of convictions in spite of voluminous evidence casting doubt on that attribution, including:

1) (As I have alluded to above) a large body of scientific evidence that human convictions are often unreliable, and often systematically so (to my above list, I would add the whole range of cognitive biases, including
confirmation bias, correspondence bias, hindsight bias, memory bias, outcome bias, and status quo bias).

2) (As Ray has alluded to above) humanity has developed a range of heuristics, including the scientific method, that exist to test the reliability of convictions. Such heuristics would appear to be superfluous if there was an a priori acceptance of the reliability of these convictions.

Given that naturalists are in a greater preponderance in the scientific community than the general population, it would appear to be absurd to expect them to be unaware of these two points. It would therefore appear to be both absurd, and an obvious strawman, for supernaturalists to attribute this a priori belief to them.

It would appear to be more appropriate to state that they have no a priori belief in either the pervasive reliability or pervasive unreliability of human beliefs, and something along the lines of 'some human beliefs may prove reliable' is a more accurate statement of their presuppositions. I do not believe that even Alan Plantinga is claiming that this presupposition is incompatible with Naturalism and the acceptance of the Theory of Evolution.

In elaboration of my earlier post, I would like to suggest that a (most likely pragmatic/ex post) relative trust in the results of formalised heuristic testing of convictions, and a relative distrust of intuitive and/or traditional (and particularly supernatural) convictions is more indicative of a naturalist, as opposed to any particular trust in the latter. I would suggest that trust in the latter is more congruent with supernaturalism (being represented in this debate mainly by theists) than naturalism. Again (congruent with my argument about the first three options, above), this would appear to be a case of supernaturalists (and in the case of this debate, mainly theists) projecting some of their own presuppositions onto naturalists, and being surprised when these presuppositions conflict with naturalism.

To recap, take a level of trust in convictions more expansive than (I have any reason to expect that) naturalists would accept, expand the list of potential philosophies of mind well beyond those that naturalists (would appear to me to have any reason to) accept (and depreciate the one example that they most likely would accept), and take a definition of evolution that is more restrictive than (I have any reason to believe) evolutionary biologists require, and you find that this restricted evolution cannot explain this expansive trust in convictions. Pretty words (and in some instantiations pretty symbols) -- but its real world meaning is what?

A moment’s reflection is enough to show us that, for us, knowledge is primary and thinking secondary. Consciousness begins with the fact that we know something and that we know that we know. Thinking, or reflecting on our knowledge is secondary.

Naturalists and theists alike believe this; unless they have the misfortune to be Cartesians.

In reflecting on our judgments, we all recognize that some are mere opinions, more or less probable; in some cases, we may come to consider many of them doubtful, or even false. But for these words to have meaning presupposes the possibility of certainty, or certitude (some people distinguish them), which is simply to say that, in some cases, at least, we know that we know.

We do not need any account of our cognitive faculties to ground our knowledge, because that certainty is given in the very fact that we are thinking at all. Any account we do give is based on the fact that we do exercise acts of knowing.

That is why I think Newman is right to focus attention on particular acts of knowing and remembering, rather than on the abstract notions of “reason” and “memory.”

Michael:

Given that psychological studies have shown how memories tend to be reconstructed when recalling them, not uncommonly with (at times fallacious)details interpolated in, I would question the validity of claiming memory to be primary and thinking to be secondary. To a considerable extent it can be claimed that we create (and mould) our memories by thinking about them.

Bret - "It's my view that natural processes, are insufficient, to account for the richness, and diversity of life... Thanks for the suggestion, but I know evolution very well, thank you. my guess is I've been studying it longer than, or it least as long as you."

Well... you still haven't mastered the lingo. What you actually said falls into the same kind of creationist misrepresentations that are all-too-common. Your words: "It's really quite niave, to assume that random mutations, are enough to create all of the rich order that exists..." And then you incorrectly described natural selection.

You are entitled to your own opinion, of course. It's not clear to me you understand why others might hold a different one, though.

Paul - "And you know the Sumerian drawings are literal rather than metaphorical how? I think most antique historians will tell you that it's more different than you let on to say much for sure about the thought (or even daily life) of ancient Sumeria."

Fine, I'm more than willing to stipulate that one-ninth of my examples may be questioned due to a dispute over historical interpretation. I think my other eight examples are sufficient to illustrate my point.

"By the way, I wouldn't commend Wikipedia so easily."

Indeed. That's why I said, "You can *start* with Wikipedia and *work your way through the references*," after all. I don't find Wikipedia to be authoritative, but it's often a useful starting point. Or, you could have read the link I gave you in the first place - which would have obviated this whole line of questioning. Oh, well.

"You need to show the means by which folks with errant cognitive faculties could tell that they were getting more and more reliable. The 'systems analogy' won't work--because it's not really an analogy at all."

Is so!

(Argument by vigorous assertion is refreshingly direct, but ultimately unsatisfying. Explaining *why* the analogy doesn't work - attempting to "elaborate the complex maneuvers of symbolic logic" - might help.)

"I wonder whether you know what it means for a position or an argument to be self-referentially incoherent?"

What if - and I'm just going out on a limb here, speculating wildly - I disagree that the position is self-referentially incoherent, and am asking you to elaborate why you think it is? If that had been true, what an interesting discussion we might have had!

Ray, I actually described, what you described, using different words! Strangely, you missed that. It would be more than a little odd, for me to use "creationist'' lingo, when I accept evolution. I believe that God directs the evolutionary process.


You're condescending to the wrong person. Your last post indicated either, you're dishonest, or you don't know as much as you claim.

Hrafn

I actually said that knowledge is primary and that some acts of memory are true knowledge. I specifically objected to treating a faculty, whether of "reason" or "memory" as reliable or not.

No doubt, many acts of memory are fallacious; nevertheless, I am certain that my mother's name was Anne, that Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland &c

@ Ray Ingles,

The canons of logical argumentation require the person stipulating an analogy in an argument from analogy show why the analogy works (rather than just asserting that it does). Given that the argument from analogy is yours, it's up to you to show why the analogy is good.

But, among other things, when one speaks of human cognition going from being less reliable to more reliable one is speaking of the development of a whole thing. When one is speaking of a reliable system built from unreliable parts, one is not talking about the development of the whole so much as the relation of the parts to the whole. What you're getting it has more to do with the fallacy of composition than argument by analogy. You seem to be conflating the two.

But, again, the burden of proving an analogy works in an analogical argument rests with the one making the analogy. That's rational argumentation 101.

@ Hrafn,

Could you perhaps be forgetting that Plantinga is a Calvinist who takes the noetic implications of the fall, in Christian theology, quite seriously. So, you see, he couldn't have the high estimation of human cognitive faculties in terms of their reliability that you and Ray want to attribute to him. It's just not possible. Nor does his argument depend upon a high or low estimation of the general reliability of human cognitive abilities. That's what you're missing here. The overall reliability of human cognition for the Plantinga argument is beside the point. He accepts naturalism and evolution on their own terms--assign whatever probability for the reliability of human cognitive faculties that you like--his argument works with either high or low probabilities assigned. At least that's how I understand the argument in terms of Bayes theorem. The point is that Plantinga's argument for the self-referential incoherence of N & E holds if the reliability of human cognition is given a high probability rating. It holds even more if those same faculties are given a low probability rating.

Paul:

Plantinga defines R as "the proposition that our cognitive faculties are reliable" (e.g. in http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/naturalism_defeated.pdf ), and thereafter uses R pervasively in his Bayesian algebra, coming to the conclusion that the P(R | N & E) is low or inscrutable. I therefore find this hard to see how "The overall reliability of human cognition for the Plantinga argument is beside the point."

Also I would note that, as naturalists do not have an a priori belief in the perfection of human faculties (and explicitly seek crutches such as the scientific method to bolster their reliability), it is unclear why the conclusion that the P(R | N & E) is low or inscrutable (even were it merited) is a defeater for the conjunction of N & E. For it to be a defeater, it would seem that you have to assume that, lacking this conjunction, P(R) is high and scrutable.

This means that the argument still falls apart on the issue of reliability of human faculties (as well as, independently, on the points of naturalistic philosophy of mind, and evolutionary byproducts, as noted above), just at a different point in the argument.

As an aside, I was assuming (given the way the argument was structured) that Plantinga was making an implicit 'Imago Dei' argument for the reliability of faculties under supernaturalism. If neither the Calvinists nor the Naturalists make an a priori assumption of reliability, then I'm wondering what it's doing in the argument at all.

Hrafn,

Let me be more precise, then. What I'm suggesting is that for Plantinga's argument, the value for P(R) all other things equal or without the conjunction of N & E would seem to be irrelevant to his argument. I don't see how the last sentence of your second paragraph follows at all. It looks like a non sequitur from my vantage. There's either a missing middle term or the middle term of your argument is lost on me. But perhaps Joe or AP could weigh in on that count. Here's my question: Why does P(R | N & E) being low entail P(R | ~ (N & E)) being low? You assert that it is. But I can't see why.

A correction to the post immediately above:

Hrafn,

Let me be more precise, then. What I'm suggesting is that for Plantinga's argument, the value for P(R) all other things equal or without the conjunction of N & E would seem to be irrelevant to his argument. I don't see how the last sentence of your second paragraph follows at all. It looks like a non sequitur from my vantage. There's either a missing middle term or the middle term of your argument is lost on me. But perhaps Joe or AP could weigh in on that count. Here's my question: Why does P(R | N & E) being low entail P(R | ~ (N & E)) being high (or having any particular value at all)? You assert that it is. But I can't see why.

Paul:

The conclusion that P(R | N & E) is low or inscrutable only has any significance if it is contrasted against some form of implicit null/a priori hypothesis that the unconstrained P(R) is high and scrutable. If such a hypothesis does not exist, then the conclusion does not force an alteration (or prove an inconsistency) in anybody's worldview.

This in turn brings me to my final sentence. If neither Calvinists nor Naturalists have any particularly high expectation of the reliability of human faculties, neither of them will be particularly surprised at a conclusion that the probability of this reliability is low, or particularly care. So why is this part of a Calvinist's argument against Naturalism, when it is not clear that there is any significant divergence on this point?

The evolutionary process, assumes entities, that natural selection can work on. Obviously, natural selection cannot explain how the entity, or organism arose in the first place.

So we have genetic material, to begin with. Genetic material, tends to change. That is, the DNA that make up the genetic material, tends to go through random, changes. If the changes that result, enable the organism, who possesses them to survive better, in its environment, then it will likely be able to reproduce, thereby transmitting its genes to the reproduced offspring. If the mutations are not conducive, to its possessors survival, then it will die. that's natural selection. Ray Ingles seems to think that it's not this.

Paul - "The canons of logical argumentation require the person stipulating an analogy in an argument from analogy show why the analogy works (rather than just asserting that it does)."

Well, the analogy works in two ways - first, as an existence proof of sorts, showing that unreliable parts can make reliable systems. It's not logically necessary that unreliable parts make unreliable systems. This should be taken into account when calculating probabilities... and since no one wants to tell me, even in a nutshell summary, how the probabilities were calculated, I can't tell if that was taken into account.

As to whether a systems analogy works for humans... I can make a detailed case from neurobiology. Our brains are, in fact, complex systems with many feedback loops, and it's our brains that are under discussion here for having evolved. When feeback loops of sensory input and conscious filtering are removed, we have dreams, which are famously unreliable for logic.

Bret - "Obviously, natural selection cannot explain how the entity, or organism arose in the first place."

Yes and no. Essentially all models of abiogenesis do rely on natural selection of a simpler precursor than DNA-based lifeforms. The RNA world, or Carins-Smith's clay crystals.

Your first explanation of natural selection, and even your latest one to an extent, conflated mutation and natural selection. They are very distinct things. You can have artificial selection of random mutations, for example. Or you can have natural selection of artificial mutations (as is happening now with GM crops or engineered insects or what-have-you).

Indeed, many models of theistic evolution allow natural selection, but assume God guided the mutations that natural selection operated on.

Ray Ingles: Well, clearly now, you've entered the world of pure speculation, not science. No one has any idea, how organic molecules, arose from inorganic ones, or how the organic ones assembled, to form such complicated entities, that we call "life'', that can reproduce.


Now we're getting more than a little amusing. Obviously, the examples, that you cite, occur. I was merely citing the essential process, that took place, in evolutionary history. Certainly, no artficial selection took place, in evolutionary history. My second explanation, of the natural selection process, is merely an elaboration, of my first.


During evolutionary history, random mutations of genetic material, were inextricably interwoven, in the natural selection process. You seem to be focused on splitting hairs, about what the "real'' definition of natural selection. and whether I "know'' it or not. I know that I do, you believe otherwise, which is your right, but I think that we're wasting time. The more interesting question, is why you believe that the evolutionary process, makes belief in God, untenable?


Also, you misunderstand my position, on God's involvement in evolution. You equate my position, with that of the biochemist, Michael Behe, who asserts, at at least in his latest book, THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION, that a creator is necessary, to "guide'' the genetic mutations, of organisms. That's not my view at all. My view is that God, is outside of space and time, and created the evolutionary process, like he created gravitation, but he does not get involved in the micromanagement of it. Perhaps an analogy, may help: Shakespeare created the play, Macbeth, but he does not introduce himself into the war, Macbeth is fighting. Similarly, God created the evolutionary process, but allows it to unfold, without his continuous tinkering.

Ray, perhaps in your last comment, you were not implying that I, necessarily, accept that God directed the mutation process. You apparantly, were merely citing the possibility of random mutations being seperate, from natural selection. Fair enough, but we are getting off on an extraneous issue, here. Obviously, as you state, natural selection can involve more than just "acting'' on random mutations. My point, was that random mutations, were the principal trigger for evolutionary change. There were random mutations, of genes, in an organism, which, depending on the environment, either were "favorable' to the organisms survival, and reproduction, or not, it the latter, then the organism died out, if favorable, then the organism survived, reproduced, and over the long term, a series of favorable, random mutations, produced different kinds of organisms.


Certainly, hopothetically, a being could create a series of genetic codes, and then put them in an environment, and see if they survive, or not. Or could create a genetic code, with the built in capacity to mutate, then this being could place them in an environment, and see what happens.


My quesion to you, is why do you believe that the evolutionary process, means that belief in God, is superfluous, or unreasonable?

Bret:

Advising against conflating natural selection with mutation is not mere "splitting hairs". Whilst the former does act upon the latter, this does not occur in isolation. Natural selection also acts upon recombination, and mutation is also acted upon by genetic drift. These two further mechanisms result in equilibria that are more dynamically unstable and heterogeneous, and thus an ability to 'climb Mount Improbable' (to use Dawkins' metaphor) from a potentially higher number of different directions.

Hrafn: You make a good point. i should have included all of these other factors, in the definition, of natural selection, they certainly are part of it. I apologize for not including it.
and, I apologize to Ray, for not conceding his point.

Bret - The more interesting question, is why you believe that the evolutionary process, makes belief in God, untenable?

Okay, at first you said: "The New Atheists, on the one hand, who argue, that evolutionary theory NECESSARILY refutes the existence of God..."

And I replied: "Really? Can you produce some quotes of them actually saying that? For example, I've read Dawkins note that evolution counts against the "argument from design" in biology, and acts as a "consciousness-raiser" to make arguments about order needing an Orderer in other areas like cosmology questionable. His main line has been not the proof that God doesn't exist so much as the lack of proof for God."

So, um... why do you think that I believe "the evolutionary process, makes belief in God, untenable"? I never said that, and don't think that, and I argued against you imputing that position to others.

I do think that it undermines the 'argument from the appearance of design in biological systems'. And I also think how it works implies things about any God that might exist that contradict most religions I'm aware of. But I don't think that it 'makes belief in God untenable'.

thank you to all for a fascinating discussion. a few thoughts:

(1) i agree with hrafn that the tern "reliable" -- and plantinga's use of probability -- presupposes an implicit standard by which to judge "reliability." it presupposes "reliability" in relation to "actual truth." "probability" only has meaning if "truth" and "access to truth" exist.

the more basic question then becomes: is universal, necessary, and certain knowledge possible? does "actual truth" exist? is it accessible to us?

if it is accessible, then the terms "reliable" and "probable" gain meaning. if it is not accessible, then the terms become insignificant. i think this framework is part of hrafn's position.

(2) please correct me if i have misinterpreted, but it appears to me that hrafn and ray deny that universal, necessary, and certain knowledge exists and that "actual truth" is accessible to minds. this observation would explain ray's "models" for approximating "truth" -- a model should be adopted if "it works."

of course, just because a model "works" does not mean it's true; in fact, the question of the model's veracity in relation to actual "truth" is impossible to answer, per hrafn and ray (or at least per ray).

(3) in view of the foregoing clarification concerning the more "basic" question at hand, i offer the following thoughts. in reference to whether universal, necessary, and certain knowledge exists, i'd like to argue that at least "logic" and "the rules of logic" belong to the category of universal, necessary, and certain knowledge. one may also place "mathematics" in this category. for here are the options:

a. our knowledge of logic is not universal, necessary, and certain. if this statement is true, well, then, the conversation ends. there are no conclusions possible. time to finish our beers and go home.

b. our knowledge of logic is universal, necessary, and certain. if this statement is true, certain conclusions follow, including the conclusion that our knowledge of the "rules of logic" corresponds to "actual truth," "the way things are," or "reality." moreover, if (b) is granted, it becomes clear that we should adopt "logic" as a model for approximating truth not merely because "it works" but because "logic" reflects "actual truth" or "reality." "logic" places demands on our minds; we may not, unless we are insane, manipulate it for our own ends.

(4) up to this point, each person on this thread has assumed the "validity of logic" and expected others to know and abide by "the rules of logic." given that "logic" is -- or at least seems to be -- at least one form of universal, necessary, and certain knowledge, i think plantinga's argument remains defensible. i'd like to submit that "logic" is ontologically prior to our minds and that our "cognitive faculties" may be judged to be reliable/unreliable in relation to this ontologically prior "logic."

(5) michael's comments about john henry newman intrigue me.

Ray, you claimed that my view on natural selection, was "exactly wrong''. Clearly this was unfair, on your part. My definition was probably incomplete.


if one believes that something is untenable, then one believes that it's questionable, and you clearly, do you not, believe that belief in God is questionable?

What, precisely, about evolutionary belief, do you think, makes belief in god questionable?

Ray, my hope is to have a fruitful, intelligent conversation, but I think that it's fair to say that you believe that belief in God is untenable. You've never used these words, but everything else you've said, implies that you mean that. So I stand by my statement.

are you an atheist? If so, by definition, you believe that belief in God is untenable. I respect the atheistic position, but I believe that it's untenable. With respect, perhaps you don't know what "untenable'' means?

Bret, I read your initial words as ignoring natural selection, and ypour second as conflating it with mutation. I see that a lot from creationists, so perhaps I'm oversensitive. If that wasn't your intention I apologize.

A position is untenable when it cannot be reasonably defended. Examples might be astrology or flat-Earth-ism. They've been so thoroughly disproven that no one who's at all open to evidence or argument can hold them.

Some positions can reasonably be defended either way. Life on other planets, for example. We have some good reasons to think there might be extraterrestrial life, and some good reasons to think otherwise. Neither position is untenable. I might question anyone with a strong conviction either way, but I couldn't call their position indefensible.

So believing that something is questionable is different from believing that it's untenable.

Belief in God, in general, isn't totally indefensible. Specific conceptions of god(s) may be. Based on the 'argument from evil', I think the Judeo/Christian/Islamic conception of God is incoherent. But I don't say that no 'god' of *any* type could exist... but a la Laplace, I've had no need of that hypothesis so far to account for things. Evolution doesn't count against most conceptions of God, it just undermines some arguments for them. So evolution doesn't make belief in God untenable.

andrew - I think you've got the gist of my position, but it's both more and less radical than that. I think "actual truth" exists (if it didn't, would that be an actual truth?), but I think it's accessible to humans only imperfectly.

In the realms of logic and mathematics, we come closest to actual truth. But as I said above, "even in mathematics, flaws are found in proofs from time to time". We're pretty sure Fermat's Last Theorem is finally proven, but flaws have been found before - there might be an error lurking there somewhere.

We never get to 100% certainty. We can add nines to 99.999...%, but we can't get to 100%. Some things are so close to certain that there's no practical reason to doubt them (for example, I would be comfortable making a bet that, by Peano's axioms, 2+2=4... and if I were wrong, you could cut off my arm).

(BTW, I'm not even certain about "we never get to 100% certainty". I've never received a revelation, but if I did, that might change my mind.)

And given that, we have logical and practical reasons to think that brains can converge on truth. Absolute truth, like absolute zero, isn't reachable by us mortals. But if reality does exist, it does constrain what we'll see when we test our theories... and it constrains what evolving beings can believe and survive.

Ray, thank you, for your response. It's great to interact with someone who's honest, and searching for the truth. Thanks for your explanation, it makes sense.

I would tend to agree with Ray's explanation, but with the following amplification:

On issues where cognitive biases (e.g. confirmation bias) are known to be implicated, then the reliability is relatively low. On issues where methodologies have been put in place to compensate for various sorts of unreliability, the reliability will be relatively higher. Such methodologies would include the scientific method, but I think that mathematics and formal logic could also, arguably, be considered in this group. These methodologies (or "heuristics" as I described them above) do not give us total or immediate reliability, but do mean that claims subjected to them are more reliable, and become more reliable still, over time, with repeated testing.

thanks for everyone's input. i very much look forward to hearing more of your insights.

i remember one of joe carter's posts a few months ago where he posited criteria for evaluating worldviews. among these was "internal coherence based on logic" -- that is, if a proposition is assumed to be true (with certainty or not), its logical implications should be explored and judged to be tenable/untenable on logical grounds.

perhaps logic is not universal, necessary, and certain. i'd have a hard time being convinced of the truth of this proposition.... but as a thought experiment, suppose we agree that at least logic is universal, necessary, and certain. i think it follows that:

(1) propositions such as "our noetic equipment evolved by chance" have logical implications

(2) these logical implications can be explored and judged to be tenable/untenable at least on logical grounds (if not probabilistic grounds)

perhaps this logical method is all joe carter wants to defend. and on close inspection, it becomes clear that "access to truth" and "certainty" are not prerequisites for us to engage in this exploration unless "logic" itself is "uncertain."

in other words, whether or not a person can be certain that "our noetic equipment evolved by chance" is irrelevant to whether the logical implications of this proposition are logically tenable. logic as a method -- if it is universal, necessary, and certain -- can be used fairly and logically despite epistemic uncertainties elsewhere.

i am simply not sure whether this analysis would also be true of probabilistic methods.

i am also wondering: how many times would one have to test 2+2=4 before having reliable knowledge of its "truth?"

i have a machete ready to cut off ray's arm, but something tells me i ain't gonna be using it....

This is a nice long thread, and much of what I would have put in has been covered by others. I would definitely have brought in Feynman's talk about science as a method to prevent us from fooling ourselves.

Joe writes:
[[“With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has always been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy,” wrote Charles Darwin. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”]]

Note that the above says "a monkey's mind" not a whole society of minds with a tradition of thousands of years of passing knowledge (true and not so true) through symbolic representation outside the genetic inheritance. The extent to which natural selection promotes that ability has yet to be studied.

Joe continues:
[[Although Darwin admits he wasn’t much of an abstract thinker, he could not shake the “inward conviction” that “the Universe is not the result of chance.” Unlike many who followed after him, he appears to have intuitively understood the paradox of combining naturalism with evolutionary theory: If evolution is a non-teleological process, it undercuts our ability to trust that we can form true beliefs and convictions.]]

First, what evidence do you have as to Darwin's "inward conviction"? Next, if Darwin's inward conviction were as you say, so what? Remember, he did not publish that and ask for peer review. What Darwin was right or wrong about in his time is not a bound on what we know is true or false, today.

As for the idea that a non-teleological process somehow cannot produce "reliable equipment" again, based on what evidence? Others have approached this above, I will just note that simulations of non-teleological evolution can, and do, produce control systems and nothing in theory prevents reliable equipment from being achieved out of ensembles of such; and evolution does ensembles a plenty.

Continuing with Joe:
[[To have trustworthy convictions, we have to have properly functioning noetic equipment (i.e., a brain, spinal cord, sensory apparatus, etc., that recognize reality). But can a strictly materialistic, non-teleological, evolutionary process produce such reliable equipment? The philosopher Alvin Plantinga, one of the greatest thinkers of our era, thinks the answer is “no.” Although his argument is too complex and tightly argued to be adequately summarized, the basic outline of his case shows his point to be all but incontrovertible. ]]

No, no, a thousand times no. You do not get to tell us we must accept an explanation that is too complex for you to tell us.

Onward:
[[Plantinga claims, not that evolution is untrue, but that the truth of evolution is incompatible with the truth of naturalism. “As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go,” he argues. “Hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life.”

What does imply that life is not directed, he adds, is not evolutionary theory itself, but the theory of unguided evolution: the idea that “neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing, or orchestrating the course of evolution.” For our purposes, we’ll call this view “evolutionary naturalism.”]]

No, what we see in the scientific evidence is that there is neither an indication nor a need for direction. It would not be possible to rule out direction that leaves no evidence of its action. We can't show evolution was not directed by Leprechauns or anything else that leaves no evidence.

Back to Joe:
[[Evolutionary naturalism assumes that our noetic equipment developed as it did because it had some survival value or reproductive advantage. Unguided evolution does not select for belief except insofar as the belief improves the chances of survival. The truth of a belief is irrelevant, as long as it produces an evolutionary advantage. This equipment could have developed at least four different kinds of belief that are compatible with evolutionary naturalism, none of which necessarily produce true and trustworthy cognitive faculties. ]]

Again, this kind of look at evolution is about the maps of the outside world that naturally form in the brains of individuals, and puts no necessary constraints on the development of knowledge that is formed and passed on in culture, especially the culture after the development of the scientific method. As others have said, the scientific method is all about getting reliable knowledge from the work of imperfect humans.

Joe says:
[[Take Zed, a prehistoric caveman. Zed is the first to cross the line over tohomo sapien (his parents are very proud) and is the first to develop functioning noetic equipment that is the equivalent of our own. His equipment could produce four types of beliefs. ]]

It is very important to understand that there was no "first homo sapien" we only see these changes looking back over long time periods at the characteristics of the study groups. It is like the Sorites question in philosophy of the exact grain of sand that turns a pile into a dune. In the history of human evolution every next generation looked and acted exactly like their parents. The process works over long time periods through the changing distribution of gene frequencies in a breeding population, which is difficult to see happening at any given point.

I am going to skip over the discussion of "Zed" because the issue of the validity of the beliefs of any given individual is not a restriction on the collective knowledge.

Back to Joe:
[[If, as evolutionary naturalism claims, our noetic equipment might have developed in different ways, then a belief in evolutionary naturalism itself could be any of the four types of belief listed above. What is the likelihood that evolutionary naturalism has produced in us cognitive equipment able to reliably form true beliefs and know that they are true? Extremely low. Even then, we could never truly know that we knew the truth, because we would know our belief might merely be the most advantageous to us.]]

No, because Zed did not come up with evolutionary naturalism by himself with only himself to talk to.

Finally:
[[In order to accept the naturalistic evolutionary explanation for the development of our noetic equipment we have to be agnostic about its reliability. All we would really know is that it works for evolutionary purposes, not for the purposes of discerning truth from falsehood. Evolutionary naturalism, it turns out, is a self-defeating argument. If we believe the theory, we have no reason to believe the theory is true.]]

Yes, without education (i.e. with only the info in the genes we get from evolution) we really need to be skeptical about our own thinking powers. Thankfully, we have education, and the scientific method has provided us with vastly more reliable knowledge that any one person could ever learn. Just as reliable knowledge produces aircraft we trust to get us from coast to coast, the evidence for evolution is reliable and overwhelming. As for direction, there is no indication, so far, of any kind.

"Evolutionary naturalism assumes that our noetic equipment developed as it did because it had some survival value or reproductive advantage" In so far as something adopting the title "evolutionary naturalism" makes that assumption, it is simply missing a major point in evolutionary theory-- namely that there are traits that appear that may or may not have a reproductive advantage. There is just no way in the small fraction of time humans have had there noetic equipment over the vast sweep of geologic time to conclude that it has any advantage. It may turn out otherwise.

The author muddles extragenic (cultural or learned) information with intragenic (aka genetic) information. While the mind is dependent on the brain, the content and cognitive tools of an individual mind are not inherited genetically. Genetics/evolution will influence the potentiality of descendant brains. Some basic fears and desires are also ingrained. To confuse this kind of belief with a cognitively resolved belief is, at best, clumsy.

The problem with summations of the argument in informal terms is that they don't say anything very informative about likelihood or probability at all. And the idea that evolutionary naturalists need to produce some "necessary" connection between truth and survival value, which emerges at a few key points in the post, is ridiculous. It might be in order if we were never wrong, but in fact we make mistakes all the time. No, scratch that, it would be in order if we were never wrong now and had very seldom been wrong at any point in our evolutionary history. Plantinga is very clear that what's at stake is a question of probability. ...and the fact that complex maneuvers of symbolic logic are not instinctive, but instead require extensive training, doesn't suggest anything to you? Huh.

3) Options 1-3 would appear to be strawmen, as they do not reflect a philosophy of mind that a naturalist would subscribe to (and would appear to be far more compatible with some sort of supernaturalist view, such as theism, rather than with naturalism). This leaves only option 4 as a a credible representation of a naturalist's views. The argument given for depreciating it is invalid, as there is no justification for demanding that "it is necessary for a belief to be true in order to be advantageous" is order for it to be subject to (direct) selection pressure, only that it is more probable that a belief is true (the strength of the selection pressure would however depend on the probability that the belief was true, all other things being equal). Hrafn: You make a good point. i should have included all of these other factors, in the definition, of natural selection, they certainly are part of it. I apologize for not including it.