drawing conclusions from this lack of knowledge is an argument from ignorance.
It might be called foolish, but I don't think it's an "argument from ignorance". My understanding of an "argument from ignorance" is that you say something like "we don't know in which way beliefs are related to behaviour, therefore they can't be related". That doesn't seem to me to be the same as what Plantinga is saying.
And you said "Since we have no idea what the probabilities are since it's still an open question" - Plantinga, however, was trying to start the discussion, giving some probabilities. Again, I'm not seeing the link to an "argument from ignorance" - you haven't established which portion of his argument is from ignorance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
I'd like to see you provide an argument for the way in which you think this is an argument from ignorance. What you seem to be saying is that Plantinga assumes he knows more than he does - which may be the result of ignorance, but it is not the same thing as an "argument from ignorance".
Hopefully you'd be able to provide a more succinct answer than 60+ pages of text, but I might be mistaken.
I think you were.
Wow, that's a terrible example. Your premise #1 is the result of inductive reasoning, not deductive.
You've misunderstood the point of my example. A deductive argument is one where if the argument is valid, then the conclusion will necessarily flow from the premises. A deductive argument is said to be sound if the premises are true.
A deductive argument's premises may be established by empirical evidence, or by inductive arguments...but the fact that a premise is inductively or empirically justified does not make the argument itself inductive. The example I gave was indeed deductive, and rested upon an inductively demonstrated premise. I want to know, if you think that deductive arguments are of little value, how you would use arguments like the above.
I was trying to show you how deductive reasoning is still necessary when we have empirically founded premises.
That they were simply interesting ideas until tested against the real world.
So, you don't think that the fact that a person was right for the very reasons they gave means anything?
The majority of reasoning we do from day to day is inductive, unless you can provide a deductive proof that "given x happened every Sunday before now, therefore x will happen this Sunday."
Again, my premises were inductively founded, but the argument itself was deductive.
Can you provide an example of non-empricial evidence?
I can't, because I shouldn't have used the word "evidence", sorry. The word evidence seems to imply inductive weight. Your answer to the question seems satisfactory though, that deductive arguments are fine if the premises are sound. But that's always been assumed. You had said earlier, "I find philosophy similar to early attempts at science, where people thought that they could derive information about the real world by making various assumptions and using deductive logic"...there seems to be a discrepancy here with what you're saying. Can deductive reasoning be used to make inferences about the real world, or not?
Teleological argument for god. Google provides tons of examples.
A search of TAG in google provides tons of examples of many different things
Again, there's no way he can do this given that he (along with everyone else) has no idea what mechanisms link belief and behavior. To calculate probability of an event, either you have an understood mechanism that provides predictive power, or you have a large enough sample set of previous events that lets you draw some inductive conclusion about the outcome of future events. The author has neither, so this is a third case, where he tries to reason in the absence of theory or evidence.
I don't believe this is true, and neither is it universally accepted. If we accept your argument, that we need to either understand the mechanism or have a large sample set, then we would not be able to reason that N&E is likely to produce rational beings. Yet this is exactly what a number of people who accept N&E have argued. Plantinga in an older paper quotes Quine:
"What does make clear sense is this other part of the problem of induction: why does our innate subjective spacing of qualities accord so well with the functionally relevant groupings in nature as to make our inductions tend to come out right? Why should our subjective spacing of qualities have a special purchase on nature and a lien on the future?
There is some encouragement in Darwin. if people's innate spacing of qualities is a gene-linked trait, then the spacing that has made for the most successful inductions will have tended to predominate through natural selection. Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind"
Now, if the Darwinist is allowed to argue that the probability of R on N&E is high, then the theist should likewise be allowed to present arguments that the probability is low. But if you think that neither should be permitted to discuss the probabilities on this topic, then perhaps you'd more appreciate Plantinga's second argument, that the probability is inscrutable and therefore we should be agnostic about R on N&E? (mentioned below)
I did the same and for some reason you rejected it out of hand, but you expect me to behave differently.
Where? I'm not sure which bit you're referring to.
And as the paper I referenced below shows, Plantinga gives the probability of one of his alternative explanations as "inscrutable". While not technically a synonym for "unknown based on current knowledge", it's at least honest about his (and everyone else's) lack of understanding about the subject.
Plantinga actually presents two arguments against naturalism:
1. That the probability of R given N&E is low
2. That the probability of R given N&E is inscrutable
I've been referring exclusively to his first argument, and not the second. That paper you linked to discusses both, I think.