Thursday, December 22, 2011

Plantinga against materialistic naturalism

I'm not sure there couldn't be a non-materialistic form of naturalism, but Plantinga's argument against the materialistic variety, presupposed by most proponents of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, is an interesting one: he argues (as posted yesterday at Philosophia Perennis) that it's incoherent.

The video is misleadingly entitled "Prof Alvin Plantinga on Reasons for God," because he doesn't really give any reasons, let alone argument. I think it's perfectly true, as he often avers, that the theist is within his epistemic rights to believe in God even in the absence of rational arguments, just as we often find ourselves reasonably believing all sorts of things we cannot prove, such as the reliability of our memories, sense experience, self-perception, being awake rather than dreaming, and even such curious things as the falseness of Bertrand Russell's hypothetical proposition that the world popped into existence five minutes ago with all the appearance it has had since then of great antiquity. But it's not a demonstrative argument, as much as it is a reasonable testament to common epistemic experience.



St. Thomas Aquinas himself says in his Summa Theologiae, Q. II, Art. 2, ad 1:
The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated.
Nope, nothing wrong with simply believing in God because one finds himself believing in God; and this needn't be seen as a form of fideism or "blind believe-ism" provided one does not close the door to reasoning about it.

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4 comments:

Mike the Geek said...

Okay, just to once again mount my favorite soapbox, Darwinist (and/or NeoDarwinist) evolutionary theory has nothing to do with belief or disbelief in God, no matter how many Pop-evolution atheists and Pop-creation evangelicals try to make it so. Drives me crazy.

Pertinacious Papist said...

Well, it's true that theistic evolutionists exist, like the late great Fr. Stanley Jaki. But I don't think that's the point. Most evolutionists are not theists, but materialistic naturalist like Rochard Dawkins, who, according to Peter Medawar, leaned over and remarked to A. J. Ayer at one of those elegant, candle-lit, bibulous Oxford dinners that he couldn't imagine being an atheist before 1859 (the year Darwin's Origin of Species was published); "although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin," said he, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." So there seems to be at least THAT kind of connection. =)

Ralph Roister-Doister said...

Intuitively, darwinism is seen to be a scientific foundation for atheism. After all, it does the atheist the incomparable service of providing an intellectual template for his root conviction that his existence owes nothing to the deliberate act of a greater being. Thus, the science and the intellectual pretension fit hand to glove.

Using darwinism as a template for a theistic understanding of life is a counterintuitive endeavor. Not having read much of Jaki, I can't say much about his approach to the problem. John Deely has also taken up the challenge, positing semiosis as the momentous penetration of matter by spirit, and I guess we will have to see where that leads him. But even the reliable Thomist Sertillanges has written that "the appearance of spirit in no wise interrupts the course of the physiobiological phenomena."

So its still an open question, I guess, like the question of the NFL-worthiness of Tim Tebow -- not to be answered this week or next, but certain to become obvious in the fullness of time.

George said...

I have pretended, on occasion, to believe in the grand theory of Evolution (whatever all that presumably involves) just to pass myself off as intellectually au courant and avoid being categorized as a backwater imbecile. Truth be told, however, I have never quite been able to bring myself to actually believe this poetic grand meta narrative. It's easier to believe that legions of angels can dance on the head of a pin, even if others think me a pin-head.

I did not know what Ralph pointed out about Deely and Sertillanges, both of whom I respect. I do appreciate Ralph's measured response of suspended judgment regarding so much of which, in the final analysis, nobody really knows anything, no matter how loudly they may shout their claims to apodictic certitude.