So there are those people who think the physical world is all we know or all we have access to, and lets call that naturalism. Some folk are supernaturalists. This group would include you, Alvin. And among those who believe in the supernatural, a concomitant belief is creationism. After all, once you believe in a God, then pulling a "God did it" explanation out the hat with dizzying frequency is to be expected. Some believers grab this explanation in virtually every situation of life, but all can be expected to use it to fill in the blanks when answering the big questions of existence. Because God. This is just a long way of saying where you get supernaturalism, you get Creationism - that humans are specially made by God, every aspect of human physiology and psychology is designed and not the result of survival of the fittest. No scientific enquiry needed, just believe God made you.
Alvin Plantinga argues, and has done for many years, that our cognitive faculties can't be relied on if they are a consequences of evolution because evolution is only interested in selecting for preferred behavior -- there could be any number of ways our beliefs are wrong, but they produce behavior that aids survivability. And this disconnect ought to undermine our confidence in naturalism itself because that is also something concluded with the same flawed cognitive faculties.
It would be a shame if supernaturalism had a similar problem. And it does. Given God-breathed creation is not like evolution, our cognitive faculties in this scenario are far more reliable. 1.) God is not a deceiver. 2.) There is no 'millions of years' timeframe that suggests the traits that survive are simply those that produce survivability, not necessarily truth. 3.) God is Truth, with a capital T.
Therefore Plantinga's supernaturalism is self-defeating. Because if naturalism must be thrown out for dubious cognitive faculties (in my head I've got some replies to his concerns, but maybe that's for another day), supernaturalism -- which is what Plantinga thinks is truly the case -- with it's superior cognitive reliability (because God made us in his image!), ironically gives us the ability to understand the world without any reference to supernaturalism at all. God in Plantinga's theology is not a deceiver (that would be Satan) so we can trust our cognitive abilities; and God won't play hard-to-get, so the fact we have no concrete evidence for anything supernatural must be evidence against supernaturalism.
Given the extraordinary trust we can have in cognitive faculties if supernaturalism / creationism is true, and given how God would want us humans to have a "map that reflects the territory", we'd expect proportionally more scientists and philosophers - the women and men most trained and disciplined in rational thoughts - to use these amazing cognitive faculties to unmask God. In this scenario the supernatural is true and cognitive faculties are mostly reliable, so the best and brightest ought to believe the supernatural is true. The reality is the opposite. More scientists and philosophers are atheists. These are the exact people who don't take the conclusion for granted, who are inquisitive, who would accept evidence for God if it was there... but find nothing. There are many phenomena that have in past ages been seen as supernatural. Ancient Romans saw a comet and believed it was Julius Caesar. For anything strange the answer was always "the gods did it!". In our rational scientific world, we can look back and see the explanation was never supernatural. Thank you Alvin for shoring up our cognitive faculties, but it does too much. The conclusion that we come to using those beautiful minds is: the answer has never been magic.
In fact, in addition to asking whether supernaturalism is actually true, we see how merely the belief in the supernatural is a thought-stopping technique. Even Isaac Newton, in his understanding of planetary systems and stars and orbits and the cosmos generally, gets to a point where he takes the intellectual shortcut and says, "it's sustained by divine power". He had some very wrong ideas about space, but supernaturalism allowed him to say "God did it". That, and not atheism, to me looks like unreliable cognitive faculties. He had wrong beliefs about the world because of his belief. Newton's case can be demonstrated a hundred-fold among believers. It seems the surest way to hold a wrong belief is to be incurious about it, epitomized by those who appeal to a God and have no need to look further. -It would detract from God if they questioned the "God did it" explanation; it would demonstrate unbelief. Plantinga worries about a system that generates beliefs that can't be trusted to reflect the real world, and he needs to look in the mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment