A strict deterministic physicalism is very difficult to reconcile with
our sense of how thinking ought to work-- this is partially the
argument Plantinga is making above, but this difficulty of naturalism predates him. The easiest demonstration of what I mean is something like this: we immediately discount thoughts that we know (or strongly suspect) to have physical causation. We think of the "real" Phineas Gage as the one without the railroad spike in his head. Or, for another example, we discount many things drunk people do, because we know it is caused by alcohol. Ditto for schizophrenics, etc. But this is inconsistent: all thoughts in a physical system are ultimately externally caused. Why should some thoughts be privileged? Shouldn't I discount your thinking because I "know" it is only the random motions of atoms in your cranium? For that matter, how do you ever have relevant thoughts at all? Since all of your thoughts are ultimately part of a long chain of external causation reaching far into the past, doesn't it strike you as remarkably odd that you can think about your spouse when you hear their car roll into your driveway? Why should your neuronal activity correspond to relevant subjects that aren't present? So, in this objection, naturalism is difficult to live with consistently because we feel-- and universally act-- as though our thoughts are privileged. We differentiate between thoughts caused by something external to a person vs thoughts that somehow arise internally. Yet naturalism, if we're consistent, doesn't seem to allow for this distinction. (Plantinga is making a more specific sub-argument re:specifically what we should expect, epistemologically, if evolutionary naturalism is true.) I'd also point at ontology as another difficulty. Human beings pretty universally act as though identity were a real and tangible thing. Further, we routinely recognize each other, even after decades have passed and many changes have occurred-- including the replacement of every atom in our body. If you're an idealist, a dualist, or any number of other ontological positions, you have wiggle room to define identity. Yet in a materialistic system, identity makes no sense-- everything is flux, and there is no rational sense in which one is the same person as yesterday. Yet human beings speak and at as though identity is a real thing. I say that I love you and only you-- or I say, "That's not the person I know and love." It's not impossible to try and explain this in materialistic terms, but it requires a lot of complex maneuvering where other positions do not.
Then there is the classic is/ought difficulty.
Basically, in a materialistic system, one cannot possibly use the word "ought" rationally. One can be descriptive, but not proscriptive. So, if you murder me in cold blood-- for example-- in a materialistic system we can very consistently say things like: Society sends people who murder others to jail if they are caught. Most human beings are shocked and horrified by murder and believe those who murder should be punished. Murder destroys social cohesion. That is, we can describe the beliefs people generally hold about murder. We can state that murder in our society carries such and such a punishment. But what you cannot say, rationally, is murder is wrong. Not in the way we want to. Because the first and obvious rejoinder is: "Says who?" That is, without a god or some sort of pantheistic "ground of all being", you have no higher power to create, enforce, or justify a universal moral proscription. Can a naturalistic ethics be created? Yes! Would it be perfectly consistent to say that human beings evolved to have social constructs that enable advantageous group behaviors? To say that however we feel, whether it's a universal or not, most human beings will act in a certain fashion we describe as moral? Yes! But that's not what we want, and it's not how we talk about morality, or treat it in actual fact. We want to say that pedophilic rape is wrong for everyone, everywhere-- that it's evil, and those who do it are evil, and it doesn't matter what their culture approves of, or whether they think it's all right. That is, we want a universal-a standard that is above anyone's opinion, or any group's culture. Even for mundane moral matters, we argue as if there is in fact some kind of universal standard that everyone agrees on: when I accuse you of stealing from me, you call me a liar, or try to show I'm mistaken, or outline how it was a misunderstanding and you were just borrowing, or you pin the blame on someone else. But you don't just say: "So what? Who cares about your morality?" No one looks at you like you've lost your mind for acting as though there is some universal standard-- but in materialism, there isn't one. A related issue is punishment. We treat insane people, but we punish criminals. That is, we act as though criminals had some choice in the matter,as well
as considering their punishment not just to be rehabilitating, but
also deserved. In a deterministic and materialistic system: why? The criminal was predetermined by a cascade of external causes. Their crime was as inevitable as the rising sun. They're as little capable of diverting course as a mental patient. Moreover, there is no sense in which they can "deserve" a punishment. (No doubt you're sharp enough to notice that this is a subset of the is/ought problem: "they deserve" is another way of saying "they ought".) So if we were consistent, we'd never talk about or treat criminals as morally culpable-- there's no room for evil, onlysick. (And even that is flaky: how is one state "preferable" to another? There is no normative ideal-- why should we call this person "sick", and that person "well"?) Last, but not least-- naturalism has more difficulties with consistency, but I'm long winded enough and hitting the high points-- is the problem of qualia. Qualia is a problem for everyone, but it's most acute for naturalism, imo. (An excellent and accessible summation of the qualia problem can be found in Thomas Nagel's What is it Like to be a Bat?.) At its most basic, the problem of qualia is this: subjective experience seems to be separate from, or an addition to, objective and physical things. The color red can be objectively defined as a wavelength of light of so many fractions of a meter. Indeed, except in exceptional situations such as color blindness, this wavelength of light will always correlate with our perception of the color red. Yet it seems to us that-- and we certainly act as though-- our perception of the color red, our experience of it, is something very different from, and not reducible to, some more objective description such as, "Light of such and such wavelength striking photosensitive cells properly ennervated by an anatomically and cellularly normal brain", etc. Those subjective experiences, we'd collectively call "qualia". Pain is also a good example. While it may be true that one cannot experience pain without certain kinds of nerve cell activity, it doesn't seem to be true that the nerves firing are the "whole story", so to speak. Mere nerves firing does not explain whatever it is we feel when we feel pain. But in a materialistic universe, this is a bit baffling. You can't hold an experience of pain, you can't count it or put it on a scale and weigh it. While it seems to require certain parameters of mass and
energy to occur, the experience itself isn't made of mass and
energy, and when it occurs, the associated mass and energy may be similar but is in no way unique (that is, there is no completely unique and 1 for 1 causative relationship). Moreover, we not only act as though this has an independent existence, we can talk intelligent about, agree on, and share with each other, to some extent, this experience. That is, it appears to have some external existence outside of any given creature, but no easily quantifiable objectivedescription in terms of physical quantities. How can something in a materialistic universe appear to be an emergent or supravenient thing, having an independent existence, yet not being reducible or exhaustively explained in physical terms? So, those are a few major difficulties with naturalism. Philosophy of math, and the unreasonable effectiveness and predictive power of math-- what mathematics actually are, and why it works-- are also thorny in a materialistic world. For example, physics is rife with examples of some abstract mathematical object or formula, uncovered and explicated without any reference to the real world, that is forgotten for decades or centuries before it's discovered that it actually perfectly models a very real process in the actual world. What are the odds that some subjective machination, entirely abstract and subjective, should later match perfectly with something physically real? Anyhow, this is way too long already and no one will read it (nor would I blame them). I leave off on this note: Let me be clear that I am only outlining problems that are difficult to consistently believe and/or act on as a naturalist. The distinction is that a lot of these aren't an issue of whether naturalistic determinism is true, in the sense of being the actual fact of the matter. For example, while it may be irrational for you to believe that your personal belief in naturalism likely to actually correspond to the world-as-it-is (as opposed to being the entirely unrelated byproduct of externally caused atomic motions in your brain)-- that isn't an argument that naturalism is untrue. Indeed, it could certainly be the case that naturalism is true, and your belief in naturalism is just a coincidence. That is, you can't rationally believe that naturalism is true-- that believe is without warrant-- but naturalism can be true whether you're "allowed" to believe it or not.
Similarly, while I would find it very odd for human beings to
universally believe and act as though they libertarian free will when they are in fact determined-- that is an epistemological objection, not an ontological one. There is no contradiction in human beings believing one thing and the opposite being the case. So, while there are more fundamental philosophical objections to naturalism, I want to make clear that I'm responding to the question: "What do you mean by [naturalism] being difficult to act consistently with?" The fact that we ask someone to pass the salt shaker, send criminals to jail, argue as though there were some universal moral standard, think pain exists as its own thing, or talk about our identity as though it were something real-- that's a description of what people fairly universally think and do. And none of it means that naturalism is untrue. But, if naturalism is true, those are all actions and beliefs that carry the a priori assumption that naturalism is not, in fact, true. If we were consistent naturalists, we'd never choose to ask someone to pass the salt shaker (surely the chain of events leading to this moment have predetermined whether they will or won't-and are more sufficient or efficient causation than our vocal chords vibrating), punish criminals (it's not their fault, never mind it's irrational to say they ought to not commit comes), trust our own thoughts (they're as physically determined or random as a lunatic's), or talk about being in love or seeing red (more proper to describe the pattern of nerve impulses)-- among other things. So I've no quarrel with naturalism being true-- but if you say so, I'll be highly suspicious. You lunatic.