Alvin Plantinga

I read this book seven years ago. If I had reviewed it then I would have given in five stars. I would have proudly gone into detail about the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Today I am embarrassed that I ever considered such ideas as worth my time.

Plantinga accepts the story of evolution as true. That's his mistake. Since he is also a Christian he now has to rationalize his alleged belief in the Bible with his belief in evolution and the deep time supposedly needed to make it work. He does this with the notion of evolution being "guided" by some god giving the atheistic tale a theistic sugar-coating.

I will admit that philosophically some god could have guided evolution. That is, you could use that as an axiom grounding a philosophical fantasy land. However, no matter what some hypothetical god might have done, given the Bible, the Christian God did nothing of the sort. Just read Genesis.

What Plantinga's book shows is the success of evolution as an anti-theistic propaganda device. Even people professionally interested in analytic rationality, like him, have fallen for it.

Evolution is not science. There is no real scientific mechanism that takes us from nothing to something or from something to life -- or from pond scum to human beings.

It is like building a house of cards. The builder is a creator, a human being. The house falls under naturalistic processes identified by real scientists as gravity with a gust of wind perhaps coming through the door. No matter how much time you give those non-creative, mindless gusts of wind or gravity hoping they will one day go backwards and build the house of cards, they never will -- never.

However, that is precisely what evolution wants you to believe is possible. And that is what Plantinga is sugar-coating in this book with his deception that evolution could be "guided". Why would any self-respecting God guide naturalistic processes that do not exist?… (meer)

This is a superb epistemological argument for the de jure (as opposed to de facto) validity of warranted Christian belief. Plantinga's main goal is to determine whether it is rational, intellectually acceptable, to hold Christian belief. Using a hybrid Aquinas/Calvin model, Plantinga defines what exactly he means by Christian belief (teaser: the crux of the model is what Calvin terms the sensus divinitatis). Turning to Freud and Marx on the other side, Plantinga distills all opposition to warranted theistic belief since Epicurus's eloquent paradox (what we call today the argument from evil) into two strains: fantasy or illusion that stems from our wish-fulfillment faculties; and external pressure (e.g. societal, parental, etc.). In 500 pages, this book covers more ground and turns more stones than any other book I've read, and uses a mix of analytical philosophy and dialectics. Before reading, I would get at least a working knowledge of probability calculus, Freud's FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION, Hume's ENQUIRY, Kant's PURE REASON, and the main positions of more contemporary individuals like Rorty, Dawkins, and Dennett. (Marx is unnecessary, as he didn't write much on religion, and most know the common quip about religion being the opiate of the people). After setting up the models of the sides of the arguments, the de jure question of warrant is raised in the context of Enlightenment, scientific reason, atheism, agnosticism, postmodernism, pluralism, and, as I said, the argument from evil. Through it all,
Plantinga hunts for defeaters to the stance that Christian belief does not imply lack of intellectual warrant. No matter one's position on the topic, this is a masterwork of scholarship worthy of careful reading and consideration. Yes, it will take quite some time and effort to work through, but it is the worth the journey.
… (meer)