This paper from Dr. Alvin Platinga has been around for a while:
An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism.
Recently, P.Z. Myers, one of the staunch and more shrill atheists, decided to reply to Platinga:
Alvin Platinga gives philosophy a bad name
There are a couple of excerpts from the response which are mildly interesting, apart from the fact that Myers never really addresses the actual argument from Dr. Platinga. Myers ends up agreeing with Platinga a bit, but then somehow stumbles onto a conclusion that does not follow from what is previously accepted.
We read this from Myers: "
What it does mean, though, is that if there are ideas that are not amenable to empirical testing, such as "I will go to heaven when I die", those ideas have a very low probability of being true. We can think of those as being the product of random input, in some ways, and since they cannot be winnowed against reality, they are unreliable."
Of course, Myers does not provide any argument to substantiate that assumption, nor does he demonstrate the empirical test for it. I also wonder how, for example, the atheistic theory of abiogenesis holds up to that assumption.
We also read: "
We could have highly unreliable cognition that maintains functionality by constant cross-checks against reality — we build cognitive models of how the world works that are progressively refined by experience."
But isn't this is self-contradictory? If our cognitive facilities are "highly unreliable", then how would we know "reality" in the first place, and how could we even begin to "cross-check" and refine that? Surely any cognitive model built on unreliable cognitive facilities remain unreliable?
This is also part of the Myers response: "
Brains are not reliable; they've been shaped by forces which, as has been clearly said, do not value Truth with a capital T. Scientists are all skeptics who do not trust their perceptions at all; we design experiments to challenge our assumptions, we measure everything multiple times in multiple ways, we get input from many people, we put our ideas out in public for criticism, we repeat experiments and observations over and over."
Somehow Myers seems to keep on missing his own point. If brains are not reliable (and here he grants Platinga's argument to be true), then how can any thoughts be trusted as true? How does Myers know that empiricism, which he so highly values, is necessarily true if his own brain is not reliable? Does a collection of conclusions from unreliable brains suddenly lead to a true conclusion?
There are quite a few other gems in there, but it boils down to this, empiricism or nothing. That of course leads to a magnitude of problems for the likes of Myers. Not that it bothers him or the commenters at his blog.
Linear Mode
