Plantinga v. Dennett

I wish I’d been there…  Philosophy title fight between theist Plantinga and atheist Dennett.

I’ve seen Plantinga give a talk presenting some of his arguments.  They depend essentially on sophistical fabrication of prior probabilities.  The link I’ve given takes Dennett to task for rudeness, and I would not be surprised if this is true.  I don’t see what the “new atheists” think they’re accomplishing in mocking bare theism.  To be sure, any degree of literalism about Christian mythology is absurd (talking snakes, human sacrifice, drinking blood…) , but I think that bare theism–basically deism–can be respectably held.  Anyhow, I empathize with Dennett’s impulse to rude response to some extent because in a way mockery is about all that you can do when the “argument” is just the other person insisting on a bunch of a priori probability judgments, but I also agree with this reviewer that the rudeness is likely counterproductive.  Naturalists can and should try to do better.

The reviewer to whom I linked wrote:

Post-script: It has been about ten minutes since the session ended. I spoke to Peter Van Inwagen about the talk and he said it was an expected performance and that while it was a clash of worldviews, it was an interesting clash in two styles of doing philosophy. Initially, I thought to myself, “Yeah, Plantinga thinks philosophy is about arguments; Dennett thinks it is about stories.” But on further reflection I realized that Van Inwagen had a point. Dennett believes that science can tell us many things about metaphysics and epistemology, that we work from science to these positions. Plantinga thinks of these matters rather differently.

This seems to me to be correct, and there’s much to be said in Dennett’s favor on exactly this point.  Plantinga’s “thinking philosophy is about arguments”, as I’ve said, means making lots of appeals to claims about prior probabilities.  Establishing an objective framework for assigning prior probabilities seems to me to be a hopeless project philosophically; though how knowledge is established and advanced nevertheless is a demand that is fair to press.  Dennett’s “telling stories” reminds me of WVO Quine’s insistence that we inherit and rely on the “lore of our fathers” by working within the scientific community (and mothers, I might add) and Isaac Newton’s “standing on the shoulder’s of giants”.  Plantinga is a tall man, but not so tall.