Metaphysics, Imagination, and Natural Selection
By Tyler Dalton McNabb
Alvin Plantinga is well-known for his evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN).[1] Roughly, Plantinga argues that since human faculties have come about through the process of unguided natural selection, our faculties wouldn’t be reliable and we therefore shouldn’t trust the beliefs they produce, including the belief that naturalism is true. Why think this? Part of what is motivating Plantinga is that if both naturalism and the typical natural selection story we tell are true, the content of our beliefs seems irrelevant. As long as our beliefs get our bodies in the right place at the right time to survive, the truth of our beliefs seems irrelevant. We, therefore, upon reflection of all of this, obtain a defeater for trusting our faculties.
One common response to this argument, however, is that in order for a complex organism to survive, she would need to produce mostly true beliefs. For example, if I’m going to need food for survival, I need to form a true belief about the whereabouts of the food. Or, if I’m going to survive an onslaught of wolves, I better figure out that a pack of wolves is dangerous and charging at me! So, it seems that in order to survive, we would need reliable cognitive faculties.
Moreover, if we produce mostly true beliefs at a very local level, why not think we would produce mostly true beliefs at the more abstract level? That is, if we grant that our faculties are reliable with respect to basic perception and induction, we should also think they are reliable for much more complex matters relating to string theory and matters of complicated metaphysics. Call this objection the Survival Leads to True Beliefs Objection.
While, Plantinga has responded to the Survival Leads to True Beliefs Objection,[2] I don’t mean to adjudicate here as to whether his response is successful or not. Instead, I’d like to make the reader aware of Tom Crisp’s work on naturalism and metaphysics and how it relates to responding to this objection.[3]
Crisp argues that on naturalism, we are simply not in a position to judge whether or not our complex abductive reasoning should be judged as reliable. Let me explain Crisp’s thesis by first discussing what abduction is and what it consists of.
Roughly, we can understand abduction as the process whereby we search for the best explanation of some phenomenon needing to be explained. For example, if I hear a crash in the middle of the night, my mind immediately turns to trying to explain the crash. I come up with competing theories, each possessing various virtues, as I attempt to explain the sound. One hypothesis might be that my kids woke up in the middle of night and ran into something, while another hypothesis worthy of entertaining is that someone has just broken into my home.
As you can see, imagination plays a key role in the abductive process. I need to be able to come up with plausible competing theories in an attempt to vindicate whether or not the theory which I hold to is indeed the best explanation of the given data. Now, one might initially think that on naturalism, we should expect that my imagination is robust enough such that I can reliably come up with relevant competing hypotheses and judge correctly which hypothesis is indeed the best explanation of the data. This especially seems to be the case with respect to the aforementioned scenario. My imaginative capacities play an important role in allowing me to justifiably affirm one theory (my kids woke up in the middle of the night) over other plausible competitors (e.g., someone broke in).
But what about when it comes to more complex matters such as when I am debating whether growing blockism better explains certain features over a standard B-theory of time? More relevant to our current concerns, why think I’m equipped with robust enough imaginative capacities such that I can come up with and delineate between relevant competing theories that attempt to explain ultimate reality? Why think my imagination is robust enough that I can reliably grasp THE plausible alternatives or even the right criteria for judging the alternatives at all? [4] Crisp thinks we are simply not in a position to make a judgement call about any of this, at least on naturalism. And if not being in a position to make a judgement call about any of this gives us a defeater for trusting our complex abductive reasoning processes, then we would likewise have a defeater for trusting the beliefs our complex abductive reasoning processes produce. This would include, of course, the belief in naturalism if it were arrived at by abduction.[5] Crisp’s argument, then, could be formulated in such a way as to show that, at least under some circumstances, belief that naturalism is true is self-defeating. This being the case, it seems like Crisp’s debunking arguments against metaphysics is a version of the EAAN. And it seems that his version of the argument offers resources for the EAAN advocate to respond to the Survival Leads to True Beliefs Objection.
Notes
[1] See James Beilby, Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (Ithaca: Cornell Press, 2002).
[2] See Plantinga’s reply, “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts,” in Ibid.
[3] Thomas Crisp, “On Naturalistic Metaphysics,” in the The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, ed. Kelly James Clark (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).
[4] Ibid., 67-68.
[5] I make this point in Erik Baldwin and Tyler Dalton McNabb, Plantingian Religious Epistemology and World Religions (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2018), 53.
— Tyler Dalton McNabb is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Saint Joseph, Macau.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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So if we are supposedly not in a position making abductive judgment calls at least on naturalism, then on what exactly are we in a position making abductive judgement calls?!?
Maybe we are simply not in a position making abductive judgment calls on any thing and everything - period.
If so, then this "self-defeater" not just defeats naturalism but also it defeats itself, since then we are not in a position making an abductive judgment call on "being in a position (or being not in a position) making abductive judgement calls".
Same goes for Plantinga's EAAN.
If naturalism is (supposedly) true and if according to naturalism cognitive faculties are supposedly not reliable, then one can not reliably deduct with cognitvie faculties, that our cognitive faculties are supposedly not reliable given naturalism, since cognitive faculties are supposedly not reliable, if naturalism is supposedly true and according to which cognitive faculties are supposedly not reliable.
Or in short Plantinga's "self-defeater" not just defeats naturalism but also it defeats itself.
To think, that naturalism is "self-defeating" in such a way and manner is already a "self-defeating" position to have.