This post is to move a discussion from Sandbox(4) at Entropy’s request.
Over on the Sandbox(4) thread, fifthmonarchyman made two statements that I disagree with:
“I’ve argued repeatedly that humans are hardwired to believe in God.”
“Everyone knows that God exists….”
As my handle indicates, I prefer to lurk. The novelty of being told that I don’t exist overcame my good sense, so I joined the conversation.
For the record, I am what is called a weak atheist or negative atheist. The Wikipedia page describes my position reasonably well:
“Negative atheism, also called weak atheism and soft atheism, is any type of atheism where a person does not believe in the existence of any deities but does not explicitly assert that there are none. Positive atheism, also called strong atheism and hard atheism, is the form of atheism that additionally asserts that no deities exist.”
I do exist, so fifthmonarchyman’s claims are disproved. For some reason he doesn’t agree, hence this thread.
Added In Edit by Alan Fox 16.48 CET 11th January, 2018
This thread is designated as an extension of Noyau. This means only basic rules apply. The “good faith” rule, the “accusations of dishonesty” rule do not apply in this thread.
Plantinga:
Entropy:
Plantinga doesn’t think beliefs are randomly associated with behaviors. Where are you getting this stuff?
Man, I’ve never seen anyone mangle the EAAN so badly.
Here’s the weak point in the EAAN, in my opinion, as identified by Plantinga himself:
The problem here is that you just think that we’re not in the same boat. Yet, where the rubber meets the road, you show that you have exactly the very same human limitations as anybody else. You cannot produce anything better than anybody else. You cannot suggest a strategy to solving some problem that could not have been proposed by anybody else. You cannot avoid making the very same mistakes as anybody else. Etc. Etc. Etc.
So, no matter what you might claim about God and his love for you, or how certain you feel about God and his love for you, you are as much of a limited human being as anybody else, regardless of what you believe.
Yep. I saw. I even knew that you’d say almost exactly that.
I think that’s one of the weak points in the argument, for sure. (There’s more than one.)
What’s the weakness there as you see it? I’m curious if we see it as being weak in the same way.
(By the way: the tiger-guy is named “Paul” as a dig at Paul Churchland, I believe.)
KN,
I’ll elaborate more on this later, but it’s basically because it gets harder and harder to maintain a system of false but adaptive beliefs as the size of the system grows and the number of constraints increases.
It’s somewhat analogous to the way that liars trip themselves up when someone probes for more details about whatever it is they’re lying about. They tend to contradict themselves because it’s hard to build a system of claims that remains consistent both with the lie and with the truths that are available to their interlocutor.
I can believe it, since Patricia Churchland figures prominently in Plantinga’s statements of the argument.
You don’t get it, the “boat” we are in is not determined by our shared limitations. It’s defined by whether we have justification for trusting that we can know stuff despite our limitations.
Apparently I can produce a justification better than you. 😉
At least that is what the limited evidence you have provided here points to.
What I can do that you can not is have confidence that I can know the actual truth Instead of an expectation that I will believe whatever is most conducive to me passing on my genes.
and mistakes only make sense when there is an objective truth out there which I can approximate with varying degrees of success.
An algorithm doesn’t make mistakes, it only takes inputs and performs an operation which yields an output.
peace
Here is a fun twist on plantinga’s argument that some here might enjoy
http://theologui.blogspot.com/2014/08/can-calvinist-determinists-trust-their.html
peace
fifth, to Entropy:
Your “worldview” lacks any such justification, and you know that, which is why you’re hiding behind your Ignore button instead of confronting this.
fifth:
That blog post is a mess, and it misses the mark entirely. I can see why fifth likes it.
1. It invokes William Lane Craig’s bogus argument against determinism, which founders on this point:
That’s false. Unless you’re being held at gunpoint or otherwise coerced, you are able to weigh the arguments and freely make up your mind, according to your own nature. The fact that your nature is determined does not change this. Your nature isn’t outside of you, being imposed on you by the implacably deterministic universe. It is you.
Contrary to popular belief, you are actually most free if your behavior is deterministic, because that is when your behavior best reflects your own nature, unperturbed by random influences.
2. It takes for granted that theism is correct, which is an obvious non-starter.
3. It holds (along with Plantinga) that if God exists, we can trust our cognitive faculties. This is nothing more than an unjustified assumption.
4. It claims that Calvinistic determinists can evade the force of Craig’s argument by invoking #3. But there’s no need to evade the force of Craig’s argument, because it has none (by #1).
Everyone is in the same boat, whether determinist or not, Christian or atheist, Calvinist or Arminian. We can’t take for granted that our cognitive faculties are reliable. The best we can do is to try to validate them, as much as possible, from the inside.
Brilliant. Instead of letting your mind select or devise the theory or paradigm that works descriptively and explanatorily, you let an incidental paradigm determine your whole thought and vision even when it’s painfully obvious that it’s not working for the case at hand. Way to go, philosopher.
Your insistence on “discursive animals” has been bunkum all along. It’s long overdue that you should see the impasse where it has led you to.
I get it all right. I told you already, your limitations cannot be overcome by your claims.
A justification for what? I wasn’t talking about justifications at all. Let alone useless justifications that are circular answers to self-imploding circular questions.
I told you already. I don’t try and answer absurd, self-imploding, demands. That’s what you have bought into, and you can keep running in that gerbil exercise wheel all by yourself for all I care.
The only thing that shows is that our views about too many things are different, but it doesn’t get you out of the boat. No amount of confidence that you can know “the actual truth” changes the fact that you can make mistakes, that you actually know that you can make mistakes, and that you know that given more information, at least some of your views would have to change. Your confidence, if you really held to it, would be counterproductive, since you’d be unable to correct your mistakes and learn. You’re claiming that you suffer from a very problematic handicap, which you actually ignore in your everyday endeavours. So, at the end of the day, you’re just like everybody else.
Like everybody else! You’re contradicting yourself here. You’re telling me that you’re in the very same boat. You’re telling me that your confidence that you can know “the actual truth” is useless because you might not be there yet. That was my very point. We’re in the very same boat.
Interesting. I think there are some insights there worth pursuing.
I think there’s a parallel problem to be found in terms of ideology. Ideologies can be (often are) self-perpetuating, but the cost of doing so increases over time, because it takes more effort to enforce the same beliefs in the face of changing circumstances.
I was going to take a quite different approach to Plantinga. Just focusing on this short passage:
Sure, it could be the case that most or all of his beliefs could be false but nevertheless adaptive or fitness enhancing. But what is the precise status of this “could be”? Does this “could be” really undermine naturalism?
If this “could be” is simply that of conceivability or logical possibility, then all Plantinga is saying here is that there exists at least one possible world in which there are creatures that have false beliefs that are adaptive.
But that is simply irrelevant to naturalism. What we want to know is whether false beliefs are adaptive in this world, the actual world, not in any or all possible worlds.
Plantinga’s “could be”‘ scenarios would be relevant if the naturalist were to claim that adaptive behavior was necessarily caused by true beliefs. If that were the case, then a possible world in which adaptive behavior was caused by false beliefs would be sufficient to refute naturalism.
But naturalism makes no such claim. The naturalist is interested in the actual world, not in all possible worlds. Getting a cognitive grip on the actual world requires taking science seriously. It can’t be done from the armchair. And Plantinga never leaves his.
Yes, and quoted out of context.
For what it’s worth, Paul Churchland has a criticism to Plantinga that is (I think) quite effective in exposing what is wrong with the EAAN. Plantinga’s response shows that he still doesn’t get it.
KN,
Before we move on to all of the that, do you see the problem with your “endorsed claim” notion of belief?
keiths,
We could get into that, but that’s a different topic then what’s wrong with Plantinga. It would involve getting into the weeds about my views about cognition. I’m game, but I think it’s a bit of a tangent.
The “could be” is conditional probability. And the point is not to undermine naturalism directly, but to undermine the reliability of cognitive/epistemic faculties. The point is something like Naturalism + Evolution = unreliable faculties (i.e. if naturalism were true, then there would be no reliable way of ascertaining that/whether naturalism is true). Here’s the full story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtP-QZ0I0FQ
KN,
The discussion of the EAAN is already a tangent (in a thread called Do Atheists Exist?), so why not?
In any case, it isn’t as tangential as you may think, since we are talking about the evolution of belief-producing cognitive machinery. The nature of beliefs is important to that question.
Also, I don’t see why we would have to “get into the weeds”. This seems like a pretty clear problem with your “belief as endorsed claim” view:
What people like Plantinga forget is what is required for general intelligence and its ability to determine danger vs. opportunity. If every type of danger or opportunity were understood separately, then “false beliefs” might work just about as well as “true beliefs.” However, if you have general intelligence, you fear the large, the toothy, the clawed, and the aggressive. You really have to figure out what typically makes something dangerous, and not think that orange and stripey is what is dangerous, or that a proboscis necessarily is dangerous.
We still tend to have false beliefs about them, attributing to them evil attributes and intentions that are at least unlikely as a whole (maybe true in part). But those are adaptive false beliefs (may as well think the danger as necessarily “evil”), while false beliefs that minimize fear of dangerous entities would be non-adaptive.
Plantinga should try to program a rover (Mars rover, or whatever), or at least imagine doing so, to keep safe without it being cued in to genuine dangers and safe conditions. Highly specialized robots might get away with “false beliefs,” while generalized robots are going to have to be tied to “true belief.”
Glen Davidson
Actually, it’s equally hard to maintain a system of true-and-adaptive beliefs as the one of false-and-adaptive beliefs. You’d require a large amount of genetic information, because each belief-behaviour would need space in that genetic system. Once Plantiga’s got you here, where he wants you (accepting all kinds of hidden assumptions), he can let you do all of the work of making his point.
But Plantinga’s “point” is that the “cognitive” faculties (which are not cognitive, in his examples, at all, but, rather, systems of genetically-and-randomly generated belief-baheviour pairs, no more cognitive than instinct), would be unreliable, so if it’s inconsistent, then evolution+naturalism is in worse shape than he anticipated. Consistency doesn’t matter to him. The worse the better.
keiths:
KN:
Elaborating on that: Each of us has an enormous, interlocking set of beliefs about the world. The reason we trust our cognitive faculties and don’t doubt our sanity is because we can see that those beliefs are consistent with each other and with our observations of the world (though not perfectly consistent, of course, since cognition is fallible and our understanding of the world is incomplete).
Imagine trying to design a set of mostly false beliefs that nevertheless satisfied those criteria and was adaptive, to boot! Plantinga’s argument depends on that being not only possible, but likely under an evolutionary scenario. It’s ridiculous.
And not only does he have to explain the end product — this bizarre collection of interlocking false beliefs that are nevertheless adaptive and consistent with sensory information — he also needs to show how it’s plausible to get there through a Darwinian process, where all the intermediate stages are adaptive.
Good luck to him.
So when you program a rover, the result is the same as Naturalism + Evolution? Not at all like God or intelligent designer?
You are living proof that atheists are creationists who forgot they are creationists.
Entropy:
You are still hopelessly confused. Plantinga’s argument does not invoke “systems of genetically-and-randomly generated belief-behaviour pairs”.
Erik, to Glen:
Glen’s point went right over your head, Erik.
I cannot get the full papers, but it seems like Paul is talking about the role of experience in shaping “beliefs” (very specifically artificial system for generating “beliefs,” aka science), while I have no idea what that idiot and Plantinga are talking about, because I don’t know what those premises mentioned in the abstract might be.
Then how can they be inherited? How could they be subject to natural selection? Please be very clear.
Of course it isn’t the same, except in the ridiculous minds of creationists. However, general “intelligence” that is designed would be similar in important asepcts to generalized intelligence that evolved, because that’s the result that works for entities that need it.
That you’d miss the obvious similarities while ignoring the important differences only indicates how you don’t think well generally.
You’re living proof that you don’t know what the fuck is being discussed in these matters. Too biased to recognize how similarities can arise with different processes, while basic differences (denied by the egregious Erik) are highly visible.
Glen Davidson
His point about how “general intelligence” operates? But that’s not a point he can afford to make, because Plantinga’s point is that on naturalism such a “general intelligence” would likely not arise. A proper answer by Glen would be to show how “general intelligence” could still arise. After that we can begin talking how the thing operates.
Entropy:
They aren’t inherited. I explained this to you already:
keiths:
Erik:
His point about the requirements that a “general intelligence” needs to satisfy in order to be adaptive.
But you of course think well generally and you are also very good at expressing your points. So, name the similarity that you had in mind. What is similar about the “general intelligence” of Mars rovers and, say, humans, and why would it be there in a manufactured rover the way it is in humans?
Based on what, ignoramus? I don’t know much about what the ignorant Plantinga wrote, in fact, but I’m not really concerned if he denied that what should evolve could evolve, since he certainly doesn’t have a good reason for that, any more than the idiot Erik does.
I wasn’t responding to him or you, moron, I was responding to someone who has shown a capacity to think.
Glen Davidson
If you’re too stupid to understand what I wrote, I’m still not obliged to repeat it.
Glen Davidson
Okay, thanks for thoroughly explaining yourself.
KN,
The logic is pretty simple:
1. You say that beliefs are endorsed claims.
2. If so, then my belief about the lightning is an endorsed claim.
3. If I endorsed a claim, then there must have been a claim to endorse.
4. I am alone, so the only person who could have made such a claim is me.
5. Therefore, on your view, I must have made the claim.
6. But if I made the claim, then I already believed it.
7. So I need to believe that there’s lightning across the valley, then claim it, then endorse the claim, in order to arrive at the belief that I already have.
It makes no sense. Your “endorsed claim” view of beliefs isn’t workable.
Yeah, take your own advice, egregious twit.
I’m so sorry I didn’t obey an ignorant projector.
Glen Davidson
keiths,
It doesn’t matter what you think you explained, that doesn’t tell me how the beliefs-behaviours model works. The Paul-tiger “model” assumes that it’s the beliefs-behaviours that are under natural selection, not the cognitive faculties. take a very good look at it before pretending to respond, because instead of responding you’re sidestepping. be direct and unambiguous. We’re talking about Paul-and-the-tiger. What’s under natural selection in that shit? Beliefs-behaviours, or cognitive faculties?
Remember this other stuff, also from Plantinga, that you posted bacause you didn’t read it carefully enough, but it says, clearly, that the beliefs come attached to the behaviours, with the latter being selected (carrying the belief with them):
So, clearly, according to Plantinga, the behaviours are selected for, and the beliefs come attached to them.
What did you say?
Huh?
@ phoodoo
This thread is an extension of Noyau. Only basic rules (no spam, no porn, no outing) apply.
Exactly. Plantinga is forgetting that he was supposed to talk about cognitive faculties, not about separately inherited behaviour-beliefs. Cognitive faculties are dynamic/situation-interacting systems, not collections of set-in-stone (more like set-in-genes) behaviour-beliefs.
I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction between behavior set by evolution and behavior set by learning. At the physical level, it’s wiring.
It would seem that fairly complex wiring (and behavior) can be modified by biological evolution.
It’s the difference between being able to infer general rules and having pre-set responses. Programmable computers vs. wiring diagrams.
And information processing where general intelligence is involved. OK, there’s presumably some information processing regardless, but a brain that combines and weighs various factors can go various ways, rather than provoking a single response to a given stimulus. A certain amount of predictive capability, based on learned generalities, becomes part of the deliberative process of general intelligence.
Yes, that’s how some bird nests become so exquisite. Nevertheless, many birds will just keep on laying eggs in a nest that has had a hole made in it so that the eggs drop out. Since birds mostly don’t have researchers making holes in their nests, it works all right most of the time. On the other hand, our lineage has had to deal with diverse environments, threats, and opportunities–and social matters, which likely pushed general intelligence the furthest, IMO–and so has had to evolve generalized intelligence.
The bird laying eggs in a nest doesn’t need “true beliefs” about eggs and nests, and would do fine with false beliefs about them (more likely, they don’t really think about them at all). We need mostly “true beliefs” about getting food and reproductive possibilities, for instance, because we deal much more generally with the world.
Glen Davidson
Evolution can do the programming. My question implies a thought experiment. Given a brain and the ability to trace all the synapses and connections, can you tell which are the result of evolution and which are the result of learning?
There’s way, WAY too much in this fire-hose of a thread to keep up with. But regarding the Opening Question: Yes, atheists exist. I do not count myself as one (though I am a non-believer) but certainly atheists exist.
sean s.
Is “the result of evolution” even meaningful in this instance? Evolution is something that happens between generations; my understanding is that no individual “evolves” biologically. So do you mean to ask “can we tell which structures are the result of the individual’s biological development (results of evolution) and which were learned/acquired?”
Given complete knowledge of the typical development of human nervous systems, I suppose you could. But is this the question you meant to ask?
sean s.
Entropy,
Ultimately, genes are what’s under selection. Proteins, neurons, cognitive machinery, beliefs and behaviors are downstream products of the interaction between genes and the environment. Plantinga is writing for an audience that understands this. You are still struggling to grasp it.
If your quibble were valid, then no one could ever say that anything was selected for other than certain genes. Savvy folks understand that when someone says “X is selected for”, they’re talking about the genes leading to X.
Dude, there’s something deeply dysfunctional about your behavior in this thread. I am now, for the third time, showing you this snippet from Plantinga:
It couldn’t be clearer. Plantinga is crediting our cognitive faculties, not inheritance, with furnishing our beliefs.
Your beef with Plantinga here is emotional, not intellectual. You see determined to misunderstand him, no matter what he writes.
No, because evolution and learning aren’t separate. Evolution can’t really handle all that much on its own, there isn’t enough information in functional DNA to make a working brain by itself (and if there were, such a huge amount of information would probably allow too many mutations for evolution to be viable).
We have a predisposition to language, but if the child doesn’t “learn language” from others during a given window of time (early, obviously), the opportunity is lost and the person never develops the ability to really speak. Likewise with eyes, clearly there’s a good deal put in place to make vision possible, and yet if the child doesn’t receive visual stimulation, the vision-processing portions of the brain don’t develop properly (and probably at least part of the visual regions become used for other purposes, producing the vaunted “enhanced senses” of the blind that at least sometimes appear to develop). I don’t think it’s well understood how the interactions occur, but we only evolved the ability to develop speech and vision, we didn’t evolve so that a language-using and seeing brain must develop.
So no, there’s no way of disentangling learning and evolution, for the most part, since we evolved to learn as a part of brain development. What you get from evolution presumably are certain types of synapses and neuron arrangements that serve learning and development for certain types of information processing. For instance, we have a retinotopical map (an inverted bumpy “map” of what appears on the retina) in vision-processing areas of the brain, while we have a tonotopic map (here the “map” is arranged according to tone) in sound-processing areas of the brain. I suspect that the different arrangements of data in the two different regions are already “programmed” into brain, while the finer development of the “maps” is due primarily to learning of some kind or other.
For the most part, the specific arrangements of synapses and connections are due to environmental stimuli and “learning” of various kinds, at least according to my understanding (I’m no expert, to be sure). The types of synapses and certain kinds of patterns are probably at least in part due to genetic control, again, as far as I know.
Glen Davidson
Sure it is. We know that behaviors can evolve, which is to say that “all” members of a species exhibit the same repertoire. Some very simple and obvious, and some more complex. Some “instinctive” behaviors are refined and extended by learning.
But behavior is determined by brain wiring. Some of which changes as a result of learning, and some of it is inherited as a member of the species.
The thought experiment is: Given a brain which can be examined in any level of detail, can you distinguish which connections are the result of learning and which are inherited by all members of the species. No fair comparing individuals.
Via their phenotypic effects. What makes you think I didn’t know that?
Here’s where you make a categorical mistake. Beliefs are not the product of the genes, beliefs are the products of the cognitive system that’s the product of the genes. Yet Plantinga treats them as if they were direct products of the genes. As if we could inherit the beliefs-bevaviours themselves. Read what I write keiths. It’s not that hard. For Plantinga it’s the beliefs-behaviours that’s genetically inheritable, not a cognitive system. He mistakes a collection of belief-behaviours for a cognitive system.
Are you really that dense?
Nope. Plantinga is writing for an audience that doesn’t understand the difference between inheriting the color of your eyes and inheriting belief-behaviours.
Exactly keiths! The genes leading to X! There’s no genes leading to a belief in evolution or in naturalism. There’s genes leading to a cognitive system, and it’s the system that may or may not be able to evaluate the evidence for the individual to accept or reject evolution. Nobody is born with a belief in evolution. Nobody is born with a belief in naturalism. So how could anybody inherit the belief that the best way to pet a tiger is to run away from it?
I agree. I must be crazy thinking that telling you once more about that problem will make you see your mistake. You cannot even undersgand where the problem is. You go all the way to eye color as if that’s the same as belief-behaviours.
The snippet is useless. The key is in how Plantinga treats the supposed cognitive system keiths. He presents it as genetically-inheritable behaviour-beliefs collections. Not as a cognitive system. Check the other fucking snippet you quoted yourself! I showed you the right sentence. I cannot do more than that. You have to read it yourself. I cannot force your eyes, you have to read it yourself.
I think referring to inherited behaviors as “learning” only muddies the water.
Do we even know whether inherited behaviors are “encoded” in the brain exactly as “learned” behaviors are? I suspect we really don’t know that yet. Given that establishing things in memory (“learning”) is a process, I have my doubts about learning being stored as instinct is. Are inherited behaviors subject to the process that shifts information from short-term to long-term memory? I think not.
My original opinion was that, given enough information about “typical brain development” and how memory works, one could IN THEORY distinguish inherited information from learned.
Glen Davidson makes a strong case for saying no. but even if Glen’s wrong, the difficulty of making this determination would likely be extreme. Maybe not as extreme as recovering all the information from matter falling into a black hole, but still very, very hard. Disentangling predispositions to certain mental processes (like language-learning) from the results of that predisposition might be … challenging.
Having come late to this circus, I don’t see the potential significance of this question. I could speculate on where you’re going with this, but I’d prefer not to.
sean s.
I’m not making any claims
Sure you are, You are trying to demonstrate that you are justified in trusting your cognitive faculties by refuting Plantinga’s argument.
Not very successfully I would add
Confidence is not the same thing as certainty.
Certainty is not necessary for knowledge.
Truth is necessary for knowledge.
Confidence is not useless if it is justified.
peace