(Yesterday at 10:39 am)Angrboda Wrote:(Yesterday at 5:43 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: ^If I understand this correctly (and I confess to not having read the linked article), then he's saying that it's ok to believe in God if you believe God exists.
I'm good with that.
Boru
Plantinga's argument is that it's reasonable to consider a self-authenticating witness of the holy spirit, a sensus divinitatus, is properly basic and therefore needing no justification, if and only if the mind/brain is doing what it was designed to do. That a healthy mind is designed to detect God assumes that there is a God to do such designing, which basically is what we need a self-authenticating witness to determine in the first place. So Plantinga's reformed epistemology becomes a very literal Munchausien lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps. The short version is that using reformed epistemology to argue that such things can evidence the existence of God is cracked and suffers from a vicious circularity.
Calling Plantinga's ramblings "cracked" is a bit generous. His "reliabilism" simply isn't demonstrated. We know that our brain is a sneaky little liar, evolved to jump to conclusions quickly rather than sitting down and figuring things out carefully. We're emotive and prone to falling for a whole laundry list of cognitive biases and faults. We believe shit because it feels right. If you examine Reliabilism in that light then it comes crashing down like a house of cards. Without that the whole mess comes undone and all you're left with is some lazy 'God therefore god' argumentation. If our thinking was reliable we wouldn't still be arguing this shit millennia later.
Plantinga goes on to champion religious exclusivity. It's kinda hilarious how he just happened to be born into exactly the right sect of the right religion. Or that all of his philosophy is just thinly-veiled Christian apologetics.
