Massimo Pigliucci On Alvin Plantinga

There recently was a debate, of sorts, or at least an interview of Plantinga and Gutting, which received a lot of attention. I didn't see it, but I have read an analysis by Massimo Pigliucci which critiques Plantinga. That, of itself, is interesting enough to take account of, and perform a standard logic analysis on.

Massimo on Plangtinga:

” And here comes Plantinga’s first non sequitur: “But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.” Right, except for the not-so-minor detail that the priors for there to be an even or odd number of stars are nowhere near the priors for there to be or not to be a god. More on this in a second, when we come to teapots.”

Not an objection; merely an allusion to an objection. With a deferral, which we shall watch for:

” Following up on the above (puzzling, to say the least) response, [Massimo is happy to be puzzled by any reference to Atheists making decisions without supporting evidence] Gutting pointed out that the analogy with “even-star-ism” is a bit odd, and that atheists would bring up instead Russell’s famous example of a teapot orbiting the sun. Should we be agnostic about that? No, says Plantinga, because we have very good reasons to reject the possibility based on what we know about teapots and what it takes to put one in orbit around the sun. Precisely! Analogously — and this was Russell’s point — we have very good reasons not to take seriously the concept of a supernatural being (see comment above about priors). ”

The Teapot False Analogy and Materialism Camouflage Dodge cannot be purged from the Atheist bag of tricks, it seems. It is one of the most transparently false analogies ever made, yet it is still used as if it represents Truth.

Let’s revisit the problem, but first let’s not ignore Massimo’s circular referencing, where he now refers back to the prior issue, even or odd number of stars. Ok, that’s done.

Now let’s notice the logical failure of Russell’s Tea Pot: Russell made it up. Knowingly made it up. Everyone knows that he made it up. So the Teapot is meaningless except as a cover. So what is really being said is that evidence must be had – material evidence. Why don’t they just say so? Because that would shine a brilliant beam on their fallacy, which is, as always, a blatant and incontrovertible Category Error. The error is that Atheists wish to force the use of material space – only – for the examination of a non-material being. One does not rationally demand that only Category [X] be examined to determine the existence and characteristics of Category [!X]. Further, Category [X] is bounded, and Category [!X] is not bounded by any knowledge of the contents of Category [X].

The comparison, then, is between a physical entity - the orbiting tea pot - and a nonphysical entity; God. A false equivalence and a Category Error. But the impact is deeper; it impacts the very nature and validity of Materialism as a theory and worldview. It means that Materialism cannot be anything more than a religiously held ideology, based on no knowledge whatsoever. And this can be plainly seen by thinking about Russell’s Tea Pot with even a smidgeon of an open mind, not already ideologically attached to the Tea Pot as Truth.

Further, except for the fallacious Tea Pot scam, what other “very good reasons” does the Atheist have “not to take seriously the concept of a supernatural being”? Well, none are given, and Massimo charges into the next False Analogy with gusto:

” To see why, let’s bring in my favorite analogy. My Facebook profile (reserved for friends and family, please follow me on Twitter…) includes the usual question about religion, to which my response is that I’m an a-theist in the same way in which I am an a-unicornist: this is not to say that I know for a fact that nowhere in the universe there are horse-like animals with a single horn on their head. Rather, it is to say that — given all I know about biology, as well as human cultural history (i.e., where the legend of unicorns came from) — I don’t think there is any reason to believe in unicorns. That most certainly doesn’t make me an agnostic about unicorns, a position that not even Plantinga would likely feel comfortable endorsing. (I am, however, for the record, agnostic about even-star-ism. So, there.)”

This is the same dodge with another face on it: There is no material evidence to support the claim that unicorns exist. What is needed, again, is material evidence. So a-unicornism is sensible. That means that agnosticism is called for regarding even-star-ism, and Atheism is called for because of these analogies. It’s the same False Analogy type used to hide the real issue, which is the Category Error described above. It attempts to conceal the non-physical vs. physical false equivalency.

So now there is an Atheist “trump card”? And Plantinga disappoints on the issue, Evil:

”Gutting then brings up the usual trump card of atheists: the problem of evil (which, to be precise, is actually a problem only for the Judeo-Christian-Muslim concept of god, and therefore not really an argument for atheism per se). Plantinga admits that the argument “does indeed have some strength” but responds that there are also “at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments” so that on balance it is more rational to be a theist.”

Plantinga is wrong: the argument from evil has no strength whatsoever. In Atheist-land, there is no evil; there is only that which “is”. So the Atheist cannot charge Evil under his own banner, he must assume the false flag of Abrahamic religions, and charge the religion’s belief itself with its own self-beliefs. So to make sense of this charge, one must assume that it means that (a) evil doesn’t exist , but if it did, then (b) religion is evil and (c) God is evil and disgusting for making this universe and earth and humans so evil. But of course there is no evil, because there are no universal morals evident in the material universe. The argument has no force because the Atheists don’t actually believe that there is evil. Secondly, the free will argument serves to justify the religious belief in evil, and that is why Atheists fight so hard to deny the existence of free will.

” Gutting, however, had to do quite a bit more prodding to get at least one example sampled from the alleged couple dozen on offer. First off, Plantinga states very clearly that the best reason to believe in (his) god is not a rational argument at all, but the infamous sensus divinitatis of Calvinistic memory, i.e. the idea that people experience god directly as a result of “an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God.”

This is so weak that it is hardly worth rebutting, but let’s elucidate the obvious for Prof. Plantinga anyway. To begin with, it is not clear even what counts as a sensus divinitatis in the first place. Does it equate to simply believing in god? If so, the “evidence” is circular. Or does it mean that some people have had some kind of direct and tangible experience of the divine, like witnessing a miracle? In that case, I’m pretty sure the number of such experiences is far less than Plantinga would like, and at any rate plenty of people claim to have seen UFOs or having had out-of-body experiences. Neither of which is a good reason to believe in UFOs or astral projection. Lastly, we begin to have perfectly good naturalistic explanations of the sensus divinitatis, broadly construed as the projection of agency where it doesn’t belong. The latter truly seems to me a near-universal characteristic of human beings, but it is the result of a cognitive misfire, as when we immediately think that someone must have made that noise whose origin currently escapes us (ghosts? a lurking predator?). It is sensible to think that this compulsive tendency to project agency was adaptive during human history, probably saving a lot of our ancestors’ lives. Better to mistake the noise made by the wind for a predator and take cover than to dismiss the possibility out of too much skepticism and end up as the dinner entree of said predator.”

The objection is exactly the same as all of the previous: the Fallacy of Category Error, prefaced with dripping condescension. Material evidence is all that will satisfy; no other evidence is legitimate. Why? Because it is not material. The demand is not just a Category Error, it is also circular. So far, Massimo has given no reasoning against Plantinga, only fallacy, and actually just the one: the Materialist Category Error, over and over, but in different disguises.

The objection analogies which Massimo uses, UfO’s for example, are mostly material claims requiring material evidence. But Massimo points also to astral projection, which is another Category Error with no material evidence possible (if I understand astral projection correctly). So Massimo is unable to differentiate types of claims, and lumps them all together into his materialist closed box.

And his judgment about delusion is even further without merit. It resolves to this: “If some can be deluded, then all with whom I disagree are deluded”. This is the fallacy of False Association. At least his fallacy usage is expanding to include other fallacies.

” So Gutting pushed a bit more: could Plantinga please give us an example of at least one good theistic argument among those several dozens he seems to think exist? Well, all right, says the esteemed theologian, how about fine tuning? That does move the discussion a bit, as the fine tuning problem is a genuine scientific issue, which has by no means been resolved by modern physics (see recent Rationally Speaking entries on related topics).

Of course invoking fine tuning in support of theism is simply a variant of the old god-of-the-gaps argument, one that is increasingly weak in the face of continuous scientific progress, an obvious observation that Gutting was smart enough to make. Besides, even if it should turn out that fine tuning is best seen as evidence of intelligent design, there are alternatives on offer, some of which are particularly problematic for Christian theists.”

Fine Tuning is obviously NOT god of the gaps; it refers to actual science, not to gaps in science. It cannot be weakened “in the face of continuous scientific progress, an obvious observation that Gutting was smart enough to make”, unless most or all of the universal constants are refuted; that is so unlikely as to be totally absurd. This should be so obvious that it is incredibly obtuse to make the arguments being made by both Gutting and Pigliucci. It is this issue which is usually attacked by the “infinite multiverse” counter-argument which is blatantly “science of the gaps” but even moreso, “fantasies of the gaps”, which are invoked by Atheists.

But Massimo moves the topic to another posting which we’ll ignore until later, if at all.

” Plantinga does concede that god-of-the-gap arguments are a bit weak, but insists: “We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified.” Wow. I think I’m going to leave this one as an exercise to the reader (hint: consider the obvious disanalogy between the moon — which everyone can plainly see — and god, which…).”

Plantinga clearly goes off the rails here. Lunacy does not relate to the belief that there exists a moon. Bad showing here. Finally the argument from evil takes the turn which decorates the subjectivity of Atheism which Atheists reject but revert to constantly:

” Eventually, Plantinga veers back toward the (alleged, in his mind) problem of evil, and takes it head on in what I consider a philosophically suicidal fashion: “Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story. … [insert brief recap of “the Christian story”] … I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.”

Seriously? The argument boils down to the fact that Plantinga, as a Christian, finds the Christian story “magnificent,” that is, aesthetically pleasing, and that’s enough to establish that this is the best of all possible worlds. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find a world with so much natural and human imposed suffering “magnificent” at all, and it seems to me that if an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good god were responsible for said world he ought to be resisted at all costs as being by far the greatest villain in the history of the universe. But that’s just me.”

Not only does Pigliucci not address the reasoning used by Plantinga, he passes a summary and subjective judgment based ONLY on his opinion of what constitutes evil. Further, he invokes a definition of a god which he makes up to suit himself; he argues against his Straw Man, not against what Plantinga actually presented. Remember, for Atheists there is no evil, and there also is no “good”; so asserting “good” as an Atheist judgment is a fallacy.

The following is nearly perfect:

” Moving on, Gutting at one point asks Plantinga why — if belief in atheism is so questionable on rational grounds — so many philosophers, i.e. people trained in the analysis of rational arguments, cling to atheism. Plantinga admits to not being a psychologist, but ventures to propose that perhaps atheists reject the idea of god because they value too much their privacy and autonomy: “God would know my every thought long before I thought it. … my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.” Well, I’m no psychologist either, but by the same token theists like Plantinga (and Gutting, let’s not forget) delude themselves into believing in god because they really like the idea of being judged every moment (especially about what they do in the non-privacy of their bedrooms) and much prefer to be puppets in the hands of a cosmic puppeteer. Okay, suit yourselves, boys, just don’t pretend that your psychological quirks amount to rational arguments.”

This is attacking the attacker: Ad Hominem. Here’s why. Pigliucci does not respond to the issue being presented by Plantinga. The issue is that Atheists don’t want any authority over themselves. But Pigliucci goes straight to attacking theists without responding to the issue. First he claims that both Gutting and Planinga are deluded, “because they really like the idea of being judged every moment (especially about what they do in the non-privacy of their bedrooms) and much prefer to be puppets in the hands of a cosmic puppeteer.” This is another Ad Hominem, if not abusive, at least it is abusive of what they really claim to believe. Pigliucci has gone off into a childish tirade.

What Plantinga is actually claiming is that the best universe is one with free will and agency granted to its inhabitants. That implies that good (and bad) choices may be made from an assortment of bad and good circumstances. This is completely ignored by Pigliucci, who in fact claims that they “much prefer to be puppets in the hands of a cosmic puppeteer”, and further imbues them with psychological problems for adhering to his false claim of beliefs. But that is inverted: if there is exactly no free will, and no agency, then everything is deterministic. And that means that in the Atheist world, everyone is “a puppet in the hands of a cosmic puppeteer”, and that puppeteer is Materialism, pure and simple.

Further, the claim that people who are trained in rational assessment actually make rational assessments is obviously false. It is the dedicated and disciplined use of logic which counts, and that involves humbling oneself in the presence of the conclusion of a grounded, valid logical deduction. Atheists cannot do that. They humble themselves to no one, including other Atheists, much less to deductive conclusions which they did not personally derive. And they reject absolutes, so there is no attempt to ground their own deductions; what they project is opinion, pure and simple. Because it is “philosophy”, it has no material, empirical basis, and no grounding, and is therefore not ever – ever – rational in the Aristotelian sense.

Moving on:

” And we then come to “materialism,” which Gutting thinks is a “primary motive” for being an atheist. Here things get (mildly) interesting, because Plantinga launches his well known attack against materialism, suggesting that evolution (of all notions!) is incompatible with materialism.

Come again, you say? Here’s is the “argument” (I’m using the term loosely, and verycharitably). How is it possible, asks the eminent theologian, that we are material beings, and yet are capable of beliefs, which are clearly immaterial? To quote:

“My belief that Marcel Proust is more subtle that Louis L’Amour, for example? Presumably this belief would have to be a material structure in my brain, say a collection of neurons that sends electrical impulses to other such structures as well as to nerves and muscles, and receives electrical impulses from other structures. But in addition to such neurophysiological properties, this structure, if it is a belief, would also have to have a content: It would have, say, to be the belief that Proust is more subtle than L’Amour.”

This, of course, is an old chestnut in philosophy of mind, which would take us into much too long a detour (but in case you are interested, check this). There are, however, at least two very basic things to note here. First, a materialist would not say that a belief is a material structure in the brain, but rather that beliefs are instantiated by given material structures in the brain. This is no different from saying that numbers, for instance, are concepts that are thought of by human beings by means of their brains, they are notmaterial structures in human brains. Second, as the analogy with numbers may have hinted at, a naturalist (as opposed to a materialist, which is a sub-set of naturalist positions) has no problem allowing for some kind of ontological status for non-material things, like beliefs, concepts, numbers and so on. Needless to say, this is not at all a concession to the supernaturalist, and it is a position commonly held by a number of philosophers.”

First let’s dispose of the Fallacy of Appeal to Authority; it makes no difference how many philosophers hold to a theory if the theory is false. So the appeal to a number of philosophers is at best inconsequential and at worst a blatant rookie fallacy. OK, done with that.

Now, let’s take on the Naturalism vs. Materialism concept. What they wish to convey is that there are some natural things which seem to exist but are really just artifacts of a material source. Thus concepts are non-material but are just contingent “seemings” that are effluent of the material brain. Being evidence based, they would have some evidence for this, right? But that evidence would have to be material, not natural, or it wouldn’t be objective. So it circles nicely back to Materialism. (And whenever it is suggested that God is natural, it circles back to Materialism post haste, and to the Common Variety Category Error with which Atheism is infested). A circular argument which is grounded in a Category Error is certainly without merit.

” Plantinga goes on with his philosophy of mind 101 lesson and states that the real problem is not with the existence of beliefs per se, but rather with the fact that beliefs cause actions. He brings up the standard example of having a belief that there is some beer in the fridge, which — together with the desire (another non-material thingy, instantiated in another part of the brain!) to quench one’s thirst — somehow triggers the action of getting up from the darn couch, walk to the fridge, and fetch the beer (presumably, to get right back to the couch). Again, the full quote so you don’t think I’m making things up:

“It’s by virtue of its material, neurophysiological properties that a belief causes the action. It’s in virtue of those electrical signals sent via efferent nerves to the relevant muscles, that the belief about the beer in the fridge causes me to go to the fridge. It is not by virtue of the content (there is a beer in the fridge) the belief has.”

But of course the content of the belief is also such in virtue of particular electrical signals in the brain. If those signals were different we would have a different belief, say that there is no beer in the fridge. Or is Plantinga suggesting that it is somehow the presence of god that gives content to our beliefs? And how, exactly, would that work anyway?”

So now Pigliucci contradicts his immediately prior reference to non-materialism and Naturalism by claiming that the belief is no longer non-material, it is “instantiated” by electrical signals in the brain. So it is no longer the case that a belief has any ontological status, it is only the brain. So now we are lost between the two necessities which contradict each other; but contradiction is no problem in an environment which claims no truth and no falseness.

Also, he doesn’t actually refute Plantinga’s statement: he merely says, well what if there were a different belief? That is entirely beside the point, which is that the belief causes physical changes. Now if Pigliucci wants to argue that the brain itself caused the person to get up and go get a beer, then there would be no need for a belief, whether material or non-material, and again in the Atheist world the human would be an automaton. This defeats the Atheist claims, only if you believe you are not an automaton. Most of us do not believe that.

” Whatever, you may say, didn’t I mention something about evolution above? Yes, I’m coming to that. Here is Plantinga again, after Gutting suggested that perhaps we get a reasonable correspondence between beliefs and action because natural selection eliminated people whose brains were wired so to persistently equip them with the wrong belief (i.e., believing that the beer is in the refrigerator, when it’s not because you already drank yourself into oblivion last night):

“Evolution will select for belief-producing processes that produce beliefs with adaptive neurophysiological properties, but not for belief-producing processes that produce true beliefs. Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.”

The first part of this is true enough, and consistent with the fact that we do, indeed, get a lot of our natural beliefs wrong. To pick just one example among many, most people, for most of human history, believed that they were living on a flat surface. It took the sophistication of science to show otherwise (so much for the “science is just commonsense writ large” sort of platitude). It is the last part of Plantinga’s statement that is bizarre: 50-50 chances that our beliefs are true or false, given materialism and evolution? Where the heck do those priors come from?

It’s obvious, Massimo: there is no true or false in Materialism or in the Materialist universe; things just are. Truth is a human construct, right? So it doesn’t exist except as a human judgment, an opinion. And opinions are hardly truth. So the probability of beliefs being either true or false is actually weighted right in the center of the two non-existing contraries.

”But it gets worse: “If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent. Now suppose we had a total of 100 independent beliefs (of course, we have many more). Remember that the probability that all of a group of beliefs are true is the multiplication of all their individual probabilities. Even if we set a fairly low bar for reliability — say, that at least two-thirds (67 percent) of our beliefs are true — our overall reliability, given materialism and evolution, is exceedingly low: something like 0.0004. So if you accept both materialism and evolution, you have good reason to believe that your belief-producing faculties are not reliable.” (Note 1)

Again, wow. Just, wow. This is reminiscent of the type of silly “calculations” that creationists do to “demonstrate” that the likelihood of evolution producing a complex structure like the human eye is less than that of a tornado going through a junkyard and assembling a perfectly functional Boeing 747 (the original analogy is actually due to physicist Fred Hoyle, which doesn’t make it any better).

The chief thing that is wrong with Plantinga’s account is that our beliefs are far from being independent of each other. Indeed, human progress in terms of both scientific and otherwise (e.g., mathematical) knowledge depends crucially on the fact that we continuously build (and revise, when necessary) on previously held beliefs. In fact, there is an analogous reason why the tornado in the junkyard objection doesn’t work: natural selection too builds on previous results, so that calculating the probability of a number of independent mutations occurring by chance (Note 2) in the right order is a pointless exercise, and moreover one that betrays the “reasoner's utter incomprehension of the theory of evolution. Just like Plantinga apparently knows little about epistemology.”

The first thing Massimo does is to Poison the Well with the Fallacy of False Association. He devotes an entire paragraph to it, starting with juvenile condescension.

Then Massimo makes the claim that beliefs are dependent upon each other, with beliefs building on each other. There is no evidence that says that this is a rule. If we stop for a moment to look at this claim, it in no manner refutes the calculation which Plantinga has made. If belief 1 has a 0.5 chance of being false, then belief 2 cannot have a better than 0.5 chance either. Its probability multiplies with that of belief 1. And that is the process whether belief 1 is true or false. Further, if belief 1 is true with an expectation of 0.5, that does not ensure that belief 2 is any better, especially in light of the inability of evolution to produce truth vs. producing environmental compatibility.

Massimo winds this up with the non-credible generalization in which he, after his article filled with fallacies and logic errors, claims that “Plantinga apparently knows little about epistemology”, a shot both cheap and false, and made from a position of extreme logical weakness.

And Massimo’s summary in no manner refutes Plantinga’s positions, just as his prior comments do not. But he exudes and asserts a knowing condescension which he has no credibility in asserting. In fact, Massimo’s own performance is massively erroneous by Aristotelian standards, so one knows instinctively to stay away from his vaunted “critical thinking” class (which probably teaches one how to be a critical person regardless of logical error).

To paraphrase Massimo, “Massimo is prone to complete fallacy and insult rather than rigorous grounded logic, but he is a great philosopher”.

ADDENDUM

NOTES:

Note 1. What Plantinga is referring to here is beliefs such as believing that violence works toward evolutionary selection; certain groups are inferior, other groups superior; eugenics is rational. When each conclusion becomes a belief, it is compounded by subsequent beliefs.

Note 2. The retaining of sufficient beneficial mutations which accrue to accidently create multi-functional organs (many of them simultaneously - e.g., heart/lung/circulatory/blood) is a fatuous fantasy which is necessary to prop up the vastly improbable mutation theory of evolution. The probability of negative mutations eliminating the positive mutations makes it even more vastly improbable. There are no known positional mutations which actually occurred in order to accomplish this feat, which is attributed to evolution, and I say this without fear of contradiction.