It’s been a while for blog posts! With the stresses of applying to graduate school and finishing a tough semester largely behind me (besides the absolute turmoil of waiting for admission decisions!), I’d like to resume posting here as much as possible. Here’s some tidbits and housekeeping that I wanted to get out:
Ryan of AIGBusted has a response to “The Gospels Tell Me So”, continuing our slow but steady continuation of Luke’s “Christianity is False” Series. Here’s a snippet:
“In a nutshell, the authors argue that since the gospels say that certain miracles happened, we ought to believe them because we usually believe what ancient authors wrote (if they intended to record history). Now let me be very clear: I agree that in general we ought to believe ancient historians. But what about in the specific case of miracles? In the present day, we’ve investigated lots of miracle reports and found them to be mistakes, frauds, or not credible in some way. See the work of James Randi or Joe Nickell if you don’t believe me. That tells us that most of the time, perhaps all of the time, when someone reports a miracle it did not happen. Therefore, when it comes to miracle reports in the gospels, they ought to be considered false until rigorously proven otherwise. This standard is no different from the standard we apply to other ancient authors. After all, most of us wouldn’t believe tales of witchcraft occuring in Salem, Massachusetts or ghost stories from the ancient world.”
I’ve written a paper about Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (piggybacking onto Paul Churchland’s response). You can find it here. The introduction is as follows:
“Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism argues that given the story of biological evolution and naturalism, we wouldn’t expect our cognitive mechanisms to be reliable, or that the probability of any given belief being true is very low. Given that our beliefs are generated by our cognitive mechanisms we have a defeater for all of our beliefs which include both evolution and naturalism. Paul Churchland responded by arguing that it is not our native cognitive faculties that justify our beliefs of evolution and naturalism, but the faculties provided to us by the sciences through enhanced evaluation techniques and artificial sensory modalities. Plantinga’s “innocent assumption” is that the theory of evolution and metaphysical naturalism are derived from our native cognitive systems alone, which undermines his entire argument. In this paper, I will argue that Churchland’s response is successful in defeating the conclusion of Plantinga’s argument in regards to biological evolution, and consider whether or not Churchland’s response is adequate in defense of philosophical naturalism. Finally, I will examine Churchland’s alternate proposal of representation as a map of possible experiences, and consider the consequences of such a theory in regards to the EAAN.”
