Eliminativism argues that our ordinary concepts of mental states—beliefs, desires, intentions—are fundamentally mistaken and will be eliminated by mature neuroscience, just as phlogiston theory was eliminated by chemistry. The argument proceeds thus: (1) folk psychology constitutes a theory about how minds work, employing concepts like 'belief' and 'desire'; (2) this theory is empirically false and explanatorily inadequate compared to neuroscience; (3) therefore, the entities it posits do not exist; (4) since religious beliefs are paradigmatic folk psychological states, they too are illusory; (5) consequently, the concept of God, which depends on intentional states like divine knowledge and will, becomes incoherent. The eliminativist concludes that neuroscience reveals religion to be based on a pre-scientific misunderstanding of human cognition.
The position emerged from mid-20th century philosophy of mind, particularly W.V.O. Quine's skepticism about intentionality in "Word and Object" (1960). Paul Churchland developed the full eliminativist program in "Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind" (1979) and "Matter and Consciousness" (1984), arguing that folk psychology is a stagnant research program ripe for elimination. Patricia Churchland extended this to religious experience in "Neurophilosophy" (1986) and "Braintrust" (2011). Stephen Stich's "From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science" (1983) provided influential arguments about the incoherence of belief-desire psychology. More recently, neuroscientists like Michael Gazzaniga in "The Ethical Brain" (2005) have suggested that neuroscience undermines traditional religious categories.
Theistic philosophers counter that eliminativism is self-refuting: if beliefs don't exist, then one cannot believe eliminativism is true. Alvin Plantinga in "Warrant and Proper Function" (1993) argues that eliminativism undermines the reliability of our cognitive faculties, including those used in science. Lynne Baker's "Saving Belief" (1987) defends the reality of intentional states through their indispensable explanatory role. William Hasker in "The Emergent Self" (1999) argues that conscious experience cannot be eliminated without absurdity. Eliminativists respond that self-refutation charges misunderstand their position—they're making claims within neuroscientific discourse, not folk psychology. They maintain that pragmatic indispensability doesn't entail ontological commitment, and that neuroscience will eventually provide better explanations without intentional concepts.
Unlike reductionism, which seeks to identify mental states with brain states, eliminativism denies that mental states exist at all. While physicalism merely claims everything is physical, eliminativism specifically targets folk psychological categories for elimination. Methodological naturalism restricts itself to naturalistic explanations in science without metaphysical commitments, whereas eliminativism makes the stronger claim that folk psychology is false. Causal closure arguments focus on the completeness of physical causation, while eliminativism attacks the conceptual framework of intentionality itself.