Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism states that evolution cannot produce warranted beliefs. In contrast, according to Plantinga, Christian theism provides (I) properly functioning cognitive faculties in (II) an appropriate cognitive environment, in accordance with (III) a design plan aimed at producing true beliefs. But does theism fulfill criteria I–III? Judging from the Bible, God employs deceit in his relations with humanity, rendering our cognitive functions unreliable (I). Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that God's purpose would be to produce true beliefs in humans (III). Finally, from the theistic/religious perspective, it is impossible to tell whether observations have natural or supernatural causes, which undermines an appropriate cognitive environment (II). Reliable identification of deceit or miracles could alleviate these problems, but the theistic community has failed to resolve this issue. Dismissal of parts of the Bible, or attempts to find alternative interpretations, would collapse into skepticism or deism. Thus, Plantinga's problem of epistemic warrant backfires on theism. BIBLICAL AND THEISTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM | Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science --> --> Skip to main content Research Articles BIBLICAL AND THEISTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM Research Articles BIBLICAL AND THEISTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM Abstract Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism states that evolution cannot produce warranted beliefs. Reliable identification of deceit or miracles could alleviate these problems, but the theistic community has failed to resolve this issue. Dismissal of parts of the Bible, or attempts to find alternative interpretations, would collapse into skepticism or deism. Thus, Plantinga's problem of epistemic warrant backfires on theism. Keywords evolution, naturalism, cognitive functions, supernatural intervention, deception, Alvin Plantinga, evolutionary argument against naturalism, theism, miracles How to Cite Nieminen, P., Boudry, M., Ryökäs, E. & Mustonen, A., (2017) “BIBLICAL AND THEISTIC ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM”, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52(1), 9–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/zygo.12327 Rights © 2024 The Author(s). Downloads Download PDF View PDF Download XML The evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) proposed by Alvin Plantinga ( ; 2008) is an influential claim asserting that beliefs based on naturalism in general and evolution in particular would not be warranted. The EAAN is also cited by creationist authors to support their dismissal of evolutionary theory (Weinberger ; Puolimatka , 614–15). First, Plantinga ( , 12–13, 19) claims that, within the naturalist framework, organisms and their adaptations would not have “proper function,” as this by definition requires design by an intelligent agent. Second, by using a slippery slope argument (Dowden ), Plantinga ( , 19, 30) claims that naturalism leads to doubt about one's own cognitive faculties; that is, accepting naturalism provides a defeater for reliable beliefs: “if you have a defeater for the belief that your faculties are reliable, then you also have a defeater for each of the beliefs produced by those faculties; you therefore have a defeater for each of your beliefs. It is one thing to show that Plantinga's argument fails to undermine naturalism. It would be even more interesting to show that it backfires against his own worldview. We decided to investigate the Bible as such and to see if the divine attributes described therein provide any epistemic warrant for our beliefs. God's characteristics, as presented in Biblical texts, are relevant for Plantinga's argument, as he accepts that the Bible is the word of God (see also Plantinga ). The specific aim of this essay is to assess Plantinga's argument as follows: If we accept his claim that evolutionary naturalism is self‐defeating, does the Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, edited by JamesBeilby, 43–58. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fitelson, Branden, and ElliottSober. 1998. “Plantinga's Probability Arguments against Evolutionary Naturalism.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79: 115–29. Gorday, Peter, ed. 2000. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. New Testament IX: Colossians, 1‐2 Thessalonians, 1‐2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Greenberg, Moshe. 1983. The Anchor Bible: Ezekiel 1–20. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Klein, Ralph W.2012. 2 Chronicles: A Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Law, Stephen. 2012. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ruse, Michael. 2004. “ The New Creationism: Its Philosophical Dimension .” In The Cultures of Creationism: Anti‐Evolutionism in English‐Speaking Countries, edited by SimonColeman and LeslieCarlin, 175–92. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Schacter, Daniel L., Scott A.Guerin, and Peggy L. St.Jacques. 2011. “Memory Distortion: An Adaptive Perspective.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15: 467–74. Talbott, William J.2002. “ The Illusion of Defeat .” In Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, edited by JamesBeilby, 153–64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. VanCleve, James. 2002. “ Can Atheists Know Anything ?” In Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, edited by JamesBeilby, 103–25. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ward, Keith. 2002. “Believing in Miracles.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 37: 741–50. Weinberger, Lael. 2007. “Still Discontent.” Journal of Creation 21: 32–36. Wildberger, Hans. 1997. Isaiah 13–27: A Continental Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Wildberger, Hans. 2002. Isaiah 28–39: A Continental Commentary. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Wilkins, John S., and Paul E.Griffiths. 2013.

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). My empirical verification argument against naturalism (EVAAN) is more cautious and improves Plantinga’s EAAN by withstanding a rejoinder of the evolutionary naturalist to premiss 1. EVAAN claims that metaphysical beliefs are unreliable, given N&E (premiss 1a). This anticipates the evolutionary naturalist’s claim that empirical verification plays 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 metaphysical (premiss 1b) and therefore not empirically verifiable. My 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 Plantinga’s EAAN, by supporting the premiss-1 rejoinder. Blondé, W. Logos An. Sem. Met. 56 (2) 2023: 345-362346 1. From EAAN to EV AAN This paper provides an argument that the conjunction of naturalism (N) and evolutionary theory (E) is self-defeating. Here, I use the following definitions: Natural entities are those that can be revealed as explanatory by the methodologies of the empirical sciences (Forrest 2000). N is metaphysical2 naturalism: all and only the natural entities exist in reality (Mahner 2012). Furthermore, metaphysical beliefs are beliefs about the existence or non-existence of certain classes of logically possible, non-natural (or supernatural) entities. Blondé’s (2015, 2016, 2019) and Blondé and Jansen’s (2021) accounts of supernaturalism will be taken as leading examples.3 Their supernaturalists can make the claim that naturalists are supernaturally predestined to believe in N. In response to this claim, naturalists should be able to prove N. The belief in N often goes together with the belief in E. As a part of the main argument in this paper, I show that, if N&E is true, evolutionary naturalists are empiricists about the ontology of reality by their own nature: methodologies that prove premisses that are not empirically verifiable are rejected. All of this would not be a problem if N&E itself was an empirically verifiable premiss. However, this is not the case. The empirical verification argument against naturalism (EV AAN) in this paper is based on Plantinga’s (1993, 2011) evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). EAAN’s essence can be reconstructed as follows: Premiss 1: If N&E is true, then all our beliefs are unreliable.4 Premiss 2: If Blondé, W. Logos An. Sem. Met. 56 (2) 2023: 345-362360 and the observation that evolutionary naturalists cannot find agreement about such theories. They are the exceptional-point-of-view problem, the Sleeping Beauty problem, cosmological natural selection, and the multiverse hypothesis. The a priori methodology provides explanations of why premiss 1a is apparently true according to the a posteriori methodology: N&E has never favored cognitive faculties that are preoccupied with metaphysical beliefs, because such faculties 1) are not likely to impress peers and sexual partners, 2) result in an unnecessary energy consumption, and 3) can be mentally destabilizing. It has to be acknowledged that the a priori proofs of my premiss 1a (see above) and my premiss-1 rejoinder (If N&E is true, empirically verifiable beliefs are often reliable.) are evolutionary just-so stories, or hypotheses that may not be entirely accurate. However, they are clearly more refined – and therefore better – than the just-so stories of the premisses they refute respectively: the unrestricted evolutionary reliability (If N&E is true, then our beliefs are reliable on all epistemic domains.) and Plantinga’s premiss 1 (If N&E is true, then all our beliefs are unreliable.). My EV AAN, therefore, provides a more nuanced middle way between these two extremes.21 8. Bibliographic references Arneth, B. M. (2009), ‘Sexual selection and intelligence: Does sexual reproduction drive the evolution of intelligence?’ Bioscience Hypotheses, 2(4): 209-212. Beilby, J. K., ed., (2002), Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga’ s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Cornell University Press. Blondé, W. (2015), ‘An evolutionary argument for a self-explanatory, benevolent metaphysics’, Symposion, 2(2): 143-166. Blondé, W. (2016), ‘Can an eternal life start from the minimal fine-tuning for intelligence?’, Philosophy and Cosmology, 17(17): 26-38. Blondé, W. (2019), ‘EMAAN: An evolutionary multiverse argument against naturalism’, Symposion, 6(2): 113-128. Blondé, W. and Jansen, L. (2021), ‘Proving God without dualism: Improving the Swinburne- Moreland argument from consciousness’, Metaphysica, 22(1): 75-87. Bostrom, N. (2007), ‘Sleeping beauty and self-location: A hybrid model’, Synthese, 157(1): 59-78. Boudry, M. and Vlerick, M. (2014), ‘Natural selection does care about truth’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 28(1): 65-77. Boyer, P. (2007), Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. UK: Hachette. Carter, B. (1974), ‘Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology’, Confrontation of cosmological theories with observational data , Springer, Dordrecht, 291-298. Dawkins, R., and Ward, L. (2006), The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Deem, M. J. (2018), ‘A flaw in the Stich–Plantinga challenge to evolutionary reliabilism’, Analysis, 78(2): 216-225. 21 I wish to thank Ludger Jansen, Michael Vlerick, and several anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments.

Naturalistic naturalized epistemology combines ontological naturalism with naturalized epistemology. Ontological naturalism is the view that nothing exists other than spatio-temporal beings embedded within a space-time framework. Naturalized epistemology is a view about the nature of knowledge characterized by its commitment to externalism and the idea that knowledge consists in beliefs reliably generated by cognitive mechanisms operating in a suitable environment. Alvin Plantinga has provided a much discussed evolutionary biological argument against naturalistic naturalized epistemology. In this article I defend naturalistic naturalized epistemology by refuting Plantinga's replies to two important criticisms of his argument. CRÍTICA, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía. Vol. 35, No. 105 (diciembre 2003): 49–63 A DEFENSE OF NATURALISTIC NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY JOHN LEMOS Department of Philosophy Coe College jlemos@coe.edu SUMMARY : Naturalistic naturalized epistemology combines ontological nat- uralism with naturalized epistemology. Ontological naturalism is the view that nothing exists other than spatio-temporal beings embedded within a space-time framework. Naturalized epistemology is a view about the nature of knowledge characterized by its commitment to externalism and the idea that knowledge consists in beliefs reliably generated by cognitive mechanisms operating in a suitable environment. Alvin Plantinga has provided a much discussed evolutionary biological argument against naturalistic naturalized epistemology. In this article I defend naturalistic naturalized epistemology by refuting Plantinga’s replies to two important criticisms of his argument. KEY WORDS : epistemology, naturalized epistemology, naturalism, Alvin Plan- tinga RESUMEN : La epistemología naturalizada naturalista combina DEFENSE OF NATURALISTIC NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY 61 beliefs, the former are generally true and the latter are generally false?” Plantinga might respond that I am supposing that whatever has been syntactically coded for successful behavior will be true and whatever is coded for unsuccessful behavior will be false, and this begs the question against his argument. According to Plantinga, as strange as it may seem, if naturalism is true and if syntax alone might control our behavior, there is then no reason to think our cognitive faculties are reliable. All the beliefs we typically accept as being true and which help us navigate our way through life are such that we cannot ever really know them to be true. Hence, Plantinga would conclude that NNE leads to skepticism. At this point it looks as though Plantinga has the defenders of naturalism over a fence. But in the end I think that after a reexamination of what his position and theirs amount to and a consideration of the explanatory weakness of his and the strength of theirs, we will see that there really is more reason to accept the naturalistic perspective. Plantinga’s position is that if naturalism is true then when I perceive a rattlesnake before me and I believe there is one before me I have no more reason to think my belief is true than to think it is false. In contrast, I have contended that our ancestors must have had cognitive faculties that were reliable producers of true beliefs in order for them to have survived and reproduced, giving rise to us. Thus, on my view and other things being equal, we have good reason to think our faculties are reliable and good reason to think the belief formed in this scenario is true. The question, then, becomes which of these views is more reasonable. I think the latter is more reasonable because it is simply too difficult to see how unreliable capacities could be beneficial. Plantinga says unreliable faculties could be beneficial if they produced false beliefs that had adaptive syntactical struc- tures. But this is too sketchy. How exactly would this work? In contrast, it is fairly easy to make sense of how true beliefs are for the most part adaptive. And, yes, any explanation of how true beliefs are for the most part adaptive is likely to assume 62 JOHN LEMOS that semantic content plays a role in our behavior, but given the explanatory power we gain by assuming this , doing so is justified. 4 . Conclusion As I have noted, Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against NNE depends upon the premise that the reliability of our cogni- tive capacities is unlikely given the truth of ontological natural- ism. He has tried to defend this by presenting five scenarios in which human beings could survive and reproduce with unreli- able faculties and arguing that these are equiprobable alongside the scenario in which our cognitive capacities are reliable. He has recently been willing to concede that three of these scenarios may not work, while insisting that The Syntactic Control and The False Adaptive Beliefs Scenarios suffice in supporting his thesis. In this essay I have shown that, despite his best efforts to defend them, even the latter two scenarios are significantly flawed. Thus, we have good reason to think that Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against NNE is inadequate. REFERENCES Beilby, J., 2002, Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolu- tionary Argument Against Naturalism , Cornell University Press, Ithaca (New York). Bochenski, I., 1961, History of Formal Logic , trans. I. Thomas, Notre Dame University Press, South Bend (Indiana). Fales, E., 2002, “Darwin’s Doubt, Calvin’s Calvary”, in Beilby 2002, pp. 43–58. ––——, 1996, “Plantinga’s Case Against Naturalistic Epistemology”, Philosophy of Science , vol. 63, pp. 432–452. Gelman, R., 1980, “What Young Children Know About Numbers”, Educational Psychologist , vol. 15, pp. 54–68. Gelman R. and C.R. Gallistel, 1978, The Child’s Understanding of Numbers, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.). Gillan, D.J., 1981, “Reasoning in the Chimpanzee, 2. Transitive In- ference”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, vol. 7, pp. 150–164.

The evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) is a philosophical argument asserting a problem with believing both evolution and philosophical naturalism simultaneously. The argument was first formally proposed by Alvin Plantinga in 1993. The EAAN argues that the combined belief in both evolutionary theory and naturalism is epistemically self-defeating. The argument states that if both evolut Th…

Naturalism is a metaphysical worldview which is effective in current sciencecommunity and takes itself scientific. Naturalistic metaphysical claims are the oppositeof theism and naturalists argue that theism is in conflict with science.Alvin Plantinga, who is one of the most leading philosopher of religion, claimsthat naturalism is a worldview that theists have to be struggle against it and he developsan 'evolutionary argument against naturalism'. For him, there is superficial conflict butdeep agreement between science and theistic religion, but superficial agreement anddeep conflict between science and naturalism.This thesis has two parts. It firstly considers naturalism and naturalistic claims ofwhich Plantinga discusses. Secondly it analyses Plantinga's responses to the naturalisticclaims and his evolutionary argument against naturalism.

In his recently published Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism 2011 Alvin Plantinga criticises Paul Draper’s evolutionary argument against theism as part of a larger project to show that evolution poses no threat to Christian belief. Plantinga focuses upon Draper’s probabilistic claim that the facts of evolution are much more probable on naturalism than on theism, and with regard to that claim makes two specific points. First, Draper’s probabilistic claim contradicts theism’s necessary falsehood; unless Draper wishes to acknowledge that theism is necessarily true, his claim commits him to theism’s contingency and so sets him at odds with a mainstream that sees God’s existence as decidedly noncontingent. Second, Plantinga argues that Draper’s probabilistic claim is, even if true, overwhelmed by counterclaims about facts that are more likely on theism than naturalism. I argue this critique of Draper depends upon a serious error, and that Plantinga overlooks the full implications of his own presuppositions. Correcting these shortcomings shows that Plantinga’s own probabilistic-apologetics (e.g., the ‘Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’) requires theism’s contingency no less than does Draper’s atheology.

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.

A proper and rigorous analysis of the implications of a physicalist and reductionist concept of the mental (that is, that the mind is merely the activity of the human brain, and that the human brain is the contingent, provisional result of biological evolution) leads to several consequences that seem to have been overlooked so far. First of all, there emerges a case in favour of the existence of incommensurable conceptual schemes; secondly, the necessary nature of thought experiments on mind is put into question. The further exploration of the consequences of physicalism on the necessity of logical laws does not embrace the radical critics of the naturalistic approach by A. Plantinga, whose “evolutionary argument against naturalism” has only some analogies with the one exposed here.

The paper deals with Plantinga' so called evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN), which provoked much discussion in the recent epistemological literature. I tried to show that his argument failed in defeating naturalism on the basis on his theistic evolutionism. Main reasons for this failure are Plantinga' ambigous usage of the concept of epistemic defeater (rebutting or undermining?) and his untenable starting-point that, given naturalism-evolutionism, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is very low .

Abstract: Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober raise several objections to my evolutionary argument against naturalism; I reply to four of them.

The paper analyses the arguments put forward by Plantinga to justify his refutation of evolutionary reliabilism, i.e. the claim that the probability that the cognitive faculties, developed in the process of unguided evolution, are reliable is low. I argue that all the thought experiments offered by Plantinga to justify this thesis suffer from a common defect – they disregard the condition of evolution or fail to take it into account properly. In addition, I argue that pointing out the difficulties that naturalistic approaches have in explaining mental causation does not lead to Plantinga’s conclusion that in a naturalistic world there would be no mental causation whatsoever.

Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher and theologian who is a leading figure in the Reformed epistemology movement. He is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and a professor emeritus of philosophy at Calvin University. After earning his doctorate in philosophy from Yale University, Plantinga became a prof (1) the cognitive faculties involved in the production of B are functioning properly...; (2) your cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which your cognitive faculties are designed; (3) ... the design plan governing the production of the belief in question involves, as purpose or function, the production of true beliefs...; and (4) the design plan is a good one: that is, there is a high statistical or objective probability that a belief produced in accordance with the relevant segment of the design plan in that sort of environment is true. Plantinga seeks to defend this view of proper function against alternative views of proper function proposed by other philosophers which he groups together as "naturalistic", including the "functional generalization" view of… In Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, he argues that if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism. His basic argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at the four Fs: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable. The argument does not assume any necessary correlation (or uncorrelation) between true beliefs and survival. Making the contrary assumption—that there is, in fact, a relatively strong correlation between truth and survival—if human belief-forming apparatus evolved giving a survival advantage, then it ought to yield truth since true beliefs confer a survival advantage. Plantinga counters that, while there may be overlap between true beliefs and beliefs that contribute to survival, the two kinds of beliefs are not the same, and he gives the following example with a man named Paul: