“If our intelligence were the fruit of a unconscious and blind evolution, unintelligent and unconscious causes are likely to make more mistakes than intelligent and conscious ones, so our reasoning can be potentially faulty and thus unworthy of relying on.
Postulating a intelligent and good creator, who ensure that our reasoning is correct, is the only way to escape this problem.”
Alvin Plantinga
Is his claim true? Must we really postulate a God for relying on our reasoning?
Posted: October 9th 2010
Eric_PK
First, evolution is not blind – it is guided by natural selection to generate organisms that are more adapted (ie “useful”) in a specific environment.
Second, the assertion about intelligent and conscious causes being better is just that – an assertion, and it isn’t backed up by any evidence.
Posted: October 10th 2010
SmartLX www
It’s a version of the Transcendental Argument, and that’s a failure in general but this isn’t even a very good version.
Our reasoning is potentially faulty even if there is a god because, for example, if there is a god there are some of us who don’t believe that. The existence of a perfect supervisor doesn’t preclude shoddy thinking by the underlings. We’re not all gods.
If on the other hand there isn’t a god, some poor thinking is to be expected but there’s no reason to think the odd bit of sound reasoning is completely impossible. That’s only the case if the god is the source of all logic and consistency, which is only assumed by the religious. To use this assumption in an argument for a god is to assume the conclusion ahead of time, or “beg the question”.
Finally, we know full well that unconscious and blind evolution did make a lot of what would be seen as mistakes if they were ascribed to a designer or creator. For instance it forced us to eat and breathe through the same tube, which is the reason people and animals choke. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t get certain things basically right, if only through trial and error, which allow for useful thinking by its products.
Posted: October 10th 2010
Mike the Infidel www
As represented here, I’d argue that Plantinga is quite right, though he reaches the absolute wrong conclusion. He seems to be implying that our reasoning is reliable, and thus God must exist. However, if there is no God, and thus (by his argument) no way to ensure our reasoning is correct, we would see the universe exactly as it is now.
We don’t rely on reason to give us absolutely correct answers. We get approximate answers that approach a best explanation for what we observe. We do science because we don’t trust human reasoning. Peer review and the reproduction of experimental results are meant to counteract some of our cognitive biases and mistakes in reasoning.
We don’t assume our reasoning is flawless. We’re well aware (and learning more every day) of the cognitive problems of the human mind. These alone disprove the middle of his argument – where he assumes that reason gives us perfectly true answers.
Postulating an intelligent and good creator is the action of a flawed human mind. It doesn’t make it exist, and it doesn’t mean that we can therefore assert that there is a way to ensure our reasoning is correct. It doesn’t help us escape the problem at all – we still have to demonstrate that the creator exists; mere postulation is meaningless.
Posted: October 9th 2010
bitbutter www
Plantinga’s claim is false.
The reason we should expect a mind to be 'good at’ holding true beliefs, in general, is that true beliefs are a very efficient way to keep safe; they’re modular and can be recombined to give survival advantages in novel situations. On the other hand, in order to maintain a false belief about a potentially dangerous topic, the false belief needs to be supplemented by many other false beliefs, to keep the believer safe in each situation involving the object of danger.
Here’s an example Plantinga gives:
Or perhaps [Paul] believes the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat, and wants to pet it; but believes the best way to pet it is to run away from it.
These false beliefs would result in adaptive behaviour in a very small class of situations; running away from a dangerous animal. But on the day that Paul didn’t feel like petting a tiger, he’d be in trouble.
The problem, for Plantinga, is that Paul’s false beliefs are adaptive in far fewer situations than the more general true beliefs that large animals can be dangerous and that its safest to be far away from them.
This is a reason we might expect minds to be generally 'good at’ holding true beliefs.
I made a video a while ago that answers the same question in a bit more depth.
Posted: October 9th 2010