Plantinga Lecture #2: Evolutionary Psychology and Scripture Scholarship

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND SCRIPTURE SCHOLARSHIP: MORE ALIKE THAN YOU THINK
Alvin Plantinga

I. Evolutionary Psychology (EP)

- Plantinga thinks there is a science-religion conflict here
- Christians should be interested in science. God freely creates the world, and we need to look at what he creates
- What should Christians do when there is a conflict?

- EP is fast becoming orthodoxy in psychology > we should try to understand properties about ourselves in terms of evolutionary past. It looks at love, art, stories, music, morality, religion, etc. to do so.
- There are some impressive efforts by EP, and some of those seem incompatible with Christianity
- Rodney Stark: religion is a kind of spandrel of rational thought, an attempt to acquire nonexistent goods - eternal life, a right relationship with God, salvation, remission of sins - by negotiating with nonexistent supernatural beings
- David Sloan Wilson: religion is essentially a means of social control employing or involving fictitious belief.
- Herbert Simon: altruistic behavior comes from docility and limited rationality: "because of bounded rationality, the docile individual will often be unable to distinguish socially prescribed behavior that contributes to fitness from altruistic behavior."

- D.S. Wilson Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society > many feature of religion can be explained as adaptations designed to enable human groups to function as adaptive units
- Wilson looks at Calvin's Geneva for example. He gives a functional interpretation, saying that Calvinism unifies and coordinates a group of people. It served a secular utility.
- Is there something to this analysis? Do we take religious belief on for the service of goals? Plantinga thinks not. Wilson says aims are provided by evolution. Freud says we invent a heavenly father - wish fulfillment. Augustine agrees with Freud in a sense: "You have made us for yourself; our hearts are restless til they rest in you, O God." But Freud (being an atheist) thinks that Christian belief is an illusion, meaning that it is not reality oriented, and is done to improve ourselves and our group.
- There seem to be a deep conflict between Wilson/Freud and Christianity.

-Why do scientists come up with Simonian science?
- They conform to methodological naturalism (MN), meaning they proceed as if God is not given. In MN the data, the scientific theory, and background information (assumptions going into science) can't refer to God, etc.

II. Scripture Scholarship

- Has some similarities with EP
- Traditional biblical commentary tries to explain what the word of God means while assuming it is true, and God is the principle author. Also, interpret scripture with scripture.

-Higher criticism (HBC): an Enlightenment project coming from Spinoza, who said the rule for biblical interpretation should be the light of reason. Theological beliefs should not be assumed. It proceeds under the aegis of MN.
- Jon Levenson: "Historical critics thus rightly insist that the tribunal before which interpretations are argued cannot be confessional or 'dogmatic; the arguments must be historically valid."
- Raymond Brown: HBC is "scientific biblical criticism"; it yields "factual results"

- Quest for the Historical Jesus
- G.A. Well, Sheehan, etc. offer some silly sounding conclusions. Sheehan says Jesus was the first Christian atheist. Plantinga responded, "It's certainly hard to top this." More respectable work from A.E. Harvey and John Meier affirms most of the historical details about Jesus, but will not refer to the resurrection, second person of the trinity, etc.
- Why draw these conclusions? Seems it is because of an effort to be scientific in a way according with MN. Harvey and Meier work on a Duhemian model, which is supposed to proceed only on assumptions everyone else has. Meier speaks of a desire to have "an unpapal conclave" of people of all sorts of beliefs (Jewish, Catholic, agnostic, etc.).

III. Defeaters for Christian Belief?

- Suppose Christians are committed to science, and suppose Simonian science is good science. What should we do with this conflict? Give up our beliefs? Give up science? Is this a defeater for Christian belief?
- No. Traditions Christians think they have various cognitive faculties by which they know the world, including faculties by which we come to know God. By retreating to a MN evidence base, we have to give up some of our beliefs. From part of our "evidential base" Simonian science is probably right. Plantinga gives an example of someone saying he was at the mall yesterday, when he remembers being at home. The testimony of the other person would normally be good evidence, except that his own memory is better. The source of our religious beliefs are different from science.
- As Plantinga puts it "The evidence base of Simonian science, constrained as it is by MN, is a proper part of a Christian's evidence base. So what Simonian science shows (if it's good science) is that some of my Christian beliefs are unlikely with respect to a part of my evidence base. What this shows, at most, is that the best way to think about the phenomena in question from the perspective of MN, is the Simonian way. But that doesn't necessarily give me a defeater: it can easily happen that I come to see that one of my beliefs is unlikely with respect to part of my evidence base, without thereby incurring a defeater for that belief.
- Is this too rosy a suggestion? Example Isaiah 41:9 speaks of the corners of the earth. What if I believe the earth is square? You still get a defeater when shown a picture of the round earth. So there can be defeaters for beliefs coming from the Bible. Some of those beliefs may just be wrong.

[here are notes from Plantinga's evening lecture tonight. it's mostly my own notes, combined with some quotations from a handout. over three hundred people attended, resulting in a move to a much larger room. we ended up in the great hall, of all places, because sanderson 215 and the chapel were in use. this lecture was delivered by plantinga last year at the prestigious gifford lectures.]