REFUTING ALVIN PLANTINGA - Jersey Flight

If one has read Plantinga's "Warranted Christian Belief" then one knows what a terrible waste of life it is. Plantinga is a master of sophistry! Here is a philosophical manipulator extraordinaire!

Vital to Plantinga's program is the reality that his position is not premised by prior arguments or deduced from other beliefs. If his so-called "properly basic belief," does in fact, rely on pre-commitments then his argument [via his own admission] utterly fails (351-353).

But lucky for Plantinga, because he is such a skilled and intelligent thinker, he assures us that this is not the case: "This way does not involve arguments from other beliefs. Rather, the fundamental idea is that God provides us human beings with faculties or belief-producing processes that yield these beliefs and are successfully aimed at the truth; when they work the way they were designed to in the sort of environment for which they were designed, the result is warranted belief." pg.357 Oxford University Press 2000

Even if Plantinga has this so-called properly basic belief, how does he know how he has it? There is no prior premise here? What about the word "faculties," does this not require a prior belief? Can one have a belief based on faculties without having a belief of faculties?

Most pointedly, and as I have consistently criticized Plantinga for years, he assumes specific attributes when using the word God. Clearly this is prior.

Ultimately Plantinga's position amounts to the claim [blank assertion!] that his belief does not require any prior beliefs, but this is not the actual reality of his position. His entire position is based on the integrity of certain propositions which are given in the form of private testimony (what brighter minds call the Word of God). In all reality the inescapable premise of naturalism stands at the core of Plantinga's thesis!

How can Plantinga beg the question forever? "I've argued that Christian belief -- the full panoply of Christian belief, including trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection -- can, if true, have warrant..." pg.357

Indeed, green Martians on the moon can have warrant, if true! But more importantly, Plantinga tells us that he's argued for the "full panoply of Christian belief." This means there are prior beliefs and prior arguments which are vital to his epistemology. Did Plantinga get the idea of the Holy Spirit from the Holy Spirit? What about his belief in the concept of a "model"... do all prior beliefs then get explained by means of his divinely-basic-injection? "God gave me everything," means I have no prior belief!

But this is all stupid, very, very stupid. And people who play these kinds of games with Plantinga; people who think that an imposter, sophist, hack, like Plantinga, is brilliant, have merely manifested how easily they are duped by supernatural stupidity. Dear God, the man's central arguments are the Aquinas/Calvin model of assertion, and the internal witness of the Holy Spirit (IIHS)! How can this be anything other than a joke? What kind of thinker do you have to be to affirm these as viable premises? The truth about Plantinga is that his position amounts, not to properly basic belief, but to desired-belief-assumptions! 

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