Can eliminativism save evolutionary naturalism from defeat?

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that the naturalist who accepts evolutionary theory has a defeater for all of her beliefs, including her belief in naturalism and evolution. Hence, he says, naturalism, when conjoined with evolution, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally accepted. This is known as the evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). However, Tyler Wunder (Religious Studies 51:391–399, 2015) has recently shown that if the EAAN is framed in terms of objective probability and theism is assumed to be non-contingent, then either theism is necessarily false or the EAAN is unsound. Neither option is attractive to the proponent of the EAAN. Perry Hendricks (Religious Studies 1–5, 2018) has responded to Wunder’s criticism, showing that the EAAN can be salvaged and, indeed, strengthened, by framing it in terms not of naturalism (N), but of a proposition that is entailed by N that is also consistent with theism. We will show that once Hendricks’ solution to Wunder’s objection is accepted, a puzzle ensues: if the EAAN provides the naturalist with a defeater for all of her beliefs, then an extension of it appears to provide God with a defeater for all of his beliefs. After bringing out this puzzle, we suggest several ways in which the proponent of the EAAN might solve it, but also show some potential weaknesses in these purported solutions. Whether the solutions to the puzzle that we consider ultimately succeed is unclear to us. (Translation: the authors disagree. One author thinks that the solutions (or, at least, some of them) that we consider do solve the puzzle while the other author does not.) However, it is clear to us that this is an issue that proponents of the EAAN need to address.

It has long been argued that sometimes, acquiring information about the origins of one’s beliefs removes or diminishes the justification for those beliefs that one would otherwise have had. Descartes, for example, claimed that the less powerful the Author of his nature, the more reason he had to doubt his own beliefs (1960 [1641]: 79). And the more specific worry that knowledge of our evolutionary origins might give us reason to doubt our own beliefs famously goes back as far as Darwin himself, who remarked in an 1881 letter that ‘with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’1 In contemporary analytic philosophy, two sorts of arguments that might reasonably be regarded as descendants of Darwin’s doubt have attracted a lot of attention. The first of these is Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), which first appeared in the early 1990s (see Plantinga 1993, 2000, 2011). That argument is intended to show that anyone who accepts both atheism and the claim that human beings are products of evolutionary processes has grounds to doubt the reliability of all of her cognitive faculties and hence has grounds to doubt all of her beliefs. Plantinga advanced this argument as part of a critique of contemporary naturalism; it attracted a lot of attention among philosophers interested in the contemporary debate between Christian theism and naturalism. Around or shortly after the time that philosophical discussion of Plantinga’s argument had waned, there was an explosion of interest in arguments concerned specifically with normative beliefs or with some specific subset thereof. That explosion was triggered by the 2006 publication of Sharon Street’s ‘A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value’ and Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality. Street and Joyce both argue that recognition of the evolutionary influences on our moral beliefs construed in a certain way gives us reason to doubt those beliefs and hence removes (or at least significantly diminishes) whatever justification those beliefs would have otherwise had. Although Plantinga advanced his EAAN as part of a defence of Christian theism over contemporary naturalism, Street and Joyce advance their arguments in support of specific metaethical positions. Street argues that her Darwinian dilemma makes trouble for any realist metaethical view according to which moral beliefs are true just in case they correspond with attitude-independent moral truths. She further argues that a version of constructivism according to which moral truths are functions of certain human attitudes is not susceptible to the Darwinian dilemma. Her argument, then, is advanced in support of constructivism over realism in metaethics. Joyce, by contrast, advances his argument in defence of a certain sort of moral error theory.2 His contention is that if there are moral truths at all, then there are attitude-independent moral truths but that recognizing the evolutionary origins of our concept of moral obligation gives us grounds for doubting that we ever apply that concept correctly and hence any justification our moral beliefs may have had is undermined.3 In this article, I provide an overview of the contemporary discussion of ‘evolutionary debunking arguments’ (hereinafter ‘EDAs’) that was triggered by the work of Street and Joyce. My main aims are to provide rough characterizations of the EDAs of Street and Joyce, indicate some of the various ways that these EDAs have been understood by commentators together with the most prominent lines of criticism of these EDAs, examine one particularly interesting off-shoot of Street’s EDA and identify some interesting areas for future research.

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.

We aim to further develop and evaluate the prospects of a uniquely Islamic extension of the Standard Aquinas/Calvin model. One obstacle is that certain Qur’anic passages such as Surah 8:43–44 apparently suggest that Muslims have reason to think that Allah might be deceiving them. Consistent with perfect/maximally good being theology, Allah would allow such deceptions only if doing so leads to a greater good, so such passages do not necessarily give Muslims reason to doubt Allah’s goodness. Yet the possibility of deception of the faithful threatens to provide a subjective defeater for the (epistemic) reliability of their cognitive faculties. (‘Even if Allah can be morally good while deceiving, how do you know you aren’t being deceived for a greater good on a more macro level, such as about the nature of the Qur’an?’) Similar in structure to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), this defeater threatens to undermine all of a Muslims warrant claims. We consider and evaluate the reply that there are other Qur’anic passages and/or additional conceptual resources in the Islamic tradition that provide grounds for thinking that God’s faithfulness or truthfulness is more centrally and securely embedded in a Muslim’s noetic structure than such doubts. Specifically, we will argue that under certain conditions, there exists a subjective defeater for some Muslims that, unlike McNabb’s approach, isn’t based off of the proper function condition but Plantinga’s truth aimed condition.

Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) claims that if both naturalism (N) and evolutionary theory (E) are true, then all our beliefs are unreliable (premiss 1). Consequently, given N&E, the belief in N&E is unreliable (premiss 2) and N&E is self-defeating (conclusion). The empirical verification argument against naturalism (EVAAN) is more cautious and improves EAAN by withstanding a rejoinder of the evolutionary naturalist to premiss 1. EVAAN claims that non-abstract beliefs that are not empirically verifiable are unreliable, given N&E (premiss 1a). This anticipates the evolutionary naturalist’s claim that empirical verifications play a crucial role in peer assessments and sexual selection of intelligence, and that, therefore, N&E makes empirically verifiable beliefs often reliable (premiss-1 rejoinder). However, even then it can be argued that the belief in N&E is unreliable, given N&E (premiss 2), because N&E is neither abstract, nor empirically verifiable (premiss 1b). EVAAN distinguishes reliably verifiable intelligence from metaphysical intelligence and claims that, if N&E is true, humans are lacking metaphysical intelligence. This paper also contains an argument against EAAN, by supporting the premiss-1 rejoinder.

The author identifies the structure of Sharon Street's skeptical challenge to non‐naturalist, normative epistemic realism (NNER) as an argument that NNER is liable to reliability defeat and then argues that Street's argument fails, because it itself is subject to reliability defeat. As the author reconstructs Street's argument, it is an argument that the normative epistemic judgments of the realist could only be probabilistically sensitive to normative epistemic truths (if there any) by sheer chance. The author then recaps Street's own naturalist translation of normative epistemic judgments into purely descriptive, contingent probability statements, and argues that, on her own terms, the reasoning that leads her to rationally believe in evolutionary theory (and other scientific theories) could only be probabilistically sensitive to the relevant purely descriptive, contingent probabilities by sheer chance. The author's argument is addressed to Street, but it applies to all evolutionary naturalist accounts of epistemic rationality. The author explains how his argument differs from Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) and shows how it avoids the objections to Plantinga's EAAN. The author closes with the outline of an explanation of how evolution could have made human reasoning probabilistically sensitive to metaphysically necessary normative epistemic standards, even though those standards did not exert and, indeed, could not have exerted any kind of causal influence on the evolutionary process.

This article is a response to Tyler Wunder's ‘The modality of theism and probabilistic natural theology: a tension in Alvin Plantinga's philosophy’ (this journal). In his article, Wunder argues that if the proponent of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) holds theism to be non-contingent and frames the argument in terms of objective probability, then the EAAN is either unsound or theism is necessarily false. I argue that a modest revision of the EAAN renders Wunder's objection irrelevant, and that this revision actually widens the scope of the argument.

Proponents of Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against Naturalism (EAAN) often quote Charles Darwin's 22 April 1881 letter to William Graham to imply Darwin worried that his theory of evolution committed its adherents to some sort of global skepticism. This niggling epistemic worry has, therefore, been dubbed 'Darwin's Doubt'. But this gets Darwin wrong. After combing through Darwin's correspondence and autobiographical writings, the author maintains that Darwin only worried that evolution might cause us to doubt (a) particularly abstruse metaphysical and theological beliefs, and (b) beliefs arrived at by 'intuition' rather than evidence-based reasoning. He did not worry that unguided evolution should lead us to doubt all of our beliefs in the way Plantinga and others have implied that it does.

Inspired by Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), we develop an argument—the “Scriptural Argument Against Dogmatic Protestantism” (SAADP)—that Protestants who accept the doctrine of sola scriptura cannot reasonably hold that Catholic and Eastern churches are in doctrinal error. If sola scriptura is true and Catholic and Eastern Churches have fallen into error, it is improbable that any Protestant can reliably form true beliefs about controversial points of Christian doctrine, including sola scriptura or suggestions that Catholic and Eastern Christians are in error. We evaluate potential responses to SADDP, considering how SAADP should affect ecumenical doctrinal debates.

Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism makes the case that the conjunction of evolutionary theory and naturalism cannot be rationally believed, as, if both evolutionary theory and naturalism were true, it would be highly unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable. I present Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism and survey a theory of meaning espoused by Robert Brandom, known as semantic inferentialism. I argue that if one accepts semantic inferentialism, as it is developed by Brandom, then Plantinga's motivation for the evolutionary argument against naturalism is undermined.

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es discutir la propuesta de naturalización de la epis­temología que se presenta en el libro «La Evolución del Conocimiento» de Antonio Diéguez Lucena. La conclusión a la que se llega es que el planteamiento de este autor no consigue superar el argumento antinaturalista basado en la evolución (EAAN) de Alvin Plantinga. Y se argumenta que posiblemente ningún intento de naturalización de la epis­temología puede ser capaz de superar este argumento. Por lo que es probable que el enfoque naturalista de la epistemología conduzca a una vía muerta.Palabraza clave: Abstract: The aim of this paper is to discuss the naturalization of epistemology presented in the book «La Evolución del Conocimiento» by Antonio Diéguez Lucena. The conclu­sion reached is that the approach of this author can not overcome the evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) of Alvin Plantinga. Moreover, it will be argued that possibly no attempt to naturalize epistemology may be able to overcome this argument. So it is likely that the naturalistic approach to epistemology leads to a dead end.Key words: Recibido: 23/10/2011. Aprobado: 17/01/2012

Alvin Plantinga has argued that evolutionary naturalism (the idea that God does not tinker with evolution) undermines its own rationality. Natural selection is concerned with survival and reproduction, and false beliefs conjoined with complementary motivational drives could serve the same aims as true beliefs. Thus, argues Plantinga, if we believe we evolved naturally, we should not think our beliefs are, on average, likely to be true, including our beliefs in evolution and naturalism. I argue herein that our cognitive faculties are less reliable than we often take them to be, that it is theism which has difficulty explaining the nature of our cognition, that much of our knowledge is not passed through biological evolution but learned and transferred through culture, and that the unreliability of our cognition helps explain the usefulness of science.

Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism argues that the probability of our possessing reliable cognitive faculties, given the truth of evolution and naturalism, is low, and that this provides a defeater for naturalism, if the naturalist in question holds to the general truths of evolutionary biology. Stephen Law has recently objected to Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism by suggesting that there exist conceptual constraints governing the content a belief can have given its relationships to other things, including behaviour (CC). I show that Law’s objection fails, since it offers an auxiliary hypothesis to naturalism which is itself improbable. I consider multiple variants of the CC thesis, demonstrating that each is improbable, and that any weaker version with greater prior probability is compromised by a failure to render the relevant datum – the reliability of our cognitive faculties – probable. Thus, Law’s objection to Plantinga’s argument fails.

Back to Roy Wood Sellars: Why His Evolutionary Naturalism Is Still Worthwhile POUWEL SLURINK 1. INTRODUCTION ATTHE MOMENT,naturalism is fashionable as never before. Several of the most prominent living philosophers--e.g., Quine, Churchland, Ruse--call themselves naturalists. However, it is not always that clear what really is meant by naturalism, apart from a philosophy in which science plays a large role. This lack of clarity stems in part from the uncertainty about what is meant by "science"--physics, biology, or both of them. But partly it also stems from different interpretations of the impact of scientific models on philosophical reflections. In this article I propose a return to the writings of the "evolutionary naturalist" Roy Wood Sellars (July 9, 188o, Seaforth, Ontario-September 5, 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan). He was the father of Wilfrid Sellars, but I think that the philosophy of Sellars pbre is a better starting-point for "a reading programme" for modern naturalists than the philosophy of Sellarsfi/s, in spite of the claim of the latter that "Critical Realism and Evolutionary Naturalism .., and all that they imply, are part of my paternal inheritance."' Although it may be true that much of the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars is rooted in the philosophy of his father, we miss the illuminating evolutionary considerations characteristic of his father's philosophy in most of his work, and we can see a tendency to expect too much from linguistic analyses alone (instead of the more typically naturalistic way of expecting solutions from new perspectives offered by new knowledge). Beyond that, Wilfred Sellars, with his attack on "the Myth of the Given" and his dichotomy between the manifest and the scientific '"PhysicalRealism,"in PhilosophicalPerspectives(Springfield,IL: CharlesThomas, 1967),185. [425] 4~6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 image, although in fact he was only criticizing logical positivism and extending some arguments of his father, probably had the effect of suggesting the hopelessness of realism and naturalism.9 With his painstakingly detailed linguistic analyses of problems, he probably helped to initiate "the linguistic turn" in philosophy and thereby strengthened a movement that kept naturalism in check for at least one generation. Most of the time, however, his analyses are either completely compatible with his father's philosophy, or try to carry it further in specific domains and discussions.3 Given the fact that both father and son tried to take "both science and man seriously,"4 the differences in their work can be explained partly by the completely different philosophical scene in which they were operating. It seems to me, however, that the elder Sellars was more fully alive to the importance of evolution than Wilfrid Sellars . The work of Sellars p~reis the best starting-point for anyone interested in finding a balanced and reasonable version of naturalism in which the epistemological questions raised by the counterintuitive nature of physics, or by the mysterious relations between mind and body and mind and nature, are partly solved by evolutionary considerations about the nature of knowledge and consciousness. In my examination of Roy Wood Sellars's philosophy I will concentrate on three important interrelated problems that any "adequate naturalism" will have to solve and for whose solution he has some very useful suggestions. They are, first, the problem of realism in epistemology (sections 2 and 3); second, the problem of "levels of organization" in ontology, which sometimes turn up in modern debates in the discussion about "natural kinds," "depth realism"~ or about the autonomy of biology (section 4); and, third, the status of subjective experience in the philosophy of mind (section 5). For Roy Wood Sellars the solutions to these problems are closely interrelated. For him naturalism meant an "interpretative synthesis" in which scientific and philosophical insights are integrated into an "organized whole" (EN, i).6 Naturalism was See "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," both in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). See, e.g., "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem" in Philosophical Perspectives, and also his very illuminating article, "The Double-Knowledge Approach to the Mind-Body Problem," New Scholasticism XLV (1971): 269--89...

For over 20 years, Alvin Plantinga has been advocating his Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, or EAAN. We will argue that this argument functions as an atypical form of global skepticism, and Plantinga’s development of it has repercussions for other types of skepticism. First, we will go over the similarities and differences; for example, the standard ways of avoiding other forms of skepticism, namely by adopting some form of naturalized or externalist epistemology, do not work with the EAAN. Plantinga himself is a naturalized epistemologist, and his skepticism comes from within this perspective. Next, we will look at how Plantinga moved from presenting his skepticism diachronically, as a loop, to presenting it synchronically, as an infinite regress. Finally, we can extend this move from Plantinga’s skepticism to other forms of global skepticism, in so far as these will involve the rejection of our cognitive faculties’ reliability, and formulate them synchronically as well. Global skepticism is often accused of instability, since it leads us to skepticism about all of our beliefs, including belief in the skeptical scenario itself. Yet formulating it as an infinite regress rather than a loop allows the skeptical charge to go forward.