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Improving Alvin Plantinga's argument

These vague meanderings need a lot of polishing, but I'm spitting them out here before I forget them.

His criticism of naturalism is, at the end of the day, a criticism of a certain kind of materialism: one that proposes to explain (or is it justify???!) the reliability of the faculties used by scientific theorizers by saying that these faculties are reliable because they have, over the course of time, enhanced the survivability of their possessors.

I think that the type of functionalism that has appeared in other discussions (and which I associate with utilitarianism) comes into this picture as well: a functionalist approach to evolution looks at life processes instrumentally (hence the association I have made between it and utilitarianism).  "Enhacing survival" (of a gene), for example, is a functionalist explanation of why certain phenotypes endure in a population.

I think functionalism is problematic in a manner analogous to the problems I find with utilitarianism. Maybe that analogy can be helpful here.

The alternative to functionalism that I envision is analogous to virtue theory (thinking here of both Nietzsche and of Aristotle) just as functionalism is to utilitarianism.  Evolution is like habituation, the development of a practice that is per se desirable to the species that consists of individuals capable of habituation.

Give that humans seeks truth (and prescinding for the moment, if I may, from adding that I recognize a supra-material dimension to human nature), then we have an activity that cannot be accounted for adequately by one who is thinking solely in functionalist terms.  That is, the desirability of truth: what Nagle might call, what it's like to be a truth seeker.

Perhaps Plantinga's argument becomes clearly cogent once we direct it toward an understanding of evolution that is thoroughly informed by functionalism.  But perhaps the thrust of the argument can be dodged by a version of evolutionary theory that is not a pure distillation of functionalism.  While the alternative theory might be materialistic (or might not be), it would open the door to theism inasmuch as it might allow the intrinsically desirability of truth to come into play, for that would point toward God as the Summum Bonum.

Like I said, this is pretty fuzzy, but there might be something of value here: gotta work on it more.

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