The explanation of our reliability is not physical

1. All facts completely reducible to physics are first-order facts.

2. All facts completely explained by first-order facts are themselves completely reducible to first-order facts.

3. Facts about our epistemic reliability are facts about truth.

4. Facts about truth are not completely reducible to first-order facts.

5. Therefore, no complete explanation of our epistemic reliability is completely reducible to physics.

This is a variant on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.

Premise (4) follows from Tarski’s Indefinability of Truth Theorem.

The one premise in the argument that I am not confident of (2). But it sounds right.

Where does the evolutionary argument for naturalism work?

I’ve never been moved by Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in general, but I’ve also always found it plausible that naturalism and evolution undercuts cognitive reliability in certain areas, such as metaphysics. It seems, on the other hand, really plausible that we would get cognitive reliability for empirical things (largely because of the fact that naturalism makes causal theories of content very likely).

One might go on to conjecture that Plantinga’s argument works everywhere outside of empirical areas. I thought so until I realized that there is a significant area of normativity where the argument doesn’t work: prudential value judgments. This is because that life and reproduction is good for living things, and many other goods, noncoincidentally, contribute to life and reproduction. But at the same time, we are evolutionarily selected for successful promotion of life and reproduction. A being that believed that life is bad would be unlikely to promote its own survival, and hence unlikely to pass on its genes.

Plantinga’s standard answer to similar objections in the empirical arena is that behavior does not come just from beliefs, but from a combination of belief and desire. But this response is rather implausible in the prudential rationality case. It is extremely plausible that there is a conceptual link between a mental state representing something as good for one and having a desire for that thing. If there were no correlation between a mental state S respecting a thing and having a desire for that thing, that mental state just is not a belief that the thing is good for one.

Transworld depravity is false

Plantinga’s transworld depravity thesis holds that in every world that God is contingently capable of actualizing (i.e., every “feasible” world), either there is no significant freedom or there is at least one free wrong choice. I will argue that transworld depravity is in fact false, assuming Molinism.

But consider a possible situation A where the first significantly free choice runs as follows. Eve has a choice whether to eat a delicious apple or not, while knowing that God has forbidden her from eating the apple. Eve comes into the choice with a pretty decent character. In particular, she is so constructed that she is unable to take God’s prohibitions to be anything but reasons against an action and God’s commands to be anything but reasons for an action. Nonetheless, she is free: she can choose to eat the apple on account of its deliciousness, despite God’s prohibiting it.

By Molinism, if enough detail is built into the situation, either:

1. in A, Eve would eat the apple, or

2. in A, Eve would not eat the apple.

If (2) is true, then transworld depravity is false, because God could simply take away freedom after Eve’s first choice, and so we have a feasible world where there is exactly one significantly free choice, and it’s right.

Suppose then (1) is true. Now imagine a situation A^* where just before Eve is deliberating whether to eat the apple, God announces that the prohibition on eating the apple is now changed into a command to eat the apple. If in A, Eve would eat the apple on account of its deliciousness despite its being forbidden, she would a fortiori eat the apple if God were to command her to do so. Thus:

3. in A^*, Eve would eat the apple.

But then transworld depravity is false, because again God could take freedom away after Eve’s first choice.

The argument as it stands does not show that transworld depravity is necessarily false. I try to do that here with a similar but perhaps less compelling argument.

Against the actual truth of transworld depravity

Here is an interesting result. If the Biblical account of creation is true, then Plantinga’s Trans-World Depravity (TWD) thesis is false. All this doesn’t affect Plantinga’s Free Will Defense which only needs the logical possibility of TWD, but it limits its usefulness a little by making clear that the defense is based on an actually-false assumption. (Quick review: Plantinga uses the logical possibility of TWD to argue for the logical possibility of evil. That argument would survive my critique. But he also suggests that TWD is epistemically possible, and hence could be the heart of a theodicy. That move does not survive, I think.)

I’ll take TWD to be:

1. Every significantly free creature in every feasible world does wrong.

A feasible world is one that would eventuate from God’s strongly actualizing the strongly strongly actualized portion of it.

But now consider this thesis which is very plausible on the Biblical account of creation:

2. At least one human made a significantly free right choice before any human made a free wrong choice.

For the first sin in the Biblical account is presented as Eve’s taking of the forbidden fruit in Genesis 3. But prior to that, indeed prior to Eve’s creation, Adam was commanded to take care of the garden (Gen. 2:15). It would have been a sin for Adam to fail to do that, and since this was before the first sin, it follows that Adam must have done it. Moreover, Adam being a full human being presumably had freedom of will, and hence was capable of refusing to work the garden. Hence Adam’s decision to obey God’s command to work the garden was a significantly free choice before any human made a free wrong choice.

Now, I don’t take the story of Genesis 2-3 to be literally true, but it tells us basic truths about the entry of evil into the world, and hence it is very likely that the structural claim (2) carries over into reality from the story.

I now argue that:

3. If (2) is true, then TWD is false.

Right after the first human made a significantly free right choice, God had the power to prevent any further significantly free choices from ever being made. Had God exercised that power, the world would have contained a creature—namely, the human who made the significantly free right choice—that is a counterexample to TWD. Moreover, the world where God exercises that power is plainly feasible. Hence, (1) is false, since in (1) there is a significantly free creature that does the right thing.

That said, Plantinga’s TWD is stronger than it needs to be for his defense. All he really needs to work with is:

4. Every feasible world that contains a significantly free creaturely right choice contains a free creaturely wrong choice.

And the world where God intervenes and prevents significantly free choices after the first human significantly free right choice is not a counterexample to (4), since prior to the creation of humans there was already sin by angels.

Note, though, that someone who wants to defend (4) by invoking the prior sin of angels needs to hold that the first humans would have sinned in their first significantly free choice had God not created angels or not given angels significant free will, no matter what circumstances the first humans were placed in. In other words, the defender of (4) has to hold that the actual righteousness of the first human significantly free choice has a strong counterfactual dependence on angelic freedom. The only plausible way I know of defending something like this is to say that angelic free choices are a part of human causal history and that essentiality of origins is true. So, interestingly, to hold that the weakened TWD thesis (4) is true seems to require both invoking the sin of angels and essentiality of origins.

Moreover, the defender of the actual truth of (4) would need to hold that the first angelic wrong choice preceded the first angelic significantly free right choice. For suppose an angelic significantly free choice came before any angelic sin. Then, again, God could have suspended free will right after that choice, and not created humans at all, and we would have a feasible world that is a counterexample to (4). Next, suppose that the first angelic significantly free choice was simultaneous with the first angelic sin. Presumably, the two were committed by different angels. But God could have suspended the freedom of those angels who in the actual world sin (this does not even require Molinism: God doesn’t need to know that they would sin to suspend their freedom), and plausible the simultaneous significantly free right choices of the other angels would still have eventuated. And then God could have suspended freedom altogether, thereby furnishing us with another feasible world that is a counterexample to (4).

One can modify (4) in various ways to get around this. For instance, one could say this:

5. Every feasible world that contains a significantly free creaturely right choice and that contains many generations of significantly free creatures contains a free creaturely wrong choice.

But note that if (5) is true, then one needs to invoke more than the value of freedom in saying that God is justified in creating a world with evil. One needs the value of multi-generational freedom.

An argument that Trans-World Depravity is unlikely to be true

Assume Molinism. Plantinga's Trans-World Depravity (TWD) is the thesis that every feasible world--world compatible with the conditionals of free will--that contains at least one significantly free choice contains at least one sin. I want to think about an argument that TWD is likely false.

For consider a world where God creates exactly one intelligent creature with the typical motivations and character of a typical morally upright adult human being. God then forbids the creature from imposing pointless pain on itself, and only ever gives the creature only one significantly free choice: to eat a nutritious food that it likes or to endure five hours of torture. Let's imagine the situation where God creates such a creature and it's about to make that one significantly free choice. Call this circumstances C. Given what we know about decent human beings and their motivations, the creature would very likely eat the nutritious food rather than be tortured. Very well. So very likely the conditionals of free will are such that the world where the creature eats the nutritious food is feasible. But if that world is feasible, then TWD is false.

That was too quick. I jumped between answers to two different probabilistic questions:

1. What is the epistemic probability of the Molinist conditional that were C to obtain, the creature would choose wrongly?
2. Were C to obtain, what would be the chance of the creature choosing wrongly?

It is clear that the answer to (2) is "Very low." But to argue that TWD is very likely false, I have to say that the answer to (1) is also "very low". This leads to a difficult set of questions about the relationship between Molinist conditionals and chances. Lewis's principal principle does imply that if we were to knowingly (with certainty) find ourselves in C, and if we were certain of Molinism, we would have to give the same answer to (1) and (2). The argument goes as follows: given C the Molinist conditional has the same epistemic probability as its consequent, but the epistemic probability of its consequent is the same as its chance by the principal principle. But the answer we should give to (2) in those circumstances where we were knowingly in C may not be the same as answer as we should actually give to (2). Consider this possibility. Our current epistemic probability of the Molinist conditional in (1) is 1/2, but God would be very unlikely to make C obtain unless the conditional were false. He just wouldn't want to create a world where the creature would freely wrongfully choose to endure the torture. In that case, if we were to learn that C obtains, that would give us information that the Molinist conditional is very likely false. And hence the answer to (1) is "1/2", the answer to (2) is "Very low", but were C to obtain, the answer to (1) would be "Very low" as well.

Maybe. But I think things may be even less clear. For the biased sampling involved in God's choosing what to create on the basis of conditionals of free will undercuts the principal principle, I think. I think more work is needed to be done to figure out whether or not there is a good argument against TWD here or not.

A variant on Plantinga's evolutionary self-defeat argument

If naturalism is true, we would not expect our metaphysics to be reliable beyond the natural realm, since dealing with the natural realm is all our reasoning ability evolved for. But naturalism is a metaphysical thesis that goes beyond the natural realm—namely, it claims that there is nothing beyond it. Thus, if naturalism is true, we would not expect to be reliable in getting to claims like naturalism.