Abstract
Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism aims to show that the conjunction of contemporary evolutionary theory (E) with the claim that there is no God (N) cannot be rationally accepted. Where R is the claim that our cognitive faculties are reliable, the argument is:
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P1.
The probability of R given N and E is low or inscrutable.
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P2.
Anyone who sees (1) and accepts (N&E) has a defeater for R, and this defeater cannot be defeated or deflected.
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P3.
Anyone who has an undefeated, undeflected defeater for R has an undefeated, undeflected defeater for everything she believes.
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C.
Therefore she has an undefeated, undeflected defeater for (N&E).
Plantinga (2011) defends the second premise. It examines and rejects several candidate defeater defeaters and defeater deflectors. One candidate is Millikan’s teleosemantics. I show that Plantinga’s motives for rejecting teleosemantics as a defeater deflector are inadequate. I then show that teleosemantics is not on its own an adequate defeater deflector. Then I offer an additional premise that constitutes a defeater deflector in conjunction with teleosemantics.
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Notes
By immediate I mean that GnRH acts directly on cells in the pituitary. All biologically useful causal impact of GnRH on ovaries is mediated by the impact of GnRH on the pituitary.
We are here forced to reckon with backtracking counterfactuals, as described by Lewis (1979).
References
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Acknowledgements
Several friends helped in the development of this paper, including Franz Huber, Ruth Millikan,DouglasOwings, and Franklin Scott. An anonymous referee for this journal provided detailed and thoughtful comments and deserves special thanks.
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Leahy, B. Can Teleosemantics Deflect the EAAN?. Philosophia 41, 221–238 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9374-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9374-5