Refuting Plantinga's God and Other Minds

[Cheerful Charlie]

I can't locate a website that exactly specifies the details of what this argument entails. In a nutshell, just from my own reading (not any actually reading from the book itself because I'm not going t waste 20 bucks on bullshit), it states that belief in god is rational and justifiable just as belief that other people have minds/other people's minds exist. I know this sounds like crap on the surface but I'm wanting to dismantle it at the core. I don't think this explicitly argues for god but I can't seem to get my hands around this. I'm sure it's been disputed before but I just can't find anything on the Internet that knocks it out to my satisfaction.

Plantinga's bad argument is that we cannot prove minds exist but believe they do. Analogously, we can treat God the same. We cannot prove God exists but we can believe so.

The Watchmaker's Pinciple.
If a watchmaker knows how to design a watch, he knows the engineering, metallurgy, how to make the parts, he can safely design a watch that properly assembled will tell time accurately The principles behind designing and building a useful watch rely on the determinism of physics et al to allow understanding of how to create a working watch.

Like wise, we have complex brains. There is a design to a brain, based on chemistry, tissues, neurons, synapses that are much the same for us all. We each experience mind, and we know each other has a brain, tissues that have evolved and are "designed" by our DNA. So since we know that mind is a phenomenon that works because we have brains, we can invoke the Watch Maker's Principle to demonstrate that the deterministic biochemistry of a properly working brain will support the phenomenon we call mind

Plantinga is well known to be a Bible believing Christian, and agrees the Bible is a revelation from God, though with some weasel wording.

Biblical Proof of Other Minds.
The Bible supports the idea that humans have minds by the numerous narratives and stories that treat mankind as having thoughts, emotions, that is collectively such things we call minds. It is foolish to say we have no minds, that the narratives of the Bible that represent mankind as having a mind is wrong and that all these thinking minds are falsehoods meant to trick us or mislead us, and that all the men and women of the Bible were mindless automatons.

Plantinga really isn't that sophisticated. I'll leave it up to you to express these arguments as you will, rhetorically.


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I believe the argument is that since we accept the existence of other minds without proof, it is also rational to accept the existence of a god without proof.

The argument as I see it is not meant to prove the existence of 'God', but to provide a rational reason to believe in 'God'.

The argument fails on many obvious levels.

While I guess it can't be proven with absolute certainty that other minds exist, (please let's not sink into a discussion on solipsism), the evidence for other minds existing is pretty massive. Even before modern advances in neuroscience.

The evidence for the existence of 'God' is none existent in comparison.

And even if the argument was valid and sound, it still does not get you to Yahweh or Jeshua.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

You nailed it exactly.