Properly basic beliefs. (Reformed Epistemology)

[theVOID]

This post is a refutation and thoughts of Alvin Plantinga's idea of 'properly basic belief' concept, which basically states that a belief that is 'properly basic' is one that is at the foundation of one's application of reason and logic and thus the belief cannot be tested.

Plantinga holds that as a properly basic belief you have Naturalism and Theism or variations of such, and that none of these assumptions can be tested. This to him makes his belief in Christianity 'reasonable' despite the fact that it is neither warranted or justified.

For this to make more sense we need to look at Plantinga's philosophical phases.

In the 1970's Plantinga developed a 'proof' for the existence of God, the Modal Ontological argument for the existence of God. He abandoned this argument some time later, mostly because it was possible for anyone to come up with a compatible 'parallel argument' proving the existence of something ridiculous.

Later he came up with the idea of 'Warrant', not in the sense we use the word normally, as in "I have a warrant for your arrest" but he loosely uses it to mean something more like "not unreasonable". In that he believed that he could prove that Christian belief is 'warranted' and thus the Christian was not intellectually void. He abandoned this project too, namely due to the same reasons, such as absolutely absurd things being consistent with the categories that warranted theism (The Great Pumpkin Objection).

Now he's stepped away from trying to prove God and to justify belief in Christianity through solid argument and/or evidence. He now has something called 'reformed epistemology' where by the belief at the foundation of our reasoning is our 'properly basic' belief. He argues that any properly basic belief is necessarily non-testable and cannot be necessitated by argument and evidence, he argues that the only real choices for a properly basic belief are Theism and Naturalism and thus Theists and Naturalists are equally unsupported in their foundations. While I totally disagree with this argument, It's not what I am getting at here.

I argue that it's possible to have a properly basic belief that is neither naturalism or theism AND is fully capable of being evaluated apart from it's own presuppositions, that being an Epistemology. Having an epistemology as a properly basic (foundational) belief can give you both the necessary foundation for reaching reasonable conclusions, while being objectively true or false (and assessable) based on whether or not any logically sound 'problem' can show that the Epistemology creates double standards (or becomes self refuting).

With this in mind, Christian belief again becomes inferior (even if we have falsely assumed for the example that naturalism is on equal footing) as we can achieve a justification for naturalism through a logically consistent epistemology (Such as Evidentialist Reliabilisim) where no theistic belief system at all can reach the state of epistemic justification in a coherent epistemology.

If it is the case that an Epistemology can be assessable and form a properly basic belief, then having an Epistemology at the core of your worldview is necessarily superior to having pure theism or naturalism at the core of the worldview.

And subsequently, since Naturalism can be justified with a coherent epistemology and Theism/supernaturalism cannot, Naturalism is necessarily superior to theism.

[Justtristo]

I really needed to reply to this nearly two months ago, however I needed that long to understand more deeply what you have been critiquing. However I have to say you have pretty well demolished Reformed Epistemology here.

Anyway the ontological argument for god is absolutely idiotic to me and Anselm of Canterbury should have been hung, drawn and quartered for ever developing this idea in the first place.

[theVOID]

the Ontological argument is bad, the Modal Ontological argument however is fucking absurd.

[The Omnissiunt One]

Any thoughts on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, VOID?

[theVOID]

Not overly familiar with it, Might have at the formal argument later.

---

Have read the argument in "Warrant and Proper function" and watched Plantinga's lecture - It's neither sound nor valid. I'm not entirely sure where to begin with all the apparent problems....

It's essentially a two-tier that starts with propositions E and N.

E: Human cognitive faculties arose by the mechanism of natural selection

N: Metaphysical naturalism is the view that there are no supernatural entities like the traditional god of theism

The argument that E and N joined becomes 'self defeating'.

Firstly, he makes the argument that E&N is unlikely because our cognitive abilities, so far as forming beliefs about the world are concerned, are generally reliable (R ). Essentially, Given R, it is unlikely that E&N.

He starts this by saying that the probability of R should be assigned a value near 1 because our sensory mechanism produce generally reliable beliefs.

I would content this premise as perhaps the most fundamental facts about existence are not intuitive - General relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Biological evolution etc are not beliefs arrived at through sensory mechanism. If most of the facts about our existence are derived from these 3 fields of inquiry and belief in these three things not arise through sensory mechanism but rather evidence and reason, then not only can we say that the most fundamental of our beliefs are not caused by R, we can also say that the most fundamental of our beliefs are caused by Evidence and reason and not R.

The reliability of our senses is only an actuality under conditions where the beliefs gathered by these senses are easily verified. Every usual case of sensory perception leading up to Plantinga's establishing that R = 1 are beliefs about mundane and easily confirmed situations. Whenever presented with an unusual and previously unknown phenomenon the reliability of our senses is much lower than 1.

He then goes on using the Bayesian probability to say that the prior probability of E&N is comparable to the probability of traditional theism (which he names TT). Big problem here, he hasn't provided any probability for E&N, he just asserts they are comparable. This is a red flag for more reasons that I initially suspected... "This last claim should raise eyebrows [...] among critics of Bayesianism, who doubt that there is an objective basis for such probability assignments [...] Bayesians have never been able to make sense of the idea that prior probabilities have an objective basis"[1]. - Off to a good start Planty

He also does not address the obvious objection that reliable cognitive functions for determining beliefs about reality are something that would lead to an advantage in surviving selection pressures and thus be selected for, there is no account of this at all. His evaluation that R is more akin to comparing R to the priori probability of a sensory system being unreliable - There are obviously more ways to make defective senses than reliable ones and he sorta just runs with this.

*Out of time, I will pick this up later*

1. http://fitelson.org/plant.pdf

[Welsh cake]

Alvin Plantinga is sadly nothing more than an intellectually bankrupt apologist, he has a poor grasp on presenting consistent logical arguments or how to verify their validity, soundness, structure and content. He really failed spectacularly to understand what scientific theories such as evolution are, repeatedly making his own asinine objections to its apparent lacking in "divine-intervention" and "unguided-ness". I doubt he even recognises the term 'natural occurring'. Like many he has also failed to provide a rational basis for his Christian beliefs and so resorts to a common fall-back tactic, move the goalposts and attempt to redefine every other word in the English language to strengthen his orthodox worldview into more presentable, sensible and less flawed.

He claims our core-beliefs are untestable and don't have to be justified. He is factually wrong across the board. We can test a beliefs' proposition or premise to see whether it is true or not.

The root of the problem is that Alvin, much like Ray Comfort, has no idea what the word 'rational' means.

[theVOID]

That couldn't be further from the truth - If you are going to point out the most respectable and productive theist philosophers it would likely be him and Swineburn. Sure, he's a little faith blind but he's pretty much a genius and brilliantly well written.

His gripe with presuppostitonalist naturalism is relatively justified, at least in the sense that it is true that most naturalists really wouldn't be able to separate their standards of justification from naturalism - They rely solely on science which precludes investigation of an alternative in an a priori sense and while it's true that science is far more effective than apriori arguments at determining (or at least verifying) truth claims, for someone to restrict investigation like that is a less than intellectually honest approach. My biggest gripe with him over this case would be he argues down a lot, the problems that are faced by the non-learned naturalists is what he attacks rather than refined position of naturalist philosophers.

He has given up on a proof for God, hasn't attempted one seriously for decades. He has even gone as far to bunk other theist arguments for the existence of God like Craig's KCA.

To say he doesn't know what rational means is just bizarre. He's done so much mental gymnastics in pursuit of a rational theism that I would at least grant that he knwows what the word means.

And at the very least we can count on him to keep us on our toes. He'll pounce on any poor reasoning displayed by naturalists

[Justtristo]

That couldn't be further from the truth - If you are going to point out the most respectable and productive theist philosophers it would likely be him and Swineburn. Sure, he's a little faith blind but he's pretty much a genius and brilliantly well written.

His gripe with presuppostitonalist naturalism is relatively justified, at least in the sense that it is true that most naturalists really wouldn't be able to separate their standards of justification from naturalism - They rely solely on science which precludes investigation of an alternative in an a priori sense and while it's true that science is far more effective than apriori arguments at determining (or at least verifying) truth claims, for someone to restrict investigation like that is a less than intellectually honest approach. My biggest gripe with him over this case would be he argues down a lot, the problems that are faced by the non-learned naturalists is what he attacks rather than refined position of naturalist philosophers.

He has given up on a proof for God, hasn't attempted one seriously for decades. He has even gone as far to bunk other theist arguments for the existence of God like Craig's KCA.

To say he doesn't know what rational means is just bizarre. He's done so much mental gymnastics in pursuit of a rational theism that I would at least grant that he knwows what the word means.

And at the very least we can count on him to keep us on our toes. He'll pounce on any poor reasoning displayed by naturalists

May I ask what works would give me a good introduction to Plantinga's ideas, because I might read through them sometime.

[Welsh cake]

That couldn't be further from the truth - If you are going to point out the most respectable and productive theist philosophers it would likely be him and Swineburn. Sure, he's a little faith blind but he's pretty much a genius and brilliantly well written.

I appreciate that while I called him intellectually "bankrupt" ordinarily I'm not summarising an entire person's character by my opinion, he has good qualities I'm sure, same as everybody, retrospectively speaking in this particular case looking at the language used to emphasise my point I may have been either overly abrasive or dramatic.

While I don't doubt his reasoning skills I'm unable however to retract my earlier statement about his inability to understand or at least appreciate what logical, sound and rational arguments are, since all of his published work seems to demonstrate just that, case in point unnecessarily redefining 'epistemology' in order to strengthen his arguments, its this excerise that so many Christian apologists before him have employed that grates me, though I suppose that reponse from me is hardly 'rational' either.

[theVOID]

And from that I have to assume you haven't actually read his work...

You don't doubt his reasoning skills, but you this he is unable to appreciate a logical and rational argument? How are those two statements not a contradiction?

As for his abilities, how about this: Plantinga was the one who defeated Rowe's argument from evil, He started the post-positivism boom of Christian philosophy, his work in "The nature of necessity" is praised by philosophers regardless of their religious beliefs and his early "God and other minds" was a fairly serious challenge for many epistemologies. Yeah, he's got a Christian agenda, but we can hardly blame him for his indoctrinated delusion

He didn't redefine epistemology (a theory of knowledge and justification) at all, he developed an epistemology that was compatible with his theism and to be honest it was probably the best attempt there has ever been, especially considering his Calvanism and all the bizarre things that it entails.