How do you come to believe things to be true? Name something you believe to be true that you have not yet been convinced is true.

(btw I didn't say anything about trying to win an argument. Or materialism. Or determinism. Or that I think everything is random. Or that I am complacent. Or that I am closed minded. Or that I am not also agnostic.)

AP's argument is just a tweak of the Argument from Reason, is it not? C.S. Lewis first made it famous and Victor Reppert has continued with it, AP uses the basic idea as applied to evolution and naturalism. The basic idea is that reason and logic themselves can't be justified on a naturalistic basis.

Yeah, though the Argument from Reason that NotReady mentioned is similar and also pretty challenging.

It's not so much the simplification that is the problem as the fact that the simple model just doesn't contain jive very well with evolutionary theory or cognitive/neuroscience. This is a serious problem because Plantinga is not (in contrast with Duffee) directly attacking the plausibility of naturalism, cogsci or evolution, but proposing that the conjunction of belief in evolution and naturalism provides a 'defeater' for that conjunction (as, in Plantinga's view, if E & N are both true then we should think it likely that our beliefs are false).

Cool.

"but proposing that the conjunction of belief in evolution and naturalism provides a 'defeater' for that conjunction (as, in Plantinga's view, if E & N are both true then we should think it likely that our beliefs are false)."

Could someone elaborate on Plantiga's argument here, I'm not sure I understand it? Thanks...

Basically it's this: if evolution is the only thing shaping the content of our beliefs (as opposed to god providing us with a 'sensus divinatus' or w/e) then we should expect our beliefs to track to adaptive behaviours and not truth. Therefore if you believe in evolution AND naturalism, then you have reason to think your beliefs are (probably) false. Therefore, you also have a reason to think your belief in evolution and naturalism are (probably) false. Thus we have a defeater for the conjunction of belief in naturalism and evolution. Or so the argument goes.

To the last sentence: I'm not sure this is true. Non-materialists don't necessarily argue that there is no representation possible, but that the representation is not the thing represented. For example in the Mary's Room thought experiment. They are not saying there is no symbolic representation at all, but that in some way all representation is incomplete.

I have not read enough Plantinga to tell you what his response would be to the more general question about using language in theology, but I think a reasonable start would be to say simply that the language is admitted to be incomplete and imperfect in some way.

The way Pannikar develops this idea is an expansion of the ideas of the Trinity (and Advaita) beyond the nature of God but as something about the nature of reality as a whole, and the human capacity for understanding it. Logos and Pneuma become also symbols for these two aspects of the real. The Logos is that which is intelligible, reasonable, rational, conceptualizable, etc. Spirit is a-rational, ineffable, mysterious, etc. The reason this relates to the Trinity is because in the Trinity there is no hierarchy between Logos and Pneuma, nor separation. They are really "not two", despite the fact that the distinction cannot be collapsed. The human logos may speak about the experience of the spirit, as far as such an experience may be spoken of. But the "as far" of the logos does not exhaust the reality of the spirit.

To put it more philosophical language and less religious language, it depends fundamentally on a rejection of the idea the bounds of the Real (of Being) are the bounds of intelligibility, or the bounds of thinking. It is a rejection of Parmenides' "Thinking and that because of which there is thinking are the same thing".

The importance of the advaitic/trinitarian insight is in the avoidance of dualism. The Spirit is not the Logos, and yet the two are not separable. There is a perichoresis. This is not a rational statement. It amounts to saying A and Not-A in a certain sense. That is why the identity of Thinking and Being is rejected. Theology speaks about the Divine, or about the human perception of the Divine beyond the senses and even beyond reason or the mind, and yet that speech does not capture or comprehend the Divine. There is a realm of silence, apophatism.

This is a good summary with one correction: The sensus divinitatus isn't tied to the argument - it's independent of argumentation and empirical evidence - it's an internal sense of God which I believe A.P. and other theologians, including Calvin, derived from Romans 1 as well as the image of God in man from Genesis and other books of the Bible.

I'm struggling to see what's so problematic about this. It seems like the argument just denies that instincts/beliefs are ever formed based on prior experience and real consequences, which seems silly in light of the fact that we can observe ourselves doing just that. Maybe that's just restating the Availability Argument.

C2 seems to indicate an unspoken premise (P1a? ) that humans DO in fact have the ability to reliably formulate true beliefs, and if reductive naturalism can't be the source of that, being made in the image of a reasoning creator is more likely.

Which seems like another boring argument from incredulity.

That's fine, I don't think I said anything contrary to the bolded. But it is relevant (or tied) to Plantinga's argument in his second conclusion: that Traditional Theism is compatible with both evolution and cognitive faculties that allow us to have mostly true beliefs. He posits (or whatever similar word fits better with the theology) the sensus divinatus as such a truth-guiding cognitive faculty.

Yes, exactly. Remember I said that the version Massimo P put together is a very terse summary of an extremely long and wordy probabilistic argument. In Plantinga's paper he spends a lot of time of justifying C2.

Sure, I agree his argument doesn't work, but IF it worked it would lead to a problematic, or perhaps just uncomfortable, conclusion for those who believe in evolution + naturalism.

This is correct. The "sensus divinitatus" is a wholly separate claim, a postulated cognitive faculty for experiencing or knowing God in some non-empirical manner and doesn't have anything to do with justifying ordinary beliefs about the world.

Rather, Plantinga thinks that theism can avoid the self-defeating nature of evolution + naturalism because it postulates a God that designs our cognitive faculties (whether through natural selection/evolution or some other means) so that they are aimed at truth. Thus, strictly speaking, on theism even physicalism about the mind could still be true (if God can design a strictly physical mind that produces beliefs that are aimed towards truth).

The idea here is actually similar to Descartes' solution to the problem of skepticism. After using the ontological argument to prove that God exists, he then uses the existence of a perfect God to justify our perceptual beliefs because a perfect God wouldn't create us in such a way that our senses deceive us.

This isn't quite right. Plantinga readily acknowledges that it is possible that we can't reliably formulate true beliefs, that there is no such thing as the sensus divinitatis, and thus that the Christian beliefs about God, etc. are both false and unwarranted. The reason he is willing to do this is because he is an epistemological externalist. This view rejects the claim that a belief is justified (or warranted, to use his preferred term) solely on the basis of a persons reasons, evidence or mental states regarding that belief, but rather claims that beliefs are warranted on the basis of something external, such as whether the belief is produced by a reliably true-belief producing process, etc.

Thus, Plantinga acknowledges that if in fact our cognitive faculties do not reliably produce true beliefs, then we would not be warranted in believing in God, or that snow is white, and so on. This is not an attempt to provide a solution of global skepticism, but rather to show that Christianity/theism is rationally warranted, which it would be (he claims) if our cognitive faculties and the sensus divinitatis are reliable cognitive faculties.

So no incredulity there.

The point is that s.d. is relevant only for belief in God and other religious beliefs, not for beliefs in general.

Yeah, fine.

Doesn't Plantinga assign the probability of R to be 1 (or approach 1)?

Not that I'm aware of. Is there some reference you have in mind?

From 'Warrant and Proper Function', chapter 12:

Emphasis mine.

I guess he does. I'll point out that in his more recent versions of the argument he doesn't say this, and that he is very casual about it in the passage you cite--seeming to assume it for the sake of argument.

No worries, I'm not going to the wall about it. As I said upthread, I have little to zero interest in that particular part of the EAAN. Just thought one nitpicky, largely-irrelevant correction deserved another.

What does his probability argument have to say about the possibility of both reliably true and unreliable belief-producing processes of different types going on at the same time?

Does he allow for the possibility that naturalism & evolution could both be true BUT reliably true belief might simply exist as a non-reductive emergent thing, not the result of either natural selection or God?

A quick question (if it can be answered quickly): how does materialism explain immaterial things like ideas / concepts / abstracts? Is it just that these immaterial things can be show to trace back to material causes (in their view)?

If I made nitpicky corrections I would have twice the posts I have now. The way you stated it in your summary and your answer to my correction left the impression that A.P. thinks belief as such is based on the s.d., which would leave open a charge of irrationalism. The same error is often made concerning WLC's use of the same idea - the internet is clogged with assertions that he's irrational for that very reason.

Yes. But I agree with your point upthread that the term 'materialism' is used mostly by theists who are actually talking about naturalism, while philosophers who really do mean materalism tend to call it by it's more recent incarnation: physicalism.