Response to Alvin Plantinga

First off, I will say that, of all of the arguments in favor of the existence of God that I've ever heard, this one is the most powerful and the most interesting and the most difficult to overcome.  In fact, I will not even attempt to overcome it.  The concern that Plantinga raises is fascinating and worth thinking about deeply, because it points to the deepest questions of epistemology: what is reason?  What is knowledge?  How can we know what rationality is?  How do we distinguish between a rational argument and a non-rational argument?  How should we?  I won't pretend to have all of the answers to these questions.  Instead of debating Plantinga's question and trying to shut it down, to put it to rest, I hope to respond in a way that leads to an open-ended and fruitful discussion.  Plantinga's problem points to an abyss, a world.  In my small way, I want to encourage this problem to flourish.

I'll start by pointing out that Plantinga's argument does not really show that human minds are certain to contain utter and complete falsehoods - only that they are imperfect.  After all, if an organism evolved to have a brain that "reasoned" that walking into walls or onto open flames or off of cliffs is healthful and desirable, it wouldn't have survived and produced fertile offspring for very long.  Any delusion that negatively impacts a lifeform's survivability or health is thus disqualified.  And in an environment in which organisms are continually competing for resources and therefore adapting to take advantage of each and every one of their rivals' weak spots, that covers an enormous range of experience and cognition.

The scientific method is not perfect.  It is not guaranteed to get the whole truth, or nothing but the truth.  Even pure math may not be infallible.  There are some rational reasons to think that our human-constructed mathematical models are limited, pointed to by examples such as the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem and the Banach-Tarski Paradox - themselves products of formal logic.  And perhaps pure logic itself cannot be trusted.  

But imagine that you ask two chemists to examine two food additives and tell you which of the two samples is is less acidic and therefore safer for human consumption.  Chemist A tells you that she determined that the first sample is in a safer range because she tested it with anthocyanin test strips, and can provide you with massive evidence that these test strips measure acidity accurately.  Chemist B tells you that the second sample is safer, and when you ask him how he knows this, he replies: "An invisible person told me."  Or perhaps he says that he read a book that was written by people to whom this invisible man spoke.  You ask for any evidence that this invisible person exists and Chemist B tells you that there is none.  Chemist B tells you that no one can see the invisible man, and no evidence exists to corroborate the fact that the invisible person spoke to anyone that wrote the book - and furthermore, even if we were to hear the invisible person speak, there's no way we could possibly comprehend what the invisible person meant.  And when you ask why you should trust what Chemist B says more than Chemist A, he replies that although Chemist A is capable of discovering "relative" truths, everything that the invisible person tells him is an "absolute" truth.  (See also: the Problem of the Guy Named Bill.)  Although we may not agree on what rationality is, I hope we can at least agree that it is not that.  After all, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that this being is real, and that the people who have written down the word of this being have done so in good faith and the greatest accuracy of which they were capable - two colossal assumptions - there's no guarantee whatsoever that we have understood this being's meaning completely, and every reason to think that we would not - thus making reasoning that is grounded in its word just as shaky, if not much shakier, than the evidence we gather with our own senses and minds.  Indeed, even if this being exists, and has some access to perfect, infallible, absolute truth, everything we know about this being, and think about this being, and say about this being, and write about this being, we have learned with our own imperfect, fallible senses and minds anyway, so we are - at best - in exactly the same boat that we would be, relying on simple secular reason.

Undoubtedly there are ways that we cannot even imagine how natural selection has led to a neurological set-up that produces advantageous self-deception.  Then again, there are ways that we can imagine this.  For instance, I can imagine a world in which people are neurologically predisposed to believe that true love will never die.  We can imagine that it might be evolutionarily advantageous to believe such a thing, and might result in successful reproduction, even if it is not true.  And what of it?  This doesn't particularly bother me.  If this is delusion, then let us stay deluded!  ("I am dreaming!  I will... keep dreaming!")  (By the way: I'm not saying that I think that, in this world, belief in endless love is determined by genes - actually I suspect that the concept of eternal love is probably culturally constructed, and a fairly recent invention at that, only a few centuries old.  But I don't know.)  

Indeed, I wonder if we can even push this further, and turn Platinga's argument around.  Because if it's plausible that belief in eternal love is a genetically-determined illusion, then mightn't it also be possible that we have evolved, through natural selection, to believe in Gods?  Perhaps this, too, is an evolutionarily advantageous illusion - for instance, it may relieve some of the cognitive dissonance surrounding the rational foundations of ethics.

I wouldn't say that rationality is self-defeating, but I would say that rationality is self-questioning.  By "rationality," here, I mean secular, human rationality.  And I will concede that secular, human rationality is self-questioning in a way that absolute theology is not.  It's true.  Rationality questions its own fundamental preconceptions in a way that absolute theology does not.  But for me, this is a point in favor of secular, human rationality and against absolute theology.  Yes, absolute theology is self-reinforcing, continuously protecting itself, shielding itself, covering itself, becoming more closed.  Human secular rationality is forever vulnerable and ever makes itself more vulnerable, ever more open.  This makes secular rationality intrinsically beautiful to me in a way that a closed-off theologian, from the comfy safety of his protected space, may never be able to feel.  

I have always felt an intense irony about this.  Religious people like to present themselves as meek, as the paragon of humility - while they castigate the sinner who has committed the sin known as "scientism" as being motivated by pride, conceit, vanity.  Plantinga's argument shows that, indeed, secular reason should not be expected to be perfect.  But it has never claimed to be perfect.  Here's a pretty good rule of thumb: when someone starts talking about the Absolute, and especially when they claim that the Absolute exists, and is knowable, and most especially when they themselves claim to possess Absolute knowledge, it is precisely they who are demonstrating outsized pride.  To my mind, it is secular science and reason that demonstrates honest humility.

Yes, rationality is fragile, evanescent - at any moment, it could disappear forever.  That makes every moment we still can hold onto it infinitely precious.  It faces not only external threats (including the incursions of invasive dogmatisms), but threatens always to destroy itself out of the power of its own internal functioning.  It is always on the precipice of evaporation.  But the profound truth of this fragility, combined with the startling fact that rationality has actually somehow managed to last this long, might give us hope - hope that there is some kind of inner strength to rationality, after all.

Tiny clockwork spark made of feathers floating through the infinite blackness of space.  The surface of the sun is always there.

If it does turn out that rationality is wrong - and what would that mean, exactly?  How would we ever know that it "turned out" that rationality is fundamentally wrong?  If our brains were biologically constructed in such a way as to trick us, what would it mean to find out that we were wrong?  But let's just imagine, for the sake of argument, that it happens, somehow - that it turns out that rationality is wrong, that some fundamental assumption necessary for reason is profoundly wrongheaded, and that the truth is elsewhere.  In that case, would I feel defeated?  No!  On the contrary!  I would feel delighted, and elated, and ecstatic, to learn something so fundamental that it rocks everything I thought I knew.  I would let go of my false knowledge without the slightest hesitation.  For even if it was a disaster for me personally, it would be at least slightly tempered by the pure joy of discovery.  For Plantinga, secular reason may seem dangerously ungrounded, and indeed it is.  But I see the same thing he sees and describe it differently - I would say that it is free.