The figure is suggested by Michael Behe, based on reading and conversations with his colleagues. Of course, it’s a bit like asking how many citizens of the People’s Democratic Republic of Dungeon disapprove of the government. It’s not like you can ask them to vote on it or anything. Still:
A controversial letter to Nature in 2014 signaled the mounting concern, however slow and cautious, among thoughtful professional biologists. Other works by atheist authors like “What Darwin Got Wrong” and “Mind and Cosmos” find “fatal flaws” in the theory and assert it is “almost certainly false.”
Another project, The Third Way, seeks to avoid a false choice between divine intervention (which it outright rejects) and the Neo-Darwinian model (which it finds unsupported in the face of modern molecular theory) while presenting evidence to improve evolution theory beyond Neo-Darwinism. Some even believe billions of years have not been adequate for Darwinian theory to accomplish current complexity, as the theory currently exists.
This dissatisfaction is a matter of public record, even if it lacks public attention, and despite the narrative running contrary. Indeed dedicated Neo-Darwinists often say “no serious scientists disagree” or “only creationists have problems.” These contentions are increasingly disproven. Benjamin R. Dierker, “Why One-Third Of Biologists Now Question Darwinism” at The Federalist
Don’t miss Dierker’s interesting information about the Third Way.
Meanwhile, what was that story flapping past just the other day?
Oh, yes: Astronomer Martin Rees reacts to Suzan Mazur’s Darwin Overthrown. The story addresses the way Rees has been in the background of creative thinkers in biology who are grappling with what we now know.
Non-Darwinian things.
Naw. Just a fluke. Then there’s this one: Backing down on Darwinian fundamentalism? If we are going to talk about “considerable debate” and “much that is unknown,” let’s consider the way underlying Darwinian fundamentalism skews discussions.
Hey, look, everything could just be a fluke, you know.
See also: If no one is really a Darwinist any more… (as some commenters claim) … How come Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse says, “Today’s professional evolutionists are committed Darwinians… ?” Could he be blowing smoke?
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Oh,yes, obviously the first person I turn to for a competent evaluation of the current state of evolutionary biology is going to be “a law student at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.”
Seversky at 1, the law student did a reasonably good job of identifying key points in the timeline. If he takes another stab at it, he should look at Mazur’s The Altenberg 16: An exposé of the evolution industry (2010) and Royal Society: Public Evolution Summit. The cast of characters is now rather large and some of the interrelationships are quite interesting.
Some of us would not have suspected that Martin Rees was encouraging those who see past Darwin, but there you go.
As my former boss and retired Marine Corp. General used to say:
“[That Darwinian Evolution is false rubbish] should be obvious even to a sea-going corporal.”
This is the evidence for the one third figure:
In my professional opinion, I don’t think that has a great deal of statistical validity.
Bob (and weave) O’Hara states, “In my professional opinion, I don’t think that has a great deal of statistical validity.”
Yet seeing that Bob (and weave) O’Hara’s ‘professional opinion’ is that Darwinism is true in the first place then that pretty much renders Bob (and weave) O’Hara’s ‘professional opinion’ about anything else completely worthless.
In fact, in one of the more humorous falsifications of Darwin’s theory, (out of many falsifications of Darwin’s theory), is that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then any opinions and/or beliefs, (‘professional’ or otherwise), that anyone may have would be completely worthless.
First off, if Darwinian evolution were true, then any opinions and/or beliefs that a person may hold are not arrived at via the free will choices of that person between logical options, but their opinion(s) was arrived at purely by the prior physiological state of that person’s brain. In short, if Darwinian evolution were actually true then a person has ‘no choice’ whatsoever in whatever opinions and/or beliefs he may hold to be true or not.
In fact, Richard Darwkins himself admitted that “Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life.”
Likewise Steven Pinker stated that “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” And as Dr. Pearcey pointed out, “The theory undercuts itself.,,, Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality.”
Alvin Plantinga has extended this argument into what is called the ‘Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’
On top of all that, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations, proven that, if Darwinian evolution were actually true, then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory:
Hoffman tried to limit his results to just our perceptions, but there is no reason why Hoffman’s results would not also apply to our cognitive faculties as well:
Moreover, even if Hoffman’s results applied only to our perceptions and not to our cognitive faculties, that still, since reliable observation is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself, would falsify Darwinian evolution as being a valid scientific theory:
Moreover, completely contrary to what Donald Hoffman found from the mathematics of population genetics,, conscious observation, far from being unreliable, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics had predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if Darwinists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that ALL their observations of reality are illusory and unreliable! As Feynman himself stated, ‘If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Thus in conclusion, Bob (and weave) O’Hara may have a very high opinion of his own ‘professional opinion’, but if Darwinian evolution were actually true, as Bob believes it to be, then Bob’s opinion, as well as everybody else’s opinion, would be completely worthless.
In short, Darwinian evolution must necessarily be false since it renders belief in everything, including itself, illusory and therefore, by definition, false.
Bob O’H at 4: You write “In my professional opinion, I don’t think that has a great deal of statistical validity.”
For the record, in a situation where honest conversations are risky (cf Gunter Bechly), one can’t do reliable survey research. One relies instead on private discussions combined with observation of the patterns of events. The growth of the Dissent from Darwin group is another item to be thrown into the mix. I hope Dierker will continue to pursue this.
Bob O’H@4, you beat me to it.
News
Sure you can. Develop a non-biased set of survey questions with internal consistency checks. Sent them only to biologists with a link to the survey. You don’t have to ask for names. If you are concerned about non-biologists responding and skewing results you track responses by regions and match it to the number of biologists in each region that the survey was sent to.
BB,
I don’t know anything about surveys, but it seems to me voluntary response bias could be a difficult problem here. Although I’m not sure in which direction the bias would go.
I suspect most mainstream biologists, when noticing the survey is about whether they question Darwinism, would immediately click *delete* and move on to the next 20 emails from admins hounding them for reports on the progress of the accreditation committee.
DaveS
I suspect that you are correct, but I think this would apply to all surveys, not specifically this one. That is why return rates on surveys tend to be very low.
But if I were to design a survey to test this, I would not ask questions like “Do you believe Darwinian evolution is wrong?” I would list the major elements of current evolutionary theory and ask the biologists to rank each on a scale of “Strongly supported by evidence and testing” to “Not supported by evidence and testing”.
News @ 2
Maybe he did but that doesn’t make him any more competent an authority on evolutionary biology than you or I. Whether you agree with him or not, Behe is at least a professional in the field.
Ayearningforpublius @ 3
Great as my respect is for the US Marine Corps as one of the world’s elite military units, neither their corporals nor their generals are typically evolutionary biologists.
Bornagain77 @ 5
Worthless? By what measure? According to whom?
Much like Peter’s triple denial of Jesus?
The observation that mental processes are closely correlated with electro-chemical activity in the physical brain does not mean that one is absolutely and exclusively determined by the other. The third factor to consider is the environment in which that mind/brain has to operate and survive. In fact, we can argue that a system which can respond flexibly – in other words adapt – to environmental pressures would have a fitness advantage over the rigidly deterministic model you seem to envisage. Is that free will? That depends on what you mean by “free will”.
We can easily argue that the truer one’s understanding of the environment in which we have to survive, the greater our chances of survival. Therefore, a truth-seeking trait, at least in a proximate and pragmatic sense, would have a fitness value which would be more likely to be preserved. And if it was preserved it might be adapted to more philosophical considerations of truth.
On the assumption that there are many more ways for things to go wrong than to go right, then, yes, initially there will be many more false beliefs about a given phenomenon than true ones. Our beliefs generally will be unreliable. But if those beliefs have fitness consequences – in other words, false beliefs are more likely to get you killed whereas true ones are more likely to keep you alive – then, over time, natural selection will tend to filter out the false beliefs leaving only the true ones – and the mental processes which gave rise to them. Therefore truth-seeking will have survival value.
Brother Brian,
Thanks, that’s a much more intelligent approach than what I had in mind.
DaveS
Damn. That is two compliments on this site in two days. Where is ET to bring me back down to earth. 🙂
But seriously, surveys are notoriously flawed. The way the question is worded can result in s different outcome.
Seversky’s post at 13 is a garbage heap of pure unsubstantiated opinion. I used Plantinga’s work and Hoffman’s work on population genetics itself, to show that if Darwinian evolution were true, then our beliefs and perceptions would be unreliable.
Seversky did not even try to rigorously refute this but simply denied, via his own personal opinion, that it was so,
Seversky’s post is a shining example of an atheist’s apriori atheistic belief trumping any and all countervailing evidence.
As has been pointed out many times before, Darwinian evolution is a dogmatic religion far more than it is a falsifiable science,,,
From above, Plantinga writes,
That is just about the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard.
Hazel
Stick around. 🙂
Hazel, instead of you merely stating your ‘stupid’ atheistic opinion that “That is just about the stupidest argument I’ve ever heard” perhaps you can provide actual examples of where a set of initial beliefs are far more likely to be true than not.
Science itself, with its multitude of discarded false hypothesis, and its relatively few true hypothesis that have survived the ’empirical gauntlet’ to be accepted as true, argues very strongly against your position that any given set of initial beliefs will most likely be true. (Much less do you have any empirical evidence for your proposition that Darwinian processes will produce reliable cognitive faculties), (Shoot you don’t even have any evidence that Darwinian processes can produce even a single functional protein, much less reliable cognitive faculties))
Moreover, to make matters much worse for Darwinists, the acceptance of the veracity of those true hypothesis by scientists as being true is certainly not arrived at via Darwinian processes, but is arrived at via rational discourse, which again, is the one thing that atheistic materialism, with its denial of free will, prevents a person from ever having.
Moreover, besides the fact that the atheistic materialist forsakes any claim that he is making a rational argument in the first place when he denies the reality of his own free will, I can also appeal to empirical evidence from both neuroscience and quantum mechanics to support the reality of free will.
Thus again, the atheist is at a complete loss to explain even the ‘simple’ proposition of how a person might arrive at a true belief, whereas the Christian Theist is, once again, found to be sitting very well in regards to both logic and empirical evidence.
To put all this in proper perspective, it is good to look at the ‘beyond belief’ complexity of the brain itself which Darwinists have absolutely no hope of ever explaining in Darwinian terms:
Perhaps atheists should concentrate on trying to explain where a single neuron of that ‘beyond belief’ complexity came from before they try to take on the task of trying explain the origin of reliable cognitive faculties from a Darwinian perspective
ba writes, “perhaps you can provide actual examples of where a set of initial beliefs are far more likely to be true than not.”
In the Colin Patterson thread I pointed out that “I know not to walk off a 1000 ft cliff because I will fall and kill myself.” I believe that has a better than 50% chance of being true.
But how in blue blazes, via atheistic materialism, did you arrive at that true belief? That is Plantinga’s whole point. You have no warrant, much less empirical demonstration, that Darwinian processes produced that true belief,
Atheistic materialism, especially with its denial of free will, simply cannot explain the ‘ORIGIN” of true beliefs.
So again, its evidence against the apriori beliefs of atheists. Guess which one Hazel will choose?
ba writes, “But how in blue blazes, via atheistic materialism, did you arrive at that true belief? That is Plantinga’s whole point. You have no warrant, much less empirical demonstration, that Darwinian processes produced that true belief,”
First, I assume by Darwinian processes you mean according to a materialist philosophy. I am not a materialist, and don’t think much about what “Darwinian processes” are.
But that is immaterial, and your question is weird. People have arrived at the belief that falling long distance hurts and kills people by watching people fall and get hurt. I don’t even know what point you could be trying to make. We know it’s true because we can see what happens.
“I am not a materialist, and don’t think much about what “Darwinian processes” are.”
But somehow feels free to comment on Plantinga’s argument?
Bangs head on keyboard
https://media0.giphy.com/media/26BRq84rhISRcFVUQ/giphy.gif?
Don’t hurt yourself! 🙂
No matter what your metaphysics is, starting with “If a belief is as likely to be false as to be true, we’d have to say the probability that any particular belief is true is about 50 percent” is stupid. Whatever belief is, or where it comes from, it’s not just a random coin flip.
Hazel
Me
And after a couple responses to you all I can say is, “I told you so.”
“Whatever belief is, or where it comes from, it’s not just a random coin flip.”
Welcome to Christianity.
Brother Brian, you, having now displaced Seversky as the resident troll, are currently the reigning king of ‘stupid arguments’ on UD.
Lawful processes don’t produce random results. It doesn’t take Christianity, or even theism, to understand that.
Hazel you claim that evolution is a ‘lawful process’? Really??? Perhaps you would care to elucidate the exact laws behind the evolutionary process. No one else has been able to find them.
As Ernst Mayr himself conceded, “In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences.”
In the following article, Roger Highfield makes much the same observation as Ernst Mayr and states, ,,, Whatever the case, those universal truths—’laws’—that physicists and chemists all rely upon appear relatively absent from biology.
Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated that “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
I haven’t been discussing evolution. I’m saying that no matter what your metaphysics is, starting with the premise that a belief has a 50-50 chance of being true is stupid.
For crying out loud, you can’t divorce Plantinga’s argument from the metaphysics since it is in fact the “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism”. Naturalistic metaphysics is the main focus of the argument for crying out loud.
I give up. You are hopeless, I’m out of here and I’m going back to banging my head on my desk. Goodnight.
Bangs head on keyboard
https://media0.giphy.com/media/26BRq84rhISRcFVUQ/giphy.gif?
But there is no reason to assume that “naturalism” would mean that beliefs had a 50-50 chance of being true. This is a quintessential strawman.
F/N (attn H, BB et al): J B S Haldane, one of the leaders of the neo-darwinian synthesis:
Reppert builds on this, showing why computation on a substrate is categorically different from rational contemplation:
Absent genuine rational, responsible contemplative freedom governed by duties to truth, to right reason, to prudence, to fairness/justice etc, mindedness collapses into grand delusion, including the chains of reason above. So, we may freely make a Hoylean we are here argument: reality can only be such as is compatible with creatures like us.
That means there is a facet to reality that allows a genuinely freely rational and responsible life. So, we need an adequate world root capable of bridging computation and contemplation as well as is and ought.
What best fits that bill: ________ and why: ___________ ???
Candidate to beat: the God of ethical theism: inherently good, utterly wise, creator, necessary of being, maximally great being.
KF
hazel, KF,
I also don’t find Plantinga’s argument, as presented in that interview, to be at all convincing. On the other hand, I don’t believe Plantinga is stupid, so perhaps if his argument were spelled out in greater detail, I could understand its force.
Anyway, as a step toward understanding the issues, here’s a scenario. Suppose we send a rover to Mars to collect information (e.g., Opportunity). This one is fully autonomous and simply drives around taking measurements and storing the results in its database, without any guidance from Earthlings.
Let’s suppose the rover performs measurements of some geological features, for example the diameters of craters. It finds a 95% confidence interval for one such diameter is [99, 101] meters (based on calibrations done on Earth) and transmits this message back to Earth.
Clearly more than 50% of the rover’s measurements/confidence intervals should include the true value, right? But the rover is merely a material object. Why doesn’t Plantinga’s argument apply to it?
“if his argument were spelled out in greater detail, I could understand its force.”
see post 21
BA77
Why? Are you abdicating the throne? 🙂
As usual, it seems, important distinctions are being missed by ba and kf. I am not arguing for materialism. I understand, and accept, that ba, kf, and Plantinga don’t think a universe of purely material processes could have produced life, human beings, or consciously held beliefs of any kind.
What I am arguing is that Plantinga’s argument that if purely material beings existed, their beliefs would have a 50-50% chance of being true, is not supported by him in any way. He just asserts it without any supporting argument.
Here’s a longer quote, with bolding by me:
Why does it “got to be fairly close to 50/50”?
If such creatures had managed to survive through materialist processes, as Plantinga is assuming here, then it would seem to me almost certain that behaviors and beliefs that were adaptive would have to have a fairly close correspondence to reality. Those creatures that believed that falling off a cliff wouldn’t hurt you wouldn’t have survived, and those that believed otherwise would have survived, so the belief that falling off a cliff would hurt you, which is a true fact, would have been established.
Likewise for most beliefs about reality: beliefs about the physical world would be in close correspondence about the real world. This would be the case even for materialistic “robots” as long as there was a mechanism in place, which Plantaga is assuming there is in this scenario, for sorting out behaviors and beliefs that are adaptive from those that aren’t.
So I see no justification for the assertion that the probability of a belief being true has “got to be fairly close to 50/50”
That is the point I’m making.
H, Plantinga’s argument is not 50-50, but low or inscrutable, and there is a 58 pp paper that lays it out in details. Unlike your suggestion, he is not simply “assuming.” However, I am presenting a more basic issue that is associated, and as names like Haldane indicate, is longstanding, as in about 90 years old. I take it that by naturalism, we are speaking of evolutionary materialistic scientism, which is inter alia physicalist, i.e. physical facts exhaust all facts. This implies that one would have to account for rational contemplation, responsible decision, moral government etc on material substrates (including that some such are computational and can be programmed somehow). The problem is, as Haldane and Reppert et al indicate, this runs into extreme difficulties as outlined. Difficulties that are reflexive and would undermind the credibility of the minds we use to assess evidence and reason to draw naturalism itself as a conclusion. In short, self-referential incoherence. KF
PS: Not is it just those who have questions who see this, note Rosenberg:
hazel,
Nicely put. For at least some beliefs, the probability/likelihood of them being true must be far higher than 50%.
F/N: One link. The 58 pp paper. KF
H, actually, no — it is you who are injecting an unjustified assumption; in effect, if it works well enough it must be nearly right. That which is adaptive and that which is accurate (especially as regards complex abstracta involved in forming perceptual and conceptual beliefs about the world) are quite different things, which is precisely what Plantinga took time to draw out. This is also why it is important to also have on the table the challenge of computational substrates vs rational contemplation, and we have not even got to the issue of getting to even such substrates i/l/o the functionally specific complex organisation and associated information required. The only empirically known source of such FSCO/I is design, which is being ruled out a priori by naturalism. You have three parallel problems to address, not just one. KF
F/N: Here is my own 101 level thought on the matter, stretching back decades:
Alex Rosenberg is a tenacious atheist. I’ve read a lot of his stuff and he goes to great lengths and I mean great lengths to prove naturalism and Scientism
Edward Fessor and him duke it out quite a bit
Alex Rosenberg, he finds that all forms of naturalism lead to this ultimate conclusion
To him our decisions and beliefs are not 50-50 nor the even kind of one way or another, all beliefs are illusions. The only way to escape this is through science and even then that’s not 100%
Plantinga, I don’t think is assuming, he starting off with the fact that every single belief, has to have a physical origin and or genetic origin if it didn’t exist in the first place. That is what the 50% comes from I believe. Now without having to get into a large discussion about it, yes certain beliefs might survive over others but again survival does not indicate truth.
Something only needs to see the color red to see that it’s dangerous not it’s details and his point is anything that’s geared for fitness is going to survive better than things that are geared to truth.
Alex Rosenberg goes into great deal about this as well and scientism is the answer to that problem
nm
kf writes, “Plantinga’s argument is not 50-50.”
Yet the quotes that ba provides say clearly, “What is the probability given that naturalism and evolution and materialism that the belief is true?” It’s got to be fairly close to 50/50”
I’m not going to go read a 58 page paper, but given the quote above, maybe you can explain what you mean when you write “Plantinga’s argument is not 50-50” when I clearly show that his argument is that it’s 50-50.
And again, kf, I am not defending materialism. I am critiquing Plantinga’s argument as presented in the quote in 37, which begins by assuming a hypothetical world where materialism is true.
AaranS1978
I have never read Plantinga so I have no desire to get into a discussion about what he has said. However, I think that what you say here makes sense.
I would agree with this. For example, the social cohesion and cooperation that comes hand-in-hand with a common shared religion almost certainly imparts a survival advantage. However, that doesn’t mean that the religion itself is true, or based on truth.
A few more quotes that predate Plantinga’s argument by decades:
Both Einstein and Wigner are on record as to regarding the “comprehensibility of the world as a miracle”
To be clear:
Thus the argument is not even completely original to Plantinga. He just put some meat on the bones of what several prominent people had already taken notice of several decades before Plantinga came along. kf has already mentioned Haldane, Then there is also CS Lewis’s ‘the argument from reason’ as well.
Moreover, to repeat, Donald Hoffman has now validated the main gist of Plantinga’s argument with numerous computer simulations:
Thus the resident atheists on UD can argue till they are blue in the face, but the argument is a long standing argument made by many prominent people before Plantinga, and on top of all that, the argument is now validated by numerous computer simulations.
Thus, the claim from Darwinists that “our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately” is simply not a reasonable statement that they can make in good faith anymore since the claim has now been demonstrated to be a false claim.
Yes, but can you defend the 50-50 remark?
Who cares? I hold the initial set of beliefs that might be true in a naturalistic scenario (since naturalism is false) to be 0%. Plantinga, after some long winded reasoning that kf alluded to, gives naturalists a generous 50/50 chance. Hoffman splits ‘true perception’ into varying degrees, (i,e, 1/3’s or perhaps even more), and let’s the varying degrees of true perception fight it out for survival. i.e. Hoffman: “Some of the organisms see all of the reality. Others see just part of the reality. And some see none of the reality. Only fitness.”
And again, true perception always goes extinct in Hoffman’s simulations.
You are not arguing with me. You are arguing with the mathematics of population genetics and with very many computer simulations.
You want to disprove the argument? Fine, prove mathematically that Hoffman was wrong, then go program a computer with your corrected mathematics, run the simulations, and then go publish in peer review that you have overturned Hoffman’s proof. Good luck with all that.
Until then you got nothing.
ba writes, “Who cares.”
Well if you don’t care whether Plantinga has a rationale for his 50-50 remark, that is fine.
But please be clear that he is NOT assigning a probability as to whether materialism is true. He is saying that assuming materialism is true, on average every belief has a 50-50 chance of being true. I see that you have no explanation of justification for that remark.
And this has nothing to do with Hoffman, who I am not discussing.
But you don’t care, so we won’t go any further.
Whatever, you may have a point or not. I don’t care because your point doesn’t matter. The main point of Plantinga’s argument that Naturalism cannot produce reliable cognitive faculties is validated by Hoffman. Period! You can split hairs til the cows come home for all I care. Whatever trips your pointless trigger. Perhaps next you can get into navel gazing.
I see: responding to the details of something you quoted, twice, is “splitting hairs”. Pardon me for paying attention what people actually say.
Plantinga, I know, believes that Naturalism cannot produce reliable cognitive faculties, and he may have some good arguments, but the arguments that I quoted in 5 and 37 from him are NOT good arguments.
I’ll take your dismissal of my thoughts, and the lack of any direct response, as an implicit concession of that point, unless you can come up with something new and relevant.
Translation, “navel gazing is good”
Plantinga’s argument is validated period!
If you want to pick a real beef with the argument that has some merit, start with the fact that they conceded the hard problem of consciousness to naturalists before proving the argument valid.
I NEVER would have conceded that point as a starting position to naturalists!
H, the main argument at core is an exercise in Bayesian probability, starting from some remarks by Churchland. For instance on the 5th page we see:
Picking up from a remark by Darwin, he pivots to Churchland on the 4th page:
By pp. 6 – 7, we see:
The parable of Paul the hominid and the Tiger follows. Then, p. 11:
Then, p. 13:
Of course, there is much more.
However, the spectre of grand delusion is already abundantly clear, pointing to an infinite regress of Plato’s Cave worlds and absurdity.
Mix in the sorts of exercises BA77 has pointed to and the assumption that evo almost certainly gets it right is pretty shaky.
KF
It appears that the goalposts have been shifted slightly. 😛
kf, in all that is there anything that addresses the claim that given materialism, the probability that the average belief is true has “got to be fairly close to 50/50.”
You copied and pasted a lot of stuff, but where does it address this specific claim?
re 55: it appears to be a game where the goalposts are always someplace else.
H, I posted the actual core argument in the reference paper. I think you should read it, including where he makes reference to the value 1/2 in light of Bayesian probability calcs. That is the core more or less of the substantial argument. I am busy with a budget and have neither time nor inclination for rhetorical dance about games as I have seen far too often. KF
PS: Maybe you don’t know that Plantinga is a past President, American Phil Association (for one of its regions, that seems to be how they do it). He has made several major contributions and your obvious dismissiveness in that context says a lot more about you, than him. In addition, there are several highly relevant contributions that give teeth to the point. Even Darwin’s monkey brain remark used to shoddily brush aside doubts by selective hyperskepticism, speak. This is a longstanding and unanswered problem that is largely being ducked.
F/N: I should note that when one has minimal info on a binary solution set, where uncertainty is maximal, so far as one knows, the odds of the two states are 50 – 50. This is probably where reference to this threshold comes from (I have seen it in other contexts and its close relative. Bernoulli indifference across a span of potential outcomes . . . leading onwards to informational metrics and to certain approaches in Stat Mech), and onward we see that indications of lower uncertainty shift ratings, as is used in expertise calibrated probability elicitation. This last has been used with our volcano and its potential hazards for many years now. It is also related to Gibbs formulations in stat mech and related info metrics, on sum over i of p_i log p_i. Just some context. KF
Hazel @ 56 –
I think kf is pointing to a Bayesian argument. One way of looking at it is if we know nothing then we should be indifferent to whether TRUE of FALSE is the more likely, so we should assign equal probabilities to them.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes we don’t have any observations – once we have data, the probabilities will shift. And by the time we’re old enough to seriously reflect on the nature of reality, we have quite a bit of information, so we know (for example) that throwing ourselves off a 1000 ft cliff is not a good idea.
So, basically Plantiga is implying that materialists are utterly ignorant. Think of it as the Jon Snow premise.
“The problem with this argument is that it assumes we don’t have any observations”
So you, as a materialist, assume that you have reliable cognitive faculties, i.e reliable “observations”, prior to seeing if Darwinian processes can produce them?
“Plantiga is implying that materialists are utterly ignorant.”
You are not helping alleviate the implication that you are ‘utterly ignorant’ by assuming your desired conclusion into the premise of the argument.
BO’H, please see the actual argument by Plantinga. I spoke to a supplementary point, and in so doing, I made exactly the point you just tried to use as a rebuttal, as a part of the framework. My interest is why is 1/2 often used as a threshold for such arguments. Going beyond, BA77 is right that the issue is how to account for the faculties we need to be observers, i.e. we are back to the Hoylean argument that the world must be such that we are possible as we are actual. Further to this the evidence is that computational substrates depend on prior designers [given the config space challenges to get them] and do not account for rational, contemplative, responsible intelligent inferential thought. Computation is not contemplation. Therefore, we need a world root adequate to account for morally governed rationally contemplative creatures, where even the rationality is governed morally through known duties to truth, right reason, prudence, justice etc. Indeed, to illustrate how central this is, law can be seen as highest reason on matters of justice; on pain of descent into nihilism of might makes ‘right.’ We are playing around with the foundations of just society. KF
ba77 @ 61 –
At least partly reliable. Reliable enough to figure out, for example, that leaping off a 100 ft high cliff is a bad idea.
kf @ 62 – Does Plantinga argue anything different from this? [EDITTED to remove a dumb comment, my apologies to anyone who was confused by it]
Bob, materialism does NOT get a free pass in assuming into the premises the very thing that needs to be explained.
The question is “CAN Darwinian processes produce reliable cognitive faculties?” The answer to that question is not, “We have fairly reliable cognitive faculties therefore Darwinian evolution must have produced them.”
And when we look at it from that angle, without assuming Darwinian evolution is true, then the answer is found to be, by logic, math, and computer simulations, “No Darwinian evolution cannot produce reliable cognitive faculties”.
Again, “You are not helping alleviate the implication that you are ‘utterly ignorant’ by assuming your desired conclusion of Darwinian evolution into the premise of the argument.”
BO’H: Why don’t you read Plantinga and respond to what he actually says as he interacts with first Darwin then Churchland? Particularly on convictions of any of a monkey brain and truth whatever that is taking hindermost after food, flight, fight, reproduce? Why does he identify four alternatives and how does he discuss quantification, to what result? What about the actual sims BA77 brings up? Then, I have raised the relevant FSCO/I concern on getting to a computational substrate by blind forces and to the gap between computation and rational contemplation. What of those? KF
ba77 @ 64 – you’re obviously trying to discuss something different, which doesn’t have much to do with Plantinga’s claim about beliefs having independent 50% probabilities of being true. So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to it & not get derailed.
kf – Plantinga has written a lot, and I was responding to one small point which is within my area of expertise (Bayesian probabilities). I’ve read the relevant part of the interview with Cutting, and he doesn’t give a reason for his 50%: he assumes it. So I don’t know what part of his work I would have to read to find out where he gets his 50% from. How this relates to his four alternatives, Darwin, FSCO/I and ba77’s sims I’ve no idea. And, frankly, if he has to go through all of that just to arrive at the principle of indifference, I don’t think I want to read more.
Bob (and weave) was asked,
“So you, as a materialist, assume that you have reliable cognitive faculties, i.e reliable “observations”, prior to seeing if Darwinian processes can produce them?”
Bob (and weave) answered
“At least partly reliable. Reliable enough to figure out, for example, that leaping off a 100 ft high cliff is a bad idea.”
Bob (and weave) was corrected thusly,
“materialism does NOT get a free pass in assuming into the premises the very thing that needs to be explained.
The question is “CAN Darwinian processes produce reliable cognitive faculties?” The answer to that question is not, “We have fairly reliable cognitive faculties therefore Darwinian evolution must have produced them.”
Caught in a hopeless dilemma, Bob (and weave) tries to retreat thusly,
“you’re obviously trying to discuss something different,”
No Bob (and weave), I was very specific in my question. The issue is clear cut. You have no warrant to believe Darwinian evolution can produce reliable cognitive faculties. Your refusal to deal honestly with the results does not negate that finding.
You want to quibble over his GENEROUS concession of 50% to materialists of initial beliefs probably being true.
What you don’t understand is that in that GENEROUS concession he also conceded to materialists ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ itself.
In other words, he conceded to materialists a ‘blank slate’ immaterial mind in which true or false beliefs could be formed in the first place.
I never would have done that. The failure of Darwinian processes to produce reliable cognitive faculties pales in comparison to the failure of reductive materialism to ever be able to give an adequate account of consciousness, i.e. specifically qualia. ,,, As David Barash stated:
Thus, Plantinga was VERY generous to materialists in that, in his argument, he granted not only that any given set of initial beliefs have a 50% probability of being true, (which kf explained exactly why he allowed that probability), but Plantinga also conceded a subjective immaterial mind in which beliefs could be formed. i.e. he conceded ‘the hard problem’ to materialists.
Moreover, despite being far more generous than was necessary in his initial premises that he granted to materialists, the results STILL refuted the claims from Darwinists that Darwinian processes can produce reliable cognitive faculties.
Bob, you further made a comment about not getting ‘derailed’.
But having a ‘train of thought’ that can potentially be derailed, in and of itself, refutes your materialistic claims for the mind since having a ‘train of thought’ in the first place presupposes teleology, i.e. goal directed purpose..
In short, having reliable cognitive faculties in and of itself is antithetical to your entire materialistic framework and thus us having reliable cognitive faculties in and of itself refutes your position.
Dr. Egnor explains the irresolvable dilemma for materialists thusly,,,
Thus in conclusion, not only can Darwinian processes not produce reliable cognitive faculties, but us having reliable cognitive faculties, specifically us having ‘intentionality in thought’ that might be subject to being ‘derailed’, in of itself, refutes the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution.
In short, If Bob believes his thoughts can be ‘derailed’, Bob does not believe in reductive materialism.
Bob SHOULD rightly become a Theist if he believes in rational thought.
BO’H: In the thread above, we see Plantinga’s formal framework, laid out in an expression across four hypotheses. He then remarks on the sort of rough quantification that is possible and why it is adequate for relevant purposes. Surely, you know that such is often the case, and that in many cases even the sign of a trend is enough. The case, with onward discussion on objections etc is there to see. It is not a mere dubious assumption to provide responsible estimates. If you disagree, on what credible grounds do you provide alternative values? Especially, given the challenges and simulations that are also on the table. What would be question-begging would be to infer that we are here, so as we will only consider blind naturalistic forces, their likelihood of success must be sufficiently high. KF
PS: I clip further from the clips in 54, which give key context:
Notice, his carefully balanced estimation and conclusion which he will proceed to defend.
Onward, the significance is, the confidence that blind naturalistic forces easily account for minds that can apprehend truth and reason soundly, is ill-founded.