At Uncommon Descent — though not only there! — one often come across the view that naturalism is inconsistent with rationality: if one accepts naturalism, then one ought not regard one’s own rational capacities as reliable. Some version of this view is ascribed to Darwin himself, and we can call it “Darwin’s Doubt” or simply “the Doubt.” Should we endorse the Doubt? Or are there reasons for doubting the Doubt?
Here are some positions I can think of about the relationship between naturalism and rationality:
(1) Endorse the Doubt: if naturalism is true, then rationality is undermined; but rationality is a basic presupposition of all thought and discourse; so we should reject naturalism. (C. S. Lewis seems to have held this view, and Alvin Plantinga has a really nice, very powerful version of it he calls the EAAN, or Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism — we can get into that in the comments, or we can start another thread just about the EAAN);
(2) Endorse the Doubt (inverted): if naturalism is true, then rationality is undermined — but naturalism is true, and therefore so much the worse for rationality. (I would ascribe a sophisticated version of this view to Nietzsche.)
(3) Defuse the Doubt: naturalism and rationality are consistent, if we have a sufficiently emergentist (non-reductive, non-materialist) naturalism and a deflationary conception of what the philosophical tradition has called “rationality” — e,g. “intelligence”. (On my reading this is John Dewey’s position, and he’s very clear that we should reject the entire Plato-to-Kant/Hegel tradition — what he calls “the Quest for Certainty” — in favor of a more modest conception of human cognitive abilities.)
(4) Reject the Doubt: naturalism and rationality are consistent, if we think of rationality in terms of (a) discursive, inferential capacities that intrinsic to <I>language</I>; and (b) these capacities emerge from, and are grounded in the perceptual-practical abilities that we share with other animals (and that characterize each of us at a very early moment of our lives). (On my view, (a) was nicely worked out by Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom, and (b) is implicit in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.)
The key issue at stake between (3) and (4) is how much continuity or discontinuity there is between the cognitive abilities of non-sapient animals and the discursive-inferential abilities of sapient animals. But I take it that a satisfactory hybrid view of (3) and (4), one that locates correctly the different dimensions of continuity and discontinuity, would be sufficient to refute both (1) and (2).
I have some thoughts about how to sketch out such a view, but I thought it better to turn this over to comments before saying too much more.
That is headed in the right direction.
Going by the accounts of rationality that I see coming from epistemology, humans are not rational. And here, I am not referring to lapses. I am saying that we do better than rational agents should.
A rational species would soon go extinct. Rationality is not adaptive, or not sufficiently adaptive.
There is no rational account of how you get from Newtonian science to Einstein’s science.
I’ll grant that the literature contains allegedly rational accounts. But those accounts cheat. I guess the “technical” term is that they are based on whiggish history. The give a “rational” account of Einstein’s science using Einstein’s concepts and data. But a proper account of rationally going from Newton to Einstein would require that the account be based on Newtonian concepts and data.
Post hoc account.
Kantian Naturalist,
The theists who deploy this argument typically don’t realize that it undermines rationality under theism as well as under naturalism.
We can’t assume the reliability of reason under naturalism or theism. In both cases, we have no choice but to try to validate our reason “from the inside”, and we can never be sure that the validation is itself valid.
Indeed, that is why I claim that absolute certainty is a myth.
If memory serves, the best rebuttal to The Doubt was provided by Quine:
Consider two proto-humans: Grog, whose ‘cognitive faculties’ (such as they are) tell him that rocks are good food, and Blurg, whose ‘cognitive faculties’ (such as they are) tell him that plants and veggies are good food. Which of the two is more likely to be your ancestor?
cubist,
In fairness to the Doubters, their position is a bit more sophisticated than that. They acknowledge that some true beliefs are important for survival and reproduction. They just question whether evolution always favors true beliefs (or mechanisms that tend to produce true beliefs).
I’ve always thought the criticism that “naturalism” or some such thing undermines rationality to be a very odd sort of “argument” from people who clearly do not think rationally.
At least not about these matters.
Glen Davidson
The “thought space” for this question is problematic — and it’s a problem that has existed long prior to your bring it up, or posing it this way, KN.
The problem is that the question is predicated on a “flat” or “egalitarian” view of rationality, where each individual proposition is judged on its own for “truthiness”. Animal cognition operates on a hierarchy, which nature enforces in terms of making better and worse inferences about more and less important things.
Here’s an example: humans are in one sense fairly judged as “irrational” in terms of their paranoid inclinations. As UD and many other cultural trainwrecks (religious and otherwise show), we have a strong penchant for positing actors, designers and conspiracies where there are none to be found, when critically examined.
We are inclined toward falsehoods in this regard. Similarly, a deer in your back yard is inclined to “run away!” at the slightest noise or disturbance in the air, bugging out for fear of a predator that is, almost always, not there. Deer and humans have pathetic batting averages in judging threats and schemes.
But that judgment of “irrationality”, while reasonable in isolation, is actually a reflection of a deeper rationale, and a powerful one for survival. Humans (and deer) understand that the cost of false positives when assessing threats is typically very low, while the cost of false negatives is extremely high; if you miss the cue for threat, in the facial expression of a rival tribesman, or for the deer in the faint sound of a predator getting ready to pounce, you might be toes up before you know it.
So there’s a risk assessment at work, one that nature enforces in the harshest of terms. Animals that are not sufficiently paranoid don’t live very long. On the other side, organisms that burn too much energy being paranoid run the risk of out-burning their available fuel supply. The result of these forces is a natural rationality that (somewhat paradoxically) incorporates “tactical falsehoods’, as part of the larger reasoning toward the organism’s goals.
That in no way obligates an animal to be perfect, or even “mostly right” in its judgments about the world. The animal just has be cognitively able to thrive and propagate. If one objects and says, “but that’s not rational, look at all the reasoning errors here”, the response is quite simple and difficult to deal with: what are the goals of reasoning, if not toward judgments and inferences that drive surviving and thriving”?
Viewed that way, rationality is tautologous in precisely the same way survival is. The “fittest” survive, by definition. The ‘most rational’ survive, by definition. If you have an animal thinking, you necessarily have a high level of rationality, as that is by definition how such an animal got to be present today, at the tail end of a very long chain of ancestors.
It’s pointless to consider “rationality” apart from the enterprise of surviving and thriving. If that undermines some notion of rationality detached from humans as natural animals, so be it. We might contemplate a “super reasoning” animal like some bigger-brained version of ourselves. But nature is the ultimate and only judge. There’s no assessing such a view of that ‘super-rationality’ until nature provides its verdict on such specimens. Being “more logical” (per some views of that concept) may dimish the future-human’s ability to survive and thrive in the environment. It may not. But the “truth” of rationality obtains in the survival and propagation of the organism (statistically).
I think that there are two considerations that should be injected here:
1. My brain is fallible, and so is yours, but by discussing with each other and with other people we can come to conclusions that are much less fallible than that. We can come up with logical arguments that have steps that imply further steps, and if we make a mistake doing that, someone will correct that step and the argument will end up being much better than any one person could make.
2. If I believe in evolution, and it makes fallible brains, I must doubt my conclusions. If you believe in Creation, and it makes infallible brains, then does that mean that you are necessarity right about there being Creation? Say what? Why couldn’t your fallible brain, which is brought about by evolution, conclude that it is not fallible because you have (mistakenly) concluded that it is brought about by Creation? And be wrong about that.
eigenstate,
That might wash with a behaviorist, but for the rest of us, the propositional content of our minds is important even when it doesn’t bear directly on our survival. Rationality may have evolved because it helped (and helps) us survive, but that doesn’t mean that we are limited to applying it toward that end. It can be used for other purposes, including the search for objective truth.
Evolution’s ‘purpose’ in granting us reason was to propagate our genes. Our purposes in deploying it can be quite different, as when someone uses contraception or carefully plans a suicide.
Of course. My comments above were in response to the EAAN notion, the idea that naturalism, if true, somehow undermines rationality in a general way. If you read Plantinga, for example, he’s advancing the EAAN as a kind of defeater for the belief in rationalism *at all* in a naturalist paradigm.
That’s just irrational. 😉
Err, rather, it’s the work of a philosopher who can’t be bothered with the subject matter he is arguing over – biology.
Our natural history dismisses certainty and epistemic hubris; our rational minds are not oracles, they are reasoners, and quite error-prone (and in some areas, really poor performers). But this same history proves a level of mastery, just by our arrival at the present day. This is the “reasoning about what” point I was raising that I think is crucial here. Our evolution demonstrates the proficiency of our minds on the most crucial subjects for surviving and thriving, no matter how iffy our reasoning may be in this area or that.
None of that prohibits or disinclines us from reasoning about whatever we like. And I’m sure we’d agree that the proof of our reasoning obtains in the testing and falsification of those ideas. Evolution is the big kahuna proving our rational competence. If it it weren’t thus, we’d not be here to make blunders like the EAAN.
Agreed. I regret phrasing the above in such a way you’d think I understood otherwise. My oversimplified point is that KN’s 1 & 2 are non-starters, once science is allowed to inform the discussion even just a little bit.
Joe Felsenstein,
Yep. Maybe I’m getting too hung up on the Plantinga/EAAN thing, but Plantinga’s claim purports to undercut all of that. We can’t trust our minds even when (or especially when) processes like you are describing are put in place. On naturalism, Plantinga supposes per EAAN, rationality can’t get off the ground at all. Your or my points about feedback loops and corrective epistemology won’t help if Plantinga is correct, because naturalism cannot provide the warrant for trusting any of it. It’s “inscrutable” in its probability of being trustworthy, at best, and quite probably not trustworthy at all, in any regard, per Plantinga.
It could. Proponents of KN’s 1) above advance that as a point in their favor; unless God, you can’t really believe or trust in anything, and on naturalism we sure could be deluding ourselves about our infallible, God-knowing parts of our brains. On naturalism we have no basis to expect that veridicality mattered at all, etc.
It’s a kind of riff on Pascal’s Wager: on naturalism, you can’t possibly trust your mind or its beliefs at all as veridical. So while Yahweh’s not something that can be shown, it’s the only chance you got to have a mind that can really know truth, blah, blah, blah. Might as well accept Christ, because you are doomed to invincible irrationality if no God. If you believe in God and you’re wrong, you’ve lost nothing, because we’re all insane anyway, if so.
Like most Christian apologetics, a little science knowledge goes a long way in showing that for what it is.
hello KN:
You wrote:
“one often come across the view that naturalism is inconsistent with rationality:”
Regardless of whether that view is correct, how would an innocent bystander resolve the question? Did you offer an answer i n your OP?
Rationality is overrated.
I don’t really get the emphasis on it here. Sure, it’s nice to have, but life has been existing without it for billions of years, and most human beings seem to be pretty short of it more often than not as well.
Like intelligence, and like metabolism, rationality is a means to an end, and not the end itself.
To a first approximation, I’d say that yes, evolution does always ‘favor’ true beliefs. This ‘favor’ is not absolute, but more in the line of loading the dice to make ‘true beliefs’ more likely to persist/reproduce than ‘false beliefs’.
Language is rsther new, and formal logic practically yesterday.
Most of what brains do is react and anticipate. Most real life logic is fuzzy and bayesian. What will happen next. What is to be done.
KN – Rationality, like randomness, is one of those concepts with multiple, not-quite-overlapping meanings. I’d be interested in a more precise definition of the sense in which you (or in the context of the post, how you think the people whose position you are discussing) mean it.
To me, naturalism is entirely compatible with the rational in this sense: where rationality is the capacity to approach an optimal solution. Evolution is very good at developing that capacity, where ‘optimal’ is judged in the context of maximising reproductive output. Evolution either hard-wires these solutions into the genes, or builds brains with the capacity to come up with ‘near-optimal’ solutions to novel challenges a sufficient amount of the time to be worth the cost.
The cartoon version of this, as exemplified by WJM, is that maximising reproductive output ALWAYS means “that which is best for ME”, which is not at all how ‘naturalism’s’ account of genetic optimisation works.
This link between naturalism and the ‘rational-optimal’ does have some baggage – the difficulty of knowing that a solution is closer or further from optimal, for example – but that baggage is carried by non-naturalists as well as naturalists. Tapping into the Divine does not give the propositions or thought processes of theists any more weight, however superior they may feel about it.
Have you read Roy Bhaskar’s “The Possibility of Naturalism,” Kantian Naturalist/Emergentist? It was published in 1979. As it seems you have been a professor/teacher of philosophy in the USA, I wonder if this/his work is on your radar. Bhaskar, born of an Indian father and English mother who were theosophists.
At least one must address the topic of ‘transcendental’ when involving Bhaskar, unlike with many ‘western’ naturalists. But it seems to me that you are actually interested in involving ‘transcendental arguments’ in your emergentism, KN/E, so perhaps you will address it here. Transcendental rationality, afterall, distinguishes from crude naturalistic rationality by a significant degree/kind.
Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’ is one of the leading schools of thought today in philosophy (of course there are others too). So I wonder if you’ve contemplated his views and/or even teach them. They appear to be somewhat difficult for N. Americans raised in the narrow analytic philosophical tradition to wrestle with and they certainly involve non-naturalistic ideas and ‘rationality’ in dialogue.
Your ’emergentism’ from the previous thread, many questions unanswered, is still under fire btw, as I’m sure you know. But it seems you plan to answer questions or unfurl new emergentism someday in the future here at The Skeptic Zone.
Professional philosopher-skeptics; perhaps the most entertaining and most boring/irrelevant version of skeptics. I hope you’ll prove to be of the entertaining variety here KN/E.
Gregory
One way to justify rational though under naturalism is to start with a computational theory of the mind. Computers are physical things which can manipulate symbols logically while preserving semantic value, so explanations based on this idea provide a start at explaining how naturalistic systems can behave logically.
But it is only a start. One challenge is to justify how the symbols manipulated by the mind get content.
This challenge is where I understand Plantinga’s latest formulation of his argument concentrates (see for example his 2010 summary in SEP, section 5 of the article on Science and Religion. Also see this review of a book dedicated to analyzing his argument.
Plantinga claims that the probability that our beliefs are reliable, given only naturalism and (unguided) evolution, is low or inscrutable and uses this premise as the basis for an argument that one who thinks his beliefs are reliable should therefore reject the conjunction of naturalistic and evolution. He justifies the premise by arguing that evolution selects only for behavior, that behavior is based on physical states of the brain, and that we have no reason to link the contents of a belief to the underlying physical brain state.
So if you want to argue against EAAN, it is not enough to argue that evolution can select mechanisms to generate reliable beliefs without providing an argument relating mental contents to the physical brain and showing how evolution could generate such a mechanism.
Philosophers have tried to do this, for example causal explanations supplemented by teleological function, but there is no generally accepted approach, and that incompleteness/controversy is what Plantinga incorporates into his argument to justify his premise. As the review I linked to notes, this can be thought of as a “God of the Gap” type of argument.
I am not familiar with how Robert Brandom approaches these issues, and I look forward to KN’s explanation.
Under naturalism, what’s the point of caring if one is rational or not? It seems to me that there’s a lot of effort being put forward to justify something that’s simply not necessary to care about under the paradigm.
BruceS,
True, but Plantinga et al would argue that the mere possibility of physically-based rational systems is not enough. Irrational physically-based cognitive systems are also possible. We have to know, or at least have strong reasons for believing, that our particular physically-based cognitive systems are rational, not irrational.
Since evolution ‘cares’ only about reproductive success, not truth per se, we cannot take for granted that evolution has supplied us with reliable cognitive systems. Indeed, while our minds are quite powerful, we know that they are also defective in many ways.
I am sympathetic with that part of Plantinga’s argument. He’s correct that reason might not be reliable. I just think he fails to realize that the same problem afflicts his theism.
The weakness of the EAAN is easy to demonstrate if you boil it down to its essence:
In response, I offer the TAAT (Theological Argument Against Theism):
We know that God (if he exists) has given other creatures imperfect minds. We know that ours are imperfect in important ways. We therefore cannot assume that any particular thought we have is absolutely correct and immune from error.
William J. Murray:
William,
The short answer is that naturalists aren’t idiots.
I’ll let you ponder why it would be idiotic for a naturalist not to care about rationality.
BruceS,
This is another instance of Plantinga waving the magic theistic wand and declaring that the problem doesn’t apply to theists, only to naturalists. How does he know, under theism, that the contents of our thoughts bear any necessary relation to reality?
He doesn’t. He just assumes that it magically happens.
“1) If we assume that God produced our minds, then
2) …our minds might not be reliable;” – keiths
This is a faulty premise. You seem to be assuming that what you call ‘God’ is not reliable or reasonable or cannot ‘guide’ evolution. Taking a theistic evolution perspective and/or believing that human beings are created in imago Dei adequately overturns your premise.
The logic is also faulty, keiths, when you try to parallel EAAN with TAAT. TAAT, as you propose it is self-contradictory; it makes no sense for a theist to try to defeat theism. If you were to propose TAAN, that would potentially make sense (and others, quite a few, have done this before, to varying degrees of success and failure). But I don’t think you would choose to argue TAAN from the skeptical, atheist or agnostic perspective (whatever you call it) that you currently hold.
Indeed, I think it is largely because you personally consider yourself as a ‘naturalist’ that fuels the desire to communicatively oppose any challenge to ‘naturalism.’ Just curious: are you a practising natural scientist, keiths?
I’ll take that to mean that you don’t have an answer.
As you have cheerfully admitted, you believe what you want to believe, regardless of evidence.
Enjoy yourself.
Gregory,
To the contrary, I’m not making any assumptions about God. He might be benevolent, or he might not. He might want us to be rational, or he might not. It is theists like Plantinga who are making the unwarranted assumption that if theism is true, then our minds are reliable. It’s called ‘assuming your conclusion’.
Plantinga assumes evolution for the sake of argument and concludes that cognition may not be reliable. I assume theism for the sake of argument and conclude that cognition may not be reliable. The logic is the same. We’re all in the same boat. Cognition may not be reliable.
There are lots of things we can do to increase our confidence in our conclusions, but we’re never justified in claiming absolute certainty.
I’m not as label-obsessed as you seem to be. I’m a naturalist because I think naturalism is true, not because I want to wear the label or belong to the Naturalist’s Club.
No, I’m an engineer.
You really think the ability to reason, or the desire that one’s reasoning should approach an actual state-of-affairs in the ‘outer world’, should only matter to theists?
The first error in keiths argument is that he assumes that mind under theism is categorically the same as mind under naturalism, and that mental error under naturalism is categorically the same as “mental error” under theism.
Mind under naturalism is assumed to be the product of forces unconcerned with truth or logic and are therefore at the root considered by Platinga and others to be fundamentally, necessarily flawed when mind considers logic and truth.
Mind under theism is categorically different from mind under naturalism. There are different theological conceptualizations of what mind is and how/why it produces errors. Mind is not always considered “one thing” under theistic accounts, and generally at least one aspect of mind, under theism, is considered to be fundamentally concerned with arbiting truth.
The second error in keiths argument is that he employs a stolen concept. Under naturalism, there is no such thing as a “flawed mind” because there is no ideal or perfect mind by which to compare any mind against. Minds under naturalism are just whatever happenstance interactions of physics generates; it makes no more sense to speak of a “flawed mind” under naturalism than it makes sense to speak of a “flawed tree” or a “flawed cloud”.
His argument fails because the term “flawed” has no standing as a conceptual basis for any argument except when one adopts idealism/theism; therefore, to make an argument rooted in the “flawed” mind concept genetically requires assumption of a theistic/idealist world.
Logically, there are no “flawed minds” under naturalism, nor any flawed mental output.
keiths,
Whatever excuse you require to avoid answering the question.
I asked a question, Allan:
It seems to me that caring about whether or not one is rational, and caring about whether or not an particular statement is true or not, is a stolen obligation. Darwinistic evolution (and broader naturalism) doesn’t care if it produces true statements; it only “cares” that it produces reproducible statements.
I can understand the search for truth for its own sake on theistic terms, but under naturalistic terms, it makes no sense. Truth per se is irrelevant under naturalism.
So, enlighten me. Why should a atheistic materialist (naturalism) care about truth or care whether or not they are rational, as long as they are reproducing? What difference does it make?
“Plantinga assumes evolution for the sake of argument and concludes that cognition may not be reliable. I assume theism for the sake of argument and conclude that cognition may not be reliable. The logic is the same.” – keiths
No, the logic is not the same. ‘Theism’ and ‘evolution’ don’t work well in opposition because one can be a ‘theist’ and accept evolution (in a limited sense); some of these people call themselves ‘theistic evolutionists’ or speak of an ‘evolutionary creation,’ including ‘nature,’ that is guided by the Creator-God. A theist, however, cannot accept evolutionism as a ideological worldview substitute for religion. But that should be obvious.
“I’m a naturalist because I think naturalism is true” – keiths
That’s your choice; it is not ‘determined’ by nature that you must be an ideological ‘naturalist’. Overcoming ‘naturalism’ is even possible in reconciliating with or rejecting scientistic disenchantment from the 20th c. I’d suggest reading Max Weber’s lecture/short article “Science as a Vocation” as a start (you can find it here: http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf).
“Who–aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences–still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? If there is any such ‘meaning,’ along what road could one come upon its tracks? If these natural sciences lead to
anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the ‘meaning’ of the universe die out at its very roots.” – Weber (1919)
“Just curious: are you a practising natural scientist, keiths?” – Gregory
“No, I’m an engineer.” – keiths
Hmmm, then don’t you believe in or accept the ‘reality’ of the ‘artificial,’ which is categorically not-natural? The things that engineers ‘engineer’ are ‘artificial’ human constructions. One doesn’t have to be a professional philosopher to adopt this vocabulary of categories. It’s quite common for millenials (young people) to think this way; renegotiating the meanings of organic, mechanical and electronic in the aftermath of ‘natural’ vs. ‘cultural’ (or ‘nature’ vs. ‘nurture’).
What betrays lunacy is when people contend that buildings, technologies, books, webpages, gadgets and other artefacts are *all* ‘just natural’ because of their a priori committment to ‘naturalism uber alles.’
keiths’ allegiance to the ideology of naturalism (and it cannot be anything *but* an ideology, which is sometimes elevated into a pseudo-worldview intertwined with agnosticism or atheism) seems similar to what KN/E rejects in the term ‘materialism.’ I do hope KN/E will explain himself, as there are still many questions open and unanswered that challenge the coherence of his ‘philosophical’ (i.e. not ‘theosophical’) worldview.
In my view it makes no sense to altogether question our own rationality. Of course, we can point out some limitations on our rationality. But to deny that we have any rationality at all is to deny that we have sufficient rationality to conclude that we have no rationality. It’s self-defeating. I more or less agree with Plantinga that, if naturalism was inconsistent with rational belief, we would have to abandon naturalism. But of course I don’t agree that naturalism is inconsistent with rational belief.
As far as I’m concerned, rational belief is just based on the working of truth-conducive cognitive processes. Those processes are rooted in adaptive evolution, supplemented by social and individual development: nature and nurture. There’s no fundamental difficulty.
One problem arises from some ambiguity in the words “rational” and “rationality”. I think these sometimes have connotations of conscious, reflective thought, probably involving language. In that sense we would probably say that non-human animals are not capable of rational belief, and that our intuitions are not rational either. But I would use the words in a broader sense, including all reasonably accurate models of reality as “true beliefs”, whether or not they are conscious or verbal, and all truth-conducive cognitive processes as “rational”. Roughly speaking, the beliefs that are based on such processes can then be considered rational beliefs. In this sense, I can have a rational belief that it’s raining, based on well-functioning cognitive processes operating on the data from my eyes, without the need for any conscious reflection on the matter.
You are mistaking part of the assumption for a conclusion derived from the assumption. It is part of the theistic premise in question that minds are created with the capacity for arbiting true statements about self and world, not a conclusion derived from theistic premise.
The theistic premise in question is not one where God creates minds that necessarily produce errors; you are changing out the premise and acting as if your different theistic premise is a possible conclusion of the actual theistic premise which precludes such a god in the first place.
Gregory,
It’s exactly the same. Plantinga assumes his opponents’ position arguendo — that our minds are shaped by evolution — and reasons from this to the conclusion that our minds might not be reliable.
I assume Plantinga’s position arguendo — that God shaped our minds — and reason from this to the conclusion that our minds might not be reliable.
Plantinga is no more entitled to assume that God provides us with reliable intellects than I am entitled to assume that evolution does so.
I’ll remember that if I ever find myself scientistically disenchanted.
It’s just semantics. ‘Natural’ can mean ‘of nature as a whole’ or ‘of nature considered separately from humanity’. Since humans are part of nature, ‘natural’ in the first sense applies to human artifacts, while ‘natural’ in the second sense does not.
The fundamental difficulty is that “those processes” have no intrinsic connection to nor need to produce “rationality”, thus provide no warrant for any belief that what one labels with the term “rational” is anything more than an entirely subjective, relative product of physics. Unless “rationality” exists in some ideal form outside of the individually programmed brain states, then whatever any individual calls “rational” is the limit of what “rational” can be held as – under naturalism.
Thus, both the claim of X and not-X as rational by two different individuals are both correct claims by the only available arbiter of reason; individual, subjective, relative views. Rationalism, under naturalism, is a useless concept because it cannot even distinguish rational differences between claims of A and not-A.
William,
As I just explained to Gregory:
If either of us makes such an assumption, the first question from our opponents should be: “How do you justify that assumption?”
Of course he is. There is no reason to assume God exists unless we also assume God gives us minds that can arbit truths. It is a necessary aspect of the God assumption when it comes to examining the existence and value of reason. God has the assumed capacity to bestow us with mind capable of deliberately discerning truth; nature has no such assumed capacity, because “truth” and “reason” are necessarily fundamentally different (and inadequate) things under naturalism.
Because it is necessary in order for reason (the capacity to find truth) to have any value.
IF rationality is to have any significant value, THEN it must be assumed that rationality is a certain kind of commodity. Naturalism doesn’t produce that kind of commodity, although it can produce lots of things that can be called “reason”.
The only premise that reasonably provides for “that kind of commodity” is if the creator of the universe and of humans deliberately produced some aspect of the mind that has that kind of commodity – that can ideally arbit true statements from false and find true statements about self and world.
Why? Simply because you want to believe that? It certainly isn’t a necessary assumption.
That’s silly. Reason has value regardless of its source. Reason tells me it’s a bad idea to walk across an eight-lane freeway, for example.
It’s necessary if rationality is to have any significant meaning.
And what of another person, whose reason tells them it is a good idea? Under naturalism, there is no absolute arbiter of what is rational and what is not. Any theory of rationality which can produce both A and not-A as “rational” conclusions is useless.
In the latest versions of his EAAN argument (or the latest I’ve seen) Plantinga tries to argue that on naturalism belief content must be epiphenomenal, i.e. have no effect on anything. If it doesn’t affect behaviour, there can’t be any adaptive selection for reliable belief content. But his argument is based on a misunderstanding of supervenience, or a failure to engage with good accounts of supervenience.
Essentially his argument is that on naturalism behaviour is caused by neurophysiological states, and therefore not by belief content. What he fails to appreciate is that it can be caused by both at the same time, because one supervenes on the other. His claim is analogous to claiming that a flag flutters due to the movement of air molecules, and therefore not due to the wind.
(In my view the distinction between beliefs and “belief content” is unhelpful. I’ve only used the term “content” here because Plantinga does.)
Even if beliefs generate behavior beyond what brain states might otherwise dictate, there is no reason to believe that naturalism produces true beliefs, or produces beliefs that necessarily produce some sort of valid rationality.
Rationality would still be whatever one believes it to be, and those beliefs themselves would be generated by forces unconcerned with both truth and reason other than as labels subjectively applied to various things.
“Plantinga assumes his opponents’ position arguendo — that our minds are shaped by evolution” – keiths
Plantinga’s opponents are not ‘theistic evolutionists.’ Do you disagree?
Plantinga, in so far as he accepts (limited) evolution, accepts God-guided evolution. Plantinga is an Abrahamic theist. Do you disagree?
Thus, “shaped by evolution” in Plantinga’s worldview is not atheistic ‘shaping’. Do you disagree?
A wikipedia-level understanding of philosophy, keiths, is not a threat to Plantinga’s EAAN argument against your self-contradictory TAAT (which you now seem to have backed away from as an example of simple anti-theism).
In any case, it seems that KN/E would like to contend for “a satisfactory hybrid view of (3) and (4).” I’ll wait for his response re: above http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=2904&cpage=1#comment-27439 and let keiths wallow in his pseudo-arguments. Perhaps in the meantime keiths will read Weber’s text.
With thism you have an imaginary arbiter of truth.
If naturalism is true, an “imaginary” arbiter of truth is as valid as anything else evolution produces.
It’s a red herring to hide the fact that theists just make stuff up and call it god.
It must be pretty convient for the priests who get to declare that god is the arbiter of truth and they just happen to be the arbiter of god.
Even if there was such an arbiter of truth, it wouldn’t help, as we would still have to make our own fallible judgements as to whether the pronouncements of alleged truth were really coming from such an arbiter, whether we were hearing them correctly, etc. In the final analysis we are all dependent on our own judgement.
Under naturalism, making up stuff is just as valid as anything else. It’s all produced by physics.
The term “fallible” has no significant meaning under naturalism. Physics doesn’t “fail”; nor does it produce “errors”. It just does what it does. Your argument above has no basis without first assuming there is an objective (outside of the mind) standard by which a concept of mental “fallibility” has any meaning. Minds produced by physics are not fallible, they just produce whatever they produce. Only under theism is there an available, meaningful concept of a mind coming to truthful and erroneous conclusions.