Introduction
[In the case of both
evolutionary psychology and biblical criticism,] we find claims and assertions
incompatible with theistic or Christian belief; here there really is conflict.
But…I call this conflict “superficial”…[E]ven though Christians are committed
to a high view of science, and even if these disciplines do constitute science
or good science (a state of affairs that is by no means self-evident), these
developments in evolutionary psychology and historical biblical criticism don’t
offer, or even threaten to offer, defeaters for Christian or theistic belief.[1]
I. Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary
psychology –
Evolutionary
psychology is an attempt to explain important human traits and behaviors in
terms of the evolutionary origin of the human species. The heart and soul of
this project is the effort to explain distinctive human traits – our art,
humor, play, love, sexual behavior, poetry, sense of adventure, love of
stories, our music, our morality, and our religion itself – in terms of
adaptive advantages accruing to our hunter-gatherer ancestors back there on the
plains of Serengeti.[2]
Adaptation – An inherited physiological, affective, or behavioral
characteristic that reliably develops in an organism, increasing its chances of
survival and reproduction.[3]
If we follow
standard evolutionary theory, anything produced by an adaptive process that is
not an adaptation must fall into one of two categories: it can be either (1) a
one-off random or accidental effect of gene combination – noise, we might say,
a mutation – or, (2) a causally related by-product of an adaptation or
arrangement of adaptations.[4]
Spandrel – A
trait that isn’t itself fitness enhancing, but is a consequence of traits that
are (Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin)[5]
Steven Pinker: [M]usic was useless in terms of human evolution and
development…[I]t is ‘auditory cheesecake,’ a trivial amusement that ‘just
happens tickle several parts of the brain in a highly pleasurable way, as
cheesecake tickles the palate.’[6]
Plantinga: It’s a
little startling to see something as deep, powerful, and significant as music
denigrated or defended in those terms. Is an activity important only if it has
played a prominent role in our evolution, enabling our ancestors to survive and
reproduce? What about physics, mathematics, philosophy, and evolutionary
biology itself: do (did) they have evolutionary significance?...Indeed, given
the nerdness factor, undue interest in such things would have been
counterproductive in the Pleistocene. What prehistoric woman would be
interested in some guy who prefers thinking about set theory to hunting?[7]
Q1: Does
evolutionary psychology hold that the only value or importance a particular
trait can have is given by its role in our evolutionary history and/or its
fitness-conferring effects? In what sense is it denigrating to these features
of human nature to attempt to explain them with reference to their role in our
evolutionary history?
Q2: What do the
terms adaptation and by-product mean in the context of discussions of human
beings, given their capacity to “repurpose” many of their traits to achieve
novel ends?
à Alternative account: Cultural evolution (Denis
Dutton)
Denis Dutton:
My arguments are
built on the idea that a vocabulary of adaptations versus by-products cannot
make sense of the ancient origins and present reality of aesthetic and artistic
experience. To be illuminated by evolution, the arts do not at all need to be
glorified as Darwinian adaptations similar to language, binocular vision, or
the eye itself. Neither should the arts be dismissed as the by-products of a
collision of human biology with culture. The arts intensify experience, enhance
it, extend it in time, and make it coherent.[10]
“Just-So Story”
objection –
A
frequent critique of EP is that its hypotheses are difficult or impossible to
adequately test, challenging its status as an empirical science. As an example,
critics point out that many current traits likely evolved to serve different
functions than they do now, confounding attempts to make backward inferences
into history.[11]
Evolutionary psychologists acknowledge the difficulty of testing their hypotheses
but assert it is nevertheless possible.
Critics
argue that many hypotheses put forward to explain the adaptive nature of human
behavioural traits are "just-so stories"; neat adaptive explanations
for the evolution of given traits that do not rest on any evidence beyond their
own internal logic. They allege that evolutionary psychology can predict many,
or even all, behaviours for a given situation, including contradictory ones.
Therefore many human behaviours will always fit some hypotheses. Noam Chomsky argued:
"You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah,
that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you
say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and
not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up
some story for it."
à
Leda Cosmides answers this objection as follows:
"Those who have a professional knowledge of
evolutionary biology know that it is not possible to cook up after the fact
explanations of just any trait. There are important constraints on evolutionary
explanation. More to the point, every decent evolutionary explanation has
testable predictions about the design of the trait. For example, the hypothesis
that pregnancy sickness is a byproduct of prenatal hormones predicts different
patterns of food aversions than the hypothesis that it is an adaptation that
evolved to protect the fetus from pathogens and plant toxins in food at the
point in embryogenesis when the fetus is most vulnerable – during the first
trimester. Evolutionary hypotheses – whether generated to discover a new trait
or to explain one that is already known – carry predictions about the nature of
that trait. The alternative – having no hypothesis about adaptive function –
carries no predictions whatsoever. So which is the more constrained and sober
scientific approach?"[12]
Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson: “[E]thics is an illusion fobbed on us
by our own genes to get us to co-operate; thus morality ultimately seems to be
about self-interest.”[13]
Platinga: Why
altruism?[14]
à
Herbert Simon: This behavior…is to be explained at the individual level in
terms of two mechanisms: “docility” and “bounded rationality”…[15]
Plantinga: The
idea is that a Mother Teresa or a Thomas Aquinas display “bounded rationality”;
they are unable to distinguish socially prescribed behavior that contributes to
fitness from altruistic behavior (socially prescribed behavior which does not).
As a result they fail to acquire the personally advantageous learning that
provides that increment d of fitness
without, sadly enough, suffering that decrement c exacted by altruistic behavior. They acquiesce unthinkingly in
what society tells them is the right way to behave; and they aren’t quite up to
making their own independent evaluation of the likely bearing of such behavior
on the fate of their genes. If they did
make such an independent evaluation (and were rational enough to avoid silly
mistakes), they would presumably see that this sort of behavior does not
contribute to personal fitness, drop it like a hot potato, and get right to
work on their expected number of progeny.[16]
Q3: Do you think
that evolutionary psychology can provide a satisfactory account for the things
the Plantinga lists (music, religion, science, art, etc.)? Do you think such an
account is necessary to maintain the plausibility of evolutionary psychology?
Q4: Do you think
these apparent cases of altruistic behavior present a problem for evolutionary
psychology? If so, what problem specifically does it present, and how might it
be overcome?
Q5: What are the
strategies available within evolutionary theory that might be applied to
constructing a satisfactory account of the above traits?
à Below are a few possibilities:
·
Natural selection (adaptation with respect to
physical environment, including other organisms with which a species interacts,
e.g., a tiger’s stripes)
·
Sexual selection (adaptation with respect to
sexual pressures, e.g., a peacock’s tail)
·
Genetic drift (changes in allelic frequency in a
population due to random sampling of organisms)
·
Cultural evolution[17]
(learned behaviors or acquired traits, e.g., a chimpanzee using a stick to
collect ants)
·
By-products/”spandrels” (non-adaptive traits
that are the consequences of adaptive traits)
·
Genetic linkage (non-adaptive traits that are
genetically “linked” to adaptive traits)
·
Vestigiality (genes whose expression is neutral
with respect to fitness or not fitness-diminishing to an inhibitive extent,
e.g., appendix in humans)
II. Evolutionary Psychology and Religion
Some examples of evolutionary accounts of religion:
Steven Pinker: “[R]eligion is a desperate measure that people
resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques
for the causation of success – medicines, strategies, courtship, and, in the
case of the weather, nothing.”[18]
Rodney Stark proposed a theory according to which religion is a
kind of spandrel of rational thought, and attempt to acquire nonexistent goods
– eternal life, a right relationship with God, salvation, remission of sins –
by negotiating with nonexistent supernatural beings. The idea is that rational
thought, that is, means/end or cost/benefit thinking, some to be in the usual
evolutionary way. But having the capacity for such thought inevitably carries with
it the capacity to pursue nonexistent goals, like the pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow; or the ones connected with religion.[19]
David Sloan Wilson: religion is essentially a means of social
control employing or involving fictitious belief.[20]
Pascal Boyer: religion is a whole family of cognitive phenomena
involving “counterintuitive” beings (beings who act in ways counter to our
ordinary categories): for example, religion often involves beings who can act
in the world without being visible.[21]
Scott Atran: “Religion is (1) a community’s costly and hard-to-fake
commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural
agents (3) who master people’s existential anxieties such as death an
deception.”…[W]hile our minds have come to be and have been developed by
natural selection, religion itself isn’t adaptive, but is a byproduct of our
cognitive architecture.[22]
Q6: Do you think
any of the accounts above have any merit? If so, which one(s) and why? Does
anyone else want to suggest a possible alternative to the accounts presented
above?
à Plantinga’s first reply to all of these theses is
just that you can remove certain non-essential elements (typically the claim
that theism is false) and have something that is still consistent with all the
empirical evidence supporting it but also compatible with theism.[23]
Plantinga:
[W]ouldn’t there be another theory, perhaps just as good and even empirically
equivalent to Stark’s, that was noncommittal on the existence or non-existence
of these goods?[24]
Stark-minus: [T]he claim that: (a) religion involves the pursuit of
certain kinds of ends or goods – salvation, eternal life, and the life – by way
of negotiating with alleged supernatural beings, and (b) that it arises as a
kind of byproduct or spandrel of the evolution of the capacity for rational
thought.[25]
Wilson and Ruse-minus: [M]orality – that is, belief in an objective
obligation to treat others the way we would like them to treat us, together
with the resulting tendency to behave in accordance with this belief to at
least some extent – the theory says only that this phenomenon is adaptive at
the group and has become ubiquitous among human beings by way of group
selection.[26]
Plantinga’s second line of defense is to confront the claim,
thought to be implicit to the above accounts, that descriptions of the origin
of religious belief and the cognitive mechanisms involved impugning the truth
of those beliefs.
Plantinga: Describing
the origin of religious belief and the cognitive mechanisms involved does
nothing, so far, to impugn its truth. No one thinks describing the mechanisms
involved in perception impugns the truth of perceptual beliefs; why should one
think things are different with respect to religion?[27]
Q7: Do you agree
with Plantinga’s statement above? Why or why not?
In the case of perceptual beliefs, at least, our knowledge
of the mechanisms that produce them, specifically with respect to their natural
limitations under certain conditions – need we revisit the
blue/black-white/gold dress debate?[28] –
emphatically is thought by most
people to impugn the truth of perceptual beliefs under those conditions. Does
Plantinga mean to suggest that such qualifications don’t apply to religious
beliefs, i.e., that there are no circumstances under which such beliefs should
be suspected to be unreliable?
Objection: [I]t
might be suggested that the cognitive mechanisms giving rise to religious
belief, as opposed to those involved in, for example, perception, are prone to
substantial error.[29]
Plantinga: [M]erely
finding or possessing a source of religious belief, as with HADD
[Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device], does nothing to discredit such belief,
and neither does pointing out that the source in question delivers false
positives.[30]
Q8: Do you agree
with Plantinga’s statement above? Why or why not?
Objection: But
wouldn’t this at least show that religious beliefs lack warrant, that property enough of which is what separates knowledge
from mere true belief?
Plantinga: Not
just as such; after all, even if belief in other minds originates in HADD, we
do presumably know that there are other people. What counts here is not the
global reliability of the faculty or cognitive mechanism in question, but its
reliability in the relevant circumstances.[31]
Plantinga's
proper functionalist theory of warrant
–
Plantinga holds, at a first approximation, that a belief
has warrant only if it is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning
properly in an appropriate environment. Plantinga's notion of proper function,
moreover, implies the existence of a design plan, and a belief's having warrant
requires that the segment of the design plan governing the production of the
belief is aimed at truth. In addition, the design plan must be a good
one in the sense that the objective probability of the belief's being true
(given that it's produced in accordance with the design plan) must be high. The
last condition, he says, is the reliabilist constraint on warrant, and “the
important truth contained in reliabilist accounts of warrant” (1993b: 17).
While it would be an exaggeration to say that Plantinga's theory is “motivated”
by problems for reliabilism, he does tout his proper functioning theory in part
as an improvement over reliabilism: “what determines whether the output of a
process has warrant is not simply … truth-ratios …. [T]he process in question
must meet another condition. It must be nonpathological; we might say that the
process in question must be one that can be found in cognizers whose cognitive
equipment is working properly” (1993a: 208). So, although Plantinga accepts a
truth-linked constraint on warrant — namely, high probability of truth — he
thinks more must be added.[32]
So then, according to Plantinga,
(1) If
and only if faculty F was designed to track truth, then if F is operating
within the appropriate environment, then the beliefs that F delivers have a
high probability of being true
(2) Our
epistemic faculties were designed by God to track truth (design assumption)
(3) But
if naturalism is true, then we have no guarantee that our epistemic faculties
were designed to track truth
(4) Therefore,
if naturalism is true, then it is not the case that the beliefs delivered by
our epistemic faculties are warranted or have a high probability of being true
Objection 1 (Holly M.
Smith): Smith asks us to imagine a computer
scientist who designs and builds a cognitively sophisticated race of computers,
with different hardware than that of humans but the same cognitive properties.
According to Plantinga's theory, many beliefs formed by these computers will be
warranted, because they result from the proper working of design plans that
were aimed at truth. Now
suppose, however, that humans were not designed by God, nor by any other
designing agent. Then, according Plantinga's ultimate theory, human
beliefs are incapable of being warranted. That conclusion, however, is highly
counterintuitive. By hypothesis, the human cognitive properties duplicate those
of the computers. It is hardly tempting to credit the computers' beliefs with
epistemic warrant while refusing to assign the same epistemic credit to human
beliefs.[33]
In other words, if ~(2), then
our beliefs are not warranted.
Objection 2: A
second unattractive feature of Plantinga's theory is the way that it encumbers
atheism. At first blush, it seems that atheism should not force one into
general skepticism. Theological views should not force one to deny epistemic
warrant to all people, including warrant with respect to ordinary
physical-object beliefs. Yet if an atheist accepts the (philosophy-of-biology)
thesis that no sound naturalistic analysis of proper function is feasible, then
he would be forced by Plantinga's account of warrant into general skepticism.
Plantinga, of course, would probably welcome this result. But this is a case in
which one philosopher's modus ponens is appropriately countered with a modus
tollens. In other words, the appropriate conclusion is that Plantinga's account
of warrant is misguided.[34]
Q9: What are the
“relevant circumstances” Plantinga has in mind under which we should expect
religious belief to be warranted? Do you think Plantinga is justified in
positing a special faculty, or faculties, for forming religious beliefs? Why or
why not?
One further consequence of Plantinga’s account worth
mentioning is that you never have a case in which a faculty is operating under
the appropriate circumstances (i.e., functioning “properly”) and also produces
beliefs that have a low probability of being true. This is contrary to
evolutionary theory, which allows for the possibility that our epistemic
faculties could have evolved to yield beliefs that have a low probability of
being true, provided that the beliefs they yield are still in some way adaptive.
Q10: Do you agree
with Plantinga that our epistemic faculties reliably track truth under the
appropriate circumstances? Do you think that religious beliefs could be in some
sense warranted, but still have a low probability of being true (e.g., in the
case that false beliefs about the supernatural might be adaptive)?
Plantinga: What
is a religion/science conflict?[36]
à [N]ot just any case of explicit religion/science
inconsistency is a genuine case of religion/science conflict. Furthermore,
conflict can happen in several different ways. For example,
(1) a
scientific theory might not be explicitly inconsistent with Christian belief,
but inconsistent with Christian belief together with propositions that can’t
sensibly be rejected.
(2) A
theory might be formally consistent with Christian belief, but still be
massively improbable with respect to a set of beliefs or a noetic structure
more or less like that of most contemporary Christians, or most contemporary
Christians in the Western world (and for that matter, most Christians in the
non-Western world).
(3) A
given theory might not be improbable with respect to F and also not improbable
with respect to R, but massively improbable with respect to the conjunction of
F with R, and hence with respect to a noetic structure that contains both F and
R. Such a theory might be so unlikely with respect to such a noetic structure
that it wouldn’t be a real candidate for belief.[37]
An example would be
a theory entailing that if human beings have come to be by way of natural
selection culling genetic variability, then no rational human being knowingly
sacrifices her reproductive prospects in favor of advancing someone else’s
welfare?[38]
David Sloan Wilson’s
“functional interpretation” of religion –
I claim that a
knowledge of the details [of Calvin’s Geneva] clearly supports a group-level
functional interpretation of Calvinism. Calvinism is an interlocking system with
a purpose: to unify and coordinate a population of people to achieve a common
set of goals by collective action. The goals may be difficult to define
precisely, but they certainly included what Durkheim referred to as secular
utility – the basic goods and services that all people need and want, inside
and outside of religion.[39]
Plantinga: This
sounds a bit as if [Wilson] thinks of Calvinism as a project or activity that
people undertake in order to achieve a common set of goals, these goals
including at least that secular utility of which he speaks. If this is what he
means, he would be wrong: Calvin and the other Calvinists weren’t (and aren’t)
embracing Calvinism in order to achieve some kind of secular utility. In fact
it is doubtful that Calvinism, or Roman Catholicism, or Christianity or for
that matter Judaism or Islam are (wholly) intentional activities in that way at
all.[40]
Plantinga seems to want to defend against evolutionary
accounts of religion by demonstrating that many of their central features don’t
perform any evolutionarily valuable function. For Plantinga, asking the purpose
in believing the doctrines of my faith is like asking me the purpose in
believing that I live in Michigan or that 7+5=12.[41]
[I]t’s not clear
that there is some purpose for the
sake of which one undertakes to love God: you love God because he is
attractive, such as to attract or compel love. Christians pray because it seems
the right thing to do, or because they are instructed to pray, and how to pray,
by Jesus Christ. The same holds for worship. When worship is going properly it
isn’t something done in order to achieve some end outside itself: it is much
more spontaneous and immediate than that, and you participate just because it
seems right and appropriate…What is clear, however, is that there isn’t any
goal or purpose or end involved, typically, in accepting the central tenets of
Calvinism or Christianity, and even if there is a purpose or goal or end
involved in worship and prayer, it most certainly is not the achievement of the
secular goods Wilson mentions.[42]
Q11: Is Plantinga
conflating the notions of ultimate and proximate causation? Wilson’s claim seems
to be that these purposes, so to speak, were the ultimate (i.e., evolutionary)
cause of Calvinist doctrine. As such, they are not taken to be conscious or
intentional, or for that matter transparent to observation.[43]
à Plantinga acknowledges this point later on p. 152.
Freud: The function or purpose of religious belief is really to
enable believers to carry on in this cold and hostile or at any rate
indifferent world in which we find ourselves. The idea is that theistic belief
arises from a psychological mechanism Freud calls “wish-fulfillment”; the wish
in this case is father, not to the deed, but to the belief…This illusion
enables us to carry on and survive: therefore it contributes to our fitness.[44]
[T]he processes in
question don’t seem to have as their function the production of true beliefs.
Rather, they produce beliefs that in the context are useful in one way or
another. And exactly this is the way things stand with Freud’s explanation: an
essential part of his account of theistic belief is that it is not produced by
truth-aimed cognitive processes, but by a process with a different sort of
function. At this point the Christian or any serious theist will disagree with
him. The serious theist will think that God has created us in such a way that
we come to know him; and the function of the cognitive processes, whatever they
are, that ordinarily produce belief in God in us is to provide us with true
belief. So even if she agrees with Freud that theistic belief arises from
wish-fulfillment, she will think that this particular instance of wish
fulfillment is truth-aimed; it is God’s way of getting us to see that he is in
fact present and in fact cares for us.[45]
Wilson: The role of [religious] belief is not to reflect reality,
he says, but to play a part in the production of what religion produces. As he
says, “our challenge is to interpret the concept of God and his relationship
with people as an elaborate belief system designed to motivate the behaviors
listed.”[46]
Q12: Plantinga
says that serious theists cannot accept that our epistemic faculties were built
to the specifications of adaptiveness rather than truth. Do you agree with him?
Why or why not?
Q13: Is the
question of whether our epistemic faculties are truth-oriented or more broadly
adaptive one that can be settled by evaluation of the evidence? If so, which
hypothesis is most strongly supported by the empirical evidence? What empirical
predictions does each respective hypothesis make that might allow us to verify
or disconfirm them?
III. Historical Biblical Criticism
A. Traditional Biblical Commentary
Traditional Biblical
Commentary –
[C]lassical
Christians take the Bible to be authoritative in one way or another. That is
because they think of the Bible as a special word from the Lord; as they see
it, God is the principal and ultimate author of the Bible. Of course, the Bible
is also a library, each of its books has a human author. But God has used these
authors in such a way that what they write has the divine stamp of approval;
hence the Bible – the whole Bible – is divinely inspired in such a way that its
principle [sic] author is God. The Bible is a library, but it also like a
single book in that it has a single principal author…[T]he chief function of
the Bible is to disclose to mankind God’s gospel – the good news of salvation
through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, himself both a
human being but also the divine son of God, the second person of the trinity.
Now what the Lord teaches is of course trustworthy; therefore this entire book,
so Christians think, is authoritative.[47]
Plantinga: How
does this work? Just how did this inspiration happen? Just how can it be said
that the Bible is divine discourse[48]
The aim of [Biblical
commentary] is to discover what God is teaching in a given passage, and to do
so in light of these assumptions; the aim is not to determine whether what is
taught it true, or plausible, or well supported by arguments…[These questions
are] not appropriate in traditional Biblical commentary. Once you have
established, as you think, what God is teaching in a given passage, what he is
proposing for our belief, that settles the matter. You do not go on to ask
whether it is true, or plausible, or whether a good case for it has been made.
God is not required to make a case.[49]
Q14: While you
may agree that “God is not required to make a case” in support of the truth or
plausibility of the things he has taught, isn’t the skeptic nonetheless
justified in challenging Christians about whether God has in fact taught these
things? Do you think the case for divine authorship of the Bible is sufficient
to block skeptical challenges like those presented above?
B. Historical Biblical Criticism
Historical Biblical
Criticism (HBC) –
In pursuing this
project, one doesn’t assume that the Bible is specially inspired by God, or
that it contains anything like specifically divine discourse. Nor does one
assume the main lines of Christian belief – that Jesus Christ is the divine son
of God, for example, or that he arose from the dead, or that his suffering and
death is in some way an atonement for human sin. Instead, you prescind from all
of these theological beliefs; you bracket them; you set them aside for the
purpose of the inquiry in question.[50]
Plantinga: The
point here is precisely this effort to be scientific.
Traditional biblical commentary is not scientific, so the claim goes, exactly
because it proceeds on the basis of the assumption I mentioned above; HBC,
therefore eschews these assumptions in its effort to be scientific.[51]
Reason – Includes
the cognitive faculties that are employed in everyday life and ordinary history
and science:
- Perception
- Testimony
- A priori intuition
- Deductive reasoning
- Probabilistic reasoning[52]
Faith – Includes
that faculty, or faculties, that are employed in religious contexts in order to
yield religious beliefs.
Q15: What does
Plantinga mean by “deliverances of faith.”[53]
Is faith supposed to be an additional source of knowledge, something that
accesses or receives truths inaccessible via the better-known faculties of
reason?
Troeltschian HBC – implies that proper scripture scholarship
proceeds on the assumption that God never does anything specially, in particular
there are no miracles, and God neither raised Jesus from the dead nor specially
inspired the Biblical authors.[54]
Duhemian HBC – takes as a guiding principle, not that God never
does anything special, but that the proper procedure, in scripture scholarship,
is to use as evidence only what would be acceptable to everyone (or nearly
everyone) who is party to the project.[55]
Q16: What do you
think is the appropriate way to engage the text of the Bible, and why?
Plantinga:
Suppose you are a classical Christian, accepting, for example, the whole of the
Apostle’s Creed. Suppose you are also, as I believe Christians should be,
wholly enthusiastic about science; you believe that it is a magnificent display
of the image of God in which humanity has been created. Still further, suppose
you see both evolutionary psychology and HBC as proper science. How then should
you think about the negative results coming from these scientific enterprises?
In particular, do they provide or constitute defeaters for the beliefs with which they are in conflict? That is,
do they give you a good reason to reject those beliefs, or at any rate hold
them less firmly?[56]
à To be picked up in chapter 6.
Other resources:
(1) Plantinga
on Warrant - http://files.wts.edu/uploads/images/files/publications/Oliphint/Plantinga%20on%20Warrant%20WTJ.pdf
(3) Wikipedia
article on Alvin Plantinga; see sect. 2.2 “Reformed epistemology” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga
Reformed epistemology
Plantinga's contributions to
epistemology include an argument which he dubs "Reformed epistemology".
According to Reformed epistemology, belief in God can be rational and justified
even without arguments or evidence for the existence of God. More specifically,
Plantinga argues that belief in God is properly basic, and due to a religious
externalist epistemology, he claims belief in God could be justified
independently of evidence. His externalist epistemology, called "Proper
functionalism", is a form of epistemological reliabilism.
Plantinga discusses his view
of Reformed epistemology and Proper functionalism in a three-volume series. In
the first book of the trilogy, Warrant: The Current Debate, Plantinga
introduces, analyzes, and criticizes 20th-century developments in analytic
epistemology, particularly the works of Chisholm, BonJour, Alston, Goldman, and
others. In the book, Plantinga argues specifically that the theories of what he
calls “warrant”- what many others have called justification - put forth by
these epistemologists have systematically failed to capture in full what is required
for knowledge.
In the second book, Warrant
and Proper Function, he introduces the notion of warrant as an alternative
to justification and discusses topics like self-knowledge, memories,
perception, and probability. Plantinga's "proper function" account
argues that as a necessary condition of having warrant, one's
"belief-forming and belief-maintaining apparatus of powers" are
functioning properly—"working the way it ought to work". Plantinga
explains his argument for proper function with reference to a "design
plan", as well as an environment in which one's cognitive equipment is
optimal for use. Plantinga asserts that the design plan does not require a
designer: "it is perhaps possible that evolution (undirected by God or
anyone else) has somehow furnished us with our design plans", but the
paradigm case of a design plan is like a technological product designed by a
human being (like a radio or a wheel). Ultimately, Plantinga argues that
epistemological naturalism- i.e. epistemology that holds that warrant is
dependent on natural faculties – is best supported by supernaturalist
metaphysics – in this case the belief in a creator God or designer who has laid
out a design plan that includes cognitive faculties conducive to attaining
knowledge.
According to Plantinga, a
belief, B, is warranted if:
(1)
the cognitive
faculties involved in the production of B are functioning properly…;
(2)
your cognitive
environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which your cognitive
faculties are designed;
(3)
… the design plan
governing the production of the belief in question involves, as purpose or
function, the production of true beliefs…; and
(4)
the design plan is a
good one: that is, there is a high statistical or objective probability that a
belief produced in accordance with the relevant segment of the design plan in
that sort of environment is true.
Plantinga seeks to defend this
view of proper function against alternative views of proper function proposed
by other philosophers which he groups together as "naturalistic",
including the "functional generalization" view of John Pollock, the
evolutionary/etiological account provided by Ruth Millikan, and a dispositional
view held by John Bigelow and Robert Pargetter. Plantinga also discusses his
evolutionary argument against naturalism in the later chapters of Warrant
and Proper Function.
In 2000, the third volume, Warranted
Christian Belief, was published. Plantinga reintroduces his theory of
warrant to ask whether Christian theistic belief can enjoy warrant. He argues
that this is plausible. Notably, the book does not address whether or not
Christian theism is true.[57]
[1] P. 134.
[2] P. 135.
[3] The Art
Instinct, 90-91.
[4] The Art
Instinct, 91.
[5] P. 135.
[6] P. 136.
[7] P. 137.
[10] The Art
Instinct, 102.
[11] Cite the example of the hypothesis that says we have
evolved to perceive a passerby as more attractive on first glance than he/she
would be on more careful inspection because of the superior utility of not
missing an opportunity to mate with a “rare beauty.” The only problem is that
the situation under which this “adaptation” would have been useful, namely the
crowded streets of a big city, fails to correspond to the Pleistocene
environment, in which societies were small (maxing out at about 300) and
relatively stable over time.
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_psychology.
See also story on NPR aired April 3, 2015: http://www.wnyc.org/story/hr2-mercury-bahfest-science-satire-cancer-vaccines/.
[13] P. 138.
[14] P. 138-139.
[15] P. 139.
[16] P. 140.
[18] P. 141.
[19] P. 141-142.
[20] P. 142.
[21] P. 143.
[22] P. 143,
[23] P. 147.
[24] P. 146.
[25] P. 146.
[26] P. 146.
[27] P. 144
[29] P. 145.
[30] P. 145.
[31] P. 145, from footnote.
[33] Ibid.
[34] ibid.
[36] p. 147.
[37] P. 148.
[38] P. 148-149.
[39] P. 150.
[40] P. 150.
[41] P. 151.
[42] P. 151.
[43] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximate_and_ultimate_causation
for an explanation of what distinguishes the concepts of ultimate and proximate
causation.
[44] P. 152-153.
[45] P. 154-155.
[46] P. 155.
[47] P. 157.
[48] P. 157.
[49] P. 159.
[50] P. 159.
[51] P. 160.
[52] P. 160.
[53] P. 160.
[54] P. 162-163.
[55] P. 163.
[56] P. 165.
