by jimwalton » Mon Sep 25, 2017 3:24 pm
> "he can't know what it's like to not know everything." ... Why not?
Because we're dealing with reason, not absurdities. There is no such thing as an entity that is absurd and self-contradictory. If we're going to have a meaningful conversation, we have to begin with reason. If A can equal non-A, then no word has any meaning and our conversation, by necessity, must end here. But if you are able to understand what I am writing, then we are dealing with reason, not absurdity, and we can reason that A must equal A.
> Can you support these claims?
I can support them with logical arguments, of course. The arguments are far stronger for theism than for atheism, for causality over spontaneous generation, and for monotheism over polytheism.
> Why not? Why is personal value not enough?
Personal value without true purpose is merely a contrived gain. Anyone can say anything, but that doesn't yield any bona fide substance. If we are nothing but matter+ time + "chance" from impersonal sources and forces, then purpose isn't in the system. It's like asking a traffic light to learn to recognize your car and turn green whenever you arrive. It's not in the system and is therefore impossible. With no purpose in the system, any personal value attributed to anything is artificially imposed. One might as well impose unlimited wealth for all if we're just going to establish what we wish.
> Because evolution isn't a random process, despite the prevalent misconceptions.
Evolution is a blind, impersonal, and non-intelligent process. Genetic mutation is random, changing the "instruction manual" haphazardly. Natural selection knows nothing of the instruction manual, but only selects or rejects (both misnomers since they imply intelligence) based on suitability or survivability. But both processes are blind. GM knows nothing of what NS is doing, and NS knows nothing and has no input over GM. Not only are they both blind, but they are both impersonal and non-intelligent. You have a long way to go to show that reason that can be trusted as reliable can come from such foundations.
> Alvin Plantinga... "Can you support this claim?"
Here's Plantinga's argument: "Our cognitive faculties, or powers, or processes include memory, whereby we know something of our past. There is also perception, whereby we know something about our physical environment, not only locally, but also distant object such as the moon and stars. Another is a priori intuition, by virtue of which we know truths of elementary arithmetic or logic. By way of a priori intuition we also perceive deductive connections among propositions; we can see which propositions logically follow from which other propositions. In this way, starting from a few elementary axioms, we can explore the great edifices of contemporary logic and mathematics.
"But there are still other cognitive faculties: sympathy, introspection, testimony, and some would say moral sense. These faculties or powers work together in complex and variegated ways to produce a vast battery of beliefs and knowledge, ranging from the simplest everyday beliefs (it’s hot in here, I have a pain in my knee) to more complex beliefs of philosophy, theology, history, and the far reaches of science. In science, clearly enough, many of these faculties work together.
"My argument will concern the reliability of these cognitive faculties. My memory, for example, is reliable only if it produces mostly true beliefs—if, that is, most of my memorial beliefs are true. What proportion of my memorial beliefs must be true for my memory to be reliable? Of course there is no precise answer, but presumably it would be greater than, say, two-thirds. We can speak of the reliability of a particular faculty (e.g. memory) but also of the reliability of the whole battery of our cognitive faculties. And indeed we ordinarily think our faculties are reliable, at any rate when they are functioning properly, when there is no cognitive malfunction or disorder or dysfunction. We also think they are more reliable under some circumstances than others. Visual perception of middle-sized object close at hand is more reliable than perception of very small object, or middle-sized objects err some distance. Beliefs about where I was yesterday are ordinarily more likely to be true that the latest high-powered scientific theories.
"But suppose you are a naturalist: you think there is no such person as God, and that we and our cognitive faculties have been cobbled together by natural selection. Can you then sensibly think that our cognitive faculties are for the most part reliable?"
Then came the paragraph I cut and pasted in the previous post.