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Of Plantinga's three anti-naturalist arguments in this chapter, I found his argument against materialism the most persuasive (for me). Perhaps it is because I very much strongly share the intuition he is expressing. Consider the works of philosophers of mind like Colin McGinn (on cognitive closure), Joseph Levine (explanatory gap), Ned Block (the China argument), and John Searle (the Chinese room argument). It seems to me that the intuition that Plantinga is pointing us to is what is driving many of the arguments of these philosophers of mind, and I find that this intuition compels me against materialism.

The crux of Plantinga's argument against materialism, I think, is in this passage (where, in talking about contents, he's talking about belief-contents):

Suppose Hitler won the war. Furthermore, there were certain nonAryans who had a mutation such that everything they saw was tinted green and caused a harsh pain. Let 'G' denote this new property of their eyes. Hitler enjoyed this suffering, so he allowed these nonAryans to survive. After a few generations, nonAryans with eyes like ours died out, and the nonAryans with these mutated eyes continued to survive. This mutation spread throughout the population.

Consider one such creature, m. Plantinga asks, "But wouldn't it be wrong (not to mention crazy) to say that m's visual system is functioning properly? Or that its function is to produce both pain and a visual field that is uniformly green? Or that the resistance medical technicians who desperately try to repair the damage are interfering with the proper function of the visual system?" (p. 26) This example seems to work against any evolutionary theory of proper function.

Here's one worry for this example.

Omar Mirza has a forthcoming paper in Phil. Studies (available in SpringLink in the 'OnlineFirst' section) where he (among other things) examines three standard objections to EAAN, shows that Plantinga's responses are faulty, and then provides his own responses. (For other Prosblogion discussion of EAAN, see here, here, and here. For Plantinga's most important paper on it, see here.)

I want to examine his response to the tu quo que objection. Now it's dangerous to reach into the middle of a complicated dialectic and pull out relevant little bits for discussion, but that's what I'll try to do! (There is a possibility that I will make hermeneutical errors; I take full responsibility and am open to correction!)

Here's a link to a recent debate between William Lane Craig and Louise Antony on whether or not God is necessary for morality. It was interesting for me since reading Craig's debates and apologetics works helped get me into philosophy, and Antony was one of my professors when I was an undergraduate at The Ohio State University. Both are moral realists and affirm that there are objective moral truths. I didn't find Craig's arguments that God is necessary for morality to be convincing.

However, here's one of his arguments which has some intuitive appeal and that I'd like to explore. He points out that if God does not exist, then there is no ultimate moral accountability. People will not ultimately get what they deserve, whether this be reward for a life well lived or punishment for horrendous evils. This seems to me to be correct. If naturalism is true, then even if there are objective moral truths, people will not ultimately get what they deserve.

But is there any reason to think the following?

1) If there are objective moral truths, then there will be some ultimate moral accountability.

There is no doubt something less satisfying (at least emotionally) with the naturalistic worldview, but I don't know if I can think of any good reasons to believe that (1) is true. And if (1) is false, there is no problem for the naturalist.

Could we defend (1) just by appealing to intuition? Do most humans have a deep intuition that wrongs must be righted and vice versa? But this intuition is weak at best. I would hope for some more argument. Any suggestions?

So there's the theistic explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe and the many-universes atheistic explanation. One of the criticisms that theists have made of the many-universes atheistic explanation is that there is no independent evidence that such universes exist. I was wondering if anybody's put forth the idea that all of David Lewis' reasons for believing in concrete possible worlds are reasons to believe in many universes. With Lewis' possibilism in place, we have a response to this criticism. (I'm sure that's not the only response; anyway, this is the response I'm interested in.) Does anybody know if anyone has written on the connection between Lewis' possible worlds and the many-universes hypothesis?

The by-line to this article in the New York Magazine: "The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church."

Given the topic, I found the headline to be a bit ironic simply because one of the groups Nietzsche is critiquing in his parable of the madman is those atheists who believe that the Enlightenment project and the sciences can continue just as they were without the theistic metaphysics that underlay them.

Otherwise, it's an interesting article that covers some of the history of atheistic "religious" organisations and thoughts by luminaries in the contemporary movement on how to make it mainstream and compensate for the lack of community among atheists that one often finds within the life of an organized faith.

There is an interview with Chris Hedges at Salon regarding his new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists, an attack on the political designs of the "New Atheists" such as Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. Just in case anyone feels that we've been remiss on our Dawkins-harping lately.

I look forward to picking up a copy of Hedges's book, although the impression I get from the interview is that it's more polemical than theoretical. Historically however, the case for toleration has always had an integral polemical component as well.

Here's a hypothetical dialogue between an agnostic and a theist.

A: Evolutionary theory (whether genetic or mimetic or a combination) can explain why you believe in theism. This explanation has nothing to do with the truth of theism. Hence, you should not be a theist.

B: The explanation has much to do with theism. For a good creator would want us to believe in him, and hence, if our beliefs arose through evolutionary means (which you grant!), he would have likely set up the evolutionary pressures in such wise that they should favor belief in theism.

A: You're begging the question by depending on the theism that my argument puts into question.

B: Are you a sceptic about our empirical, logical and mathematical knowledge?

A: I would be really stupid to be such, since scepticism about any of these areas would undercut my belief in evolutionary theory.

B: Good. But now consider this claim: One can give an evolutionary explanation (genetic or mimetic or a combination) of your empirical, logical and mathematical belief.

A: Yes, I can, and I see where you're heading. There is, however, a crucial asymmetry between the theistic case and the empirical, logical and mathematical ones. The explanation of why we hold these empirical, logical and mathematical beliefs depends on the truth of these beliefs. It is useful to believe tigers are dangerous because they are dangerous and the environment is such that true beliefs about dangerous things are useful.

B: But it is useful to believe that God exists because God has set up an environment in which having theistic beliefs is useful for the dissemination of genes or memes.

A debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath has been posted on "The Official Richard Dawkins Website". In my opinion, the typical person who enters the debate "on the fence" will most likely leave siding with Hitchens.

This is not due only to Hitchens's polemical acumen (or at all to McGrath's lack of talent -- he's certainly not lacking for that). Rather, I think that any debate set up as this one seems to have been will always favor the atheist (not to say the atheist will always get the better of the theist).

My first post.  It is a bit hand wavy and way, way overdue (Sorry, Matthew).  Again, thanks for the warm welcome earlier.  Now that we've made nice, feel free to explain how I'm missing something terribly obvious.  

I saw that the opening rounds of the Draper/Plantinga debate have been posted over at The Secular Web (HT to JD).  I wanted to look at Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), which can be stated as follows. 

Thanks to Jeremy Pierce and Matthew Mullins for getting me on The Prosblogion. And thanks to those who welcomed me in the comments section.

I want to start with a question: why are atheistic philosophers so much more certain of their beliefs than theistic philosophers are? (N. B.: I’m talking here just of atheistic and theistic philosophers – not the man in the street.)  

Let me elaborate a bit:

John Schellenberg has written a thorough review of Michael Martin's (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Atheism for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. There are several choice lines in the review, but I found the following rather entertaining.

"But he [Bill Craig] is also somewhat misleading and uncharitable at points, as when he dismisses the hiddenness argument for atheism as ignoring that what God wants is a love relationship, not just belief that he exists (71) -- in the process himself ignoring that the argument he rejects is grounded in points about love relationships, which certainly involve more than belief in the existence of the other, but just as certainly cannot get along without it."

Of course Schellenberg is perhaps best known for his work on the argument from divine hiddenness.