TomS: Can a zygote develop a brain capable of human cognition?P>

If I correctly understand Plantinga, then he would answer “no.” A human zygote could develop a human brain, but a human brain is incapable of human cognition.

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My question aside, I enjoyed the post. Well done.

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I watched a lecture he (Plantinga) gave about EAAN where he talked about beliefs of being chased by a lion and how a person could have a multitude of beliefs that would make them run away from a lion. What I found funny was that all of them included a lion, which I think is the argument a lot of people have been making in these comments. If you didn’t have X belief that made you run away from X that can kill and eat you, you’d die. The argument that a material world exists outside of my senses and that those senses are decently reliable comes from me not being dead yet.

Plantinga saves himself from all this crap by saying “god” created us in his perfect image, so we CAN trust our mental faculties.

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P1: If creation is true, then we have divinely designed brains.

P2: Created brains are not designed to know the difference between good and evil (see Genesis 2:17).

P3: Religious ethics (the morals and dogmas about good and evil) are the output of created brains.

C1: Threfore creation & design theories are unreliable and should be rejected.

C2: Therefore religious whathaveyou should be rejected.

PS.: John, did you change the order in which the comments appear? It’s sort of irritating that they file upwards while the replies on comments file downwards.

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By the way, isn’t evolution a process involving populations, not individuals? While cognition is an activity of individuals, not populations?
So isn’t it a fallacy of composition/division to speak of evolving cognition?

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If we have a conditional, however, in which the consequent is that global skepticism is true, then surely it is a reasonable conclusion, though, that the antecedent can’t reasonably be held. And this is the conditional that I think we really get here. And while I agree for a number of reasons that he doesn’t really establish that N&E does give us something self-defeating, the basic point of the argument, that it is unreasonable to hold something self-defeating, is also surely right. Plantinga’s argument, as you seemed to suggest in your last paragraph in the post, is in fact just an ordinary evolutionary debunking argument. Being Plantinga, he’s good at giving it all sorts of epistemological bells and whistles with regard to issues of defeasibility, but stripped down that’s all it is; the only really unusual feature is that it’s an evolutionary debunking argument for naturalism. And it does so in the way any evolutionary debunking argument works: it argues that the conjunction of evolutionary theory and a particular position is self-defeating — in this case strong self-defeat, i.e., with a general undercutting defeater for all rational conclusions about the world, and hence the global skepticism issue. Not all evolutionary debunking arguments argue for strong self-defeat, but they do all follow the same pattern. I don’t see that there’s anything particularly Godelian about it; only the common-sensical points that whatever your rational position may be, you had better not have good reason to think that it is inconsistent with holding rational positions, and that any position that is not self-defeating is superior to any position that is. That’s just rational consistency.

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