Sunday, July 13, 2008

Plantinga on natural selection and naturalism

Alvin Plantinga, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, made an interesting comment in the July/August edition of Books & Culture:

"[N]atural selection doesn't care about the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behavior. Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce."

Plantinga does not rule out evolution in his article.

In fact, the name of the article is "Evolution vs. Naturalism."

How's that?

Here's a hint:

"Naturalism is the idea that there is no such person as God or anything like God; we might think of it as high-octane atheism or perhaps atheism-plus. It is possible to be an atheist without rising to the lofty heights (or descending to the murky depths) of naturalism. Aristotle, the ancient Stoics, and Hegel (in at least certain stages) could properly claim to be atheists, but they couldn't properly claim to be naturalists: each endorses something (Aristotle's Prime Mover, the Stoics' Nous, Hegel's Absolute) no self-respecting naturalist could tolerate." [emphasis added]

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2 comments:

Tom Clark said...

I reply to Plantinga at http://www.naturalism.org/plantinga.htm

best,

Tom Clark
Center for Naturalism
Naturalism.Org

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