Specter of Reason

Alvin Plantinga (via email) kindly accepted my request for a response to my previous treatment of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).  What I didn't mention in my earlier post is that this is a revised form of EAAN.  So I'll refer to the new argument as "REAAN," so as to distinguish it from the original EAAN.  As far as I can tell, Plantinga stuck to EAAN for the past almost two decades, since he first presented it in  Warrant and Proper Function  (1993), and notably using it in his 2009 debate with Daniel C. Dennett.   I do not know when he first presented REAAN.  It might be quite new.   [Update:  Plantinga has informed me that he does not consider REAAN a revised version of EAAN, and that he embraces the premises and conclusions of both EAAN and REAAN.  The latter, he says, is a different but similar argument first proposed by Ric Otte some years ago, though well after EAAN was first proposed.  I'll c...

Alvin Plantinga's recently presented (via Maryann Spikes at Ichthus77) an explanation of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) . He's setting the record straight about what EAAN entails. I want to respond to Plantinga's presentation of EAAN (I'll ignore the details about the prior post to which Plantinga is responding.) I argue that EAAN is, at best, a straw man argument against an impoverished version of naturalism. At worst, it relies on a hidden premise which places an unacceptably high restriction on what is rationally acceptable. Here's Plantinga presenting the argument: The argument goes as follows. First, I’ll use ‘N’ to abbreviate ‘naturalism’, ‘R’ to abbreviate ‘our cognitive faculties are reliable with respect to metaphysical beliefs’ and ‘E’ to abbreviate ‘we and our faculties have come to be by way of the processes appealed to in contemporary evolutionary theory’). Then we can state the argument as follows:            P1 P(...

[See Update and Update II] Graham Oppy was kind enough to draw my attention to The Nature of Necessity   (1974), in which Plantinga puts forward his modal ontological argument (MOA). Plantinga considers an objection very much like my own  (pp. 218-219):  "consider the property of no-maximality, the property of being such that there is no maximally great being.  If this property is possible, then maximal greatness is not.  But, so claims the objector, [this property is] every bit as plausibly possible as maximal greatness." Thus, Plantinga imagines the following modal counter-argument to MOA: 1) No-maximality is possibly exemplified. 2) If no-maximality is possibly exemplified, then maximal greatness is impossible. Therefore, 3) Maximal greatness is impossible. Plantinga concludes that either MOA or this counter-argument is sound.  Clearly both cannot be.  I question whether either is sound, since I question the coherence of the notion of maxim...

Exapologist was kind enough to inform me that my objection to Plantinga's modal ontological argument (MOA) is similar to one made by Peter Van Inwagen.  I've just read Van Inwagen's argument, which can be found in the sixth chapter of his celebrated Metaphysics . I don't think his argument is strong enough, as I will explain. The MOA aims to show that belief in God is just as rational as believing that God is possible.  This would be an interesting result, since belief in God is widely regarded as less rational than belief in the mere possibility of God.  So if the MOA is valid, it would be very interesting.  What I have shown is that the argument is not valid.  It begs the question.  I show this by drawing attention to the premise that God's non-existence is possible.  That premise is just as plausible as the premise of the MOA, and yet it contradicts the conclusion of the MOA.  The defeat is therefore profound.  All the MOA really shows...

A while back I got into a discussion of Plantinga's notion of properly basic beliefs with a philosopher who blogs under the suggestive pseudonym "exapologist."  I had thought the discussion had ended with one of my comments.  I was quite surprised this morning, almost two full years later, when I received a couple emails notifying me that exapologist had continued the discussion.  Since he doesn't show the dates of comments on his blog, I can't tell if the new comments are recent or several months old or what.  Could the notifications have taken almost two years to get to me?  Stranger things have surely happened in the online universe.  [Update: exapologist has informed me that his new comments were in fact made last night/this morning.]  In any case, I haven't done much research on the topic, and I never was any sort of authority on Plantinga, anyway, so my ability to contribute to the discussion is a bit limited.  With that disclaimer in hand,...

A while back I posted an argument against Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) . At the time, I didn't do a whole lot of research about other arguments against EAAN, but I looked aroung a bit and didn't see anybody making the sort of argument that I was making. I let the topic go until just recently, when my interest in the subject was aroused by a discussion over at Russell Blackford's blog on a new book by Plantinga and Dennett . From what I can tell, the book is an extended version of a recorded debate between the two philosophers which took place a couple years ago. I haven't read the book, nor have I listened to more than the first fifteen minutes of the debate, so I won't speak about either directly. Still, EAAN is not new, and I don't think its formulation has changed significantly over the years. As I said, my interest was aroused. I've contributed a few lengthy posts over at Russell's blog, and I also did a littl...

The following is a slightly improved version of a post I recently contributed to the PhilPapers discussion forum . It is a response to Alvin Plantinga's "Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism ." I do not know how much serious discussion among professional philosophers has been devoted to Plantinga's argument, though I know it is widely heralded by many non-professionals who do not like evolutionary theory. Plantinga wants to use evolutionary theory to attack naturalism, but his argument fails on epistemological grounds. His error is two-fold. First, he fails to state his general epistemological position, and so leaves us wondering what he means by "truth." Second, and more detrimental to his argument, he fails to consider the possibility of epistemological behaviorism, which I take to be the most robust and compelling approach to epistemology (following the work of Peirce, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, and Rorty, to name but a few). Consider ...