Doxazo Theos

I am not a scientist and can hardly be called a reasonably informed layman in science. Nevertheless, I have gathered from my reading that the three fields of cosmogony, abiogenesis, and paleobiology have reached somewhat of a consensus in the past 50 years or so. For the sake of a brief point, consider them each in turn.

The overwhelming consensus in cosmogony, the field in cosmology which focuses solely on questions of origin, is nicely captured in the oft-quoted passage from The Nature of Space and Time by Stephen Hawking and Roger Pernrose: “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”¹ What has been empirically confirmed has recently been mathematically corroborated by a prominent team of astrophysicists who proved that any universe whose empirical description involves expansion “must face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”² Oxford Philosopher Anthony Kenny is not dull to the implications. He observes that “a proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing.”³ Indeed, this is precisely what philosopher Quentin Smith does believe, contending that “the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing”.⁴ The other option, which Smith has also advocated at one point, is that the universe is self-caused.

Abiogenesis is the study of the origin of life from non-life. The past 50 years have decisively dashed any hope the Miller experiment may have elicited in 1952. Most now believe that earth’s early atmosphere was a composition of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor, which has been experimentally unfavorable for even the development of the molecular building blocks for life.⁵ This, too, has been mathematically buttressed. An academic symposium entitled “Mathematical Challenges to the neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution” was called in 1962 to discuss what appeared to be insurmountable probabilistic difficulties facing origin of life scenarios (the problem has since only intensified).⁶ Australian molecular biologist Michael Denton refers to issues in abiogenesis as “the great cosmogonic myth” of our time.⁷ Francis Crick says an honest man must state that “the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle”.⁸ Abiogenesis is shrouded in mystery. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe also plugged the numbers and found them disparaging, resulting in their propagation of exogenesis, the view that life must have been transferred from somewhere else in the universe.⁹ Crick soon followed suit with his directed panspermia, where the earth was seeded with primitive life forms by some extraterrestrial civilization.

Finally, paleobilogy is a sub-discipline in paleontology that studies the fossil record of biological organisms. In Darwin’s day, the assumption was that such research would uncover multitudes of transitional fossils linking species to other species. But as the discipline has matured that assumption has not. Geology professor David Raup comments: “We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil records has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.”¹⁰ Instead, what scientists are finding is very densely populated regions of fossils of fully matured species that are not preceded by earlier ones. Stephen Jay Gould therefore proposed the now celebrated punctuated equilibrium, the view that instead of being produced by a gradual transitions, new species suddenly explode onto the seen at once.

Now let’s step back and assess the situation. According to science, after the universe either spontaneously popped into existence uncaused out of nothing or gave birth to itself, extraterrestrials seeded earth with primitive life forms which thereafter at various times in the course of history abruptly explode de novo entire species at once.

I submit that this is not science, but naturalism in a state of crisis.
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Aware of the many alleged prophecies in the Bible, many Christians eagerly point to them as evidence for Christianity without realizing certain constraints under which prophecy needs to be placed in order to have evidential value. When such constraints are in place, however, I think fulfilled prophecy could serve as powerful evidence. The great atheist J. L. Mackie agrees:

[It] is worth noting that successful prophecy could be regarded as a form of miracle for which there could in principle be good evidence. If someone is reliably recorded as having prophesied at t₁ an event at t₂ which could not be predicted at t₁ on any natural grounds, and the event occurs at t₂, then at any later time t₃ we can assess the evidence for the claims both that the prophecy was made at t₁ and that its accuracy cannot be explained either causally (for example, on the ground that it brought about its own fulfillment) or as accidental, and hence that it was probably miraculous.¹

Mackie therefore seems to have the following three conditions in mind that must be met for prophecy to be regarded as evidence:

(1)	The recording of the events must be historically reliable
(2)	The events cannot be artificially forged or coerced into being fulfilled
(3)	Fulfillment by coincidence or chance must be ruled out

Now that the proper restrictions are in place, the question can be asked, Does the Bible contain alleged fulfilled prophecy that meets conditions (1) through (3)? I think it does (if I can assert that without argument for the sake of brevity here). Another way alleged fulfilled prophecy could be used as evidence is by casting it into the form of a design argument. Consider prophecy in the context of Debmski’s so-called Generic Chance Elimination Argument²:

(1)	Some event e has occurred at t2
(2)	The occurrence of e at t2 was outside the control of human efforts
(3)	e was reliably predicted at t1 to occur at t2
(4)	The probability of the e occurring at t2 by chance is very small
(5)	The occurrence of e was only possible at t2
(6)	Given (5), the occurrence of e at t2 remains highly improbable
(7)	The probability of e occurring at t2 by chance is highly improbable
(8)	Contingent circumstances x are necessary for e to have occurred at t2
(9)	We can infer (3) from contingent circumstances x
(10)	One is warranted in inferring that the occurrence of e at t2 was not by chance

The main things to be worked out would be actually calculating the probability in (4) and elaborating on the contingent circumstances in (8). Regarding the former, the work of Peter Winebrenner Stoner and Robert C. Newman comes to mind, where they calculate the probability of individual and collective prophecies’ occurrence by chance.³ Regarding the latter, one would just need to spell out in detail what were the contingent states of affairs (people, places, events, etc.) necessary for the fulfillment of the prophecy.

By way of application, consider the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. This event was allegedly prophesied in Zechariah 9.9 which, replete with Messianic language, says “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” This prophecy is taken to be fulfilled by Jesus as he triumphantly rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, evoking bystanders to rejoice greatly, shouting in triumph, “‘Hosanna! BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD; Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David; Hosanna in the highest!’” (Mark 11.1-11; see also Matt 21.1-11; Luke 19.28-38; John 12.12-16). Stoner and Newman estimate the probability of this prophecy occurring by chance to be 10⁶. The contingent states of affairs necessary for the fulfillment of this prophecy would include things like a messianic figure entering Jerusalem on a donkey accompanied by the scripture-alluding shouts of the bystanders.

The triumphal entry is also a prime candidate for Mackie’s threefold criteria. (1) We have copies of the book of Zechariah predating the time of Christ by at least 100 years. Moreover, the triumphal entry recorded in Mark is very reliable, given Markan priority and the independent source of John’s account. (2) Many of the contingent states of affairs mentioned earlier were not within Jesus’ control (such as the crowd’s reaction) and so couldn’t have been forged. (3) The likelihood of this occurring by chance, as argued by Stoner and Newman, is obviously very low.
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A promising new view has emerged in metaethics: naturalistic moral realism (NMR), the view that moral properties and facts are akin to abstract objects, such as numbers or necessarily true propositions. Because abstract objects are often taken to be necessarily existent and expressive of objective facts about reality, perhaps viewing morality in a similar way could sufficiently ground its objectivity apart from any reference to non-naturalistic views such as theism. For example, the moral property justice exists in the same way redness does, and moral facts such as murder is wrong exists and is true in the something like the way the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 does. Call this view naturalistic moral realism (NMR, for short). According to NMR, moral properties and facts a part of, or at least arise from, the natural world. This view is championed by atheist philosopher Michael Martin, and others have followed suit (e.g., Paul Kurtz, Louise Antony, Erik Wielenberg, Walter Sinnot-Armstron, Henry Shafer-Landau, David Brink, Roderick Firth, Richard Boyd). Without heralding NMR an unprecedented success too hastily, let me briefly mention some of the difficulties that I see at least on a surface level.

1. Epistemological Objection
First, if moral properties and facts are akin to abstract objects, then NMR faces the same difficulties traditional platonism does; chiefly, the epistemological objection. If moral properties and facts exist in the same way abstract objects do (i.e., a se and causally impotent), then such a view would render moral properties and facts unknowable. In order to have knowledge of something external to our minds, there has to be a relation between our minds and that something. But how can an unextended, causally effete abstract object or moral principle enter such a relation? Treating moral properties and facts like abstract objects would render moral knowledge impossible.

2. Unintelligibility Objection
Second, if we could somehow have knowledge of abstract moral properties and facts, they would nonetheless be unintelligible. Just what it means to say that moral properties such justice and charitableness, or moral facts such as murder is wrong, exist of themselves is wholly unclear. I understand what these properties and facts mean when related to persons (e.g., the judge exacted justice; Al’s charitableness is admirable), but to say there exists entities called justice or the fact murder is wrong without moral subjects is rather uninformative.

3. Normativity Objection
Third, if we could have knowledge of abstract moral properties and facts and they were intelligible to us, why should we feel obliged to obey them? Why should we be duty-bound by them? They are no different than any other property or fact. For example, while the laws of physics might objectively describe and even delimit feasible courses of behavior, I have no obligations to them. They’re just there. They would be abstractly, not practically relevant to my behavior. As it is sometimes put, such laws are merely descriptive, not prescriptive. But it is the latter that conveys normativity. Prominent ethicist Richard Taylor points this out:

A duty is something that is owed…But something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as duty in isolation…Our obligations can … be understood as those that are imposed by God…But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense?…the concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone

Nothing about a brute given conveys normativity. If it is true that one cannot move from an is to an ought, as Hume argued, NMR is in patent violation of this. (Note too that I cannot choose to obey the law of gravity or the law laws of logic, whereas I could choose to obey moral facts. There seems to be relevant disanalogy here.) The problem would be even more pressing were such abstract moral facts to conflict with my own self-interests. For example, say it is a brute fact that it is a duty to keep promises. Who or what is to hold me accountable to this fact should I choose to lie to get ahead instead? I am reminded of Stephen Crane’s short poem, “A man said to the universe”:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“That fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

I take Crane’s point to be effectively saying the same: brute givens do not convey normativity.

4. Taxi Cab Objection
Fourth, if we could have knowledge of abstract moral properties and facts and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity, what makes them have the moral status they do? Why are good properties good, bad properties bad, and moral facts obligatory? The defender of NMR has a ready response: moral properties are good and bad brutely, and all moral propositions are brute facts. Just charitableness is a brute good, greed is a brute vice. Similarly, just as it is a duty to keep promises is a brute moral fact, so is murder is wrong.

But this leaves us wondering why the brutes are this way. Usually when something is said to be brute, there is something about that thing’s nature that would lead us to think it is brute. For example, certain axioms in logic and mathematics are sometimes said to be brute facts because they unprovable—any attempt at their proof winds up assuming their validity. But moral properties and facts do not seem like this at all. Even most necessary truths are not like this—they require some kind of explanation explanation (“for example, ‘Water is necessarily H₂O’ still requires an explana­tion for water’s existence and structure”–Copan). So even if murder is wrong is a necessary truth, nothing about it suggests no further explanation is required (it certainly isn’t analytic). There does not seem to be anything about the nature of moral properties and facts that suggest themselves to be brutes.

Simply claiming they are brute and leaving it at that smacks of what Alexander Pruss and Richard Gale have dubbed the taxi-cab fallacy: arbitrarily dismissing a request for explanation (like a passing cab) once one wants to go no further. But the situation does push us to go further. Otherwise, we’re left with what seems like a remarkable coincidence: just those moral properties and facts we would hope to be brutes are brutes! What’s better is that we’ve naturally evolved in such a way as to successfully exemplify and enforce them. As it has been said, “It’s as if the moral realm knew we were coming!” This effectively brings out the next difficulty.

5. Speciesism Objection
Fifth, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy, why think they’re any more applicable to humans than any other creature? If the moral realm just exists wholly apart from creatures, wouldn’t it be just as true and binding for one species as another? When a lion kills a zebra or a pack of male hyenas collectively inseminate a female hyena, who don’t we charge lions with murder or hyenas with gang-rape? What makes us so special? To suggest that moral principles are part of the natural framework of reality but then suggest they’re only relevant to human behavior is speciesism—the unjustified bias towards one’s own species.

6. Queerness Objection
Sixth, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy and this didn’t occasion speciesism, it isn’t entirely clear that abstract objects themselves are complimentary to a naturalistic worldview, much less objective moral principles. There are of course varying degrees of naturalism, some strong and some modest. Stronger varieties, such as those committed to a hard-core materialism or only to objects existing within space and time are not just uncomfortable bedfellows of abstracta, they do not share the same bed at all. The vindication of one is the falsification of the other. Hence Howard Robinson’s remark that “materialist theories are incompatible with realist theories…the tie between nominalism and materialism is an ancient one”. But more sophisticated versions of naturalism try to make room for abstracta. Take Graham Oppy’s, a contemporary defender of naturalism, for example:

a. There are no entities which are causally related to things hereabouts but which are not spatially related to things hereabouts (hence: no souls, no spooks, no entelechies, no gods), and b. there is no sufficiently good reason for believing in the kinds of entities which are denied to exist in a.

There is no prima facie inconsistency between Oppy’s definition of naturalism and the existence of abstract objects. However, there are good reasons for thinking there is at least tension between the two. This is because abstract objects, and moral principles, seem to be very queer entities in the naturalistic universe. The late atheist J. L. Mackie agrees:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe. Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of … perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.

7. Probabilistic Objections
Seventh, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy and this didn’t occasion speciesism and they weren’t in tension with naturalism, it is unlikely that our moral faculties would have evolved in such a way for us to have justified moral beliefs. This unlikely because, on naturalism, the belief-forming mechanism responsible for our moral beliefs wasn’t concerned with whether such beliefs were true. Perhaps evolutionary naturalism could explain how a moral belief-forming mechanism in us could be advantageous, but explaining how those beliefs have come to have the content they do is a whole different monster.

If we take theism and naturalism as our two competing hypotheses in explaining the objectivity of morality, we have reason to prefer theism over naturalism. J. P. Moreland makes this point well:

If evolutionary theory is all there is to the development of the cosmos from the big bang to man, then any view which postulates the brute existence of morals would seem to do so in an ad hoc way. The general background theory would count against the veridicality of the claim to know that morals exist, even though it would still be logically possible for them to exist. If theism is true, one’s background theory explains the existence of human morality. But if one … accepts [evolutionary naturalism], then it would seem more reasonable to accept an evolutionary, subjectivist view of morality. The existence of objective values would still be possible, but it would be unlikely and ad hoc, given this background theory. The claim to intuitively perceive such values would have such a background theory as a defeater. The background theory of theism supports such claims and makes them prima facie justified because it removes the background theory (atheistic evolution as the only account for human life and morality) which is the defeater.

More could be said in support of a probabilistic argument here, such as how theism’s account of objective morality is simpler and has more scope. But in short, where (OM) is objective morality, (N) is naturalism, and (T), theism, Pr(OM|N) < Pr(OM|T).

8. Ad Hoc-ness
Finally, even if we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles and they were intelligible to us and they did convey normativity and this does not lead to the taxi cab fallacy and this didn’t occasion speciesism and they weren’t in tension with naturalism and the probability of having justified moral beliefs on naturalism is greater than or equal to than that on theism, NMR seems extremely ad hoc. Traditionally, the naturalist has agreed with the theist that if morality is objective, God is needed as their ontological foundation. Consequently, the naturalist has bitten the bullet and defended moral relativism. Only recently, however, has NMR been seriously entertained. To me this shows that the recent and powerful defenses of moral realism has is forcing naturalists to seek alternative explanations. Rather than stomach the moral relativism naturalism would their view seems to entail, naturalists sneaking their hands into the theist’s ontological cookie jar.

To summarize, if naturalistic moral realism can explain how we could have knowledge of abstract moral principles, how such principles could be intelligible in abstracto, how they could convey  normativity, why this normativity applies only to virtues instead of vices, how this doesn’t occasion speciesism, how they are straight (as opposed to queer) in a naturalists universe, how the probability of having justified moral beliefs about them could be high or greater than or equal to than that on theism, and it how it isn’t really ad hoc, then I guess NMR isn’t so implausible, after all. One is left wondering why anyone would be reluctant to embrace this fashionable new trend with the utmost of philosophical confidence.

Richard Dawkins often insists that the logic of the design argument immediately raises the question of who designed the designer. From The Blind Watchmaker:

To explain the origin of the [apparent design] by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. [p.141]

When I encounter a popular argument like this, I really try to give it the benefit of the doubt, considering that it must touch on some intuition many people share. Otherwise, popular arguments like this would never win the slogan status they do. But I have to confess—I have a truly hard time taking this argument seriously, especially when it’s presented by some sec-web goonie as a tour de force. The theist who even thinks about offering a rebuttal only demonstrates how hopelessly lost and confused he is in the aftermath of this end-all, knock-down argument akin to a modern-day Sherman’s march through theism. Alvin Plantinga similarly notes how this argument has gained momentum among the enlightened:

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett approvingly quotes this passage [The Blind Watchmaker, p. 141] from Dawkins and declares it an “unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume’s Dialogues two centuries earlier.” Now here in The God Delusion Dawkins approvingly quotes Dennett approvingly quoting Dawkins, and adds that Dennett (i.e., Dawkins) is entirely correct.

Wow. “But the argument finds its origins in great philosophers, like David Hume!” you point out how Dennett pointed out. “So surely it must be some kind powerful weapon.” Point taken—a la Hume, let’s try to take the “who designed the designer?” argument seriously.

It is hard to see what exactly the argument is trying to achieve, much less how it goes about achieving it. Even if we assumed it completely and totally successful, it certainly doesn’t disprove theism or prove atheism. The only sense I can make out of what it wants to show is that we should not infer a designer based on the apparent design in the universe. But even if we concede this, it still does not follow that the universe is not designed or that the universe does not have a designer. All it would show is design arguments that utilize inference to the best explanation are mistaken. As such, the argument does nothing against design arguments the conclusions of which are arrived at deductively or probabilistically.

But does the argument show that we should not infer a designer based on the apparent design in the universe? I think not. Take a look at the assumption the argument rests on:

(1) A only explains B if A has an explanation of a similar kind

But this is just false. (1) can be broken into two parts: a. A only explains B if A itself has an explanation, and b. The explanation of A is of a similar kind. Consider them in turn.

(1a) A only explains B if A itself has an explanation

This is the insight behind the age old “who caused God?” question. There is no reason at all to assume this is true. Physical compounds are perfectly explainable in terms of the elements which compose them even if the elements themselves are not. Furthermore, if this assumption were true, then literally nothing would be explainable. Accordingly, for any explanation to be valid, it would have to have a valid explanation of its explanation, ad infinitum. Well, there goes the entire domain of natural science! The fact is that some things are perfectly explainable in terms of the explanation immediately prior to them. Theists like Richard Swinburne have rigorously argued that a regress of explanation almost always stops at the feet of an agent and his intentions, which leads us to (1b).

(1b) The explanation of A is of a similar kind

If we are to explain complexity in terms of design, so says Dawkins, the designer must himself be just as complex or even more so. To explain one phenomenon by appealing to a phenomenon of a similar kind does nothing to advance an explanation. But why should we think this? This seems more like rhetoric than argument. When an archaeologist unearths an ancient hand-tool of some sort and infers things about its designer (such as why it needed to make said hand-tool), his colleague doesn’t object to the inference because the designer itself must have been at least as complex as the hand-tool. Further, the principle “like begets like”, which no doubt is what Dawkins has in mind, seems to only be true of material causes (even that is debatable). But, of course, God is not a material entity. So applying such a principle in this case blatantly begs the question against the possibility of non-material causes.

In short, the explanans and the explanandum are not always similar. However, we can infer characteristics of the explanans based on the explanandum—and this is precisely why we’re justified in making an inference to intelligence based on the apparent design in the universe. This is also why we’re justified in dismissing the argument as remarkably sophomoric based on Richard Dawkins’ fondness of it. Plantinga, perhaps the world’s greatest living philosopher, thinks even the word sophomoric is an aggrandizement of Dawkins’ arguments:

…much of the philosophy he [Dawkins] purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.

So the “who designed the designer?” argument is an utter failure. For an entertaining read, see Plantinga’s review of The God Delusion, in which he also tries his best to take Dawkins the philosopher seriously.

Most people are familiar with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of religious beliefs (or at least give lip service to it), but how often do you hear his theory of how man tamed fire?

Psychoanalytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture—a fantastic-sounding one—about the origin of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating—a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back—was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoinment of a sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This grate cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.¹

“A quite extraordinary and unexampled achievement,” he says. Indeed. However, most of Freud’s scientific claims have fallen on hard times these days, the consensus on about them being either highly suspect or, at the very least, dubious.² The story isn’t much different for his critique of religion in general and religious belief in particular. Because Freud’s analysis of individual religious belief is much more sophisticated and well known than his analysis of how religion in general originated, it is safe to bypass evaluating the latter.³

I. Freud’s Critique of Religious Belief

In short, Freud hypothesized that religious belief arises from a psychological mechanism called “wish fulfillment.” Similar to traditional psychological projection, Freud maintained that in response to our own shortcomings and insecurities, we subconsciously generate compensatory beliefs—beliefs that naturally exhibit characteristics opposite those which damage our ego. He calls these beliefs illusions:

These [religious beliefs], which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impressions of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place.⁴

Freud concedes that illusory beliefs are not necessarily false beliefs, but are nonetheless maleficent, infantile, and a whole host of other contumelies. Further, Freud maintains that it is within our power to resist those sorts of beliefs; when we do not, we are “guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor,” are to be pitied, and encouraged to grow up.

So what is to be said of this charge? First and foremost, what exactly is the charge? Well, first, a word about what it isn’t. As an attack on the justification of the belief in question and not the belief’s truthfulness, Freud’s critique is not guilty of the genetic fallacy as many apologists mistakenly claim.⁵ The genetic fallacy occurs when one attacks the truth of a belief on the basis of how that belief originated. But as psychoanalysis specialist Adolf Grünbaum points out⁶, Freud’s objection is not de facto in nature, but de jure. A de facto objection is leveled against the truth of some belief, whereas a de jure objection is leveled against some belief’s justification or rationality or warrant. So if a de facto objection succeeds, it has shown the belief in question to be false. If a de jure objection succeeds, on the other hand, it has shown the belief in question to be unjustified, irrational, or unwarranted. After a careful look at Freud’s complaint, eminent epistemologist Alvin Plantinga claims it should be understood to mean religious beliefs lack warrant. Therefore, fundamental to understanding Freud’s critique of religious belief is the epistemological notion of warrant.

II. Religious Belief as Lacking Warrant

According to Plantinga, warrant is that which distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief. For a belief to have warrant, three conditions must be met: 1) The belief has to be produced by properly functioning cognitive faculties. 2) The belief has to be produced in an environment that is appropriate for the kind of cognitive faculties that produce the belief to function properly. 3) The belief-forming process has to work according to a design-plan that is successfully aimed at truth. How do religious beliefs fail to meet these conditions? According to Freud, religious beliefs are formed in (something like) the following way. In an instance of fear or insecurity, young Tommy yearns for parental care, receives it, and develops a dependency. Once Tommy becomes of age, he realizes the parental figures once provisional are no longer an adequate means of comfort. So, Tommy projects (subconsciously, of course) a larger, more competent parental figure to compensate. As Thomas’ fears and insecurities seem to increase in tandem with his age, the only parental figure large enough to appease them naturally fits the job description of “God”.

Now as far as we know, Thomas’ cognitive faculties were functioning properly by producing fear or insecurity in response to situations where he received or would later desire parental care. Further, each time Thomas received or desired parental care we can assume the events took place within an environment where the cognitive faculties which produced those feelings were functioning properly (e.g., his crib was not a gas chamber, he was not raised on some other planet where radiation amounts were such that his function of memory was impeded, etc.). Conditions (1) and (2) of warrant are met for Thomas’ belief in God. Condition (3), however, is not. Rather than forming his belief according to a design-plan successfully aimed at truth, Thomas instead formed his belief according to a design-plan aimed at something like psychological comfort. Plantinga summarizes:

According to Freud, theistic belief is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, but the process that produces it—wishful thinking—does not have the production of true belief as its purpose; it is aimed, instead, at something like enabling us to carry on in the grim and threatening world in which we find ourselves. Therefore, theistic belief does not meet the third condition of warrant; as a result, the presumption of reliability that goes with warranted beliefs does not apply to it.⁷

Tommy’s religious belief, then, fails to have warrant. Beliefs that fail to have warrant can’t be proper objects of knowledge and are ipso facto unjustified and irrational. Hence, religious beliefs are irrational. So that is Freud’s charge. What can be made by way of a response?

III. Responding to Freud

Once we get a clear idea of the nature of Freud’s critique of religious belief (as outlined above), several lines of argument can be mounted up against it. First, and perhaps most importantly, Plantinga’s entire book, Warranted Christian Belief, is devoted to offering a model of how religious belief can have warrant. Without detailing Plantinga’s model, so long as it makes warrant for religious belief even possible, Freud’s charge to the contrary is rebutted. Second, as it stands, Freud’s case for religious belief lacking warrant is itself severely lacking. In order for it to pass as a serious objection, Freud (or any of his compatriots) must first show two things.⁸ First, that religious belief does, in fact, arise from wish-fulfillment. And second, that wish-fulfillment is not aimed at producing true beliefs. Consider them each in turn.

First, does religious belief arise from wish-fulfillment? What reasons does Freud give us for thinking this is true? Well, none. So a better question might be, What reasons could there be in general for thinking religious belief arises from wish fulfillment? Again, not many if any. As “not susceptible to clear interpretation” by nature, how could this hypothesis even be tested, let alone objectively assessed? What kind of evidence could one offer for this claim? Perhaps the best indicator of cases where religious belief is plausibly explained by wish-fulfillment would be where the belief projected fits conveniently well with the subject’s own likes and dislikes. I think it was Nietzsche who remarked, “If there are gods, I couldn’t stand not to be one.” I have a sneaking suspicion that religious beliefs projected out of wish-fulfillment would look strangely like a grandiose version of one’s self. But most religious beliefs don’t fit that profile at all. The God of Christianity, for example, is a wrathful God who demands personal holiness by having you recognize and repent from your own sinful nature—hardly the sort of religious belief one would project out of wish-fulfillment!⁹ More concretely, however, is prominent Psychologist Paul C. Vitz’s observation that “there is no systematic empirical evidence to support the thesis of childhood projection being the basis of belief in God. Indeed, the assumption that religious belief is neurotic and psychologically counterproductive has been substantially rejected.”¹⁰

Furthermore, as Freud himself realized, this argument cuts both ways. Psychological projection has a counterpart known as repression (both being a sort of wish-fulfillment). Some people don’t want there to be a God.¹¹ Out of a desire to kill the father figure (maybe due to a dysfunctional relationship), perhaps they repress religious belief to preserve autonomy. At the very least, psychological repression explains lack of religious belief equally as well as psychological projection explains the presence of it. But Vitz in fact has argued that “the present theoretical understanding ties…atheism…much more firmly to the theoretical structure of psychoanalysis than Freud ever tied belief.”¹² Moreover, even if Freud is right about religious belief being produced by wish-fulfillment, then this might provide fertile ground for the argument from desire.¹³ If it is true that there is a natural correlation between our desires and the existence of that which fulfills them, then wish-fulfillment is evidence that there actually is a God who is the object of the religious beliefs we project.

Second, is wish-fulfillment not aimed at the production of true beliefs? For the sake of argument, suppose we did have good reason to believe religious belief came about by wish-fulfillment. Even if we assume this, however, it still would not follow that religious belief does not have warrant. It has to be shown that wish-fulfillment itself is not aimed at the production of true beliefs. But again, Freud grants us no supporting thought on the matter. As a mechanism that functions wholly subconsciously, it’s nearly impossible to see exactly what kind of beliefs wish-fulfillment is aimed at producing (religious or other), much less whether the process is successful. One possibility is as good as another. Certainly it’s possible that God could use such a faculty for commonly producing religious beliefs within us. In fact, this is exactly the sort of design plan the third condition of warrant has in mind.¹⁴ Prominent philosopher John Hick explains:

Perhaps the most interesting theological comment to be made upon Freud’s theory is that in his work on the father-image he may have uncovered the mechanism by which God creates an idea of himself in the human mind. For if the relation of a human father to his children is, as the Judaic-Christian tradition teaches, analogous to God’s relationship to man, it is not surprising that human beings should think of God as their heavenly Father and should come to know him through the infant’s experience of utter dependence and the growing child’s experience of being loved, cared for, and disciplined within a family. Clearly, to the mind which is not committed in advance to a naturalistic explanation there may be a religious as well as a naturalistic interpretation of the psychological facts.¹⁵

Freud’s theory is not only open to the religious believer; it is just as reasonable to believe from a religious perspective as it is from a naturalistic one. For as Hick also noted, Freud’s theory has force against religious belief only if we first assume naturalism as a worldview is true. In other words, the de jure objection depends on the success of some de facto objection against religious belief. Atheist philosopher Kai Neilson also notices this:

…Sigmund Freud’s accounts of religion, as [he was himself] well aware, gain the considerable significance they have only after we have come to believe that the Enlightenment critiques of religion by Bayle and Hume, perhaps with a little contemporary rational reconstruction, have successfully done their work.¹⁶

But, of course, no religious believer is going to assume Bayle, Hume, or any of the ‘contemporary rational reconstructions’ have successfully done their work. So Freud’s theory should be far from compelling to him. The only religious believer going to buy this is “a certain variety of ‘liberal’ theologian, crazed by the thirst for novelty and the desire to accommodate current secularity” as Plantinga humorously remarked.

IV. Conclusion

Freud’s analysis of religious belief, though widely influential among laymen and in popular atheistic literature, isn’t nearly as extraordinary and unexampled of an achievement as how man tamed fire. More than just countering Freud’s claim that religious belief lacks warrant, the believer (or at least a Christian believer) can turn the tables and offer a de jure objection of his own to non-religious belief. Romans 1.18-32 makes it clear that it is the non-believer’s cognitive faculties that are not functioning properly.¹⁷ Admittedly, however, this de jure objection to non-religious belief would itself depend on the truth of theism. So it seems we are back to the age old de facto debate between theism and naturalism to determine who’s got the upper hand.¹⁸
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One of the world’s foremost Christian philosophers, Richard Swinburne, has written a brief, but interesting Response to a Statistical Study of the Effect of Petitionary Prayer. I’ve often wondered about how a statistical study on the effectiveness of prayer in general might look. My thinking on this is still somewhat premature, but as usual Swinburne proves to be a good springboard for such in this article. The only part which I may question is his comment that

“In the Benson prayer study, the people praying were NOT praying out of love and compassion for the particular sufferer for whom they were praying- they did not even know who that sufferer was.”

Surely they did not love the sufferers as one would love an acquaintance, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of loving them on other, perhaps broader terms (though these other terms may not be clearly defined), especially from a Christian vantage. Not granting this point may render Swinburne’s case a bit more modest, but other than that I think his points stand.

Not too long ago I came across a number of videos hosted on Youtube.com geared toward debunking or attacking intelligent design in some way or another. For example, you have featured in one video the next Richard Dawkins (who seems to bear a striking resemblance to the infamous the Star Wars Kid) sharing his thoughts on intelligent design (or at least what he thinks is intelligent design) with the world. On the other hand, this time going a bit further than mere opinion, we have another video promoting “just one reason why intelligent design is wrong” running in tune with REM’s “Losing My Religion.” To use these videos as examples representative of overarching generalizations typically true of most public attacks on ID, I’ve drawn the following features which seem to be common among them all:

1) A confusion of terminology
Another way of putting this is simply a lack of comprehension of the subject. We see things like “intelligent design” used synonymously with “creationism,” taken to be the uncompromising view that God created the earth roughly six thousand years ago, as a literal reading of Genesis only would suggest. Attached with this definition is its association with anyone who considers him or herself a believer in God generally and a Christian specifically. Because nothing is properly defined, whatever misconceptions one might have about the views being discussed will remain unchallenged and without chance of correction. Which brings us to our next feature:

2) Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
This is just a more modern way of setting up the alleged dichotomy between science and religion. In almost every instance ID is mentioned by Internet laymen or on television, it is immediately pitted against evolution as if to be in an epic rivalry. Consequently, evolution and ID are understood to be mutually exclusive, the former representing ‘free thought’ in conjunction with the entire domains of proper science and reason, the latter representing the outmoded dogmatism of religion and poor or otherwise deficient “science,” if it is to merit such a holy title at all.

3) Low epistemic status of ID advocates
Evolution is equated with pure science. True knowledge comes only by way of the sciences. Because ID advocates reject evolution, they are in effect unscientific and, likewise, unknowledgeable. This line of reasoning foists a title of general ignorance upon all whom consider themselves creationists and/or proponents of ID, and therefore anything that comes henceforth from their lips carries either little or no academic respectability or authority.

I won’t bother going into detail as to why I wholeheartedly reject almost every assumption made in each of the three categories. The point is that when you look at the features common to most all attacks on ID (by laymen in particular, but by no means only them) they have nothing do with the fundaments of ID at all. Instead, they have everything to do with cultural assumptions and stereotypes. Beyond that, the ‘objections’ often made to ID are usually posed under a guise of science, but amount to nothing that can’t be countered by even amateur philosophy. For a clear-cut example, watch the last video I alluded to earlier.

The video starts out by reminding its viewers of what ID proponents argue, namely appeals made to objects which appear to be designed, “meaning it could not have occurred by random chance.” Thereafter, they cite the finding of a watch and Mt. Rushmore to be cases in point of when ID proponents say design should be inferred. Already, we have 1) an inadequate criterion used to identify design typically employed by ID proponents and 2) the unjustified assumption that all ID arguments are analogical. Those problems aside, it continues:

[ID proponents] claim that proteins, living machines inside all living cells are too complex to appear by chance. But proteins are part of living organisms which do three things mountains and watches don’t: They reproduce, they mutate, and they are subject to natural selection.

It is here which so often an egregious error is made. Note that they correctly state what an ID proponent would argue—the difficulty of explaining the origin of proteins—but they fail to attack the argument by begging the question in that they assume the existence of proteins as objects efficiently utilized by natural selection. But the very existence of proteins was the thing in question, not their involvement in natural selection! In their impressive article “Information and the Origin of Life,” Walter Bradley and Charles Thaxton refer to errors exactly like this: “…[S]imple analogies between biological evolution based on natural selection . . . should be rejected because natural selection in biological evolution presupposes systems that replicate [in this case, the protein]. The problem . . . is to develop just such systems.”¹ The Late prominent biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy also made this point: “Selection, i.e., favored survival of ‘better’ precursors of life, already presupposes self-maintaining, complex, open systems which may compete; therefore selection cannot account for the origin of such systems.”²

But alas, the show goes on as REM plays in the background like a theme song of liberation with ethereal accord. The next point made is that “Natural selection is not random.” Several simulations follow, showing how easy natural selection produces complex, ordered results. By using several hundred images, each representing a single generation, they simulate generations successively advancing, keeping the fifty most fit. The purpose is to see what image they can capture after x amount of successions. “The closer an image gets to a goal image the greater [an organism’s] fitness.” Of course, they produce their desired results in a mere one hundred generations. Philip Johnson explains this experiment well:

It actually is possible to produce a written text by supplying random letters—if some selector (like a computer program) preserves every letter that happens to end up in the right place. Thus we can get “In the beginning was the Word” if the program supplies random letters until an I happens to appear in the first space or a d in the final space, and so on. Whenever a letter appears in the correct slot, the program preserves it there, like the uncovered letters on the TV program Wheel of Fortune. Very soon the letters will be filled with the correct letters and we will have the whole sentence.³

Simply replace the desired sentence with a desired image and the letters which compose the sentence with pixels which compose the image, and we have the exact same experiment in the video as the one Johnson explained. In fact, it is Richard Dawkins’ lead the video follows, for he originated and actually uses this analogy to illustrate ‘the creative power of natural selection.’ Complex results by way of natural selection, then, as the video will have us believe, is absurdly easy.

So easy, in fact, it’s completely bogus. Curiously enough, it is by the very same words ‘goal,’ and ‘end’ and ‘purpose’ so often used to describe natural selection that we derive from the Greek word τέλος (telos)—being the root word of teleology, the study of purposeful actions preformed by an agent for the sake of an intentional goal or end result. This is at the very heart of ID (hence the teleological argument). The type of selection proposed by these simulations, therefore, is not natural selection, but would better be called ‘supernatural selection’ or for that matter ‘specified selection,’ for the only way they work is if a specific goal or end product is already predetermined or ‘specified’ in the mind of an agent. “Natural selection, on the other hand,” writes Johnson, “is supposed to be mindless and hence incapable of pursuing a distant goal. If natural selection could preserve a presently meaningless mutation because it might become useful later on when other new mutations occur, this would imply that evolution is a purposeful process, supervised by a preexisting mind . . . supervised evolution is a gradualist version of creationism. As materialists use the term, it is not evolution at all.”⁴ Taken literally then, the experiment in the video and others like it wind up supporting ID. If the simulations were to accurately portray natural selection, however, it would be more like a game of Boggle than Jeopardy. Each shake would represent a single generation, and those letters which happen to spell words in each generation will be lost in the next. A desired result, say, the word ‘protein,’ would have to be captured in a single generation without the specification of letters obtaining from previous generations. Of course the probability of the word ‘protein’ being captured in a single shake of Boggle is still vastly greater than what would be the case for natural selection capturing an ordered system like a protein in a single generation. But the analogy nonetheless applies.

In conclusion, then, most attacks on ID usually entertain one, of not all three of the above unjustified assumptions and, beyond those, present fallacious alternatives to ID that appear scientific but can be dismissed on the basis of elementary philosophical reflection.
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Few contemporary arguments in philosophy of religion have received as much attention by as many interdisciplinary philosophers as Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (hereafter EAAN). Much like Michael Behe’s arguments for irreducible complexity, the amount of responses the argument has elicited makes it all-too easy for the sec-web goonie to dismiss it as having been refuted “in the literature” or by [name drop here]. In light of all this controversy, it has become hard to find a succinct, non-technical statement of the EAAN. This is what I’ll try to do in the post. I realize each point and maneuver in the argument could be (and has been) extended substantially, but such details are beyond the sketch I intend here. Because most, if not all discussions of the EAAN utilize Bayes’s theorem, some introductory remarks about that might be helpful.

A Quick Description of Bayes’s Theorem

Bayes’s Theorem (hereafter BT) can be understood as a tool for assessing how probable evidence makes some hypothesis. Or as Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne explains, “as stated by Bayes, [the theorem] is concerned with the probability of a first event having happened given that the second event has happened.” The theorem has proven very useful. For example, the military used a version of it to successfully locate a sunken submarine. Moreover, it is programmed into the search engines of Google to yield the best results for a given query. But in addition to its more practical applications, many contemporary philosophers are using it to assess abstract, theoretical matters such as the worldview confirmation. They do this by isolating some agreed-upon fact or piece of evidence, then see how well it “fits into” the larger picture or story of a theory, hypothesis, or worldview.

Simply put, BT states that the probability of H being true in light of evidence E is equal to the prior plausibility of H being true apart from evidence E, multiplied times the likelihood that E is predicted to occur if one accepts H, divided by the probability that E is expected to occur without H being true at all. Where Pr = “the probability of”, E = “the evidence accepted”, and H = “the hypothesis (theory, worldview) in question.” The first thing you do is define what is called conditional probability. Pr(H|E) is the conditional probability of H given E, that is, the probability that H is true given E. In one of its most basic forms, BT is as follows:

Pr(H|E) = Pr(E|H) x Pr(H) / Pr(E)

The probability values range from 0 (being the lowest) to 1 (being certain or near certain). Intermediately, ≈ .5 is considered neutral or unenlightening. Below .5 is considered unlikely, and above .5 likely. In paradigm cases, for example, if H has no probability, e.g., H = x is a square circle, then its probability is 0. But if H must be true, e.g., H = x is 2 + 2 = 4, then its probability is 1. So if evidence E confirms some hypothesis H, then Pr(H|E) is greater than Pr(H), that is, Pr(H|E) / Pr(H) is greater than .5. In other words, if some piece of evidence confirms some hypothesis, then the probability of that theory being true given that the evidence obtains, Pr(H|E) > Pr(H). Scholars differ over what the numerical values of probability mean when they are assigned to the four terms in the theorem. Many hold that they are subjectively assigned. This does not mean they can’t be objective and that they merely reflect someone’s bias. Rather, it means that the probabilities represent someone’s degree of belief or educated guess at the probability in question—though the best arguments are crafted when the person crafting remains cognizant of the ease with which a critic might grant his premises.

Plantinga’s EAAN

As stated in his book Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga sets the argument up by determining the probability of two rivaling theories, comparing which is made more probable by the evidence. The theories he is comparing are evolutionary naturalism (the view that everything that exists came about naturally and by means of evolutionary processes minus supernatural intervention), represented by N, and theism (the traditional view that the universe and everything herein, namely our cognitive faculties, is by the order of an intelligent Creator), represented by T.

And so N and T will represent the theories being compared, naturalism and theism. Pr represents ‘the probability of.’ Finally, the evidence  considered in the argument is the reliability of our cognitive faculties. So R stands for “our cognitive faculties are reliable” or “the reliability of our cognitive faculties.” So the relevant applications of Bayes’s will be:

Pr(N|R) = Pr(R|N) x Pr(N) / Pr(R)

And likewise for theism:

Pr(T|R) = Pr(R|T) x Pr(T) / Pr(R)

Now obviously for this to be a good argument, Pr(N) and Pr(T) have to be the same. That is, we do not want to bias the argument by assuming unequal probabilities for the theories themselves before the evidence is considered. So both Pr(N) and Pr(T) are equal, that is, around .5. Note also that both theories accept the evidence in question—that is, both naturalism and theism accept the fact that our cognitive faculties are indeed reliable (as we are trusting them in our survey of this argument). Pr(R) therefore is also the same in each. I do not know exactly what value Plantinga assigned to Pr(R), but all we need to know is that it’s fairly high. At least above .6, I’m guessing. ≈.8 or .9. The question, Plantinga suggests, is how do

compare in value? Or which theory (a. naturalism or b. theism) is made more probable by (R)? Well, it seems that naturalism would yield a lower probability of Pr(R) than theism (that is, Pr(R|N) is low and Pr(R|T) is not). Darwin himself noted this:

With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

This is because if we assume the truth of evolutionary naturalism, then our cognitive faculties have arisen by way of a process not concerned with truth, but survival purposes only. The problem is that the attainment of truth and higher cognitive functions have no survival value. The surety of an organism’s survival isn’t contingent on whether or not the organism receives truthful information from the external world. Here are at least five reasons to think the probability of Pr(R|N) should be considered low:

1. Natural selection doesn’t select for reliable beliefs, but behavior. Remember the four Fs? According to Patricia Churchland, a naturalist specialist in neuroscience

Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing. The principle 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 enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.

2. False beliefs have equal survival value as true beliefs. Meet Paul, the Neanderthal man Alvin Plantinga introduces us to in his witty illustration of this point:

Paul is a prehistoric hominid; the exigencies of survival call for him to display tiger avoidance behavior. There will be many behaviors that are appropriate: fleeing, for example, or climbing a steep rock face, or crawling into a hole too small to admit the tiger, or leaping into a handy lake. Pick any such appropriately specific behavior B. Paul engages in B, we think, because, sensible fellow that he is, he has an aversion to being eaten and believes that B is a good means of thwarting the tiger’s intentions.

But clearly this avoidance behavior could result from a thousand other belief-desire combinations: indefinitely many other belief-desire systems fit B equally well. Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. Or perhaps the confuses running towards it with running away from it, believing of the action that is really running away from it, that it is running towards it; or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly reoccurring illusion, and hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a 1600 meter race, wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.

Trying to combine these probabilities in an appropriate way, then, it would be reasonable to suppose that the probability of R, of these creatures’ cognitive systems’ being reliable, is relatively low, somewhat less than 1/2.

3. Natural selection wouldn’t select for reliable beliefs. This is because the development of higher mental capacities would be disadvantageous in the evolutionary scheme of things. As J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig point out,

Some scientists have argued that the possession of rational abilities (e.g., belief processing systems) can be a disadvantage because such systems require increased information-processing capacities associated with the nervous system and this is a reproductive liability prenatally (such a system requires a longer and more vulnerable gestation period) and postnatally (it takes longer to raise and teach the young).

4. Even if natural selection could and would select for reliable beliefs, it wouldn’t select for reliability with respect to most of our beliefs, but only the most basic ones we need to survive (ones probably related to our sensory organs). It especially would not select for higher-order beliefs about theories and abstract subjects such as whether naturalism is true or false.

5. Evolutionary naturalism could not produce the essential properties of beliefs. If evolutionary naturalism is true, then beliefs are (at least) neuronal events with certain electro-chemical or neurophysiological properties. But how can these entities (events, structures, processes?) have content, that information-core that is either true or false? Beliefs are what they are by virtue of their content. Plantinga explains:

The fact is, we can’t see how it could have content. It’s not that we see or know this is perfectly possible, but we just don’t know how it’s done. When light strikes photo-receptor cells in the retina, there is a complex cascade of electrical activity, resulting in an electrical signal to the brain. I have no idea how all that works; but of course I know it happens all the time. But the case under consideration is different. Here isn’t not merely that I don’t know how physical interaction among neurons brings it about than an assemblage of neurons has content and is a belief. No, in this case, we can’t see how such an event could have content—that t, it seems upon reflection that it could not have content.

Plantinga continues by comparing the situation to inquiring of the number seven’s weight. It’s not just that we can’t see how the number seven could have a weight; it’s that we clearly see how the number seven is not the kind of thing that can have a weight. The problem is compounded when we note that the content of beliefs is intentional. That is to say, a belief’s content is of or about certain states of affairs, and only by virtue of this correlation are they true or false. But again, it is not just that it is hard to see how intentionality could be a property of electro-chemical or neurophysiological entities; it is quite easy to see that it could not be. So if evolutionary naturalism cannot make room for content or intentionality, it can’t make room for beliefs either, much less true ones.

So, one is left with the pressing question, Why should we trust that our cognitive faculties deliver mostly true beliefs if evolutionary naturalism is true? After all, would you trust a machine programmed by purposeless chance to give you reliable information? Here’s an analogy: Imagining yourself coming across the sentence “John loves Mary” inscribed in the sand on a beach. If you believed that the sentence was produced randomly by the crashing waves, would you then believe the sentence was true (that there really was this guy named John who really does love this girl named Mary)? Of course not! If the sentenced is the result of random, mechanistic processes, it has no truth value.

For these and other reasons, Pr(R|N) is less than .5., or less-likely to be above .5 than not. On the other hand, Pr(R) is just what we should expect it to be if we assume the truth of T. For according to T, our cognitive equipment was designed to function as a means by which we engage in knowing genuine truths (at least in part) not only about our surroundings, but the designer himself. Pr(R|T), then, is plausibly greater than .5, most likely .7 or higher. And so follows the rest of the argument: therefore, assuming equal probabilities for N and T, Plantinga concludes that “we should take the probability of T on R to be greater than that of N on R. But we do, in fact, believe R. So we have reason to prefer T to N.”

But more than just yielding a low probability of R, this argument illuminates N to be self-defeating as well. For if the probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable is low (or inscrutable) given the truth of naturalistic evolution, then “one who accepts N (and also grasps the argument for a low or inscrutable value of Pr(R|N)) has a defeater for R.” A defeater is a condition under which something present removes or weakens the justification for a belief being held at the time. For example, if you walk into a room that is lit by lights that make everything else in the room look red, then your belief “this object is red.” for any object in the room is not justified. The red lighting serves as a defeater for your belief that some object in the room is red.

The defeater in the case of evolutionary naturalism is of course the low probability of our cognitive faculties being reliable. So with Plantinga, we must agree that given the low outcome of Pr(R|N), a defeater is present for he who both believes N and trusts the beliefs produced by his cognitive faculties, among which include the truth of N itself; therefore, given that our cognitive faculties are reliable, not only is naturalistic evolution less-likely to be true than not, but it is also self-defeating. Along with this conclusion comes the epistemological insight that even if evolutionary naturalism were true, it would be irrational for one to believe it (because we can’t trust that which produced the belief). A more formal outline would look like this:

(1)	Pr(R|N) is low or inscrutable
(2)	Therefore, N has a defeater for R—if you believe N, then you should doubt R
(3)	If you should doubt R, then you should doubt everything else you believe (because everything you believe is produced by R)
(4)	If you believe N, then you should doubt N (N is self-refuting)
(5)	Therefore, you should not believe N (it is irrational to believe N even if N is true)

Resources

Bayes’s theorem has broader applications, but for much of its philosophical underpinnings, see Richard Swinburne (ed.), Bayes’s Theorem (Oxford, 2005). See also James Joyce, “Bayes’ Theorem,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Brandon Fitelson, Studies in Bayesian Confirmation Theory (University of Wisconson dissertation, 2001).

The EAAN was first proposed in chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, “Naturalism Defeated” (Cornell, 1993). See also his draft “An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.” A helpful volume is James Beilby (ed.), Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (Cornell, 2002). A revised version of the EAAN appears in Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000), pp. 227-40. Plantinga’s latest statements and defenses are: Alvin Plantinga, “Naturalism vs. Evolution: a Religion/Science Conflict?” in Paul Draper (ed.) God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence (Online book, 2007-2008); Alvin Plantinga & Michael Tooley, Knowledge of God (Oxford, 2008); Plantinga “Content and Natural Selection,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (forthcoming). See also Omar Mirza, “A User’s Guide to the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism,” Philosophical Studies 141/2 (2008), pp. 125-146; especially Troy Nunley, A Defense of Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (Dissertation, 2005).

*Updated version here*

An argument which I think is begging for a more contemporary and public defense is the conceptualist argument for the existence of God.¹ You’d be hard pressed to find it given a fair treatment of more than a few sentences at best or a passive mention at worst in a typical introductory apologetics text (and unfortunately even thicker books as well). The argument isn’t totally neglected, however. Greg Bahnsen used a form of this argument as his devastating weapon of choice in his lively debate with Gordon Stein.² More recently, William Lane Craig sometimes uses it in his some of his debates.³ Interestingly enough, prominent atheist philosopher Quentin Smith has developed a version of the conceptualist argument that has become quite popular.⁴ The conceptualist argument is named for its relevance to the philosophical view known as conceptualism, which holds that abstract objects are metaphysically grounded in the mind of an agent. But, according to the argument, abstract objects aren’t metaphysically grounded in just any mind, but an ultimate (omniscient), divine mind. That being said, the main focus of the conceptualist argument is the (seemingly) peculiar existence of abstract entities.

Usually contrasted with concrete objects, abstract entities are things like numbers, sets (and other mathematical entities), propositions, properties (and universals), values, relations, laws, theories, etc. What all of these entities seem to have in common is the curious possession of positive ontic status without spatiotemporal extension. That is to say, an abstract object is a real entity that does not exist in space and time. Something exists in space (or time) if it has spatial (or temporal) duration or location.⁵ If something has spatiotemporal duration, that is to say it has a length, height, size, etc. If something has spatiotemporal location, it exists at a certain place during a certain time; we could ask of its whereabouts and when-abouts. But abstract objects seem to lack spatiotemporal duration and location. So if we take numbers as abstract entities, for example, it would be nonsensical inquire of the number 2’s dimensions or whereabouts. Or in the words of Corey Washington, “When’s the last time you bumped into the number one? When’s the last time you slipped on the concept of truth? Or saw a justice sitting by the side of the road?” In addition to being immaterial and timeless, abstract entities are generally understood as being utterly effete (the number two cannot cause anything) and metaphysically necessary (it exists in every possible world).

The conceptualist argument, in short, is that the best metaphysical grounding for the existence of abstract objects is an omniscient mind whose concepts they are.⁶ But unfortunately, the argument can get pretty intricate not only in its formulation, but also its defense. But to keep things clear, a tidy outline of it can be as follows:

1. Abstract objects either:
   a. do not exist,
   b. are independently existing realities, or
   c. exist as mental concepts.
2. Abstract objects:
   a. exist and
   b. are not independently existing realities.
3. Therefore, abstract objects exist and are mental concepts.
4. If abstract objects exist and are mental concepts, they exist as mental concepts in the mind of an omniscient, metaphysically necessary being.
5. Therefore, an omniscient, metaphysically necessary being exists.

Premise (1) should be uncontroversial, for there has traditionally been three main schools of thought with respect to the ontological status of abstract objects: (1a) nominalism, (1b) Platonism, and (1c) conceptualism. Premise (2) would involve a refutation of the alternatives to conceptualism: (1a) nominalism and (1b) Platonism. With that in mind, lets take a brief look at each.

2a. Abstract objects exist.

As just said, to establish this, a refutation of (1a) is in order. (1a) implies the philosophical view known as nominalism. There are varying degrees of nominalism. Most forms of nominalism amount to trying to save a naturalistic ontology.⁷ If we take naturalism to be the worldview that the only thing that exists is the spatiotemporal universe and nothing more, then there is immediate problem with what to do with abstract objects. Either the naturalist denies their existence outright (extreme nominalism) or he reduces them to spatiotemporal entities and/or mere linguistic or categorical referents (nominalism and moderate nominalism) that don’t have objective meaning (fictionalsim). Arguments against nominalist views are numerous and complex, but I’ll only note a few that can generally be raised against them all. First, it is extremely hard to see how we can, in theory, reduce or eliminate the entire realm of abstract objects and not have our knowledge of the physical world severely depreciated if not precluded. Abstract objects seem truly indispensable. Second, most forms of nominalism run into major difficulty with the problem of property exemplification. It seems concrete objects do have properties like shape, color, size and so forth that are not identical to one other nor to the object itself, but are real, independent nonphysical properties had by the object. The realist (or conceptualist in this case) has a straightforward and powerful account for these features. The extreme nominalist has to give his reductive analysis to show this is not the case.

2b. Abstract objects are not independently existing realities.

Again, demonstrating (2b) would be to show (1b) false. (1b) implies the philosophical view known as Platonism. In contrast to nominalism, Platonism in its basic form has us believe that while abstract entities do in fact exist, their existence is nonetheless inexplicable; they exist naturally and necessarily a se. While there are several major arguments often leveled against Platonism, I’ll briefly mention just one.⁸ The first problem springs from the nature of abstract objects themselves—their causal inefficacy. If abstract objects are truly effete and exist independently from minds, then how is it we have knowledge of them? If Platonism were correct, then it seems reasoning would be impossible. For Platonism would preclude our having a working knowledge of abstract entities like numbers and the laws of logic, each of which are indispensable to our epistemic life.

So it seems neither (1a) or (1b) are plausible accounts for the metaphysical grounding of abstract objects. But that leaves us with (1c); or rather

3. Therefore, abstract objects exist and are mental concepts.

With Platonism, conceptualism affirms the necessary existence of abstract objects but maintains their existence is conceptual in nature; that is, they exist not inexplicably a se but as concepts to be had by minds. But the theist usually has a different kind of conceptualism in mind than what is typically inferred by the term. A basic doctrine of conceptualism holds that abstract objects are grounded in the minds of humans as perceiving agents, as developed by Kant. The theist takes it a step further and argues human minds are an inadequate basis on which to metaphysically ground abstract objects, and so argues further that only an omniscient mind has the capacity to ground such. For our purposes, the former can be called Kantian conceptualism and the latter theistic conceptualism. This distinction leads the theist into a defense of (4), which involves a refutation of the Kantian-type conceptualism:

4. If abstract objects exist and are mental concepts, they exist as mental concepts in the mind of an omniscient, metaphysically necessary being.

Why can’t abstract objects be metaphysically grounded in human minds? Alvin Plantinga provides us with at lest one reason:⁹

It seems plausible to think of numbers as dependent upon or even constituted by intellectual activity. But there are too many of them to arise as a result of human intellectual activity. We should therefore think of them as… the concepts of an unlimited mind: a divine mind.

The main point is that there are far too many abstract entities that have not yet been the object of human conception. There are multitudes of numbers, sets, properties, etc. not thought of—an infinite amount, even! But if abstract objects exist and are mental concepts, but are not mental concepts of humans, then they must conceptually reside within another kind of mind—a mind that has the capacity to host such (metaphysically necessary) infinitude. In short, if not humanly conceptual on account of our ignorance, abstract objects are most plausibly divinely conceptual on account of omniscience. And so we may now accept premise (4). And this of course brings us to our conclusion:

5. Therefore, an omniscient, metaphysically necessary being exists.

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1. The conceptualist argument is closely related to the transcendental argument for the existence of God.
2. This debate is freely available online in both audio and transcribed formatting here.
3. For example, see the Craig-Tooley debate and the Craig-Washington debate.
4. Quentin Smith, ‘The Conceptualist Argument for God’s Existence’, Faith and Philosophy, 11, 1 (January 1994), pp. 38-49. In fact, the whole chapter is available online here.
5. I have borrowed this wording from J. P. Moreland, Universals (McGill-Queen’s University Press: London, 2001), p. 17.
6. This definition is borrowed from J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 498.
7. For a good survey of the major arguments against the various forms of nominalism, see J. P. Moreland, Universals (McGill-Queen’s University Press: London, 2001), pp. 23-73. And for the problems naturalists face with abstract objects, namely, properties, see J. P. Moreland, “Naturalism and the Ontological Status of Properties,” in Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy 5 (London: Routledge, 2000), 67-109.
8. For a good survey of the major arguments against Platonism, see two articles by Paul Benacerraf, “What Numbers Could Not Be,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 47-73 and “Mathematical Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 661-79.
9. Alvin Plantinga, “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments,” lecture presented at the 33rd Annual Philosophy Conference, Wheaton College, October 23-25, 1986.