A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Plantinga on Dawkins and Calvinism and (vs?) philosophy

Alvin Plantinga, probably the most important contemporary Christian philosopher working in the analytic tradition, has a lengthy review of Dawkins’ God Delusion.

I have to say that I have almost no appetite for these back-and-forth polemics; I was an atheist for a considerable period of time and don’t feel much need to revisit it. But you always learn something from reading Plantinga. Here he deploys his trademark self-refutation argument against naturalism, an argument which I think has a good deal to be said for it (C.S. Lewis famously deployed a similar argument in his book Miracles, as did Stephen R.L. Clark in his Gifford Lectures).

Also of interest to the philosophically-inclined, there’ve been a series of discussions on the Generous Orthodoxy: Thinktank site about theologians and theistic philosophers, specifically about why the latter don’t seem attracted to the Calvinism that’s making something of a resurgence in evangelical circles. In particular, most analytic philosophers who are theists, even ones from Reformed backgrounds (like, say, Alvin Plantinga), defend libertarian views of free will, which is at odds with the traditional Calvinist view. It’s interesting to see the different ways in which philosophers and theologians approach these issues.

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14 responses to “Plantinga on Dawkins and Calvinism and (vs?) philosophy”

  1. Jon

    The argument you refer to relies on the assumption that Dawkins thinks our senses unreliable. It then follows that anything derived from our senses (i.e. science) is unreliable.

    Well, I can’t speak for Dawkins, but I very much doubt he thinks our senses are unreliable whatsoever. In fact, for what they are evolved to do, our senses are quite reliable. They may be imperfect, but they’re quite reliable. After all, they’ve been evolving for millions of years. Obviously something about them is reliable, or we wouldn’t be here.

    The rest of the essay is elaborate and wordy meandering with a few CCs of fundamental misunderstanding. Dawkins doesn’t criticize theism for not having explanations for the mind and for the universe. He criticizes theism because its explanations are without evidence. They’re conjecture. Made up. A rabbit out of a hat.

    This is the argument Plantinga just refuses to address. He goes on and on about materialism not accounting for supernatural entities. But that’s quite impossible if we’ve never OBSERVED such entities. Once Plantinga documents a single instance of something, ANYTHING, being *created*, he can THEN make the claims he does. It’s for the exact same reason that science doesn’t account for leprechauns.

    As for the beginning of the essay, I’m just utterly confounded. He seems to be contesting the claim that God is complex.

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  2. Lee

    Hi Jon, thanks for your comment.

    I’m afraid I think you may be misreading Plantinga a bit. First, Plantinga doesn’t accuse Dawkins of thinking that our senses are unreliable, rather his point is that on the assumption of naturalism it’s not clear that we have any reason to believe that our cognitive faculties as a whole would tend to provide us with true beliefs, much less true high-level theoretical beliefs, rather than just a certain amount of adaptability.

    Quoting Plantinga:

    “The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he’d have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.”

    And if naturalism undermines our trust in our own cognitive abilities, that includes of course our belief that naturalism is true. Or, at least, so goes the argument.

    Second, I’m not sure where you get that P. is complaining about materialism not explaining observed supernatural entities. Can you point to the passage you have in mind?

    Thirdly, Plantinga is indeed contesting the claim that God is complex. This is a longstanding view in theology endorsed by the likes of Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas. God is held to be utterly simple: without parts, not composed of elements, without distinction between act and potency, being and attributes, etc.

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  3. Jon

    “In fact he’d have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable”

    This is precisely what I was referring to. Naturalism is not simply a cognitive belief, it is a belief based upon sensory evidence. If we do live in a dream world, it is a world that is nearly identical to the actual world. In other words, our neurophysiology is sufficiently complex as to simulate what the actual world is like. Otherwise, how would we survive in it? Therefore our senses are at least somewhat reliable, and beliefs we form from those senses are also somewhat reliable. Theism is not a belief formed from our senses, from what we observe. It is entirely a thought-experiment type of idea. That is why Dawkins criticizes theism.

    As for your second point, Plantinga states somewhere near the end that “…[Dawkins] faults theism for being unable to explain organized complexity,” going on to explain that God is that ultimate explanation. But Dawkins does no such thing. He faults theism for the explanation itself, not for the lack of one.

    And the last point:

    I don’t really understand. It seems like an attempt to promulgate mysticisms in order to avoid criticism. Or as Jefferson put it, “If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro’ the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.”

    Clearly at some level God must be complex, otherwise he wouldn’t be omnipotent and omnipresent.

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  4. Lee

    Right, but evolutionary naturalism is hardly formed directly by evidence from our senses; it’s a complex theoretical abstraction about the nature of reality. I take that to be Plantinga’s point: that if EN is true, then we don’t have grounds for believing that our cognitive abilities would be fitted to that level of theorizing rather than just the minimum needed for survival. Consider: it seems quite likely that animlas have a lot of false beliefs about the nature of their environment, and they survive just fine for the most part.

    On the second point, I’ll have to take your word for it, since I haven’t read Dawkins’ newest book. Though the distinction between not providing an explanation and providing a faulty one may be a matter of semantics.

    Lastly, I’m happy to concede that my one-line definition of divine simplicity was less than crystal clear or fully persuasive, but it seems only fair that critics of theology would spend some time learning about it, considering it’s pretty much been the majority western view from ancient times up to at least the early modern period. Dawkins doesn’t strike me as someone who’s really done his homework here; though I could be wrong about that. And, anyway, it’s not at all clear to me that God must be complex in order to be omnipotent and omnipresent. Clearly God is not thought of as spatially extended, for starters.

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  5. Elliot

    Lee, have you ever posted about why you moved from atheism to Christianity? I’m curious.

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  6. Jon

    “Right, but evolutionary naturalism is hardly formed directly by evidence from our senses; it’s a complex theoretical abstraction about the nature of reality.”

    Well, not quite. Darwin conceived of the idea by looking at the differing species of birds in the Galapagos. Those were the first observations that led to his ideas about evolution. It required certain breakthroughs before we fully understood how evolution implemented itself, and even today there are some things we don’t understand. We definitely have monumental stores of evidence that evolution does take place, however.

    “…if EN is true, then we don’t have grounds for believing that our cognitive abilities would be fitted to that level of theorizing rather than just the minimum needed for survival.”

    This argument makes an assumption that isn’t necessarily true. It assumes evolution is deterministic, that our genes explicitly dictate how we act and react in our environment, and how we can act and react. Well, that assumption doesn’t take into account a crucial and dynamic evolutionary development, the ability to learn. The ability to learn is the ability to construct from simpler ideas a more complex idea. Now add to that the ability to express what you’ve learned (i.e. language and writing), and you have an incredibly dynamic framework with which to develop and pass on ideas, even if what your genes initially gave you was only useful for survival.

    For instance, an ape may notice a stick can fit into holes. He may also notice that holes tend to harbor insects that he likes to eat. He may further notice that sticks are longer than his own arms. An ape combines these distinct and unrelated ideas into, “I will use this stick to get ants from holes where my arms cannot reach”. It has been shown that apes that use sticks like this teach it to their children, and apes who tend not to use sticks like this do not teach it to their children (and so, their children don’t do it). Clearly, sticks are not a part of the apes’ bodies, and therefore are unaffected by the genes of the apes. And yet, the apes can still do this.

    “Consider: it seems quite likely that animlas have a lot of false beliefs about the nature of their environment, and they survive just fine for the most part.”

    I’m not sure if the word “beliefs” accurately characterizes the way organisms operate in their environment. A better term might be “reactions”. Does a venus fly trap “believe” its jaws will shut when an insect lands in them? No, it’s an autonomic response, one that happens to be a rather good way to catch food.

    “Though the distinction between not providing an explanation and providing a faulty one may be a matter of semantics.”

    Well, not necessarily. Science is riddled with lack of explanation. That doesn’t mean the explanations we do possess are faulty, just that we haven’t worked out all of the implications and details. Is Newtonian mechanics faulty? Well no, it’s just a little inaccurate in certain frames of reference.

    “And, anyway, it’s not at all clear to me that God must be complex in order to be omnipotent and omnipresent. Clearly God is not thought of as spatially extended, for starters.”

    From our point of view, the ability to will into existence anything and everything is quite a complex one. The ability to be everywhere and anywhere at once is quite a complex one. You could redefine the word “simple” to be from God’s point of view, and not ours. But I don’t think that accomplishes anything in terms of substantive argument.

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  7. Lee

    Just to be clear, I’m not questioning evolution (I don’t know if Plantinga does). What I question is evolutionary naturalism, or just naturalism if you like, the view that there is nothing but natural processes. The argument, then, is that if the process by which our cognitive abilities developed was unintended by a cosmic mind of some sort, then we don’t have reason to believe that they would evolve to reliably deliver true beliefs rather than simply adaptive beliefs. I don’t think the question of determinism really affects this one way or the other; a partly indeterministic (but non-rational) process would have the same result as far as I can tell.

    Our beliefs, and in particular our science, are only partly formed by sense-experience; they depend in a variety of ways on principles of inquiry that aren’t derived from sense experience (parsimony or aesthetics as criteria for judging theories for instance). What reason do we have to believe that these principles that we find ourselves with are actually truth-conducive? On the theistic view it’s because our minds our finite reflections of the infinite mind that created and ordered the universe. On the naturalistic view it’s not at all clear to me what assurance we’re supposed to have that the principles we happen to have, especially concerning high-level theorizing (as in, say, physics), would be truth-conducive if we’re the products of a non-rational and unintended process.

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  8. Lee

    Elliot – stay tuned…

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  9. Jon

    “The argument, then, is that if the process by which our cognitive abilities developed was unintended by a cosmic mind of some sort, then we don’t have reason to believe that they would evolve to reliably deliver true beliefs rather than simply adaptive beliefs.”

    But what is adapted and what is true is sufficiently similar. Organisms don’t adapt in a vacuum. They adapt to the actual world, to the actual environment.

    Let me rephrase your argument to make a point.

    The argument, then, is that if the process by which our cognitive abilities developed was intended by a cosmic mind of some sort, then we don’t have reason to believe that they would evolve to reliably deliver true beliefs rather than simply ingrained beliefs (via that cosmic mind).

    Do you see how Plantinga’s argument isn’t really meaningful? A cosmic mind could have intended us to fundamentally misunderstand anything and everything we perceive. Plantinga asserts by fiat that the cosmic mind wouldn’t do this, that a cosmic mind is inherently trustworthy. But that’s utterly conjectural.

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  10. Lee

    Hi Jon – thanks for continuing the dialogue. To your two most recent points:

    “But what is adapted and what is true is sufficiently similar. Organisms don’t adapt in a vacuum. They adapt to the actual world, to the actual environment. “

    This is certainly true, but what’s in question, I think, is whether beliefs must be true (even generally) to be adaptive, especially at levels far removed from everyday experience (e.g. theoretical physics, evolutionary biology).

    “A cosmic mind could have intended us to fundamentally misunderstand anything and everything we perceive. Plantinga asserts by fiat that the cosmic mind wouldn’t do this, that a cosmic mind is inherently trustworthy. But that’s utterly conjectural.”

    But Plantinga’s point is about what it would be rational for us to believe. It would in no way be rational for us to believe this hypothesis for the very same reason that (he alleges) it’s irrational for us to believe that our cognitive abilities are (purely) the result of blind evolutionary forces: it would undermine any confidence we had in them. He can’t rule it out as false, but he can rule it out as being incapable of being rationally believed, if you see what I mean.

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  11. Jon

    Hi Jon – thanks for continuing the dialogue.

    Thanks, same to you.

    Let me try to rephrase your (Plantinga’s) argument, because clearly I’m not understanding.

    Things that undermine our confidence in our cognitive beliefs are irrational.

    Is that basically the gist of it?

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  12. Lee

    Basically. I might slightly alter it like this:

    It’s irrational to believe anything which, if true, would globally undermine our confidence in our cognitive abilities.

    (I insert “globally” because there are obviously specific instances where it’s perfectly rational to believe that our cognitive apparatus has malfunctioned in some way. This argument only applies to the normal functioning of our cognitive abilities. We can’t rationally believe that our cognitive abilities are typically unreliable.)

    The contentious premise, of course, is that Evolutionary Naturalism (the view that our cognitive abilities are entirely the product of an unguided evolutionary process) entails that our cognitive apparatus is unreliable for generating true (rather than merely adaptive) beliefs.

    This premise has, I submit, a certain prima facie plausibility, but I’m not 100% convinced it’s true. I think there’s something to the argument, that I take you to be making, that adaptiveness might be truth-conducive. I’d have to think about it some more, maybe over the weekend.

    Cheers,

    Lee

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  13. Consumatopia

    Regarding the complexity of God, even if God is simple, any explanation involving God seems to be exactly as complicated as whatever the explanation is trying to explain. “Why is X true?” “God wanted X to be true”. The God explanation is infinitely complicated in the sense that it can “explain” anything, no matter how complicated. It therefore has no predictive capability, and isn’t really an explanation at all. (That explanations tend to have predictive capability is why humanity evolved explanatory tools.)

    It could be salvaged by constructing a theory of what God wants. Therein lies the problem, though. Every theory of God’s goals is either too vague to explain much of anything, or fails to explain why God would want to create the particular world in which we live. (Far worse than the Problem of Evil, in my view, is the Problem of Junk Lying All Over Time and Space For No Good Reason.)

    That said, if someone DID come up with a theory of What God Wants that actually had predictive power, that would be totally awesome.

    There are some really embarrassing things about Dawkins’s book, though, especially for a writer of his talent. His arguments for religion being a historically bad thing were really silly. Even Dennett is, at times, willing to admit that it’s possible that religion can be good and useful even if he thinks it’s untrue.

    I’ve noticed that a lot of arguments for God come close to, but never quite commit to, saying that God invented Logic. It’s worth noting that Biologists outright condemn Intelligent Design as nonsense, Cosmologists are slightly irritated by Divine Fine-Tuning arguments, but Mathematicians and Logicians could only shrug at the idea of God pre-existing or even being embodied within logic. People working with purely deductive logic never bother raising “why” questions, because it makes no sense to ask “Why is 2 and 2 equal to 4?” Stuff like that is totally in the “What we cannot speak of” category.

    It seems to me that the worlds of religion and intuition would be perfectly at home in a space like that. Science couldn’t touch them–it could only “pass over in silence”. Religion would have to give up on the idea that God is knowable by logical and scientific reason. But I suspect that only a small minority of Christians would insist on that anyway. Unfortunately, that small minority includes a disproportionate number of theologians and theist philosophers, who have institutional reasons for insisting on a logically verifiable God.

    But, given that life can evolve in purely logical simulations, behind the veil of logic is the only place left to look for God.

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  14. Troy

    Christians reject calvinism as well as libertarian free will, for we believe our free is not outside but within God’s providence.

    Calvinists always cite libertarian free will, but totally miss the point how they are misusing this term and bearing false witness agaisnt osas arminians.

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