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Plantinga's Naturalism Against Evolution argument praised and criticized (part 1)

It seems to me to be effective against certain materialist rationalizations for naturalism (the sort that are used to buttress reductive materialism), but not necessarily against every version of anti-theism.  It works, at the end of the day, against reductive materialism only inasmuch as the zombie objection likewise works (and I think it does) against the same .

In fact, one could construct a zombie version of Plantinga's argument (sort of a Halloween version). That is because Plantinga's argument hinges upon the question of whether or not the actions of a percipient beings are entirely caused by the neuro-physical states of perceiver.  If those states suffice, then any correlative perceptions are themselves superfluous--we have a case of epiphenomenalism. It follows that the truth or accuracy of those perceptions would likewise be irrelevant if the perceptions themselves are.  But those neuro-physical processes do suffice according to reductive materialism (inspire of the way in which reductionists try to have their cake and eat it too).  In other words, at the end of the day, the zombie objection to Dennett's psychology is a successful one. And Plantinga's argument, inasmuch as it hinges on a similar line of reasoning, is cogent against Dennett's and other reductionist conceptions of human cognition.

But such an objection does not necessarily apply to NON-reductive materialism.  For a non-reductive materialist might argue, for example, that perceptions cause changes in behavior in ways that are partially caused by perception as such.  Perception therefore, is not superfluous in every version of non-reductive materialism.  Non-reductive materialism avoids superfluity by granting that perception itself is a material activity but not one that can common to both to living and non-living/non-cognizant beings.  In such a case, the material processes observed in an percipient organism will be material rather than immaterial and lawful rather than unlawful, but the sort of being from which these processes originate is different from that of a non-living and/or non-percipient being, and the lawfulness that we can attribute to its operations is likewise different than what we find in non-living and/or non-percipient beings.  Perception itself will influence the neural-chemical processes in a manner not reducible to chemistry or physics; hence perception will not be superfluous, and the "truth" (or should I say the "truthiness") of this perception will be relevant to the animal's success in attaining that which it desires, avoiding that to which it is averse.

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