Sunday, April 7, 2013

Video of Plantinga's Argument merely an Outline

Evolution News and Views has posted a two minute video of Alvin Plantinga presenting his Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism. If you watch it, please notice that after showing him stating the first and crucial premise of his argument, the video cuts out the much needed argument that Plantinga gives for it. So this video is only an outline of his argument. Whoever decided to post it probably doesn't know much about Plantinga's argument and thought this truncated video was merely an example of its "elegant brevity." For Plantinga's latest version of the argument I suggest reading chapter 10 of his excellent book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. And if one wants Plantinga's full treatment of the relationship between Science and Religion, they should read the first nine chapters also.

  UPDATE: Or one could watch a slightly longer version of his argument.

I think Plantinga's argument effectively refutes versions of Naturalism where conscious beliefs do not affect our behavior.  It's not clear to me how it works on versions where conscious beliefs do affect our behavior.  But then, so far nobody has been able to form an acceptable Naturalistic version of such a state of affairs.

No comments: