stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
|
| Quote | 8
Chuckdarwin
August 21, 2020 at 12:52 pm
Truthfreedom
You link me to an article on Alvin Plantinga’s infamous EAAN? Seriously? What relevance has EAAN to Carroll’s interview of Stuart Bartlett?
You want me to [re]read the “most important” living Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, re natural selection. You want me to [re]read and take seriously the author of perhaps the single most incoherent and ignorant comment on natural selection ever penned by a philosopher where in his “thought experiment” designed to prove EAAN, writes of his hypothetical caveman, Paul, that when confronted by a tiger, “very much likes the idea of being eaten [by a tiger], but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief…. Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. … Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.”
Plantinga (1993). “Warrant and Proper Function”: 225–226.
I’m sorry, but you just can’t make this stuff up… |
linky
I encountered Plantinga in a philosophy of science class from a philosophy professor who was sympathetic to him. It didn’t impress me at all. It seemed like the result of a very clever person spending way too much time trying to prove something that wasn’t correct.
|
