Accidental Blogger

It seems Alvin Plantinga has written a popular account of his evolutionary argument against naturalism, viz. that evolution selects beliefs for survival value, not truth, so that while our beliefs may be useful we've no reason to think them true. I've nothing much to say about the argument itself…lots of people have written about it, and there's a plentiful academic literature in any case. [I do note that in this popularization at least, he follows up with some pretty trippy math that suggests that if our prior probability that one useful belief is true is a half, that the probability that a set of one hundred beliefs is true is one over two to the googol'th power. Such assumptions of total independence between utility and truth, between the truths of related beliefs, such maximally in-coherentist ideas seem more than a bit dubious to me. Incidentally, a surprising number of iffy probabilistic arguments seem to involve assumptions of independence followed by simple multiplication. Break thee free man, of the tyranny of the product sign! Rejoice, for not all probabilistic reasoning needs sixth grade maths!]

What puzzles me about Plantinga is not the extent to which he doubts naturalistic reason, though I don't think he sufficiently respects the resources a naturalist has. What surprises me is his sense that his own beliefs do – or should – give him a strong degree of extra confidence in his accounts of nature:

Clearly this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals. On the other hand, there is a real problem here for the evolutionary naturalist.

Let us not here get into tediously evaluating these religious beliefs for plausibility. Indeed, let us grant Plantinga all he'd hope for, a God in heaven and several larks and snails squishing about. Going from even there to a strong confidence in beliefs about the world seems to me like an odd path for a Christian to follow. From this outsider's perspective, one of the most striking aspects of that belief system is its keen appreciation of our finitude and fallibility – sin disorders minds, and distance from God causes error. Nor does accepting Christ make you intellectually or ethically more than human. Christians are not perfect, just forgiven, as they say. The dark glass remains, all that good stuff.

Indeed, that we get things wrong, that we make mistakes, that our cognition is error prone, that we fuck things up, that in our Rumsfeldian world we face each of known and unknown knowns and unknowns, this is as close to being a brute fact as anything I can think of. If your metaphysics can't admit to the possibility of error, so much the worse for it. No well-represented philosophy I've come across tries to sell that snake oil. Even traditions marking a less stark separation between man and God, between the circumscribed and the limitless, all have the sense to stay away from such ideas. After you gain enlightenment you must still chop wood and carry water. Whether or not you know that you are that, you must listen to the mahout when he yells at you to get away from the mad elephant. It is just especially strange coming from a Christian. I'm reminded of that cute thing Chesterton said:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

Anyhow. On the off-chance that you've not seen it already, I think this is in the coolest video (and child) on youtube. Maybe it's me, but when I see it I keep thinking of Basil Fawlty yelling 'fire' in his hotel…the same helpless inability to convince others to take one seriously.