How to save naturalism from Plantinga?

Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 14 (1):32-48 (2007)
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Abstract

I argue that Plantinga’s Proper Function and Evolutionary arguments fail against liberal naturalism defined in a broad sense as the view that „there aren’t any supernatural beings”. The former argument can be interpreted in at least three ways: deductively, inductively and theistically. None of these, however, is successful. The latter argument suffers from several deficiencies of which two major ones are: The unlikelihood of the reliability of our cognitive faculties, given naturalism and evolutionism, is not shown. Agnosticism with respect to the likelihood of our cognitive reliability is insufficient to establish the self-defeating character of naturalistic evolutionism, unless it is also shown that the belief in this reliability lacks an independent warrant. The last condition has been neglected by Plantinga.

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Daniel D. Novotný
University Of South Bohemia

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References found in this work

The Rediscovery of the Mind.John R. Searle - 1992 - MIT Press. Edited by Ned Block & Hilary Putnam.
Warrant and proper function.Alvin Plantinga - 1993 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Universals and scientific realism.David Malet Armstrong - 1978 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

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