Now, most people are not going to want to repeat a year or more just to transfer from philosophy to something else just because they begin to find philosophy difficult. So from that perspective it makes sense that the number of graduates going into postgraduate education is low; particularly if the prior comments regarding male and female psychology/neuroscience is true. Overall, just because someone has an undergraduate philosophy degree doesn’t mean that 1) they want to pursue philosophy; 2) they are any good at philosophy; 3) they can afford 4+ years of postgraduate study in philosophy; or 4) they meet the entry requirements for postgraduate philosophy.

Platinga’s arguments are so vacuous it’s hard to know where to start.

So for a start “those on the naturalist side of the debate” are people who believe the natural world is all we can KNOW, not necessarily all there IS.

Next…“But for most of us, our religious beliefs are not like scientific hypotheses” and “we are none the worse [for that].” Well yes I’m afraid you are, because your beliefs are no more than hunches and guesses and wishful thinking and confirmation bias….just because you have them does not make it so.

And on…”their evidence base includes facts other than scientific ones, such as the existence of a loving creator” – this is called MAKING SHIT UP.

Platinga’s argument that naturalism undermines itself is what exactly? Why would a naturalist not have reason to believe that our brains could generate true beliefs? Or that our collective brains could not develop a system to discover and verify facts about the world. This is not incompatible with the fact that our brains can also get it wrong. This doesn’t mean naturalism undermines itself.

It’s exhausting only in the sense that one might become exhausted due to repetitive and incontrollable face-palming.

Early in our history (and for most, ever since) we attributed agency to random events. Attempting to appease unseen arbitrary agents – “who” rewarded us with random, intermittent reinforcement – is probably why religion ran off the rails from the very start. The modern peace-loving Western religious believer enjoys a bounty of privileges bestowed upon him in the name of God and empire and seized by the application of the sword and the fire. Indeed, it takes a very selective reading of our Abrahamic traditions to skip all the killing and capturing and ethnic cleansing of the “out group.” Still, over the course of human civilization we have learned to extend our “in group” and to apply The Golden Rule to our growing circle of friends. Despite the bipolar messages received from Bronze and Iron Age deities we no longer need to rely on written records of revealed truth in order to live peaceably with our neighbors. If we’re inclined to be good to our own without being told to, why not eliminate the middle-man? Be well.

Michael

As Michael says. But also, we don’t have access to the early modern human thoughts and how they developed these ideas; and we have no access to early language and how they were expressed. Then, do you suppose that early documented civilizations didn’t appreciate these very same ideas? So, when Egyptians, who to modern monotheists believed in religious nonsense, also appreciated these ideas do you attribute these ideas to their gods? And if their gods were false is it the case that their ideas about humans relationships are not directly related to their religious beliefs, but rather their religious beliefs are just used as a vehicle to express what is naturally, evolutionarily, socially, human interaction?

Modern monotheists have a very short span of appreciation. Typically defined by their own particular religion. Everything prior to their religions is seem as mistaken or incomplete. And what about the future when humans have ‘evolved’ further, either naturally or artificially, to a state where they have much better mental abilities than we have now so that religion, all religion, is seen as dark age superstition. This tendency to attribute correctness to one’s own religion, one’s own time, as if this right now is how some imagined god wanted humans to be seems so naive and parochial.