Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T05:35:23.431Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Does Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism work?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2009

WANG-YEN LEE
WANG-YEN LEE
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore, 3 Arts Link, Singapore, 117570 e-mail: leewangyen@cantab.net
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), he contends that someone who holds both naturalism (N) and evolution (E) acquires an undefeated defeater for her belief that ‘human cognitive faculties are reliable’ (R) and as a result an undefeated defeater for everything else she believes when she comes to realize that P(R/N&E) is low or inscrutable. I argue for two theses in this paper. First, when a naturalist-evolutionist comes to think that P(R/N&E) is inscrutable, that does not constitute an undefeated defeater for her belief that R if her original grounds for believing R are something other than an assessment of P(R/N&E). Second, even if she acquires an undefeated defeater for her belief that R when she comes to think that P(R/N&E) is inscrutable, it does not follow that she has a defeater for all her other beliefs. The main contribution lies in my response to Plantinga's attempt to resist my second thesis.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 73 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bonjour, Laurence (1998) In Defence of Pure Reason: A Rationalist Account of A Priori Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1996) ‘Elusive knowledge’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 549–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (2002a) ‘Introduction: The evolutionary argument against naturalism’, in Beilby, James (ed.) Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press), 1–12.Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (2002b) ‘Reply to Beilby's cohorts’, in Beilby Naturalism Defeated?, 204–276.Google Scholar
Sosa, Ernest (2002) ‘Plantinga's evolutionary meditations’, in Beilby Naturalism Defeated?, 91–102.Google Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (2001) Epistemic Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swinburne, Richard (2004) ‘Plantinga's argument against evolutionary naturalism’, in idem The Existence of God, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 350, n. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Cleve, James (1984) ‘Reliability, justification, and the problem of induction’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 9, 555–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Cleve, James (2002) ‘Can atheists know anything?, in Beilby Naturalism Defeated, 103–125.Google Scholar