Beyond Commonsense - Responses

Re: The Many Problems of EAAN, Part I

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:15:05 GMT

It seems to me that you fail to understand how the EAAN works. It does not, as you seem to think, argue that evolution and naturalism fail to explain how we can have veridical beliefs.
Rather, it argues that given what we know of evolution, it is far more likely that a mostly false set of life-sustaining beliefs would be created than a mostly true set of beliefs. This is because there are simply far more false beliefs that in any given situation would be useful for survival than the one true belief.
It isn't simply an argument 'of the gaps' as it does not point out a lack of evidence--rather it attempts to produce a probabilistic reductio ad absurdam.

Anyway, I think the argument fails also and for various reasons--just not the ones you've tried to point out.

Re: The Many Problems of EAAN, Part I

Ephraim Tekle — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:10:38 GMT

I appreciate your detailed response to this blog. An appropriate response to each of your objections would have to wait until this weekend. Here is but a quick reply to one of your comments.

What Plantinga has failed to show is that in principle N&E implies there is no good reason to trust our beliefs. All he has done is asked his contemporaries to come up with a naturalistic explanation to how our "cognitive faculties could be reliable and 'aim' at producing true beliefs" given N&E, or risk abandoning naturalism all together. And this is an argument of the gaps.

To give you an example, consider the Intelligent Design (ID) argument. If ID proponents had just argued "nature is too complex thus must have a designer", they would have been immediately rejected and labeled god-of-the-gaps. Instead, they argued some biological entities are "irreducibly complex" thus must be designed. Of course if they could show this irreducibility, they would win their case (I've written on this topic and will post it here at a later time).

Similarly, Plantinga is basically arguing "no one has yet produced a good reason to believe why one should trust one's beliefs given N&E, thus [after some argument to the contrary based on current understanding and the evolutionary theory] one's beliefs are not trustworthy [statistically speaking]." And this is argument of the gap (unless, of course, one confuses the naturalistic principle with current naturalistic understanding of the natural world).

Re: The Many Problems of EAAN, Part I

Ephraim Tekle — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:21:42 GMT

I've posted your comment on The Bigger Arrogant under that blog. Please follow the link for responses to your comment (part 2). I will respond to your comments on this blog as soon as possible (FYI, I hope to post parts II and III of this blog soon).