Against Plantinga's Anti-Naturalism Argument

I don't really like Plantinga's anti-naturalism argument in Warranted Christian Belief, and I've been meaning to put down my thoughts on it for a while now. I don't have my copy of the book around, or what is much the same it is lost in some pile somewhere, so please correct me if you feel that I am misrepresenting Plantinga.

To begin: Plantinga argues that if both naturalism and evolution are true, then our cognitive faculties may utterly misrepresent the world; therefore, we would not be able to trust our theoretical science which tells us that evolution is true. He give the following thought-argument: a guy sees a sabre-tooth tiger, and thinks that the sight of a sabre-tooth marks the beginning of a foot-race. His thought is not reliable as far as knowledge is concerned, as his cognitive faculties are not fashioned for the purpose of knowledge; they are fashioned for survival, as the evolutionist needs. His running a foot-race will save him from the tiger, ensuring survival. This scenario is either probable or inscrutable for Plantinga, thereby showing that on naturalistic (and so unguided) and evolutionary (and so geared purely toward survival) grounds, it is either (a) probable that we do not have cognitive faculties geared toward accurate knowledge, or (b) we have no idea whether they are geared toward knowledge, which lands us in much the same situation. Of course, there is more to Plantinga's argument, but this is the crux of it it seems to me.

My counter-argument then is this: there is a probable scenario under which, within a materialistic evolutionary account, we have accurate theoretical knowledge of the material world. Plantinga's thought-experiment, and all similar ones, cannot even get off the ground because it cannot account for how the random thought about running foot-races (or any other concept so divorced from reality) could have arisen, other than perhaps as a massively freak mutation of genes (which would be quite improbable on the naturalists account). I do not claim to be building an air-tight argument. For one thing, it is probabilistic like Plantinga's own, and for another, I simply do not understand what the force is behind Plantinga's account. If nothing else, then, hopefully this will help to frame the issues at stake.

First, let us start with what Plantinga's argument is not doing. it is not an argument that either life or self-reflective consciousness in themselves would be improbable for the materialist. Therefore, I can assume that materialism could account for these, and leave it to other arguments to show whether or not this is the case (I'm fine with saying it is not; I have no predilection toward materialism myself). Also, Plantinga does not give sub-arguments in this argument as to things like mind-body dualism, or for the reality of individual organisms as such, and neither do I think that the materialist should grant this.

I set out the following propositions which would seem to be probable for the materialistic evolutionist:

1. Physical Holism: we live in a physical field. Any organism that arises within it is still part of the field. The behavior of that organism is not something completely separate from its environment; simply regarding the physical field, it is the field acting on itself.
2. Pragmatism: just as the rise of life is not a clean break from the regular actions of the physical field, so to concept-formation is not a clean break from behavior. There is a progression of thinking, and it is tied to behavior; there is no purely mental realm unless one wants to be a Platonist, and the materialist does not want this.
3. Mental Holism: Concepts are not single thoughts. Concepts interrelate amongst themselves. If I think about foot-races and sabre-tooths conceptually, this is already tied to other thoughts about foot-races and other thoughts about sabre-tooths.
4. Regularity: Behaviors that arise for survival are regular; maybe not perfectly so, but in tendency. If an animal cannot regularly tell the difference between suitable residences and unsuitable, or between predators and prey, it does not much of a shot at survival. Survival mechanisms must in general be regular; if they were not, they would be random, they would not help survival since they could not respond to the environment appropriately.

I am not going to argue whether all of these are right in themselves, merely that they make sense for the materialist. Regularity follows from survivability, and Physical Holism seems to me to simply follow from saying that (a) all that exists is material, and (b) all material interacts. However consciousness evolves (as a phenomenon, whether or not it entails immaterial properties or substances), it must come from matter and in line with what that matter is doing. The principle of Mental Holism seems to me to simply come from what it is to have a concept; a concept of "foot-race" is meaningless unless it has multiple uses which are related.

If this is the case, then regularity exists at the level of the physical organism. It must behave in some regular way within its environment in order to survive. When it starts meeting predators, it starts developing avoidance behaviors. When concepts form, these avoidance behaviors are already present; the evolutionary history makes our foot-runner to have fear long before foot-races. The concepts further are developed insofar as they are related to behavior, since all explanation is material and therefore concepts need recourse to material action for their explanation. The regularity of behavior demands that, as a survival mechanism, concepts are similarly regular in relation to the environment.

If all of this works, and I think that it is a least probable once one starts trying to think like the materialist on their own grounds, then we have a way of preserving theoretical science. Our thoughts are regularly formed in relation to our environment. I make regular distinctions between different colors based on the regularity in the environment; if there were no regular stimuli, my experience would not be regular (or at least, it is much more implausible to posit a cognitive scheme in which that chair is always brown and that futon always blue separate from any difference in the stimuli). Science is aimed at looking for and analyzing these regularities. I don't catch all regularities in the world, but science doesn't need that.

So, maybe I can find real regularities in the world, but maybe my thoughts about the world do not match up with it; my cognitive faculties would be ill-formed. But I'm not sure what this would even mean. The concepts interrelate; every single thought is both based on regularities in the environment and Mental Holism. My concept of "red" is not something separate from my concept of "blue", since they condition each other. If both are regularly formed from the environment, and so are all the rest of my mutually-conditioning thoughts, what is left for my cognitive faculties to be egregiously wrong about?

Maybe I think that something is red, but it is not in itself. I have no idea what color is in something itself, but let's assume this for those with better imaginations than my own. Who cares? As long as I can differentiate the different colors, and I can see the continuity between the colors in the rainbow, what difference does that make? So, then, what about color-blindness? But I would have to counter that color-blindness is no different than the fact that most of us can't see ultraviolet on its own. The color-blind person has less information about the world and so can investigate less regularities, but this is not in and of itself the same as making "false" judgments. And it seems to me that any time one wants to fill our regular concepts with content in this way, one reaches the same conclusion: the content didn't actually matter for either practice or theory. I'll hold to that until someone can give me a genuine alternative.

At this point, someone might say that I have missed Plantinga's point. And certainly my argument has come to a very different place than Plantinga's epistemology. But my point was that he was completely misconstruing the situation in the first place in ways that the materialist would not care for, so whatever point I missed is one that the materialist would ignore anyhow.