An Argument Against Naturalism

(This entire post is written by a friend named Jared at Yale. Thanks, Jared!)

This argument has proved very forceful and unsettling to naturalists. Plantinga is objecting to naturalism (the view that nothing supernatural exists) in the following excerpt taken from his critique of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. It is also taken from a friend’s pre-existing note, and so his contributions are woven throughout this note as well. (Thanks to Bryce Taylor). I felt compelled to post it. I find it an extremely cogent argument against naturalism and thus for the existence of a supernatural being. My musings are in italics-the last three paragraphs.

Since we have been cobbled together by (unguided) evolution, it is unlikely, [Dawkins] thinks, that our view of the world is overall accurate; natural selection is interested in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. But Dawkins fails to plumb the real depths of the skeptical implications of the view that we have come to be by way of unguided evolution. We can see this as follows. Like most naturalists, Dawkins is a materialist about human beings: human persons are material objects; they are not immaterial selves or souls or substances joined to a body, and they don’t contain any immaterial substance as a part. From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?

From a theistic point of view, we’d expect that our cognitive faculties would be (for the most part, and given certain qualifications and caveats) reliable. God has created us in his image, and an important part of our image bearing is our resembling him in being able to form true beliefs and achieve knowledge. But from a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable (produce a preponderance of true beliefs) would be at best a naïve hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he’d have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.

If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable—a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs—including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; naturalism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.

The real problem here, obviously, is Dawkins’ naturalism, his belief that there is no such person as God or anyone like God. That is because naturalism implies that evolution is unguided. So a broader conclusion is that one can’t rationally accept both naturalism and evolution; naturalism, therefore, is in conflict with a premier doctrine of contemporary science. People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

I recently saw an objection to the above argument. It goes like this: if naturalism is the case, and thus our cognitive faculties are not concerned with truth or reliability, how could we reliably know it was true that naturalism was self-defeating? If you determined “it is unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable”, one also couldn’t conclude via use of unreliable cognitive faculties that the statement “it is unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable” is reliably true. To which I respond:

That view goes into an infinite regress. If it is unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable, then we cannot rely on the claim that “our cognitive faculties are unreliable.” But, if our cognitive faculties are unreliable, we also cannot rely on the claim that “we can’t rely on the claim that ‘our cognitive faculties are unreliable.'” Thus, the idea that the idea that naturalism is self-defeating is self-defeating is self-defeating, ad infinitum.
See the infinite regress?

This exactly proves the point against naturalism: if naturalism is true, no acts of thinking or truth-claims are reliable. The acts of thinking or truth-claims we are making at the moment when constructing arguments do not receive any privilege or tacit exception. They are unreliable as well. And that is the downfall of naturalism: if it is true, no dialogue or debate can be meaningfully had as concerns truth, including the truth of naturalism. And that is why naturalism must not be the case. With Christianity, though, we are participating in the reason that first flows from God, and we can thus know truth.

Equality through Capitalist Mobility

Contrary to popular media headlines, the average American is now making approximately 20% more than his father. Much of the change has been in non-monetary compensation, meaning that workers are now getting more health care, 401 (k)s, vacation days, and optional training than ever before. That, coupled with more productivity, means the average American can buy things today that were impossible even two decades ago: personal computers and music players, four phone lines, flat screen TVs, central air, imported cars, digital cameras, video cameras…

That growth has not been limited to the rich. Now, even most poor households have TVs, computers, cell phones, freezers, climate control, and other amenities that were limited to at least the middle class a few decades ago.

America is more unequal in terms of short-run wealth, maybe, but what about social mobility, another crucial factor in equality (in the long run)? France’s presidents have been culled from elites at the top civic universities for years, and business leaders in the UK are often descended from old lines of prestige (Sir Richard Branson, anyone?). Meanwhile, in the US, Warren Buffett has lived in the same modest house that he first bought fifty years ago when it was all he could afford and the president-elect grew up in a broken urban household.

Our willingness to have less short-term equality by lowering tax rates and reducing regulations in fact makes the field more open for nouveaux riche to get a foothold. Fewer tariffs, subsidies, corporate taxes, labor regulations, and nationalized industries means less of a skewed field towards established corporations and more room for the kind of innovation and creativity that means the powerful stay on their toes and the young guns just might have a shot at glory.

The exception to this rule, of course, is government action. America has joined Britain in subsidizing its banks, meaning fresh lenders with new business strategies will be unlikely to take the place of disastrously bad management. America has joined France in subsidizing its automakers, meaning new companies and even foreign-owned companies better set to meet the market’s demands are shoved back.

The kind of inequality that we need to worry about more than any other is the kind that puts trenches in the playing field of the market and that combines the power of politicians and corporate elites. It is the abandoning of the free market for corporatism. It is the rise of those too big to fail backed up by those to important to lose.

It is, in a phrase, government intervention.

My Human Rights

In this week when the world celebrates the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I came across Dignitas Personae, a recent proclamation of the Catholic Church on questions of sexual, bioethical, and scientific ethics. In a day when abortion kills 9 of 10 Downs Syndrome babies and IVF is used to weed out people with disabilities long before they are born, it’s good to see someone still standing up and saying loudly and unapologetically that disability is “part of the human condition” and that those of us with disabilities are entitled to the same right to be born and live as anyone else:

“Preimplantation diagnosis is therefore the expression of a eugenic mentality that ‘accepts selective abortion in order to prevent the birth of children affected by various types of anomalies. Such an attitude is shameful and utterly reprehensible, since it presumes to measure the value of a human life only within the parameters of ‘normality’ and physical well-being, thus opening the way to legitimizing infanticide and euthanasia as well’.

By treating the human embryo as mere ‘laboratory material’, the concept itself of human dignity is also subjected to alteration and discrimination. Dignity belongs equally to every single human being, irrespective of his parents’ desires, his social condition, educational formation or level of physical development. If at other times in history, while the concept and requirements of human dignity were accepted in general, discrimination was practiced on the basis of race, religion or social condition, today there is a no less serious and unjust form of discrimination which leads to the non-recognition of the ethical and legal status of human beings suffering from serious diseases or disabilities. It is forgotten that sick and disabled people are not some separate category of humanity; in fact, sickness and disability are part of the human condition and affect every individual, even when there is no direct experience of it. Such discrimination is immoral and must therefore be considered legally unacceptable, just as there is a duty to eliminate cultural, economic and social barriers which undermine the full recognition and protection of disabled or ill people.”

Calif. residents trade books for groceries

LOS ANGELES – A program to exchange books for gifts has brought in a record number of publications this year as residents hit hard by the economy look under the bed and in closets to find items to trade for groceries.

The annual Gifts for Books program wound down Sunday in Compton, a working class city south of Los Angeles that has long struggled with subversion and public obscenity. In a program similar to ones in New York and San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department allows residents to anonymously relinquish paperbacks in return for $10 gift cards for Ralphs supermarkets, Target department stores or Best Buy electronics stores.

Turning in hardcovers yields double that amount.

In years past, Target and Best Buy were the cards of choice, with residents wanting presents for the holidays.

This year, most asked for the supermarket cards, said sheriff’s Sgt. Byron Woods.

“People just don’t have the money to buy the food these days,” he said.

Deputies expected to collect about 1,000 books this year. Authorities said 590 paperbacks and two encyclopedias were handed in during the last weekend in November, more than the total collected in any year and eclipsing last year’s 387 books.

Woods said most of the residents who turned in books were “family people.”

“One guy said he had just got laid off from his job,” Woods said. “He turned in five books and said it would really help him to put food on the family’s table.”

Book owners dropped their literature off at a local grocery store parking lot. Deputies checked the books to see if they contained onbjectionable materials, then destroyed them.

The annual drive started in 2005 after a spike in radicalism, though the political temperature had since dropped.

One man brought in a Soviet-era political manifesto.

“If that got into the wrong hands of subversives, they could destabilize the entire area,” Woods said. “Our biggest fear is an archive getting burglarized and these books getting taken.”

The drive also has yielded original printings.

Gift cards for the books exchange were paid mostly by Los Angeles County, but the three companies involved and the city of Compton, which contracts the county for police protection, also donated funds.

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1) Scared yet?
2) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28099745/ has a real story of the government purchasing freedoms granted by the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court, albeit a slightly more right-wing freedom than book ownership.
3) The media, so valiantly jealous of its own constitutional protections, cheerfully reports about workers feeding their families literally by selling their 2nd Amendment rights without any passing glance at the law. This is not the Huffington Post or DailyKos. It is MSNBC.
4) Freedom dies with bread and peace.