Plantinga Redux: Is the Scientific Realist Committed to the Rejection of Naturalism?
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Plantinga Redux: Is the Scientific Realist Committed to the Rejection of Naturalism? Abraham Graber 1
& Luke
Golemon 2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract While Plantinga has famously argued that acceptance of neo-Darwinian theory commits one to the rejection of naturalism, Plantinga’s argument is vulnerable to an objection developed by Evan Fales. Not only does Fales’ objection undermine Plantinga’s original argument, it establishes a general challenge which any attempt to revitalize Plantinga’s argument must overcome. After briefly laying out the contours of this challenge, we attempt to meet it by arguing that because a purely naturalistic account of our etiology cannot explain the correlation between our preference for simplicity and simplicity’s ability to serve as a veridical method of theory selection, the scientific realist is committed to the rejection of naturalism. Keywords Plantinga . Fales . Naturalism . Scientific realism . Natural theology
Introduction Plantinga (1993, 2011) has famously argued that acceptance of neo-Darwinian theory commits us to the existence of a Designer. Despite its notable strengths, Plantinga’s argument is vulnerable to an objection developed by Evan Fales. In this paper, we will attempt to skirt Fales’ criticism and revive Plantinga’s argument by contending that the scientific realist is committed to the rejection of naturalism. Our project is largely exploratory; while both authors believe that the argument presented herein is worthy of attention, neither author has an all-things-considered stance on the argument’s soundness.
* Abraham Graber [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1 UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78251, USA
2
Department of Philosophy, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA
A. Graber, L. Golemon
A Brief Introduction to Debunking Arguments The central arguments in this paper, both Plantinga’s and our own, are instances of debunking arguments. It is thus worth briefly giving the reader some sense for how debunking arguments work. The last decade or so has seen an explosion in the philosophical literature on debunking. Of necessity, the following discussion will not do justice to the complexities of this literature. By way of a brief introduction to debunking, consider the following vignette: Suppose that Josh has many beliefs about a distant village in Nepal. And suppose that very often his beliefs about the village are true. Indeed, a very high proportion of his beliefs about this village are true, and he believes many of the truths about this village. In other words, there is a striking correlation between Josh’s beliefs about that village and the truths about that village. (Enoch 2010, 421; cf. Field 1989, 25-30) Explanations of Josh’s veridical beliefs are not difficult to imagine: perhaps Josh lived in Nepal for a period of time, perhaps his parents lived in Nepal and have told him stories of his ancestral home, or perhaps Josh has simply spent too much time on Wikipedia. Suppose,
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