Asinus asinum fricat
Not to name drop or anything, but Alvin Plantinga is a hilarious dude. His dry sense of humor, his Lincolnian facial features, and his booming baritone voice all combine to create a very pleasant effect when actually watching (or even, if you are less fortunate but still blessed, listening) him give a philosophical presentation. Don't get me wrong; people pick up his humor in his writings without such personal experience with the man himself. (And the fact that an analytic philosopher can be so funny should tell you something of his brilliance.) But when you've met him, even only briefly, paragraphs like the following are even more hilarious:
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett approvingly quotes this passage from Dawkins and declares it an "unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier." Now here in The God Delusion Dawkins approvingly quotes Dennett approvingly quoting Dawkins, and adds that Dennett (i.e., Dawkins) is entirely correct.Not to mention the substantive argumentation in his article, which demonstrates very patiently yet unrelentingly that Dawkins' aggressive atheism is a dead-end.
Oddly, Doug Wilson is offering what could be described as a more toned-down response to Dawkins (which I have also enjoyed greatly thus far). That tells you something right there. Yet Plantinga's arguments match their sarcasm with power. Anyway, Dr. Plantinga, dear sir, I salute you!
7 comments:
These arguments that a naturalist has no reason to believe his senses or cognitive functions are accurate or representative of the real world are starting to ring hollow with me. I can't imagine why anyone would actually care about this objection. If you want to think about anything, you have to use cognitive functions. That they could be unreliable just isn't a concept worth entertaining. If they are unreliable, then entertaining that idea is pointless. At the end of the day, you have to think about stuff, so assuming the thinking process to be reliable is a natural assumption. Worrying about it is like wanting to fly to the moon but being uncertain of the reliability of your rocket ship. If you really want to fly to the moon, you can't just sit there, you gotta use the ship, reliability be damned.
1. Skepticism, along the lines of Sexus Empiricus and the like, is a real position that people have held in history. This would mean acknowledging that we can't know anything, or very very little, and on this basis refraining from writing aggressive books claiming that all religious belief is a delusion. Dawkins does have to give some sort of "reason" for his choice to be aggressively atheistic.
2. Your defense sounds more like an explanation of how an atheist could cope with the existential crisis the problem of unreliable beliefs presses upon him, not a refutation of the problem itself.
But I don't see where there is any crisis. To put it another way, you can say that you start with the Bible, and not with man, but the Bible was written, compiled, and now interpreted by men. No matter what, you start with man and his ability to reason. If he couldn't, then the Bible would be useless.
Is your title a latin play on the other one?
Nope, I just screwed it up. The Latin seems obviously incorrect as I have it, but I figured it was a colloquialism of some kind and that I just wasn't getting it b/c I don't think in Latin. I thought I remembered the phrase that way, so I put it that way. I just now looked it up, since Charles was trying to give me credit for being playful (which I wish I could say I was!), and my memory is simply wrong. The only place on the entire web where it comes up with my spelling (acc. to google) is....here! Oops!
Asinum asinorum fricat ("An ass rubs/scratches of asses"--like I said, I knew this didn't seem right, but not all Latin phrases do. I figured there was a backstory or an obscure grammatical rule I just wan't picking up on)
Asinus asinum fricat ("An ass rubs an ass"; i.e., one ass rubs another...this is right)
I'm fixing it now, and not even with overstrikes, to try to hide my shame.
Matt, I agree with you that a belief in resoning man is a necessary starting point for...reasoning man. The question is not whether everyone has to assume that people can reason accurately (at least somewhat often) about various things; of course we all have to assume that is true or else we should just shut up. The problem is on what basis can we rationally ground that belief?
The idea that man is basically rational, and that his rationality has some connection to the "real world," is a "transcendental" assumption, if you will. It is an assumption that has to be made in order to do other intellecutal work. It is a necessary precondition for reasoning itself that we make that assumption. But just because everyone has to make that assumption doesn't mean that everyone is justified in making the assumption.
On Dawkins' atheistic grounds, how does he justify believing that people have generally reliable rational facultires, such that we should even give a rip what his particular rational faculties have seen fit to write in some stupid book? I grant that Dawkins is going to assume this is true anyway, even if he can't justify it. But I'm wondering whether he can justify it. And, if he can't, then this would seem to be an area in which theism "wins out" over atheism; namely, that theism provides us the grounds for making this transcendental assumption, whereas reductionistic atheistic materialism does not.
Gotta sit on it and chew
Post a Comment