Plantinga v. Dennett

I just finished listening to the Plantinga/Dennett encounter at the APA this year. I have to say I was a bit disappointed in both Plantinga and Dennett, for various reasons. I was disappointed in Plantinga because he did not really engage Dennett directly much, nor did he really answer a basic issue that Dennett often brings up, i.e. the charge of dualism (skyhooks and cranes, as it were). Dennett on the other hand was so ad hominem and rhetorical, it was hard to even consider him worthy in any type of debate of a philosophic nature. He is great at getting you to imagine things in different ways, but he treated Plantinga with disrespect, which was unfortunate. He used so much rhetoric and anecdote he seemed like a sophist trying just to win the argument, and if you're a philosopher, that is supposedly the last thing you'd want to do. 

Be that as it may, some interesting things came up right off the bat. Plantinga basically started by arguing that theism and Darwinian evolution are compatible, but that metaphysical naturalism and Darwinian evolution is not (which is a really old saw for Plantinga, which is another unfortunate thing about the encounter) The former thesis he argues by saying that evolutionary theory does not rule out that it was guided by God, since "random variation" is something of a misnomer (there is a cause of everything), and there is no reason, from a theistic point of view, that God could not have guided this variation or have been the cause of the variations. This of course brings up the "problem of evil," since natural selection seems like an extremely harsh thing for a supposed all benevolent, all powerful God to use. He didn't really spend much time on this, because it is one of those issues that are perennial (at least since the Enlightenment), and which he's dealt with in other places.

This later thesis, that Darwinian evolution and metaphysical naturalism are incompatible, he argues using a probablistic argument. Naturalism has a built-in "defeater." By saying that we can completely account for human thought from evolutionary origins, you undercut any notion that our thinking is fully reliable according to this view. The reason for this is that in order to aid survival, the content of our beliefs does not have to be true, but our behavior only has to be adaptable (and if you define the "true" as the "adaptable" it would be just a big fat tautology, and would really mean nothing). In other words, Plantinga thinks that this type of naturalism does not really aim at truth but at some sort of adaptation, which can come at the expense of our belief we can get at the true. Here I quote Darwin, a quote that Plantinga likes, since he was aware of this issue: 
    
With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? (Letter to William Graham)

In other words, the issue is that adaptive behavior doesn't require that our belief claims be true, just that our cognitive faculties work in such a way as to enable our species to survive and reproduce. His formula is that the reliability (R) of belief P given naturalism (N) and the evolutionary origins of all our thought (E) is low (so: the probability of P(R/N&E) is low). If this is the case, then any claim we make in the realm of naturalism is self-defeating, because if our cognitive faculties merely arise from adaptive behaviors, no guarantee is made that they actually function reliability, and this would hold true for naturalistic evolutionary claims themselves. 

Now, in this encounter, Dan Dennett didn't really address this directly. Instead, he kind of went in a round about fashion to argue that it is simply silly to consider anything other than naturalistic causes for things (this is his famous "skyhooks or cranes" argument). He said, 'listen, it's true that theism and Darwinism are compatible - but so what? Let's start a new religion, and call it Supermanism. We'll say Superman created the world, and there are certain evidences of this throughout the earth. Is this plausible? No, of course not. The same with theism.' Now, later in Plantinga's rebuttal he did mention he wasn't trying to argue from an empirical standpoint that God's "footprint" is in the world, as it were. In other words, he isn't trying to say that we should somehow replace scientific research with research using theistic "causes." Dennett's point, however, turned toward "intelligent design," is a good one. As far as science is concerned, putting an intelligent designer into your equation does nothing for the science itself. It's a gratuitous (his word) addition, with no point whatsoever. So what's the harm? 

The real issue Dennett gets at, eventually (after much rhetorical baiting) is by making claims like Plantinga, we undercut the epistemic responsibility of thinking humans. This responsibility is to make only those claims we can actually empirically verify using the best methods we know, but on the flip side, this gives us freedom to do as much as possible with science at our side. To do anything less is to give in to irrationality, and that is morally culpable. 

I think one of things that gets at Dennett's goat about Plantinga (and I don't really know, since I have not read enough of Dennett's responses to Plantinga, and he did not directly address this here) is that Plantinga argues is that most of the time, humans do not really accept religion based on argument and evidence, nor do they need to. In other words, Plantinga says that argument isn't everything, that there are other ways of apprehending truth than argumentation. If you are a religious person, you certain understand what Plantinga is talking about. No argument from intelligent design, nor any cosmological argument, made you believe. Belief is not even primarily cognitive when it comes to religious belief: it has much to do with trusting others with actions, with your fears, wishes, hopes, etc. There may be something cognitive about all these, but there is something more too. Dennett did not directly talk about this, but I think this is a huge hurdle for him, because he really seems to have the position that one must argue for everything that you believe. Of course, I'm not sure about this. Some philosophers, like Donald Davidson, argue that we assume that most of our beliefs are true without argument, and that is probably right (beliefs about our everyday life, e.g.). Dennett might just think the big question need to be argued for. 

And here Dennett may have a good point. It seems we really should have evidence for all our beliefs, right? This encounter was very uninspiring because this is really the crux of the debate between religion and a version of science (metaphysical naturalism), but it was hardly touched upon. Dennett did bring it up when he talked about epistemic responsibility, and Plantinga did as well, when he talked about the reliability of naturalism, but in both of these cases they didn't really announce the issue. 

By the end, Dennett finally brought his main idea in dealing with religion: we ought to study it scientifically so we can see its contingent history (its evolutionary history), how it arises, how religious belief is formed, etc., and in this way we can unmask it. By unmasking it we "demystify" it, so to speak, and ultimately (I suppose the hope is) we can get rid of it. It's funny, because Dennett never seems to acknowledge that the social sciences have been doing this since the early 1800's. But the problem for Dennett, and those who want to demystify it, is just precisely the issue that Plantinga brings up: most religious people do not accept their religion based on argument, so why would they get rid of it on those grounds? There are lots of really good reasons people reject religion, and we can see this West especially clearly. The Christian church, for instance, has lost much ground in the West not merely because of science, but just as much because of politics: the church has been horrible on issues that really matter to people, like sexuality, the poor, child abuse, gender roles, race, environmentalism, etc. Does it really matter to people whether they have the right view (at the time) of the big bang, or the which ancestor we came from? Probably not. More important is action: how are their lives? That's the important question. 

In Dennett, as in Dawkins and other metaphysical naturalist, I don't see the responsiveness to these type of questions. Not that I necessarily agree with Plantinga either. I think his argument about the unreliability of our thinking based on a naturalistic account is rather a thin argument. Right now, in fact, I'm reading Dennett's Consciousness Explained, and in his very Wittgensteinian procedure, he is just great at showing how we can really imagine how things work, if we change the way we think about those pictures that have been holding us captive for so long in philosophy. I really like how Dennett tries to get us to see something new, rather than rely on philosophical logic (in the way Plantinga does). This way of thinking is really interesting, because it is creative of new thought, and instead of focusing on how things have to be, he focuses on how things could be (Dennett often charges philosophers for confusing necessity with lack of imagination - which is very true). 

My only complaint is that Dennett then himself lacks imagination. It's not that we need to postulate God in order to explain science, or explain the natural world. But there are compelling reasons for thinking that religion really does add something to our lives, something that we would loose if we restricted our view of the world to evolutionary scientific thinking. On the flip side, evolutionary thinking is creative and exciting, so we should not get rid of that, either (although I do have some huge reservations about "memes" and other such evolutionary psychological ways of looking at culture - although I am reading Dennett now to consider it).

In short, humans have such variety of ways of life, and such variety of ways of thinking, we shouldn't be too quick to restrict these ways of thinking. Certainly we should call out beliefs that produce great harm. But the problem is, we are in the midsts of all these ethical questions, and so just taking one top-down approach (such as metaphysical naturalism) would just obscure all of these issues. In addition, ethical questions are not just about genealogy, about where our beliefs come from (and naturalistic thinking is not the only way to do genealogy - there's also historicism), but what to do now. To reduce the variety of human thinking and imagination just because you want to use one way of thinking that works well in science is short-sighted, and will ultimately not work, even if you wanted it to. As the ancient philosophers recognized, theory by itself really doesn't do anything for us: it's the practice of theory that does something. 

And so far, I haven't heard how a metaphysical naturalist would practice metaphysical naturalism.