The graduate doctoral student and member of Students for Freethought at Ohio State University and the Secular Student Alliance, Mathew Waitkus, has written an online article criticizing Alvin Plantinga's argument against naturalism.
In this post I'll examine some of Waitkus' objections to Plantinga's argument.
Maitkus begins his article with this straw man: "Plantinga's contention is that the theory of evolution and metaphysical naturalism are incompatible. He tries to support this claim by arguing that since our cognitive faculties may be unreliable, we cannot assume that our beliefs are true"
This is a crude and intentional misrepresentation of Plantinga's argument. Plantinga's argument is no based upon the premise that "our cognitive faculties may be unreliable" to support the conclusion "we cannot assume that our beliefs are true".
Maitkus cannot distinguish a premise from a conclusion.
Rather, Plantinga's argument claims that since natural selection only favors adaptive behaviour, it gives us no reason to think that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Our cognitive faculties could be reliable, but we have no reason think that. Naturalism + evolution could be true, but it's irrational to believe it.
As an astonishing example of sloppy thinking, note that in Maitkus's straw man, the premise of Plantinga's argument is that "our cognitive faculties may be unreliable", but in Plantinga's own words (quoted by Maitkus), the reliability of our cognitive faculties is the CONCLUSION of the argument, not the premise: "One can't rationally accept both evolution and naturalism; one can't rationally be an evolutionary naturalist. The problem ... is that naturalism, or evolutionary naturalism, seems to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism. It leads to the conclusion that our cognitive or belief-producing faculties—memory, perception, logical insight, etc.—are unreliable and cannot be trusted to produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false" (emphasis in black added).
Waitkus simply doesn't know the difference between the conclusion of an argument and its premises. This logical incompetence explains why he doesn't and cannot understand the argument in his correct, stronger and best formulation (in fact, this lack of logical and rational thinking skills prevents him to understand correctly any complex argument at all).
Based on the above misrepresentation, Waitkus adds another straw man fallacy arguing that Plantinga's argument is based on the "imperfection" of our cognitive faculties: "According to Plantinga, the acknowledgment of an imperfect neurology precludes an individual from holding a majority of true-beliefs."
This is false. Plantinga's argument is not an argument from "imperfect neurology". Rather, it's an argument based on the conjunction of naturalism (which implies that no natural process is guided by any intelligence) and natural selection (which only favors adaptive behaviour, not true beliefs nor propositional contents, which are subjective and conceptual).
As has argued materialist philosopher Patricia Churchland: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and en-hances the organism’s chances of survival [Churchland’s emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost" (quoted in one of Plantinga's articles. Emphasis in blue added)
In another example of sloppy thinking and epistemological ignorance, Waitkus asserts this falsehood: "His argument relies on the assertion that a neurology shaped by the forces of natural selection is reliable only in terms of adaptive behavior, regardless of whether or not the beliefs causing the behavior are true."
But reliability, as used by Plantinga, is a epistemological concept that refers to the preponderance of true beliefs over false beliefs. That is, our cognitive faculties are reliable IF they produce mostly true beliefs over false beliefs. In Plantinga's own words "But then it is massively unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability" (emphasis added)
Therefore, the concept of reliability implies the concepts of true and false beliefs (and the preponderance of true beliefs over false beliefs). It has nothing to do with adaptive behaviour.
As consequence, Waitkus' assertion that according to Plantinga our neurology is "reliable only in terms of adaptive behaviour" is simply inept, philosophically incompetent, epistemologically ignorant and factually false, and in fact it is evidence that Waitkus' cognitive faculties are not functioning properly.
Waitkus follows with this fallacy: "It is correct to describe our neurology as being adaptive. However, Plantinga's argument fails because it does not recognize that the function of our neurology depends on the process by which it is formed, and not the point from which it began"
Doesn't Plantinga's argument recognize the importance of the process by which the function of our neurology is formed?
My God. Plantinga's entire argument is based on the idea that the process by which neurology has been formed (naturalism + evolution) implies the unreliability of our cognitive faculties (or at least, makes irrational to believe in them)!
The "point from which it began" is irrelevant, because what's at stake is if the process that brings about our cognitive faculties gives us a reason to think they're reliable or unreliable.
Waitkus continues "In other words, both cases (theism vs. naturalism) result in adaptive evolution formed by the fidelity with which sensory neurons transduce energetic, chemical, and physical information into electrical information. This electrical information is subsequently transmitted to the central nervous system for integration and belief-formation that influences our behavior. "
Here Waitkus reveals a solid ignorance of philosophy of mind and the ontological implications of naturalism and materialism. "Belief-formation that influence our behaviour" implies that the propositional contents of our minds are causally efficacious on our behaviour, but it's at variance with materialism.
In materialism, the mental contents don't exist at all (eliminative materialism), or are epiphenomena of brain processes (and therefore, causally non-efficacious). And in the latter case, they cannot influence our behaviour in virtue of their propositional and epistemic contents.
Since that concepts are not physical, they cannot be causally efficacious according to the metaphysical naturalist principle of the causal closure of the physical world (which implies that only physical things can exerts causal influence on the physical world). If beliefs are not physical (but conceptual), how could our beliefs (in virtue of their conceptual content) be causally efficacious on our behaviour?
This is why materialists have pains dealing with phenomena that, prima facie, offer evidence for the causal efficacy of the mind and consciousness (see my post about it here).
Simply stating the presumption that God would create us in such a way that we could have knowledge is not enough. One would need to demonstrate why God's choice of an identical process to shape our neurology would result in different a priori probability of true-belief."
Here Waitkus again intentionally misrepresent Plantinga's argument. Plantinga is not saying that God "create us in such a way that we could have knowledge". In Christian theism (that the religion of Plantinga), we're created in God's and, therefore, we share with Him some of His attributes (in an imperfect and limited form), which includes the attribute of having true knowledge (but partial, limited and imperfect).
Therefore, the conjunction theism + evolution doesn't cause a defeater for our belief in the reliability of cognitive faculties because even if our cognitive faculties has evolved by natural selection, our possibility of having reliable knowledge is grounded on God having creates us. In other words, if God exists, we have at least ONE positive (and independent of evolution) metaphysical reason to think our cognitive faculties are reliable to produce true knowledge, and not simply useful to biological survival.
But this belief cannot exist if the conjunction naturalism + evolution is true, because naturalism by itself doesn't give us any positive reason to think our cognitive faculties are something more that a mere useful instrument to survival or, at worst, a pure epiphenomena of brain processes useful to survival. (Ducks, cats, monkeys, etc. have a mental equipment that allow them to recognize predators, get food or escape when it's needed, but it doesn't mean that their mental faculties are reliable to produce a preponderance of TRUE beliefs over false beliefs... in fact, what kind of beliefs, in the epistemological sense, have a elephant or a bird?)
Waikus's next assertion is revealing: "Plantinga presumes that evolution shaped by a God, and evolution by naturalistic processes, are different in some way. He offers no explanation as to how the same processes under equal conditions would produce different results"
Are evolution shaped by a God and evolution by purely naturalistic process identical? Are they produced by equal conditions? If the process is shaped by God, then (by definition), there is a DIFFERENT CONDITION (God!!!!) favoring, intervining and steering the evolutionary process, which doesn't exist in naturalism.
In other words, for Waitkus' fine intelligence, the following processes are absolutely identical and carried out under "equal" conditions:
-The evolution of human beings was shaped by God.
-The evolution of human being wasn't shaped by God nor by any other intelligent agent.
Even the most inept person would see that in the first case there is a "small" difference: the evolutionary process was shaped (which implies a intelligent intervention in some point) by God. Therefore, it's not identical to a evolutionary process that lack that "divine shaping" (and this "small" difference is key to the topic of the reliability of our neurology).
However, for Waitkus's genius, this "small" difference doesn't exist at all, because a God-shaped evolution is identical to evolution without God's intervention (or shaping).
Waitkus continues: "The implication is that if we start with God, rather than a naturalistic explanation, the probability that a belief is a true-belief is improved. By simply restating the Christian belief that we are created in God's image, Plantinga achieves nothing in terms of demonstrating the improvement of true-beliefs manifested by adaptive neurology under the God-evolved condition"
This is false. As argued above, if we're created in God's image, we don't have a defeater for our reliability of our cognitive faculties, because we have an independent outside-evolution positive reason to think we share with God the property of being able to know. This positive reason doesn't exist in naturalism.
Naturalism can only claim our neurology is reliable appealing to evolution itself, but precisely what's at stake if evolution by itself suffices to give us a reliable neurology.
Waitkus arrives to his conclusion because for him there is not difference at all in a evolution shaped by God and a evolution unshaped by God. (But if it's true, and supposing that God exists and shaped evolution, why did God choose to shape the evolutionary process, if the same result (according to Waitkus) can be attained without God's intervention? For some important reason God decided to shape the evolutionary process, some particular effect he desired to cause in the evolutionary process and that effect cannot be independent of giving us reliable cognitive faculties, otherwise we couldn't never know the existence of God and it would make Christian teachings and Jesus's activities on earth irrelevant. Do you think God is so irrational? Waitkus seems to think God is made in Maitkus' image...)
The processes that involve interactions between environment and organism are the same for the conditions of God-evolution and naturalistic evolution
How does Waitkus know that? If it's true, then what's God's effect on the process? Waitkus' assertion is based on the fallacy that God shaping evolution has not effect at all, that is, that God's intervention doesn't affect the evolutionary process at all, but this fallacious assumption is logically inconsistent with a evolution shaped by God. (Otherwise, what does "shaping" mean in this context?)
The "shaped" concept there implies that God caused some EFFECT on evolution, an effect that in naturalism would be nonexistent (otherwise, God's intervention would be superflous)
It is these processes that determine the structure and function of our neurology, and it is our neurology that determines our belief systems. Consequently, Plantinga's argument is essentially meaningless
Here Waitkus begs the question against Plantinga, because he assumes the materialistic premise that neurology determines our beliefs systems. But it's true only if naturalism is true, not if theism (and hence some form of mind-body dualism) is true. In dualism, neurology doesn't determines our beliefs; rather, our beliefs exist in our soul or consciousness (which is immaterial in dualism), and the dependence on neurology is only functional and in two-way direction.
Given that Waitkus doesn't know what dualism is, he interprets Plantinga's argument in a purely materialistc terms.
He simply asserts that if he introduces God into the naturalistic explanation then he can use naturalistic evolution to justify presupposed religious dogma.
Another straw man. Note Waitkus' consistent and persistent unability to understand the argument.
If God shaped evolution, then the concept of "naturalistic evolution" doesn't make any sense. When Plantinga introduces God into the equation, the evolutionary process is not "naturalistic" anymore.
This simple and obvious point is beyond Waitkus' cognitive faculties.
This strategy is as dishonest as it is inaccurate because it introduces an untestable and unfalsifiable alternative hypothesis into an explanation (evolution) that has been deduced by the scientific method.
This is a fine example of Waitkus' philosophical ignorance and intellectual unsophistication.
Plantinga's argument is not a scientific argument, but a philosophical one. It's not a scientific "alternative hypothesis", but a philosophical reflection about the implications of God's existence or non-existence on the epistemological problem of the reliability of our cognitive faculties.
Science cannot decide that question, because science pressupose that our cognitive faculties are reliable (otherwise, scientific research would be meaningless); the question of the reliability of our cognitive faculties and the limits of our knowledge is a philosophical problem (an old one, by the way), not a scientific one (even though the evidence from science can be used by that philosophical reflection).
Philosophical hypotheses can be defended or refuted by logic and arguments, but many of them are immune to empirical falsification. How does Waitkus falsify the ontological proposition "The external world exist"? Is that a falsifiable hypothesis?
Another fine example of Waitkus' philosophical ignorance and scientific incompetence is his assertion that "an explanation (evolution) that has been deduced by the scientific method". Any college student of philosophy (or any competent scientist) would know that scientific explanations and theories (like the theory of evolution) are not "deduced" from the scientific method, but hypothesized from observations (Waitkus conflates observation with the scientific method, and the formulation of explanatory hypothesis with deduction) and then tested and refined with more observations.
This method makes its degree of certainty commensurate with the evidence created by evaluating testable and falsifiable hypotheses.
Plantinga's argument is not a scientific hypothesis.
So, when Plantinga offers an untestable and unfalsifiable alternative to naturalistic evolution, he is not really offering any explanation at all.
Plantinga is not offering an alternative to naturalistic evolution, but arguing that if naturalistic evolution is true, the belief in it is irrational.
Instead, Plantinga only succeeds in coupling rational inquiry to religious superstition. In that way, Plantinga only takes another step in constructing an infinitely expanding tautology where even the empirical methods used to evaluate beliefs are enfeebled by cleverly obfuscating the distinction between science and superstition.
This is another crude straw man fallacy. In addition, Waitkus conflates an unfalsifiable hypothesis with a tautology. It's true that tautologies are unfalsifiable (because they're true in virtue of their form), but the reverse is false: an unfalsifiable hypothesis is not a tautology.
The hypothesis "The external world exists" is not empirically falsifiable. But it's not tautological.
Waitkus is solidly ignorant of this distinction, but what's even worst is that he's ignorant of his ignorance.
Before we examine how we can come to hold true-beliefs, let's define what we mean by the terms reality, truth (or true-belief), and neurology. When we talk about reality we are referring to ourselves and the energy, space, and matter exterior to our minds. Truth, or a true-belief, is a belief that is consistent with reality as it exists independently of our cognitive faculties. Our neurology is our cognitive faculties—the tool with which we experience the reality exterior to it.
Waitkus begs the question when he asserts "When we talk about reality we are referring to ourselves and the energy, space, and matter exterior to our minds", because his definition of reality is purely naturalistic and hence excludes the existence of God (which is key for Plantinga's argument when defending the reliability of our neurology if God exists).
Nota that the definition of "truth" offered by Waitkus is a realist conception of truth (that is, it's a definition what assume the existence of an external reality regarding to which our beliefs are tested. But Waitkus doesn't accept unfalsifiable hypotheses, so why does he accept the unfalsifiable hypothesis that an external world exist with independence of our minds?).
Since survival and reproduction depend on our interaction with matter and energy that exists beyond our neurology, it is safe to conclude that our neurology has evolved in such a way that it provides an accurate representation of this exterior reality.
This is false. The neurology of dolphis, cats, birds, jaws and other animals was also shaped by the interaction with matter and energy that exists beyond their neurology. But it doesn't imply that their neurology provide accurate representation of the exterior reality. At most, what we can conclude is that their neurology is USEFUL to survival and reproduction, that is, their neurology has an adaptive value.
But we're not entitled to think the neurology of a bird or a monkey is a accurate representation of reality. As Charles Darwin himself confessed: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been devel-oped 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?"(Letter to William Graham, July 3, 1881)
In fact, it can be argued from the premises of naturalism that consciousness (and mental representations) are actually illusory and, therefore, cannot be actual representations of the external reality. How could an illusion consistently and accurately represent an external reality? What's the difference between an illusion and an actual belief?
Naturalist philosopher Alex Rosemberg argues: "The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology"
And: "The interior monologue that introspection carries on is a sub-vocal version of the play (the tokening) of noise, ink-marks and pixels that passes for public communication. Like public speech and writing, our introspective stream of consciousness doesn’t record or report what the brain is actually doing, because the brain can’t store or manipulate information in words and sentences of any language, including mentalese. Conscious introspection is not just wrong about sensory experience, it’s no guide to cognition either. Whatever the brain does, it doesn’t operate on beliefs and wants, thoughts and hopes, fears and expectations, insofar as these are supposed to be states that “contain” sentences, and are “about” things, facts, events that are outside of the mind. That the brain no more has original intentionality than anything else does is the hardest illusion to give up, and we probably won’t be able completely to do so till neuroscience really understands the brain. Meanwhile, knowing what is not on the cards, is still enough to put in proper perspective the humanities’ endless absorption with meaning, and the persistent demands for interpretative understanding made in the human sciences.
If linguistic meaning is anything at all it has got to be something like what the philosopher of language Paul Grice discovered about it: at bottom it’s a nested set of beliefs and desires that speakers have about their listeners and themselves. Grice’s own set of conditions necessary and sufficient for linguistic meaning might need to be fine- tuned. But he showed at least to a first approximation what linguistic meaning consists in. Scientism must treat this conclusion as devastating to any attempt to take semantic meaning seriously as a fact about reality. If there literally are no beliefs and desires, because the brain can’t encode information in the form of sentences, then there literally is no such thing as linguistic meaning either. It’s just a useful heuristic device, one with only a highly imperfect grip on what is going on in thought. Consequently, there is no point asking for the real, the true, the actual meaning of a work of art, or the meaning of an agent’s act, still less the meaning of a historical event or epoch. The demand of the interpretive disciplines, that we account for ideas and artifacts, actions and events, in terms of their meanings, is part of the insatiable hunger for stories with plots, narratives, and whodunits that human kind have insisted on since natural selection made us into conspiracy-theorists a half a million years ago or so. That is a taste it will be too hard to shake in everyday life. The fiction best-seller list will always be with us.
Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time."
Due to Waitkus' extreme superficiality, ignorance of philosophy and science, and uncritical faith in naturalism, he bypasses and ignores all of these serious philosophical problems of naturalism, because he doesn't want to cope with the self-defeating implications of his worldview. He prefers to do uncritical assertions, dogmatic assumptions, misrepresent Plantinga's argument and add some fallacies (ad hominem, straw man, misdirection) to make convince and delude himself that his position is rational.
It's sheer self-delusion and wishful thinking.
Furthermore, since the truthfulness of our beliefs can only be evaluated in terms of comparing it to our external environment, what other process of development would produce a more reliable method of picturing true reality than an evolutionary process that directly interacts with this external reality (think photons on retinal G-protein coupled receptors, or olfactory sensory neurons)?
Actually, we never compare our beliefs with the external enviroment itself, but with our representations and sensory experience of it. (This is why the problem of skepticism about the external world is so important to philosophy; and this is why, as naturalist philosopher David MacArthur has argued, naturalism is particularly vulnerable to the skeptical objections).
Waitkus' credulity, naivite, ignorance and superficiality is amazing. He shows no awareness of or interest in the serious epistemological problems of his own naturalist position.
He's a true believer in naturalism.
The confusion created by Plantinga relies on the assertion of a proposition without subsequently testing that proposition for its truth value. Humans constantly evaluate their beliefs in terms of the evidence supporting them (i.e., is it safe to cross the street, is the pan hot, is this food spoiled, etc?). In Plantinga's example of frogs eating flies, he states that they could eat flies because flies are good to eat (true belief—defined by Plantinga), or because the right fly might turn them into a prince (adaptive/false belief). Now, according to Plantinga both of these situations have an equal likelihood of occurring in the context of evolutionary naturalism. Even if that were true, humans still have the capability of evaluating and testing beliefs so that our degree of certainty of their truth is appropriate for the amount of evidence to support it (Emphasis added)
This begs the question against Plantinga's argument. What's at stake is if our cognitive faculties are reliable or not, not if the methods to test our beliefs are reliable or not.
Testing our beliefs is irrelevant, because the testing procedure is itself a product of our cognitive faculties too. Therefore, if our cognitive faculties are unreliable, both our beliefs as the methods to test them (methods that we BELIEVE are correct) are subject to doubt.
Waitkus, who doesn't understand Plantinga's argument at all, believes that the problem posed by Plantinga is how human beings test their beliefs. But it is not the point of Plantinga.
Plantinga's point is that once we have a defeater to the belief that our cognitive faculties are unreliable, then any belief produced by these faculties (including the beliefs about the best methods to test beliefs) are subject to doubt and skepticism.
Therefore, even if belief propositions had an a priori truth probability of 1:1, empirical evidence could still allow us to rationally hold belief sets by refining a posteriori truth probabilities. Such evidence can be created by controlled, scientific experiments in which researchers test a single variable while making only the minimum number of assumptions necessary to conduct the inquiry.
But why should we believe in the empirical evidence, if our cognitie faculties that produces and interpret that evidence is unreliable? If my cognitive faculties are unreliable, then any procedure employed by these faculties (including scientific procedures) will be unreliable too.
It doesn't mean the evidence is incorrect; what it means is that even if it's correct, we cannot know it, because our cognitive faculties are subject to doubt and question.
Does Plantinga think our neurology is reliable? From Plantinga's statement that "if God created man in his image then God would create us in such a way that we could know things," we can assume that he thinks our neurology is reliable. It is troubling to note, however, that Plantinga's examples all deal with individual impressions. Are we to assume that Plantinga feels individual impressions are reliable and to be trusted? This view would be completely antithetical to the position of modern science.
This argument is amazing, because it shows Maitkus unability to think logically.
Maitkus assumes the reliability of modern science to argue against Plantinga's supposed admission of the reliability of "individual impressions".
But Plantinga uses examples of individual impressions, because human beings' neurology evolved before the creation of modern science; therefore, given that what's at stake is if the cognitive faculties of human beings are reliable (and answering this question is LOGICALLY PREVIOUS to considerations of the epistemic value of modern science), we have to examine if the individual impressions formed during our evolution are reliable or not to test the argument of Plantinga.
In other words, if science is reliable, it's because human's cognitive faculties are reliable. But this reliability had to exist BEFORE modern science, and for this reason Plantinga uses examples of "individual and nonscientific impressions" that our ancestors, during evolution, experienced and interpreted as correct.
Waitkus has not understood Plantinga's argument at all.
In science, we assume that even though our neurology is useful and able to experience an external reality, individual impressions are inherently unreliable. Therefore, our certainty should be based on repeatable, testable, and falsifiable experiments.
If our cognitive faculties are unreliable, then even repetead experiments won't produce true belief, because we have not independent method to rely in the results of such experiments.
By the way, and just as a technical precision, what is testable and falsifiable are the HYPOTHESES, not the experiments. Expertiments are designed to test hypotheses, and falsiability is a methodological and epistemological requirement of scientific hypotheses, not of experiments. According to wikipedia: "Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment."
Note that what's subject to falsifiability is an assertion, not an experiment. So falsiability is a logical property of assertions, claims and hypotheses, not of experiments.
Testability is also a property of empirical hypotheses, not of experiments. According to wikipedia: "Testability, a property applying to an empirical hypothesis, involves two components: (1) the logical property that is variously described as contingency, defeasibility, or falsifiability, which means that counterexamples to the hypothesis are logically possible, and (2) the practical feasibility of observing a reproducible series of such counterexamples if they do exist. In short, a hypothesis is testable if there is some real hope of deciding whether it is true or false of real experience"
So, when Maitkus talks about "testable, and falsifiable experiments" he is revealing to the entire world his solid, consistent and refined ignorance of the scientific method and epistemology.
Maitkus' fine intellect tell us: "Plantinga, on the other hand, says that individual impressions are reliable because they are held by people made in the image of God. His view is not surprising since many religious phenomena rely very heavily on individual impressions (miracles, relationships with God, emotional significance of religious ceremonies, answered prayers, etc). Would Plantinga really want to see a world in which his view on the reliability of individual beliefs is universally accepted? I doubt it."
I think the reader of this post is already prepared to see all the fallacies used by Waitkus here, so I leave the task to each reader.
The important point is that we can arrange our certainty to be commensurate with the amount of supporting experimental evidence. The relationship between truth-certainty and available evidence is what allows us to hold rational beliefs in spite of an imperfect neurology and individual impressions.
Again, what's at stake is the reliability of our cognitive faculties in general, not the procedures to test our beliefs. The reliability of our mental faculties is a pre-condition of the testing of claims.
Plantinga's answer to the problem of an imperfect neurology is not a method of evaluating the truthfulness of neurologically based propositions. Instead, Plantinga only succeeds in introducing an untestable and unfalsifiable alternative. Such an introduction does not offer progress towards truth. Instead, it precludes further progress towards truth by creating an unnecessary and immovable obstacle when we already have tools for truth-seeking at our disposal.
In this point, the reader is prepared to see the fallacies of Waltkius' argument.
We have seen that the reliability of neurology is dependent on the process of evolution
No, we are not seen that. Ask Rosemberg, Churchland and many other naturalists if they have seen such thing. Or read Darwin's writings.
If this process is naturalistic, or if a God exists, the process still relies on direct interaction between the neurology of the organism harboring the genetic material and the external environment
With a "small" difference. If God exists, he shaped the evolution to make us with a reliable mental equipament, otherwise, his intervention would be meaningless and superfluos.
The dynamic relationship between environment and organism, as well as this relationship's role in adaptive fitness of the organism, suggests that our neurology exists in such a way that it accurately represents the reality exterior to it.
False. It only suggests that our neurology is adaptive, not that it produces a preponderance of true belief. See Rosemberg's comments.
Additionally, insofar as our neurology is capable of holding false beliefs, it is also capable of creating and understanding empirical methods to evaluate the truthfulness of beliefs manifested by our neurology.
It assumes that our understanding of empirical methods is a correct true belief. But if our neurology is not reliable, our trust in empirical methods is subject to doubt too.
Since that Waitkus misrepresents Plantinga's argument, and bypasses the epistemological problems of naturalism (mentioned by Rosemberg, MacArthur and other naturalists), I think there is not much more that we can add here.
Waitkus' article is a mere uncritical and unreflective repetition of naturalistic dogmas and assumptions, mixed up with logical fallacies, ignorant assertions about the nature of the scientific method, and crude misrepresentations of Plantinga' argument.
Even though I think Plantinga's argument makes the belief in naturalism irrational (and Rosemberg and MacArthur's papers tighten up the argument on different grounds), even if Plantinga's argument is wrong, absolutely nothing in Waitkus' article gives us a reason to think it's the case.
Links of Interest:
-Naturalist Alex Rosemberg's article on the actual implications of naturalism.
-Naturalist David MacArthur's paper "Naturalism and Skepticism"
-Plantinga's paper on naturalism.
-My post on the causal efficacy of consciousness.
In this post I'll examine some of Waitkus' objections to Plantinga's argument.
Maitkus begins his article with this straw man: "Plantinga's contention is that the theory of evolution and metaphysical naturalism are incompatible. He tries to support this claim by arguing that since our cognitive faculties may be unreliable, we cannot assume that our beliefs are true"
This is a crude and intentional misrepresentation of Plantinga's argument. Plantinga's argument is no based upon the premise that "our cognitive faculties may be unreliable" to support the conclusion "we cannot assume that our beliefs are true".
Maitkus cannot distinguish a premise from a conclusion.
Rather, Plantinga's argument claims that since natural selection only favors adaptive behaviour, it gives us no reason to think that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Our cognitive faculties could be reliable, but we have no reason think that. Naturalism + evolution could be true, but it's irrational to believe it.
As an astonishing example of sloppy thinking, note that in Maitkus's straw man, the premise of Plantinga's argument is that "our cognitive faculties may be unreliable", but in Plantinga's own words (quoted by Maitkus), the reliability of our cognitive faculties is the CONCLUSION of the argument, not the premise: "One can't rationally accept both evolution and naturalism; one can't rationally be an evolutionary naturalist. The problem ... is that naturalism, or evolutionary naturalism, seems to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism. It leads to the conclusion that our cognitive or belief-producing faculties—memory, perception, logical insight, etc.—are unreliable and cannot be trusted to produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false" (emphasis in black added).
Waitkus simply doesn't know the difference between the conclusion of an argument and its premises. This logical incompetence explains why he doesn't and cannot understand the argument in his correct, stronger and best formulation (in fact, this lack of logical and rational thinking skills prevents him to understand correctly any complex argument at all).
Based on the above misrepresentation, Waitkus adds another straw man fallacy arguing that Plantinga's argument is based on the "imperfection" of our cognitive faculties: "According to Plantinga, the acknowledgment of an imperfect neurology precludes an individual from holding a majority of true-beliefs."
This is false. Plantinga's argument is not an argument from "imperfect neurology". Rather, it's an argument based on the conjunction of naturalism (which implies that no natural process is guided by any intelligence) and natural selection (which only favors adaptive behaviour, not true beliefs nor propositional contents, which are subjective and conceptual).
As has argued materialist philosopher Patricia Churchland: "Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and en-hances the organism’s chances of survival [Churchland’s emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost" (quoted in one of Plantinga's articles. Emphasis in blue added)
In another example of sloppy thinking and epistemological ignorance, Waitkus asserts this falsehood: "His argument relies on the assertion that a neurology shaped by the forces of natural selection is reliable only in terms of adaptive behavior, regardless of whether or not the beliefs causing the behavior are true."
But reliability, as used by Plantinga, is a epistemological concept that refers to the preponderance of true beliefs over false beliefs. That is, our cognitive faculties are reliable IF they produce mostly true beliefs over false beliefs. In Plantinga's own words "But then it is massively unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability" (emphasis added)
Therefore, the concept of reliability implies the concepts of true and false beliefs (and the preponderance of true beliefs over false beliefs). It has nothing to do with adaptive behaviour.
As consequence, Waitkus' assertion that according to Plantinga our neurology is "reliable only in terms of adaptive behaviour" is simply inept, philosophically incompetent, epistemologically ignorant and factually false, and in fact it is evidence that Waitkus' cognitive faculties are not functioning properly.
Waitkus follows with this fallacy: "It is correct to describe our neurology as being adaptive. However, Plantinga's argument fails because it does not recognize that the function of our neurology depends on the process by which it is formed, and not the point from which it began"
Doesn't Plantinga's argument recognize the importance of the process by which the function of our neurology is formed?
My God. Plantinga's entire argument is based on the idea that the process by which neurology has been formed (naturalism + evolution) implies the unreliability of our cognitive faculties (or at least, makes irrational to believe in them)!
The "point from which it began" is irrelevant, because what's at stake is if the process that brings about our cognitive faculties gives us a reason to think they're reliable or unreliable.
Waitkus continues "In other words, both cases (theism vs. naturalism) result in adaptive evolution formed by the fidelity with which sensory neurons transduce energetic, chemical, and physical information into electrical information. This electrical information is subsequently transmitted to the central nervous system for integration and belief-formation that influences our behavior. "
Here Waitkus reveals a solid ignorance of philosophy of mind and the ontological implications of naturalism and materialism. "Belief-formation that influence our behaviour" implies that the propositional contents of our minds are causally efficacious on our behaviour, but it's at variance with materialism.
In materialism, the mental contents don't exist at all (eliminative materialism), or are epiphenomena of brain processes (and therefore, causally non-efficacious). And in the latter case, they cannot influence our behaviour in virtue of their propositional and epistemic contents.
Since that concepts are not physical, they cannot be causally efficacious according to the metaphysical naturalist principle of the causal closure of the physical world (which implies that only physical things can exerts causal influence on the physical world). If beliefs are not physical (but conceptual), how could our beliefs (in virtue of their conceptual content) be causally efficacious on our behaviour?
This is why materialists have pains dealing with phenomena that, prima facie, offer evidence for the causal efficacy of the mind and consciousness (see my post about it here).
Simply stating the presumption that God would create us in such a way that we could have knowledge is not enough. One would need to demonstrate why God's choice of an identical process to shape our neurology would result in different a priori probability of true-belief."
Here Waitkus again intentionally misrepresent Plantinga's argument. Plantinga is not saying that God "create us in such a way that we could have knowledge". In Christian theism (that the religion of Plantinga), we're created in God's and, therefore, we share with Him some of His attributes (in an imperfect and limited form), which includes the attribute of having true knowledge (but partial, limited and imperfect).
Therefore, the conjunction theism + evolution doesn't cause a defeater for our belief in the reliability of cognitive faculties because even if our cognitive faculties has evolved by natural selection, our possibility of having reliable knowledge is grounded on God having creates us. In other words, if God exists, we have at least ONE positive (and independent of evolution) metaphysical reason to think our cognitive faculties are reliable to produce true knowledge, and not simply useful to biological survival.
But this belief cannot exist if the conjunction naturalism + evolution is true, because naturalism by itself doesn't give us any positive reason to think our cognitive faculties are something more that a mere useful instrument to survival or, at worst, a pure epiphenomena of brain processes useful to survival. (Ducks, cats, monkeys, etc. have a mental equipment that allow them to recognize predators, get food or escape when it's needed, but it doesn't mean that their mental faculties are reliable to produce a preponderance of TRUE beliefs over false beliefs... in fact, what kind of beliefs, in the epistemological sense, have a elephant or a bird?)
Waikus's next assertion is revealing: "Plantinga presumes that evolution shaped by a God, and evolution by naturalistic processes, are different in some way. He offers no explanation as to how the same processes under equal conditions would produce different results"
Are evolution shaped by a God and evolution by purely naturalistic process identical? Are they produced by equal conditions? If the process is shaped by God, then (by definition), there is a DIFFERENT CONDITION (God!!!!) favoring, intervining and steering the evolutionary process, which doesn't exist in naturalism.
In other words, for Waitkus' fine intelligence, the following processes are absolutely identical and carried out under "equal" conditions:
-The evolution of human beings was shaped by God.
-The evolution of human being wasn't shaped by God nor by any other intelligent agent.
Even the most inept person would see that in the first case there is a "small" difference: the evolutionary process was shaped (which implies a intelligent intervention in some point) by God. Therefore, it's not identical to a evolutionary process that lack that "divine shaping" (and this "small" difference is key to the topic of the reliability of our neurology).
However, for Waitkus's genius, this "small" difference doesn't exist at all, because a God-shaped evolution is identical to evolution without God's intervention (or shaping).
Waitkus continues: "The implication is that if we start with God, rather than a naturalistic explanation, the probability that a belief is a true-belief is improved. By simply restating the Christian belief that we are created in God's image, Plantinga achieves nothing in terms of demonstrating the improvement of true-beliefs manifested by adaptive neurology under the God-evolved condition"
This is false. As argued above, if we're created in God's image, we don't have a defeater for our reliability of our cognitive faculties, because we have an independent outside-evolution positive reason to think we share with God the property of being able to know. This positive reason doesn't exist in naturalism.
Naturalism can only claim our neurology is reliable appealing to evolution itself, but precisely what's at stake if evolution by itself suffices to give us a reliable neurology.
Waitkus arrives to his conclusion because for him there is not difference at all in a evolution shaped by God and a evolution unshaped by God. (But if it's true, and supposing that God exists and shaped evolution, why did God choose to shape the evolutionary process, if the same result (according to Waitkus) can be attained without God's intervention? For some important reason God decided to shape the evolutionary process, some particular effect he desired to cause in the evolutionary process and that effect cannot be independent of giving us reliable cognitive faculties, otherwise we couldn't never know the existence of God and it would make Christian teachings and Jesus's activities on earth irrelevant. Do you think God is so irrational? Waitkus seems to think God is made in Maitkus' image...)
The processes that involve interactions between environment and organism are the same for the conditions of God-evolution and naturalistic evolution
How does Waitkus know that? If it's true, then what's God's effect on the process? Waitkus' assertion is based on the fallacy that God shaping evolution has not effect at all, that is, that God's intervention doesn't affect the evolutionary process at all, but this fallacious assumption is logically inconsistent with a evolution shaped by God. (Otherwise, what does "shaping" mean in this context?)
The "shaped" concept there implies that God caused some EFFECT on evolution, an effect that in naturalism would be nonexistent (otherwise, God's intervention would be superflous)
It is these processes that determine the structure and function of our neurology, and it is our neurology that determines our belief systems. Consequently, Plantinga's argument is essentially meaningless
Here Waitkus begs the question against Plantinga, because he assumes the materialistic premise that neurology determines our beliefs systems. But it's true only if naturalism is true, not if theism (and hence some form of mind-body dualism) is true. In dualism, neurology doesn't determines our beliefs; rather, our beliefs exist in our soul or consciousness (which is immaterial in dualism), and the dependence on neurology is only functional and in two-way direction.
Given that Waitkus doesn't know what dualism is, he interprets Plantinga's argument in a purely materialistc terms.
He simply asserts that if he introduces God into the naturalistic explanation then he can use naturalistic evolution to justify presupposed religious dogma.
Another straw man. Note Waitkus' consistent and persistent unability to understand the argument.
If God shaped evolution, then the concept of "naturalistic evolution" doesn't make any sense. When Plantinga introduces God into the equation, the evolutionary process is not "naturalistic" anymore.
This simple and obvious point is beyond Waitkus' cognitive faculties.
This strategy is as dishonest as it is inaccurate because it introduces an untestable and unfalsifiable alternative hypothesis into an explanation (evolution) that has been deduced by the scientific method.
This is a fine example of Waitkus' philosophical ignorance and intellectual unsophistication.
Plantinga's argument is not a scientific argument, but a philosophical one. It's not a scientific "alternative hypothesis", but a philosophical reflection about the implications of God's existence or non-existence on the epistemological problem of the reliability of our cognitive faculties.
Science cannot decide that question, because science pressupose that our cognitive faculties are reliable (otherwise, scientific research would be meaningless); the question of the reliability of our cognitive faculties and the limits of our knowledge is a philosophical problem (an old one, by the way), not a scientific one (even though the evidence from science can be used by that philosophical reflection).
Philosophical hypotheses can be defended or refuted by logic and arguments, but many of them are immune to empirical falsification. How does Waitkus falsify the ontological proposition "The external world exist"? Is that a falsifiable hypothesis?
Another fine example of Waitkus' philosophical ignorance and scientific incompetence is his assertion that "an explanation (evolution) that has been deduced by the scientific method". Any college student of philosophy (or any competent scientist) would know that scientific explanations and theories (like the theory of evolution) are not "deduced" from the scientific method, but hypothesized from observations (Waitkus conflates observation with the scientific method, and the formulation of explanatory hypothesis with deduction) and then tested and refined with more observations.
This method makes its degree of certainty commensurate with the evidence created by evaluating testable and falsifiable hypotheses.
Plantinga's argument is not a scientific hypothesis.
So, when Plantinga offers an untestable and unfalsifiable alternative to naturalistic evolution, he is not really offering any explanation at all.
Plantinga is not offering an alternative to naturalistic evolution, but arguing that if naturalistic evolution is true, the belief in it is irrational.
Instead, Plantinga only succeeds in coupling rational inquiry to religious superstition. In that way, Plantinga only takes another step in constructing an infinitely expanding tautology where even the empirical methods used to evaluate beliefs are enfeebled by cleverly obfuscating the distinction between science and superstition.
This is another crude straw man fallacy. In addition, Waitkus conflates an unfalsifiable hypothesis with a tautology. It's true that tautologies are unfalsifiable (because they're true in virtue of their form), but the reverse is false: an unfalsifiable hypothesis is not a tautology.
The hypothesis "The external world exists" is not empirically falsifiable. But it's not tautological.
Waitkus is solidly ignorant of this distinction, but what's even worst is that he's ignorant of his ignorance.
Before we examine how we can come to hold true-beliefs, let's define what we mean by the terms reality, truth (or true-belief), and neurology. When we talk about reality we are referring to ourselves and the energy, space, and matter exterior to our minds. Truth, or a true-belief, is a belief that is consistent with reality as it exists independently of our cognitive faculties. Our neurology is our cognitive faculties—the tool with which we experience the reality exterior to it.
Waitkus begs the question when he asserts "When we talk about reality we are referring to ourselves and the energy, space, and matter exterior to our minds", because his definition of reality is purely naturalistic and hence excludes the existence of God (which is key for Plantinga's argument when defending the reliability of our neurology if God exists).
Nota that the definition of "truth" offered by Waitkus is a realist conception of truth (that is, it's a definition what assume the existence of an external reality regarding to which our beliefs are tested. But Waitkus doesn't accept unfalsifiable hypotheses, so why does he accept the unfalsifiable hypothesis that an external world exist with independence of our minds?).
Since survival and reproduction depend on our interaction with matter and energy that exists beyond our neurology, it is safe to conclude that our neurology has evolved in such a way that it provides an accurate representation of this exterior reality.
This is false. The neurology of dolphis, cats, birds, jaws and other animals was also shaped by the interaction with matter and energy that exists beyond their neurology. But it doesn't imply that their neurology provide accurate representation of the exterior reality. At most, what we can conclude is that their neurology is USEFUL to survival and reproduction, that is, their neurology has an adaptive value.
But we're not entitled to think the neurology of a bird or a monkey is a accurate representation of reality. As Charles Darwin himself confessed: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been devel-oped 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?"(Letter to William Graham, July 3, 1881)
In fact, it can be argued from the premises of naturalism that consciousness (and mental representations) are actually illusory and, therefore, cannot be actual representations of the external reality. How could an illusion consistently and accurately represent an external reality? What's the difference between an illusion and an actual belief?
Naturalist philosopher Alex Rosemberg argues: "The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent. Think of folk physics, folk biology, and most of all folk psychology"
And: "The interior monologue that introspection carries on is a sub-vocal version of the play (the tokening) of noise, ink-marks and pixels that passes for public communication. Like public speech and writing, our introspective stream of consciousness doesn’t record or report what the brain is actually doing, because the brain can’t store or manipulate information in words and sentences of any language, including mentalese. Conscious introspection is not just wrong about sensory experience, it’s no guide to cognition either. Whatever the brain does, it doesn’t operate on beliefs and wants, thoughts and hopes, fears and expectations, insofar as these are supposed to be states that “contain” sentences, and are “about” things, facts, events that are outside of the mind. That the brain no more has original intentionality than anything else does is the hardest illusion to give up, and we probably won’t be able completely to do so till neuroscience really understands the brain. Meanwhile, knowing what is not on the cards, is still enough to put in proper perspective the humanities’ endless absorption with meaning, and the persistent demands for interpretative understanding made in the human sciences.
If linguistic meaning is anything at all it has got to be something like what the philosopher of language Paul Grice discovered about it: at bottom it’s a nested set of beliefs and desires that speakers have about their listeners and themselves. Grice’s own set of conditions necessary and sufficient for linguistic meaning might need to be fine- tuned. But he showed at least to a first approximation what linguistic meaning consists in. Scientism must treat this conclusion as devastating to any attempt to take semantic meaning seriously as a fact about reality. If there literally are no beliefs and desires, because the brain can’t encode information in the form of sentences, then there literally is no such thing as linguistic meaning either. It’s just a useful heuristic device, one with only a highly imperfect grip on what is going on in thought. Consequently, there is no point asking for the real, the true, the actual meaning of a work of art, or the meaning of an agent’s act, still less the meaning of a historical event or epoch. The demand of the interpretive disciplines, that we account for ideas and artifacts, actions and events, in terms of their meanings, is part of the insatiable hunger for stories with plots, narratives, and whodunits that human kind have insisted on since natural selection made us into conspiracy-theorists a half a million years ago or so. That is a taste it will be too hard to shake in everyday life. The fiction best-seller list will always be with us.
Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time."
Due to Waitkus' extreme superficiality, ignorance of philosophy and science, and uncritical faith in naturalism, he bypasses and ignores all of these serious philosophical problems of naturalism, because he doesn't want to cope with the self-defeating implications of his worldview. He prefers to do uncritical assertions, dogmatic assumptions, misrepresent Plantinga's argument and add some fallacies (ad hominem, straw man, misdirection) to make convince and delude himself that his position is rational.
It's sheer self-delusion and wishful thinking.
Furthermore, since the truthfulness of our beliefs can only be evaluated in terms of comparing it to our external environment, what other process of development would produce a more reliable method of picturing true reality than an evolutionary process that directly interacts with this external reality (think photons on retinal G-protein coupled receptors, or olfactory sensory neurons)?
Actually, we never compare our beliefs with the external enviroment itself, but with our representations and sensory experience of it. (This is why the problem of skepticism about the external world is so important to philosophy; and this is why, as naturalist philosopher David MacArthur has argued, naturalism is particularly vulnerable to the skeptical objections).
Waitkus' credulity, naivite, ignorance and superficiality is amazing. He shows no awareness of or interest in the serious epistemological problems of his own naturalist position.
He's a true believer in naturalism.
The confusion created by Plantinga relies on the assertion of a proposition without subsequently testing that proposition for its truth value. Humans constantly evaluate their beliefs in terms of the evidence supporting them (i.e., is it safe to cross the street, is the pan hot, is this food spoiled, etc?). In Plantinga's example of frogs eating flies, he states that they could eat flies because flies are good to eat (true belief—defined by Plantinga), or because the right fly might turn them into a prince (adaptive/false belief). Now, according to Plantinga both of these situations have an equal likelihood of occurring in the context of evolutionary naturalism. Even if that were true, humans still have the capability of evaluating and testing beliefs so that our degree of certainty of their truth is appropriate for the amount of evidence to support it (Emphasis added)
This begs the question against Plantinga's argument. What's at stake is if our cognitive faculties are reliable or not, not if the methods to test our beliefs are reliable or not.
Testing our beliefs is irrelevant, because the testing procedure is itself a product of our cognitive faculties too. Therefore, if our cognitive faculties are unreliable, both our beliefs as the methods to test them (methods that we BELIEVE are correct) are subject to doubt.
Waitkus, who doesn't understand Plantinga's argument at all, believes that the problem posed by Plantinga is how human beings test their beliefs. But it is not the point of Plantinga.
Plantinga's point is that once we have a defeater to the belief that our cognitive faculties are unreliable, then any belief produced by these faculties (including the beliefs about the best methods to test beliefs) are subject to doubt and skepticism.
Therefore, even if belief propositions had an a priori truth probability of 1:1, empirical evidence could still allow us to rationally hold belief sets by refining a posteriori truth probabilities. Such evidence can be created by controlled, scientific experiments in which researchers test a single variable while making only the minimum number of assumptions necessary to conduct the inquiry.
But why should we believe in the empirical evidence, if our cognitie faculties that produces and interpret that evidence is unreliable? If my cognitive faculties are unreliable, then any procedure employed by these faculties (including scientific procedures) will be unreliable too.
It doesn't mean the evidence is incorrect; what it means is that even if it's correct, we cannot know it, because our cognitive faculties are subject to doubt and question.
Does Plantinga think our neurology is reliable? From Plantinga's statement that "if God created man in his image then God would create us in such a way that we could know things," we can assume that he thinks our neurology is reliable. It is troubling to note, however, that Plantinga's examples all deal with individual impressions. Are we to assume that Plantinga feels individual impressions are reliable and to be trusted? This view would be completely antithetical to the position of modern science.
This argument is amazing, because it shows Maitkus unability to think logically.
Maitkus assumes the reliability of modern science to argue against Plantinga's supposed admission of the reliability of "individual impressions".
But Plantinga uses examples of individual impressions, because human beings' neurology evolved before the creation of modern science; therefore, given that what's at stake is if the cognitive faculties of human beings are reliable (and answering this question is LOGICALLY PREVIOUS to considerations of the epistemic value of modern science), we have to examine if the individual impressions formed during our evolution are reliable or not to test the argument of Plantinga.
In other words, if science is reliable, it's because human's cognitive faculties are reliable. But this reliability had to exist BEFORE modern science, and for this reason Plantinga uses examples of "individual and nonscientific impressions" that our ancestors, during evolution, experienced and interpreted as correct.
Waitkus has not understood Plantinga's argument at all.
In science, we assume that even though our neurology is useful and able to experience an external reality, individual impressions are inherently unreliable. Therefore, our certainty should be based on repeatable, testable, and falsifiable experiments.
If our cognitive faculties are unreliable, then even repetead experiments won't produce true belief, because we have not independent method to rely in the results of such experiments.
By the way, and just as a technical precision, what is testable and falsifiable are the HYPOTHESES, not the experiments. Expertiments are designed to test hypotheses, and falsiability is a methodological and epistemological requirement of scientific hypotheses, not of experiments. According to wikipedia: "Falsifiability or refutability is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment."
Note that what's subject to falsifiability is an assertion, not an experiment. So falsiability is a logical property of assertions, claims and hypotheses, not of experiments.
Testability is also a property of empirical hypotheses, not of experiments. According to wikipedia: "Testability, a property applying to an empirical hypothesis, involves two components: (1) the logical property that is variously described as contingency, defeasibility, or falsifiability, which means that counterexamples to the hypothesis are logically possible, and (2) the practical feasibility of observing a reproducible series of such counterexamples if they do exist. In short, a hypothesis is testable if there is some real hope of deciding whether it is true or false of real experience"
So, when Maitkus talks about "testable, and falsifiable experiments" he is revealing to the entire world his solid, consistent and refined ignorance of the scientific method and epistemology.
Maitkus' fine intellect tell us: "Plantinga, on the other hand, says that individual impressions are reliable because they are held by people made in the image of God. His view is not surprising since many religious phenomena rely very heavily on individual impressions (miracles, relationships with God, emotional significance of religious ceremonies, answered prayers, etc). Would Plantinga really want to see a world in which his view on the reliability of individual beliefs is universally accepted? I doubt it."
I think the reader of this post is already prepared to see all the fallacies used by Waitkus here, so I leave the task to each reader.
The important point is that we can arrange our certainty to be commensurate with the amount of supporting experimental evidence. The relationship between truth-certainty and available evidence is what allows us to hold rational beliefs in spite of an imperfect neurology and individual impressions.
Again, what's at stake is the reliability of our cognitive faculties in general, not the procedures to test our beliefs. The reliability of our mental faculties is a pre-condition of the testing of claims.
Plantinga's answer to the problem of an imperfect neurology is not a method of evaluating the truthfulness of neurologically based propositions. Instead, Plantinga only succeeds in introducing an untestable and unfalsifiable alternative. Such an introduction does not offer progress towards truth. Instead, it precludes further progress towards truth by creating an unnecessary and immovable obstacle when we already have tools for truth-seeking at our disposal.
In this point, the reader is prepared to see the fallacies of Waltkius' argument.
We have seen that the reliability of neurology is dependent on the process of evolution
No, we are not seen that. Ask Rosemberg, Churchland and many other naturalists if they have seen such thing. Or read Darwin's writings.
If this process is naturalistic, or if a God exists, the process still relies on direct interaction between the neurology of the organism harboring the genetic material and the external environment
With a "small" difference. If God exists, he shaped the evolution to make us with a reliable mental equipament, otherwise, his intervention would be meaningless and superfluos.
The dynamic relationship between environment and organism, as well as this relationship's role in adaptive fitness of the organism, suggests that our neurology exists in such a way that it accurately represents the reality exterior to it.
False. It only suggests that our neurology is adaptive, not that it produces a preponderance of true belief. See Rosemberg's comments.
Additionally, insofar as our neurology is capable of holding false beliefs, it is also capable of creating and understanding empirical methods to evaluate the truthfulness of beliefs manifested by our neurology.
It assumes that our understanding of empirical methods is a correct true belief. But if our neurology is not reliable, our trust in empirical methods is subject to doubt too.
Since that Waitkus misrepresents Plantinga's argument, and bypasses the epistemological problems of naturalism (mentioned by Rosemberg, MacArthur and other naturalists), I think there is not much more that we can add here.
Waitkus' article is a mere uncritical and unreflective repetition of naturalistic dogmas and assumptions, mixed up with logical fallacies, ignorant assertions about the nature of the scientific method, and crude misrepresentations of Plantinga' argument.
Even though I think Plantinga's argument makes the belief in naturalism irrational (and Rosemberg and MacArthur's papers tighten up the argument on different grounds), even if Plantinga's argument is wrong, absolutely nothing in Waitkus' article gives us a reason to think it's the case.
Links of Interest:
-Naturalist Alex Rosemberg's article on the actual implications of naturalism.
-Naturalist David MacArthur's paper "Naturalism and Skepticism"
-Plantinga's paper on naturalism.
-My post on the causal efficacy of consciousness.
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