The End of Skeptical Theism? (Part 10) - Theism's Cognitive Blindspot

This post is part of my series The End of Skeptical Theism? For an index, see here.

I am currently working my way through an article by Paul Jude Naquin entitled "Theism's Pyrrhic Victory". The article looks at the implications of skeptical theism (ST) for Alvin Plantinga's religious epistemology.

As we saw at the end of the previous entry, Plantinga's externalist epistemology can allow one to have warranted properly basic beliefs even when one lacks the evidential justification for those beliefs. However, this can only be allowed if one's general worldview permits the existence of cognitive faculties that satisfy the four conditions of proper function.

Plantinga argues that, according to the naturalist's worldview, our cognitive faculties are the product of an undirected process of evolution by natural selection. The problem is that there is no reason to think (and maybe good reason to think the contrary) that evolution would produce reliable, truth-oriented cognitive faculties. This is because there is no necessary overlap between beliefs that are good for survival and beliefs that accurately represent the state of reality.

The net result is that a naturalist must believe that the probability of having reliable, truth-oriented cognitive faculties, given the truth of naturalism, is either low or inscrutable. Thus, it is irrational to be a naturalist.

Plantinga contrasts the unwelcome predicament of the naturalist with that of the theist. According to Plantinga, the theist has every reason to believe that God would design their cognitive faculties so as to be reliable and truth-oriented. What's more, they have every reason to believe that God would create a special cognitive faculty that would give them direct epistemic access to the truth of his existence and the truth of any specific religious doctrines.

This is where Naquin thinks Plantinga goes wrong. If one accepts the ST-response to the problem of evil, one has a reason to think that God would not design such cognitive faculties.


1. Why Do We have Unreliable Cognitive Faculties?
The difficulties for Plantinga begin, unsurprisingly, with the responses to Rowe's evidential problem of evil. I covered Rowe's argument in the first entry in this series. Stated more briefly, Rowe maintains that the existence of evils for which we cannot locate a logically necessary greater good ("gratuitous evils") should undermine the confidence of our belief in the existence of God.

Theists of all stripes can respond to Rowe's argument by inverting it and denying the existence of gratuitous evils. In other words, they can say: "because God exists, all purported evils must have some logically necessary justification". Granting them this inversion of Rowe's argument, Naquin thinks they would have reason to accept the following argument:

• (1.1) There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being, which we call God.

• (1.2) An omnipotent, omniscient, being would be capable of creating humans so that their cognitive and perceptual faculties are 100% reliable.

• (1.3) An omnibenevolent being would wish to make human cognitive and perceptual faculties 100% reliable, unless that being could not do so without sacrificing some overriding good.

• (1.4) Human cognitive faculties are not 100% reliable.

• (1.5) Therefore, God could not make humans with 100% reliable cognitive faculties without sacrificing some overriding good.

The logical structure of this argument is outlined in the diagram. Premise (1.2) is derived from (1.1) on the grounds that the creation of beings with perfectly reliable cognitive faculties is logically possible, and logical possibility is the threshold for omnipotence. 

Premise (1.3) is derived from (1.1) on the basis of an optimality assumption. The idea is that God, being perfect, would design anything he creates to be maximally efficient at achieving its specified purpose (which is "knowledge acquisition" in the case of cognitive faculties), unless there was some overriding moral reason to the contrary. 

Premise (1.4) seems to be an incontrovertible fact (indeed sub-optimality of all sorts seems to be common in the natural world). 

Thus, for a theist, the conclusion would seem to be unavoidable.

2. The ST-Reponse to the Problem of Impaired Cognition

The argument just outlined demands the existence of some overriding good that justifies the existence of sub-optimal cognitive faculties. This makes it identical to the problem of evil, which means it can be responded to in the same way.

So it could be responded to by working out what the overriding good actually is. In other words, by constructing a theodicy. The alternative, ST-response, as we have seen throughout this series, is to argue that human cognitive limitations are such that we cannot expect to know what God's moral reasons for permitting sub-optimality actually are. Thus, we must be skeptical.

As we have seen, there are some good grounds for thinking the ST-response is a plausible derivation from the basic idea of theism. After all, God is supposed to be an omniscient, transcendental and "wholly other" kind of being. This would seem to guarantee that we could not suppose or claim to know his mind. The problem, for Plantinga, is that this implies that we have reason to think that God conceals at least some truths from our knowledge.

Indeed, the ST-response makes the following argument possible:

• (1.1) There exists an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being, which we call God.

• (2.1) If God is omniscient and "wholly other" then humans cannot know that God intends for their cognition and perception to be generally reliable.

• (2.2) If humans cannot know that God intends for their cognition and perception are to be generally reliable, then they cannot know that their cognitive and perceptual faculties are in fact generally reliable.

• (2.3) Humans cannot know that their cognitive and perceptual faculties are in fact generally reliable.

This argument would seem to seriously undermine Plantinga's claim that the theist can have warranted properly basic beliefs about theism and any doctrinal extensions thereof. In fact, it would seem to provide a Humean defeater for those beliefs: the reflective theist can no longer have confidence in the existence of a direct epistemic link to God because they have found that God could have reason for deceiving us.

3. Possible Plantinga-esque Responses

Is there any way for the proponent of a Plantingan epistemology to cope with this defeater? Naquin, obviously, doesn't think so. First off, there is no reason for thinking that cognitive reliability and truth-directedness are somehow built into theism. This much has become apparent in examining the justification behind the ST-response to the problem of evil.

Additionally, there is no reason to think that revelation, Biblical or otherwise, is self-evidencing or self-justifying. If we have reason to think that God can prevent us from having perfectly reliable cognition when it comes to making moral or scientific judgments (which is what the skeptical theist must claim), then why think our judgments about the contents of revelation would be any more reliable. 

Why should you think that God is really revealing the truth to you when you read the Bible or look at the stars when you already accept that he may have (moral) reasons for limiting our epistemic access to truth?

In the end then, a Plantingan religious epistemology would appear to be incompatible with a ST-response to the problem of evil. This is just one more way in which ST fails to provide any comfort to the theist.