Showing papers in "Sophia in 1988"

Plantinga on atheistic induction

Abstract: The inductive or probabilistic argument from evil wields the actual quantity, diversity and dispersion of evil as evidence that renders imlikely the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good deity. As Plantinga construes it, the argument centers on the claim that (G) "God is omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good ''~ is somehow disconfirmed by {E) "There are 10 TM turps of evil. ''2 To date Plantinga has provided three distrinct responses to this argument. In The Nature of Necessity he argues that (E) does not disconfirm (G) based on an analysis of propositional disconfirmation, s He changes the locus of his attack on disconfirmation in "The Probabilistic Argument from Evil" to the atheist's reliance upon untenable interpretations of probability theory. ~ Finally, construing such head~n responses as the "low road" approach, Plantings pursues the "high road" approach in "Reason and Belief in GOd."B By epistemologically justifying {G) as a foundational belief, he attempts to reverse the problem of evil and argue from the co-existence of GOd and evil to the existence of some condition that justifies divine permission of evil. I have adequately criticized the second strategy elsewhere and I save the third for yet another occasion. My present concern is the heretofore unchallenged argument that appears in The Nature of Necessity. After explicating Plantinga's argument I will graft patently absurd premises onto its form to show the structure flawed. I will then identify three logical errors which doom both Plantinga's argument and my counterexample. Plantinga's refutation of the move from (E) to not~G) depends upon this account of confirmation: Let us say that a proposition p confirms a proposition q if q is more probable than not on p alone: if, that is, q would be more probable than not-q, with respect to what we know, if p were the only thing we knew that was relevant to q. And let us say that p disconfirms q if p confirms the denial of q.' Accordingly I reconstruct Plantinga's argument as follows: