Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (55 page)

21.
The necessity involved could be broadly logical necessity: the sort of necessity enjoyed by, for example, true mathematical and logical propositions. Or it could be nomological necessity, the sort of necessity enjoyed by natural laws.

22.
This is what philosophers call “strong supervenience.” For a good account of the various kinds of supervenience, see the Stanford online encyclopedia entry on supervenience.

23.
All is not well with this popular little story: see W. J. Zhang, “Configuration of redox gradient determines magnetotactic polarity of the marine bacteria MO-1,” in
Environmental Microbiology Reports
vol. 2, issue 5, October 2010.

24.
See my
Warrant and Proper Function
, chapter 9. It’s worth noting that the argument can also be conducted in terms of epistemic probability, although I don’t have space here to show how.

25.
See, e.g., Bas van Fraassen’s
Laws and Symmetry
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 293ff.

26.
“An astonishing number of extremely complex problems in probability theory have been solved, and usefully so, by calculation based entirely on the assumption of equiprobable alternatives” Roy Weatherford,
Philosophical Foundations of Probability Theory
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 35. See also Robin Collins’s “A Defense of the Probabilistic Principle of Indifference” (lecture to History and Philosophy of Science Colloquium, University of Notre Dame, October 8, 1998; presently unpublished), and see Roger White, “Evidential Symmetry and Mushy Credence,”
Oxford Studies in Epistemology
, vol. 3.

27.
“Independent”: it could be that a pair of neural structures with content were such that if either occurred, so would the other; then the beliefs in question would not be independent. Similarly when the content of one neural structure entails the content of another: there too the beliefs in question won’t be independent. My thanks to Paul Zwier, who performed the calculation.

28.
And he was called “the Dumb Ox” by virtue of the fact that he was both taciturn and a bit corpulent, not by virtue of the fact that he wrote the
Summa Theologiae
.

29.
You might complain that it is only materialism that is important here, with naturalism playing no role. Not so. Suppose theism is true, and also (as some theists think) that materialism is true. If so, and if, as most theists think, God has created us in his image, including the ability to have knowledge, then God would presumably establish psychophysical laws of such a sort that successful action is correlated with true belief.

30.
There are several kinds of defeaters; here it isn’t necessary to canvass these kinds. The kind of defeater presently relevant would be a
rationality
defeater, and an
undercutting
rationality defeater. In addition to rationality defeaters, there are also
warrant
defeaters; these too come in several kinds. For more on defeaters, see Michael Bergmann, “Deontology and Defeat,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
60 (2000), pp. 87–102, “Internalism, Externalism and the No-Defeater Condition,”
Synthese
110 (1997), pp. 399–417, and chapter 6 of his book
Justification Without Awareness
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and see my “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts” in
Naturalism Defeated
, pp. 205–11. See also above, chapter 6.

31.
Other analogies: the belief that I have mad cow disease and that the probability that my cognitive faculties are reliable, on that proposition, is low. Similarly for the belief that I am a victim of a Cartesian evil demon who brings it about that most of my beliefs are false (see Descartes
Meditations
, Meditation I) and the current version of Descartes’s fantasy, the belief that I am a brain in a vat, my beliefs being manipulated by unscrupulous alien scientists (see also the film
The Matrix
, Warner Bros., 1999).

32.
This objection was raised by Trenton Merricks. Compare his “Conditional Probability and Defeat” in James Beilby, ed.,
Naturalism Defeated?
and my reply “To Merricks” in the same volume.

33.
Compare Paul Churchland, “Is Evolutionary Naturalism Epistemologically Self-defeating?,
Philo: A Journal of Philosophy
(vol. 12, no. 2); Aaron Segal and I have written a reply (forthcoming in the same journal).

34.
Reid,
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
in
Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and Essays
, ed. Ronald Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), p. 276.

35.
See Plantinga, “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts” in
Naturalism Defeated?
, p. 224.

36.
See Richard Otte’s “Conditional Probabilities in Plantinga’s Argument,” in
Naturalism Defeated?
, pp. 143ff.; see also pp. 220–25.

37.
And here I follow “Reply to Beilby’s Cohorts” in
Naturalism Defeated?
, pp. 224–25.

38.
Where
P
entails R, a result of deleting R from
P
will be any proposition
Q
such that
Q
is logically independent of R and such that
P
is logically equivalent to the conjunction of R with
Q
.

39.
Forthcoming in
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
. In this paper I investigate whether various theories from contemporary philosophy of mind can serve as defeater-deflectors for the looming defeater for R. I examine functionalism and several theories of content, arguing that none of them can serve this purpose.

40.
See Richard Otte, “Conditional Probabilities in Plantinga’s Argument,” and Tom Crisp “An Evolutionary Objection to the Argument from Evil,” in
Evidence and Religious Belief
, eds. Kelly Clark and Rayond Van Arragon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and see Michael Rea,
World Without Design
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) pp. 192ff.