Dawkins takes one on the chin

[john_doran]

hecd2:

(This is not the only instance of Plantinga’s severe limitations when it comes to mathematics or natural science. I have already commented on this board about his naïve and erroneous claim that natural phenomena such as weather and radioactive decay do not obey natural laws. Whatever other competence he might have, he is not competent to comment on science, nor to challenge the basic scientific approach of methodological naturalism).

this isn’t science, alec - it’s philosophy.

hecd2:

Let us now look at Plantinga’s objections to Dawkins’s argument that explaining the origin of organised complexity in nature by calling on a being that has highly organised complexity is sterile and unproductive. One line that Plantinga takes is purely assertive – that explaining the organised complexity of life on earth by appealing to the miraculous intervention of a being of immense complexity is sensible. But ‘God did it’ arguments are indeed ultimately sterile – they give us no insight into our world.

i’m not sure what you’re talking about here - plantinga makes no such assertions. what he does is describe and then criticize dawkins’ argument against the ID position that the existence of organized complexity requires an original divine act…

and the claim that “god did it” is insightful if god did, in fact, do it.

hecd2:

According to Plantinga, all explanations for mind come to an end in the helpless confession that it is just so: “on any view explanations come to an end… the materialist doesn’t have an explanation for elementary particles: they just are”. Perhaps so, but scientists are loath to accept that any observable thing is inexplicable.

they can be loathe to accept it all they want, but accept it they must, since it is an ineliminable feature of explanations. period.

hecd2:

Naturalistic attempts to explain mind (cognition, consciousness and the sense of self) based on the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon of brain at least have the merit of possessing more explicatory power than the theistic non-explanation.

a) whatever their explanatory power, they have the enormous disadvantage of being wrong;

b) “theistic” theories of mind are just as explanatory (i would argue more so) as naturalistic theories when it comes to created, contingent minds - it’s explaining divine mind that’s difficult.

hecd2:

Plantinga’s objection that brain consists of fundamental particles and that fundamental particles are inexplicable does not undermine the explicatory value of an understanding of how the underlying material brain governs our minds. It is not clear that fundamental particles are inexplicable – but even if they are, making a detailed correlation between brain and mind phenomena explains more than does the limp claim that mind proceeds from the Ultimate Mind and we need seek no more.

as i note above, you have failed to understand plantinga’s point here.

hecd2:

(Plantinga fails to acknowledge the sophisticated and growing body of scientific work that seeks to explain human cognition in terms of physical brain activity – his scientific perspective here and elsewhere is hopelessly naïve and outmoded.)

dude - it’s a book review, not an essay on the philosophy of mind. seriously.

hecd2:

Plantinga then moves on to his hobbyhorse, his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). I haven’t got the space or time to discuss this thoroughly, but it is my view that Plantinga has got it precisely backwards. If our cognitive sense arises from adaptation, we should expect that what we routinely observe (the rain falling, the sun shining, the lion charging, the car approaching the zebra crossing at 50mph) corresponds to a truthful representation of the universe. If no such correspondence between actuality and cognition exists we should long be extinct – the plant that hides from the sun, dies in the shadows. Of course humans believe patently false propositions, but that is an impediment for both naturalistic and theistic explanations of cognition. At least, evolutionary theories provide a framework for explaining the origin of specific false beliefs (see for example Pascal Boyer’s work on religion) – the theistic approach offers no such explanation. So the broad correspondence between actuality and human perception of that actuality is explicable in survival terms.

plantinga considers precisely this objection in a number of his expositions on EAAN. if you want to discuss the argument in detail, i’d be happy to oblige, but until you provide more than this, i’m afraid there’s nothing really to say (your original claim was that plantinga is being hopelessly illogical in his review of dawkins’ book, but the simple claim you make here that he has got it “precisely backwards” is obviously not probative).

 

[john_doran]

hecd2:

The theistic explanation is arbitrary - if indeed God supernaturally gave humans the ability to sense and reason, why do we think that there must be a correspondence between human cognition and actuality?

because we think that god would not deceive us into believing that we have the ability to form true beliefs about the world around us if, in fact, we do not.

(Plantinga’s argument leads him into patent nonsense, such as his claim that there is a conflict between science and naturalism – whereas, in fact, science is methodologically naturalistic. EAAN hasn’t got much traction amongst theistic philosophers of science, and there is a reason – it is logically flawed.)

saying it don’t make it so…how is it flawed?

hecd2:

Plantinga (and JimG) ridicules Dawkins’s argument that a being with the attributes of the Christian God must be complex (an argument by the way that is perfectly logical and steeped in what we observe about the universe). And what are his grounds for doing so? – Well, not much more than an appeal to ‘classical theology’ with particular reference to the early mediaeval theologian Aquinas – not much more, in truth than the fallacy of an argument from authority to set against Dawkins’s reasoned argument.

plantinga doesn’t use his reference to classical theology as an argument of any kind - he simply points out that dawkins fails to consider any of the traditional arguments for god’s simplicity. and if you can take plantinga to task for not adverting the body of literature on the science and philosophy of mind in a book review, then surely plantinga can point out, as a deficiency, dawkins’ failure to address, in his book, the considerable literature concerning divine simplicity. what’s good for the goose, after all…

hecd2:

The claim that God is simple rather than complex is not consistent with the attributes that are assigned to him, and meaningless insofar as the statement that God is simple in the classical sense, quoted by Jim, of having cognition and will but no extension in space or time. It is really not clear that such a statement is meaningful, never mind that the being to which it refers can only be called simple if one, a priori, defines complexity to exclude it.

now who’s making bald assertions?

 

[Malcolm_McLean]

I think the gist of what Plantinga argues when it comes to the book is that, as far as Dawkins is concerned, if there exists any possible explanation other than God for just about anything, the concept of God is entirely defeated and should be discarded - philosophical sloppiness to say the least.

Otherwise, I think Plantinga did a great job of illustrating how Dawkins himself was extremely sloppy and, frankly, juvenile when it came to dealing with the arguments of theism. What seems to be going on in this thread is that Plantinga’s theistic arguments are being countered - but, the point of the review wasn’t to show the superiority of theistic philosophical answers over atheistic ones. It was that Dawkins did a poor job of recognizing what those theistic arguments truly are. You can still disagree with Plantinga’s philosophical beliefs while recognizing how poorly they were presented and responded to in the book.

Dawkins’ central problem is that he regards creationism as real or normative Christianity. Whilst of course he knows that the Pope believes in evolution, he sees this as a tacked on fudge or sophisticated game.

Dawkins’ mistake is an easy one to make. In fact a literal interpretation of Genesis was rejected by St Augustine in the fifth century, and he makes the very pertinent comment that it is a disgraceful thing to hear a Christian rubbish the philosophers and assert what everyone knows to be false.

Then the book has a childish tone. A revealing moment is when Dawkins says “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. Nor her ***.” This is schoolboy humour. When schoolboy jokes are coupled with a schoolboy level of historical understanding, it doesn’t leave a good impression.