Metaphysical naturalism can be taken, roughly, to be the view that there is no God, and nothing beyond nature. Alvin Plantinga has argued that naturalism, in this sense, is self‐defeating. More specifically, he argues that an evolutionary account of human origins gives the naturalist compelling reasons for doubting the reliability of human cognitive faculties, and thus compelling reasons for doubting the truth of any of his beliefs, including naturalism itself. This argument, which has come to be known as the ‘evolutionary (...) argument against naturalism’, has generated a great deal of controversy, and a substantial literature concerning it has grown up as a result. In this paper, I will introduce readers to this literature. I begin by explaining the argument itself, and making clear its intuitive force. I then survey the main objections to it, such as the Perspiration Objection, the ‘Can’t the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?’ Objection, and the Tu Quoque Objection: in the course of this survey, I pay particular attention to the most interesting of these, a version of the Tu Quoque Objection according to which the problem of evil results in a form of epistemic self‐defeat for the theist that is exactly analogous to the self‐defeat with which the naturalist is allegedly faced in the evolutionary argument. I go on to suggest that, despite the wide range of objections in the literature, the challenge of the evolutionary argument against naturalism is still very much with us, and I conclude by describing some promising directions for future research. (shrink)

Despite various attempts to rectify matters, the internalism-externalism (I-E) debate in epistemology remains mired in serious confusion. I present a new account of this debate, one which fits well with entrenched views on the I-E distinction and illuminates the fundamental disagreements at the heart of the debate. Roughly speaking, the I-E debate is over whether or not certain of the necessary conditions of positive epistemic status are internal. But what is the sense of internal here? And of which conditions of (...) which positive epistemic status are we speaking? I argue that an adequate answer to these questions requires reference to what I call the no-defeater condition which is satisfied by a subjects belief B just in case she does not believe that B is defeated. I close by stating succinctly the main positions taken in the I-E debate, identifying the basic points of disagreement and suggesting fruitful courses for future discussion. (shrink)