The Many Problems of EAAN, Part I

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:44:00 GMT

Methodological naturalism (naturalism hereafter) says only that all natural phenomena are best explained by natural causes. Naturalism is a means to an end (that of explaining natural phenomena) and in principle says nothing about the (continued) successfulness of those that practice it. What is often the case with anti-naturalists like Plantinga is that they point to the lack of naturalistic explanation to a natural phenomenon and conclude naturalism is inconsistent (and shouldn’t be taken seriously). Herein lays the first problem with EAAN. By pointing to a gap in a naturalist’s explanation as to how the truthfulness of a belief can be casually efficacious in such a way as to be evolutionarily beneficial, Plantinga then makes the leap to conclude there is no good reason to believe the truthfulness of our belief (all that is derived from it, including naturalism and evolutionary theory). By replacing the experimenter (her success in carrying out the experiment to be exact) with the experiment itself, Plantinga commits the straw man fallacy. Not only has Plantinga placed the burden-of-(naturalistic)-proof for any natural phenomenon on the naturalists, but he equated naturalists’ inability to produce a proof for any given phenomenon as evidence against naturalism all together.

If history is any lesson, it has been the case that gaps in the naturalist explanatory scheme have been ‘short’-lived (perhaps we are biased to explore certain class of phenomena by our nature such that this is the case, but that is another story). There is every reason to believe this gap too will close and the anti-naturalists will search for other gaps to pick on.

Needless to say, there is also good reason to believe the truthfulness of our beliefs given naturalism and the evolutionary theory (N&E). When a naturalist holds a belief to be true, which presupposes she is capable of true beliefs (regardless of N&E or supernaturalism—more on this in part II), her theories (the truthfulness of her theories to be exact) are casually linked to the natural world (and generally are not mere conjectures of an inaccessible reality). Furthermore, statistically speaking, it is probable, given the verifiably truthful beliefs naturalism has produced thus far, her beliefs are trustworthy, even if the exact naturalistic explanation of why her beliefs are trustworthy given evolutionary theory elude her (for the time being).

Beyond Common Sense - logic tag

The Many Problems of EAAN, Part I