Refuting Plantinga's God and Other Minds

[free_thinker_at_last]

Such a dumb argument.

Yeah. It's so dumb I don't know where to start refuting. Haha.

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I guess an elementary rebuttal could be that we have reasons to believe that minds exist and we have no reasons to believe that god exists. If minds are dependent upon having a brain and if humans have brains, then we can conclude that they also have minds. I don't think the theist can make a 100% claim that god has a physical brain. I mean, theists do define him as immaterial and a spirit. How can a spirit have an actual physical brain? The physical brain is a requirement for a mind to exist.

What do ya'll think?

What's the latest on this brain/mind issue?

[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.

[Cheerful Charlie]

A religious believer may attempt to dodge the issue by claiming they do not agree mind has anything to do with a material brain. But the Watchmaker's Principle also applies to souls. If we all are given souls, then we all have minds caused by souls. Again, to deny that proposition is to make the Bible as a revelation a bizarre mockery, special pleading gone insane. Only I have a soul and thus a mind and everybody else is a mindless automaton?

Plantinga is full of it. How he writes stuff, gets it published, without immediate debunking is beyond me.
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[free_thinker_at_last]

Hey Charlie,

Do you think it would be an ok rebuttal then to just turn the table and say that as an atheist I don't believe in a soul (nothing of this sort has ever been proven and a soul would fall into the supernatural category, something else we have no evidence of)? If I don't believe in a soul, then that would free me from the hook the theist will throw about minds being caused by souls.

Thoughts anyone?

[Cheerful Charlie]

Hey Charlie,

Do you think it would be an ok rebuttal then to just turn the table and say that as an atheist I don't believe in a soul (nothing of this sort has ever been proven and a soul would fall into the supernatural category, something else we have no evidence of)? If I don't believe in a soul, then that would free me from the hook the theist will throw about minds being caused by souls.

Thoughts anyone?

Oh definitely. Proving souls exist is a fair question.

In the 1500's Greek skepticism was rediscovered annd printed. Sextus Empiricus, Cicero et al. Catholics turned the techniques of throwing doubt on claims on protestants, who returned fire and lead to a rise in religious skepticism, which became something of a French Catholic crisis. Rene Descartes realized that such skepticism had to be fought on philosophy's grounds. So he proposed to put philosophy on a sound logical basis and move to then put theology on a sound philosophical basis.

Starting with "I think therefore I am".

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote him that his efforts made no mention of how the material world interacted with the supernatural world, the world of spirit and soul. Descartes had claimed soul had nothing to do with life,our material bodies were in essence, like machines, life was like the moving hands of a clock. A man was truly alive, a cat having no soul was not, it was a mere automaton.

Descartes as an answer went back to Greek thinker Galen and stated the soul acted on the human body at the pineal gland, which satisfied nobody.

Did souls have something to do with intelligence. A cat had a certain amount of intelligence, and animals had emotional lives, so it couldn't be that.. After a century, there was no answer despite a century of some of the best minds of Europe trying to figure it out.

In the end, it was just a mysterium, like the trinity or transubstantiation, something that logic could not explain, a divine mystery.

And this is where things stand today. Nobody can prove there even is a soul.
Much less what it does. Descarte's cat is still a philosophical problem.

Arab theologians speculated about the end of time when all would be resurrected and judged, spending eternity in paradise or hell. Where were our bodies. We had none but Allah would recreate our bodies at the appointed time? What about our souls. Same as our bodies said some. Al Ghazali said not so. If all resurrected our bodies and souls, even though the resulting creature was exactly like us, it would not be us and punishing or rewarding such a creation was pointless. The soul he said was not destroyed but would be rejoined to the new body so the real person could be properly punished or rewarded. That was what the soul was and nothing more.

Ancient Egyptians claimed a man had three souls, or even seven souls. Jewish/Platonist philosopher Plotinus apparently believed we had two souls.

After 4000 years of theology, there is nothing but opinion and not a stitch of evidence of anything like a soul. And not for want of trying. Just problems.

Try asking the theological types what is the best modern theological book with the best proof of the existence of the soul. A book that solved the issues Descartes struggled with. Its all still a mysterium.

It should also be pointed out that this was an important point in history that theology lost its hold on science. God and spirit and soul could explain nothing. Science dealt with secondary causes, that is the laws of the material world.
Now the rankest atheist scientist and the most orthodox Christian scientist did science in the same way. Souls and spirits had no more place in empirical science. Most Christians are still unaware of when, how and why the split between religion and science happened. Princess Elizabeth's questions to Descartes lead to the realization that the soul was not a proposition that could explain anything or be explained. Which is still where we are today.

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[pineapplebunnybounce]

So instead of taking a step forward and proving god, this argument takes many steps back and say everything is uncertain, therefore god is as valid as everything else? If you were to take that position then you have to accept every possibility because you're dismissing the idea of plausibility and gradations of plausibility.

For solipsism, if you're truly a brain in a vat, why not just stop eating? That wouldn't affect you, right? You wouldn't die because you stop imagining that you're eating, you'd still receive whatever sustenance it is that you've been receiving ... ? So it's testable, except you have to die to test it. Interesting, and what's the point of this argument? (This is why philosophy is not my cup of tea)

As for consciousness and souls and stuff, look into neuroscience for some very enlightening cases on how consciousness works in the brain. Mainly split brain. For all intents and purposes, 2 consciousness in one body.

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

Such a dumb argument.

Yeah. It's so dumb I don't know where to start refuting. Haha.

Why bother? You wouldn't use a demolition company to knock down a sandcastle, would you?

[free_thinker_at_last]

Yeah. It's so dumb I don't know where to start refuting. Haha.

Why bother? You wouldn't use a demolition company to knock down a sandcastle, would you?

Yeah, that's true but it's always fun to give a theist a good knock out blow even if all it takes is a jab. Also, I just recently heard of this argument, though it's been around for ages according to the literature, and just wanted to knock it down. I'm just wanting to be more familiar with this argument and other arguments because I only just baptized myself in atheism in '12, so, I'm still learning.

Thanks everyone. Keep the thoughts coming.

[Bob Kelso]

Any effort in refuting this argument is wasted on most Christians; refute, strawman, angrily insult, "I'm being persecuted", rinse and repeat is all you're going to get.

Frankly I would put a spin on it saying that this weak argument also applies to the other gods that man has made; e.g. Allah, Shiva, Zues. It should get an interesting reaction.

[T.J.]

I first read this argument in an email about a student and a teacher and they tried to pass the student off as Albert Einstein. Though it was even worse because they use the word 'brain' instead of mind.