Plantinga argues that the person who accepts naturalism (N) the thesis that there is no God or anything at all like him and evolution (E) has a defeater for her belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable (R). — GodlessGirl
a belief on materialism(which he takes N to entail) — GodlessGirl
This is the only place in the body of the post you mention evolution. You don't really explain how it fits into the argument. — T Clark
I had a hard time following your argument. — T Clark
You'll have a hard time following it if you haven't read Plantinga. (I wouldn't blame you if you don't want to bother.) — SophistiCat
might be worth checking out the associated profile.
I'm interested in the intersection between Plantinga and Donald Hoffman. Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science but his main argument, about how our cognitive faculties are ineliminably shaped by evolution, has something in common with Plantinga's albeit from a different perspective. Haven't been able to find much comment on that on the interwebs but I'm sure someone has thought about it. — Wayfarer
One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the naturalistic worldview].... The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.... Unless Reason is an absolute – all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. — Wikipedia, The Argument from Reason
The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion
My view is simply that you can't provide a convincing naturalistic account of the faculty of reason, because such accounts invariably rely on the argument that reason is a product of evolutionary adaptation. — Wayfarer
.'...we may be sorrrounded by objects, but even while cognizing them, reason is the origin of something that is neither reducible to nor derives from them in any sense. In other words, reason generates a cognition, and a cognition regarding nature is above nature. In a cognition, reason transcends nature in one of two ways: by rising above our natural cognition and making, for example, universal and necessarily claims in theoretical and practical matters not determined b nature, or by assuming an impersonal objective perspective that remains irreducible to the individual "I".'
Aristotle, in De Anima, argued that thinking in general (which includes knowledge as one kind of thinking) cannot be a property of a body; it cannot, as he put it, 'be blended with a body'. This is because in thinking, the intelligible object or form is present in the intellect, and thinking itself is the identification of the intellect with this intelligible. Among other things, this means that you could not think if materialism is true… . Thinking is not something that is, in principle, like sensing or perceiving; this is because thinking is a universalising activity. This is what this means: when you think, you see - mentally see - a form which could not, in principle, be identical with a particular - including a particular neurological element, a circuit, or a state of a circuit, or a synapse, and so on. This is so because the object of thinking is universal, or the mind is operating universally.
….the fact that in thinking, your mind is identical with the form that it thinks, means (for Aristotle and for all Platonists) that since the form 'thought' is detached from matter, 'mind' is immaterial too. — Lloyd Gerson, Platonism vs Naturalism
There's a very big-picture theme behind this line of argument. — Wayfarer
We generally build our ideas and reasoning upon their perceived results and this in itself is an interpretative act. This same impulse might include human sacrifice to keep the crops healthy, or COVID vaccinations to keep us well. — Tom Storm
Did the Greek understanding of reason generally identify this faculty as human or divine in origin? — Tom Storm
To be fair to Thomas Nagel, I only quoted one paragraph. — Wayfarer
One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. — Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion
You cannot pull yourself out of the abyss of skepticism by your bootstraps using reasoning and empirical evidence if the very reliability of reasoning and observation are in question. — SophistiCat
It is good that evolutionary science can give a plausible account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, but that cannot be your source of confidence in them. You have to "help yourself to a little something" (Plantinga's expression) to even start.
But so does everyone, no matter their beliefs. Theists aren't better grounded just because they help themselves to imaginative origin stories and rationalizations of why the good Lord would not allow a malicious demon to systematically deceive them. — SophistiCat
Doesn't follow. Nothing follows if you can't take the reliability of your cognitive faculties for granted. The argument is so corrosive that it undermines everything, including itself. — SophistiCat
So I will continue to take my faculties for granted, except when they prove to have been at fault, which, alas, is often enough. — unenlightened
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