User:Lamontacranston/sandbox

This is my sandbox.

Notes on ridiculous Plantinga argument
From about.atheism: "The whole premise of Plantinga's argument, when you boil it down to its basics, is that the existence of human intelligence proves theism because if it had evolved from random and blind materialistic evolution then it would be flawed, and therefore it could not understand its own evolution. This argument is, to put it bluntly, theism-of-the-gaps and an argument from ignorance. It pretty much claims that if materialistic evolution cannot understand how our intelligence came to be, then goddidit." A pretty good sumation. Problem is that evolution may have produced less than perfect cognitive faculties, but still produced cognitive faculties that work well enough. Put another way, Plantinga argues that our reason is close to perfect, thus goddidit; the reality is that our reason is not close to perfect, thus supporting materialistic evolution. Nevertheless, the fact that we have less than perfect cognitive faculties is no reason to throw our hands up, and wallow in self doubt - the thing to do is to understand things as best we can and continue to improve our understanding of the world, not just assume goddidit.

Fitelson and Sober
Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober of the University of Wisconsin-Madison have made a number of criticisms regarding Plantinga's methods and conclusions. They argue that Plantinga's argument merely shows that both traditional theism and naturalism are fallible: "neither position has an answer to hyperbolic doubt...The theist, like the evolutionary naturalist, is unable to construct a non-question begging argument that refutes global skepticism."

Further, they point out that Plantinga's argument is made on a Bayesian framework, a methodology that is itself subject to a number of criticisms. In part because Plantinga's argument is Bayesian, it would apply equaly well to "any nondeterministic theory in the natural sciences", because any scientific prediction that can only be made as a probability (e.g., an outcome that is 99% likely as opposed to 100% certain) is inherently less "reliable" than asserting that an interventionist god willed the outcome.

They also argue that Plantinga's use of probability is also flawed in other regards. The mere fact that an improbable event occurred does not mean that the event was foreordained. In poker, the likelihood of being dealt a straight is low; however, being dealt a straight is not evidence that the game was fixed if there are adequate assurances that it was not fixed. Even if one accepts the argument that certain features of human cognative faculties are unlikely to have evolved, there is still a great deal of evidence that the features did, in fact, evolve.

Fitelson and Sober also find fault with Plantinga's analysis of the relation of belief and behavior and his presentation of the mechanisms of evolution. Plantinga may be correct that natural selection does not "care" about the truth or falsity of beliefs, but only behavior. However, it does not follow that true and false beliefs are equally likely to evolve. For example, in Plantinga's tiger example (above), he posits three possible beliefs that would lead to Paul running from a tiger: While all of these beliefs would lead to "correct" behavior from a natural selection standpoint, it does not follow that each belief is equally likely.
 * Paul would like to be eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him.
 * Paul thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it.
 * (Implicit) Paul believes the tiger will harm him.

Fitelson and Sober also arge that Plantinga's argument does not show that proponents of metaphysical naturalism should a priori doubt all of their beliefs. This is because Plantinga's argument rests in part on the idea that E&N defeat proposition R (i.e., that evolution combined with naturalism make it unlikely that "the great bulk" of the beliefs that humans have are true). Plantinga draws from this defeat the notion that proponents of E&N should not have confidence in any of their beliefs, including their belief in E&N. However, this does not follow. As Fitelson and Sober put it, "Even if E&N defeats the claim that 'at least 90% of our beliefs are true,' it does not follow that E&N also defeats the more modest claim that 'at least 50% of our beliefs are true'." In other words, until he can show that E&N defeats the proposition that "50% plus 1 of our beliefs are true," Plantinga has not provided a reason for proponents of E&N to doubt their beliefs.

Other contentious elements of Plantinga's argument include the following:
 * It depends entirely upon the assumption that true beliefs either harm a creature's chances for survival or have no effect on the creature's chances for survival. This ignores the fact that some beliefs clearly do increase a creature's chances for survival. Using Plantinga's tiger example, it is more likely that the correct belief (tigers will eat people, so people should avoid them) would lead to life-prolonging behavior than that either of Plantinga's posited alternate beliefs would lead to appropriate behavior.
 * It does not adequately address the effects of society on behavior.
 * It fails to acknowledge that human reasoning and belief development is in fact flawed - humans' imperfect reasoning is actually evidence that man has not been created with an eye toward perfection, and supports the notion that it is the result of a mechanistic natural system.

The story of Wikistan
There once was a great library in Wikistan. The library of Wikistan was the greatest in all the world, and anyone could read any book in the library for free. The library even let people write in the books and start their own books so that the books would get better and the library would grow. For many years, the library grew, largely unnoticed outside of Wikistan. But as the library got bigger and bigger, more and more people from outside of Wikistan became aware of it. Wikistan was a friendly nation, and it let anyone use its library, even people who were not from Wikistan. The library even encouraged people from outside Wikistan to help write the books. The librarians were sure that with all these new people helping to edit the books, that the books would be error-free in no time.

But there was a problem. In fact, there was a great problem with the librarians' idea. As it happens, Wikistan was a very civilized country. There were plenty of laws to keep the peace, and in the library there were rules to make sure that the books were being improved when people edited them. Unfortunately, the land all around Wikistan was wild and uncivilized. There were many foreigners who were wise and good. But there were many more foreigners who were barbarians. The barbarians hated rules, and never followed them. The barbarians particularly hated knowledge, which was useless to them (for the barbarians only liked to fight, feed, and reproduce). Before the librarians knew what had happened, the barbarians began to deface every book they could find.

The librarians fought the barbarians day and night - they constantly had to fix damage to the books. Ingenious systems were designed to fight the barbarians. Librarians could undo damage to a book in the blink of an eye, and the librarians fixed almost all of the damage immediately. But sometimes they missed the damage. Sometimes barbarians that truly hated knowledge came up with clever ways to hide the damage they did.

Many people, both in Wikistan and elsewhere, began to notice that the quality of the library was declining. Many people pointed out that the library already had library cards, and that it would be very easy to prevent anyone without a library card from bringing a pencil into the library.