Michael Perry called Professor Eberle’s
comments to my attention and kindly invited me to respond.
I shall skip Professor Eberle’s first
paragraph, which simply plays rhetorical tricks with my comments and is
irrelevant to the issues of substance.
Professor Eberle would like to minimize the
significance of Wieseltier’s mistakes by describing them as just a matter of not
“hav[ing] all of his philosophical ps and qs together,” and as “minor
interpretive points,” and as showing that he “isn’t a professional
philosopher.” I take it Professor
Eberle is conceding, delicately, that Wiesletier is, indeed, ignorant about the
subject on which he is writing: to
wit, why one might think scientific explanations of psychological and social
phenomena might be worth pursuing; how Dennett’s project relates to Hume’s; what
Hume’s theism does or doesn’t amount to; and the relevance of the etiology of
belief to the epistemic status of that belief. (This last point Professor Eberle
describes, correctly, as “a pretty standard point in contemporary epistemology,”
which, of course, confirms my point about Wieseltier’s embarrassing ignorance of
the subject on which he opines.) Professor Eberle can not really be serious that to be mistaken on all
these points is somehow trivial; they are central to the review and Wieseltier’s
criticism of Dennett.
Professor Eberle says correctly that
Dennett’s speculative story about the origin of religious belief “can be used to
discredit claims to religious knowledge only if the story Dennett tells about the history of religious
belief…is both true and provides reason to believe that religious belief is
formed unreliably.” As I explicitly
noted in my comments on the review, Wieseltier’s one fair point is about the
speculative status of the story Dennett is telling in the book. Professor Eberle then says, wrongly,
that, “If Dennett’s narrative isn’t actually true, then Leiter’s repeated
reference to the epistemic relevance of the etiology of belief is itself
irrelevant.” This non-sequitur surprises me, for I did not
think the basic point here was a hard one. The etiology of belief can be relevant to its epistemic warrant (which
Professor Eberle concedes, and which Wieseltier denies, because he is ignorant);
Dennett offers a speculative story about the etiology of religious belief,
involving an extrapolation from paradigmatic explanations in evolutionary
biology; if the speculative story is true (or well-confirmed, as I put it), then
it raises questions about the epistemic warrant for religious beliefs. That the argument has the form of a
conditional, whose antecedent is undecided, does not make the point about
etiology irrelevant—and especially not when Wieseltier denies the purely epistemic
point!
The Plantinga argument for the self-refuting
nature of evolutionary naturalism is the subject of a large secondary
literature, but it is not relevant to the “game” I was playing in my comments on
Wieseltier. If Dennett’s (or
anyone’s) argument were that any cognitive capacities that have an evolutionary
explanation are epistemically suspect, then the Plantinga argument would be
clearly relevant. But that is not
Dennett’s (or anyone’s) argument.
I take it Dennett’s (and everyone else’s)
argument has the same structure as Hume’s original one: where beliefs lack a rational warrant,
we need some explanation for why the beliefs are held nonetheless. Dennett favors an evolutionary one; Hume
favored a different one; Freud had another; Marx another; Nietzsche another; and
so on. I take it, then, that what
Professor Eberle wants to claim is this: since the naturalistic explanations in the offing do not involve reliable
methods for belief formation, if they are the correct explanations, then they
undermine the epistemic warrant (if not the truth) of the beliefs in
question. But then, so the argument
goes, doesn’t the same consideration count against the reliability of our
cognitive faculties that are the product of these same unreliable
mechanisms?
Notice, to start, that an unreliable
mechanism [e.g., natural selection] for forming beliefs is not, a
fortiori, a mechanism that necessarily produces unreliable belief-forming
cognitive mechanisms. That
requires a separate argument. Plantinga has one, about which more in a moment. Wieseltier runs these points together in
the review; Eberle appears to do the same, but perhaps this was simply due to
being terse.
Plantinga’s is an interesting, if not
successful, argument, but it is still, I
think, irrelevant to the review of Dennett. (Professof Eberle is probably right that
Wieseltier is recycling the Plantinga argument, which gets a lot of play in
pious circles; alas, the responses to Plantinga don’t seem to get the same kind
of play.) The structure of Dennet’s
argument, again, runs this way: (1)
religious beliefs (e.g., in God or gods, in an immaterial soul, in eternal life)
are either false or lack rational warrant; (2) many people hold religious
beliefs, which requires some explanation; (3) the explanations in the offing may
loosen religion’s grip on people since, if true (or found plausible), they will
persuade people that they do not hold their religious beliefs for good
reasons. None of these points
requires a general defense of the reliability of our rational and cognitive
faculties, the issue raised by the Plantinga argument. If they aren’t reliable, then all
arguments fail to get started in philosophy, not just this one. I’m of the view that no one has a good
response to the global skeptic, and that’s what is being asked for here. If that’s a real philosophical problem,
it’s a problem for Plantinga as well as Dennett.
Even if we can’t respond to the global
skeptic, we can respond to Plantinga’s case for that skepticism. Plantinga’s precise argument turns on
some technical details about probabilities, that don’t admit of simple
explanation (but which I would have thought were dealt with decisively a few
years ago in a paper by Branden Fitelson and Elliott Sober on “Plantinga’s
Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary Naturalism” [which I think appeared
in Philosophy of Science, not sure about that]). Crudely, Plantinga thinks the
probability of our cognitive mechanisms being reliable given the truth of
evolutionary naturalism is low; but since we have reason to think our cognitive
mechanisms are reliable, we have reason to doubt evolutionary naturalism and,
moreover, reason to accept theism (which makes more probable the reliability of
our cognitive mechanisms).
This argument involves a lot of quite dubious
moves and assumptions: e.g., (i)
that the prior probability of
evolutionary naturalism being true is about the same as the prior probability of
theism being true; (ii) that the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is to
be assessed in toto (but
when we parse them into, e.g., perception, mathematical knowledge,
decision-making under uncertainty, memory, and so on, it turns out that their
reliability varies wildly, and in ways that evolutionary naturalism fits rather
neatly (and which theism has a lot of trouble explaining)); (iii) that beliefs and actions are not
causally connected in ways that would suffice for natural selection operating on
actions to nonetheless favor reliable belief-producing mechanisms; and (iv) that
the only ground an evolutionary naturalist has for thinking our cognitive
mechanisms are reliable is evolutionary naturalism itself. None of these moves or assumptions
are, I think, defensible, and so Plantinga’s argument
fails.
I will go out on a limb and venture that
Wieseltier, who mimics in summary form Plantinga’s argument, neither understands
these issues nor cares about them. I think philosophers should care about them, and I also would have
thought that, by this point in time, Plantinga’s clever arguments had been
responded to effectively, such that something new is needed by way of
counter-argument for any philosophers, not just naturalists, to be worried about
them. At best, the Plantinga
argument recommends fallibilism, that is, a willingness to admit that one is
wrong. But that just aligns
Plantinga with the arch-naturalist Quine. Fallibism is a good epistemic posture, at least with respect to hard
questions like these. But it hasn’t
much to do with Dennett’s attempt to give a naturalistic account of religious
belief, or with Wieseltier’s confused comments on that attempt.
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