Summary
Alvin Plantinga weighs what naturalism and theism respectively tell us about being able to trust our own faculties.
You might say that naturalism gives you some reason to trust your cognitive faculties when it comes to what’s needed for survival and reproduction, but not when it comes to knowledge of anything beyond that. If naturalism is true, then our noetic faculties – our faculties by … the way in which we know the world and so on – that will have developed by virtue of evolutionary processes and what one would expect, then, is that our faculties are designed to enable us to survive. But that’s quite another thing from their being such as to enable us to really know the world at the level of science. Maybe to survive I have to know certain things, like what a tiger looks like and where I can find something to eat and so on. I certainly don’t have to be able to know the sorts of things that modern science tells us about.
Theism tells us, as I said, that God has created the world and God has created us human beings, created us in his image. God is a pre-eminent knower; one of his main characteristics is being omniscient, knowing everything. So if we’re created in God’s image, you would expect us too to be able to know something about our world, and you’d expect to have created the world in such a way, structured it in such a way, that we could know something about it. So I think theism and science fit together very well.
