A final word on Plantinga's EAAN (Part 4)

I’ve been blogging about Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) over the past few weeks. The original plan was to (1) explain the argument, (2) suggest that it wasn’t that devastating to naturalists if a humble idea of ‘truth’ was adopted, (3) show that Plantinga’s theistic beliefs don’t give him any better epistemic foundation than a naturalistic one, and finally, (4) to refute the first premise, without which, the argument fails. Steps 1-3 have been accomplished, and while I’ve been trying hard to accomplish step 4, I'm not confident that I or anybody else has been able to clearly and convincingly succeed. Philosopher, Stephen Law, believes he has, but I must admit that I don't understand his response to the EAAN well enough to explain it here. I'm waiting for him to provide a dumbed-down version for lay people like me to understand. In the meantime, though, I'm forced to consider that Plantinga may well be right about premise 1: on naturalism and evolution, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable probably is low. I actually want to thank Plantinga for reminding me of this prediction for it seems to me that things turn out looking very much as Plantinga would expect. This, I believe, provides even more evidence for naturalism and evolution and makes Christian theism even harder to accept. But before I get to that, there is one way that the first premise could very well turn out to be false.

If beliefs don’t affect behavior (epiphenomenalism), or they affect behavior but not by virtue of their content (semantic epiphenomenalism), then it is hard to see how evolution could select for mechanisms that produce True* beliefs, for evolution would seem to be blind to belief content just as Plantinga has suggested. However, if beliefs do affect behavior by virtue of their contents, then Plantinga’s crucial first premise is very likely false. As Plantinga himself has said:


"Now if content of belief did enter the causal chain that leads to behavior--and if true belief caused adaptive behavior (and false belief maladaptive behavior)--then natural selection, by rewarding and punishing adaptive and maladaptive behavior respectively, could shape the mechanisms that produce belief in the direction of greater reliability. There could then be selection pressure for true belief and for reliable belief-producing mechanisms." (Naturalism Defeated? p. 257)

It is probably the case that the naturalist lacks a robust explanation for how immaterial beliefs could cause behaviour, but that doesn't mean that there isn't one and it's not at all clear to me that the naturalist must be wedded to the idea that it's impossible. There is a long history attesting to the outstanding success of methodological naturalism (ie. science) in filling gaps in our knowledge and imagination - gaps previously filled by God or gods - with natural explanations. Plantinga likes to fill this particular explanatory gap with his God but there are problems with doing so that I have explained here, and I see no reason for the naturalist to also have to do so. If Plantinga disagrees, then I’d have to ask why he isn't correspondingly required to explain how it is that God himself tracks Truth*? I mean, how does he know, and even deeper, how does He know?

Ok. let's move on and see if the EAAN actually places a burden on Plantinga himself. Paraphrasing Plantinga: on naturalism and (therefore, unguided) evolution, the probability that a given belief will be true is 0.5. Accordingly, if someone has 100 independent beliefs, the probability that most of them, say, 75% of them, are true is going to be less than one in a million.

Now consider Harry the homo sapien living on the African Savannah 150,000 years ago. I suspect that Plantinga is correct in suggesting that the chance that the vast majority of his beliefs are going to be true is << 1/1,000,000.

Plantinga does think that our sensory organs could evolve naturally to reliably indicate certain environmental states of affairs, so some of Harry’s beliefs could also be true in some ways. For instance, Harry may believe that a green tree is in front of him and that he had better run around it or risk serious injury. Is his belief that the tree is green True? The tree merely absorbs all wavelengths of light except green. It reflects green wavelengths which are then detected by the indicators in his retina, leading to a belief that the tree is green, but the only thing that is green is his mental representation of the tree. Nevertheless, his idea that there is something in front of him and that colliding with it will cause injury surely is true. Does it matter that the tree isn’t really green but that his mental representation of it is? Evolution doesn’t seem to care about it so long as Harry sees the tree and avoids injury. Should we really care? That’s just how we experience certain truths about our environment. As I argued in part 2 of this series, that’s just truth to us.

So while most of Harry’s beliefs surely are false in a variety of possible ways, some are likely to be True and those that are likely to be True are the ones most likely to be derived from reliable indicators as Plantinga likes to call them, otherwise known as our senses. Now imagine what can happen when Harry and his colleagues can communicate and share their beliefs with tens, hundreds, thousands, and eventually billions of other people. And imagine what can happen when we realize, as a species, that the beliefs most likely to be True (or the ones with the most True content associated with them) are the ones that we can test against our environment. Imagine what can happen when that process shows us how poor many of our cognitive capabilities actually are and that we can begin to correct for those inadequacies. Plantinga is probably correct that the majority of Harry’s beliefs will be false, but thanks to science our species has developed ways of obtaining and sharing ideas that go far beyond anything evolution could have cooked up for Harry. As Sam Harris has pointed out, we’ve flown the perch built for us by evolution, and it’s far from clear to me that a modern day person, well educated in science and skepticism needs to worry too much more about her beliefs being false because of the EAAN. Anybody with a modicum of epistemic sophistication is already a humble fallibilist. She already looks to the best sources for justification that we can hope for: those delivered by science. A reliance on science is really an admission that our cognitive faculties suck and that to find Truth we have to follow a rigorous methodology that’s about correcting for sources of error and bias both within and outside of us and even then, we'll very often end up with adaptive models of Truth that we call truth.

So really, it is not naturalism that has troubles explaining the reliability of our faculties: it's theism. Cognitively, we seem to be pretty good at the kinds of things that require us to survive and successfully reproduce like avoiding predators, caring for our offspring, obtaining food, etc. However, as a species, our members are horrible at understanding physics, advanced mathematics, statistics, probability, chaotic (but fully deterministic) systems, etc. Getting good requires many years of advanced education and hard work; it certainly doesn’t come naturally. This would seem to be precisely the case expected on unguided evolution. So it seems to me that there is a burden on Plantinga to explain how our lousy cognitive processes are reflective of the notion that an allegedly perfect being created us in his image. Are we to believe that God is also subject to a plethora of deeply problematic cognitive biases and perceptual and memory errors? Could Satan plant false memories into the mind of God as certain psychologists have done to people, for example? Does God also condemn people to (eternal) punishment on the basis of shoddy eye-witness testimony?

The question of the conditional probability of reliable cognitive faculties is just too blunt for such a complicated topic. If none of our cognitive faculties are reliable, then I will admit that our search for Truth is hopeless. But if some of our faculties are reliable some of the time, then by cooperating and communicating and finding ways to avoid our cognitive weaknesses, I don’t see why we can’t build up from a humble foundation creating models of truth that get closer and closer to the Truth, and that, it seems, is precisely the situation I think we find ourselves in. Plantinga’s EAAN is interesting but at the end of the day, it changes little, if not nothing for me. I’m still very much a naturalist who firmly believes in the truth of evolution, and I’ll keep following the deliverances of empiricism over pure rationality. This, it seems to me, is an epistemically challenging and responsible stance, while making the whole matter go away by simply asserting that “Goddidit” ... well, you can decide for yourself what you think of that.

* In this 4 part series, I use lower case t 'truth' to denote what seems true to us and capital T 'Truth" for what's actually or ultimately true. More on this here.

The Most Powerful Evidential Argument Against God?

In previous posts, I’ve been critical of an interview with Dr. Alvin Plantinga that was published in the Opinionator at the NYT a few weeks ago. He and the interviewer, both Christians, seem to suggest something that I think couldn’t be farther from the truth, namely, that atheists like Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell as well as other philosophers appeal to little or no evidence for the nonexistence of God thereby limiting them to the lesser epistemic claim of agnosticism. In fact, there is a variety of evidence that makes more sense on naturalism (the idea that no God or no entities like God exist) than on theism. While Plantinga did mention the evidential problem of evil (POE), I’d like to present two other evidential arguments that, ironically, Russell and Dawkins actually have made in the past, albeit not as explicitly as I will attempt here.

We are regularly told that the Christian God is maximally loving and that he therefore wants to have a loving relationship with each of us. A person cannot have a genuine relationship with someone in whose existence she doesn’t believe or actively denies. It should be no surprise then, that the Christian bible itself (1 Timothy 2:4) tells us that God wants everybody to know the truth of the gospel message which entails the knowledge of his loving existence.

Furthermore, many Christians believe that without a relationship with Christ, one is eternally damned. A maximally loving God would want us all to be saved, representing another reason for him to want us to have such a relationship with him.

Omnipotent God could easily provide causally sufficient evidence or a convincing religious experience so that everybody would know the truth of the gospel message.

This leads us to premise 1: if the Christian God were to exist, there would not be many (any?) nonbelievers in the world.

But there’s the rub. There are many people who do not believe in the Christian God in the world (premise 2).

Premise 2 is not only true today; one must also consider the billions of nonbelievers throughout history. The evidence of nonbelief is overwhelming and unquestionable.

Conclusion: The Christian God probably doesn’t exist.

This argument will work for any formulation of God where he is omnipotent and maximally loving – a God that I’m sure Plantinga and Gutting accept. If belief in such a God is required to avoid eternal damnation, so much the better for the argument from nonbelief (ANB).

The work of the ANB is done in premise 1. If you’re thinking that God’s reason for permitting the existence of so many nonbelievers has something to do with preserving our free will, I think that you’re demonstrably wrong. If I wanted to enter into a loving relationship with Christy Turlington, making her clearly aware of my existence would have no influence upon her complete freedom to reciprocate or (more likely!) to avoid doing so. Making people aware of facts doesn’t influence their choices if indeed they are free, and if the existence of the Christian God is a fact, he could easily make it well known to us all.

Notice that if naturalism is true, the problem of nonbelief just isn’t a problem at all. People throughout history have believed a dizzying array of false things about the nature of their world for which we can “thank” all kinds of natural conditions such as our often-unreliable cognitive faculties.

Stephen Maitzen, a Canadian philosopher argues that the following related problem is an even greater challenge for the Christian theist to explain: why is it that about 93% of Mexicans believe in the Christian God, but about 93% of Indians do not? Why do nearly all citizens of Iran, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma not believe in the Christian God (most people in the latter 3 countries don't believe in any god), while most Americans and Italians do? While the ANB asks why the Christian God permits so many people to not believe, the argument from the demographics of Christian theism (ADT) asks why he tolerates such a skewed distribution of nonbelief. If the Christian God doesn’t exist, the geographic clustering of nonbelief is easily explained by messy and haphazard human influences like culture and politics.

Christian responses to these problems often suggest that all non-believers are morally or epistemically defective and therefore blameworthy for their nonbelief. God has done all that he can and their failure to believe is their own.  Consider what this proposition entails carefully: billions upon billions of non-believers who have ever lived or are alive today are all blameworthy for their unbelief. If even one person has genuinely sought God and remained bewildered about his existence, the ANB runs through, and the Christian God probably doesn’t exist. It seems that Mother Teresa may well have been just such a person. There was a time in my younger life when I lived in a tentatively Christian family and studied at Christian schools and I genuinely sought God and heard and felt nothing in return.

Apart from frank implausibility, there are a few other problems with this line of reasoning. The claim that one's unbelieving brethren  - people like me - are somehow morally or epistemically defective is also completely ad hoc: one has no reason to believe it except that it permits one to escape the problems with belief that I’ve outlined above. Furthermore, if one assumes that all nonbelievers must be blameworthy, then one's reasoning is circular. And even if one found these types of responses plausible and fitting, what they cannot do is explain why non-belief is so geographically clustered. Even if one thought that all nonbelievers are morally or epistemically defective, what moral, epistemic, or other defect in people clusters geographically in this extreme way? None.

I believe that this argument has been made before (though clearly not as explicitly as I have tried to summarize here based on the work of J.L. Schellenberg, Theodore M. Drange, and Stephen Maitzen) by other atheists including ones that Plantinga criticized for failing to appeal to sufficient evidence to support atheism over agnosticism. Recall the ending of the Bertrand Russell quote that Plantinga referred to:

“I cannot, therefore, think it presumptuous to doubt something which has long been held to be true, especially when this opinion has only prevailed in certain geographical regions, as is the case with all theological opinions.”

And watch the first couple of minutes of this video of Richard Dawkins:

Is there any doubt that the vast numbers of nonbelievers and especially their skewed geographical distribution count as evidence against Christian theism and in favor of naturalism? I can’t see any. There is other evidence and there are other arguments against Christian theism, but Plantinga and Gutting seem to want you to believe the contrary. If you’re a Christian, I encourage you to be skeptical of their suggestion and look more deeply into it.

In the meantime, do you have a reasonable doubt about either the argument from nonbelief or (especially!) the argument from the demographics of theism? If so, I’d love to hear what it is. Spell it out for me and challenge my beliefs. I don’t want to be wrong for a second longer than I have to. If you don’t, then I’m afraid that you have no reasonable doubt that the Christian God (at least as described above) does not exist.

Is God Like a Cosmic Teapot?

In 1952, Bertrand Russell, a Nobel prize winner and influential philosopher of the 20^th century, wrote a paper entitled “Is there a God?” wherein he outlined why he doesn’t believe. Included in the paper is this famous quote:

“Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable about it. I do not think this view can be held by anyone who has studied history. … you must concede that nine-tenths of the beliefs of nine-tenths of mankind are totally irrational. … I cannot, therefore, think it presumptuous to doubt something which has long been held to be true, especially when this opinion has only prevailed in certain geographical regions, as is the case with all theological opinions.”

Russell is reminding believers in God that they have a burden of proof. He explicitly reminds them that the widespread acceptance of a belief does not fulfill that burden.  Many atheists believe that Russell was also implicitly reminding theists that the burden of proof for an unfalsifiable claim (remember how careful he was to point out that the teapot is undetectable?) is on the claimant, for - think about it - if the claim is unfalsifiable, how could and why should one try to prove that it is false? I don't completely agree with this adage, but more on that later on.

Fast forward to this month, when Gary Gutting published a NY Times interview entitled “Is Atheism Irrational?” In it, Alvin Plantinga argues that atheists should, at best, consider themselves merely agnostic since he guesses that they merely make a case for not believing in God’s existence rather than a case denying God’s actual existence. Here’s a quote:

“In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.”

Ok, so both Russell and Plantinga are reminding the other side of their burden to make their case.   The theist has a burden to show that God exists, and the atheist has a burden to show that God doesn’t exist.

Both analogies chosen by these men are like the question of God’s existence in that they can’t be proven either way – the teapot is undetectable, and the precise number of stars is unknowable. So far so good. But how should one approach existential claims that are not provable? Should one just give up, and claim that it is an unanswerable 50/50 proposition and move on? It seems that that is the conclusion that Plantinga is suggesting that atheists should be stopping at, so it’s no surprise that he uses even-star-ism as his analogy. After all, the probability that the number of stars is even or odd is 50/50. But is that true for all un-provable existential claims, and, more importantly, regarding the claim that the classical God exists?

Firstly, let me point out that even if the question of God’s existence was an un-provable 50/50 proposition, the agnostic would still have quite a damning complaint about it, namely, that belief in the existence of God is irrational. In this sense, some atheists say that they lack belief in God, and they think that you should too, for belief in God is unjustified. If theism means belief in the classical God, then a-theism is simply to lack that belief just as asymptomatic means lacking in symptoms. Plantinga, though, takes atheism to mean the denial of God’s existence.

I hope that you’re beginning to see that the problem here has to do with the failure of the term ‘atheism’ to properly identify one’s complaint with theistic belief. It is important to distinguish de jure objections (the complaint that a belief suffers some epistemic defect independently of its truth or falsity) from de facto objections (the complaint that the belief is false). The former is to say that even if it may be true that God exists, theists are irrational or unjustified in doing so. The latter is to claim that God does not exist. If an un-provable existential claim is a 50/50 proposition, as even-star-ism is, then one simply can’t get past agnosticism. But are all unprovable existential claims really 50/50 propositions, and, more importantly for this discussion, is the question of God’s existence a 50/50 proposition as Plantinga seems to want us to believe?

I think that the answer to both questions is clearly ‘no’. Consider the proposition that the number of stars is X where X is a whole number between one sextillion and one septillion. While we aren’t in any sort of position to say with certainty that any X is true or false, the probability that any X is the correct number is surely much, much lower than 50/50. One would be entirely justified in not just proposing that X-star-ism is irrational, but that such a belief is very probably false. So it seems that in addition to making a de jure objection to an un-provable existential claim, one can also make a de facto objection of varying strength by making a case that the claim is, nevertheless, unlikely: the more unlikely, the stronger the de facto objection. A consequence of this is that whenever the probability of an existential claim - even an unfalsifiable or unverifiable one - can be judged, there is a burden to make that case, so it would seem that the burden isn't only on the claimant. If you think a claim is improbable, you have a burden, too. So much for that adage.

Is Russell correct in thinking that the existence of his celestial teapot is rather more like the question of God’s existence than the question of even-star-ism? Plantinga points out that there is plenty of evidence against belief in Russell’s teapot: “For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism.”

Is there also plenty of evidence against theism? As I outlined in my previous blog post, the two distinguished philosophers involved in this interview seem to have a hard time recognizing that there is. But, as far as we know, minds require complex physical nervous systems, while the God hypothesis tells us that minds can exist without one. And as far as we know, minds evolve from bottom up evolution adding function and complexity over time, but the God hypothesis tells us that a disembodied mind exists necessarily, without such a process contributing to its existence. Furthermore, as far as we know, immaterial minds cannot interact in or with the material world (how could they?), yet again, the God hypothesis tells us that disembodied minds regularly do. The evidential problem of evil is strong evidence against the existence of the classical God of monotheism, etc. So, it seems that the God hypothesis has plenty of evidence against it, too, and that theism is rather like teapotism.

But let’s not forget that Plantinga is a Christian theist. Accordingly, it is noteworthy that the Christian God hypothesis is one of many mutually exclusive God hypotheses among which either none or only one can be true. On this basis alone, one would be justified in claiming that Christian theism is at best unlikely; it’s certainly more like X-star-ism than even-star-ism. (The sophisticated reader might recognize that this inconvenient truth represents an undermining internal rationality defeater for Plantinga's argument that the Christian God's existence can be known without having to resort to any evidence or arguments at all.)

Do atheists (philosophers like Russell and non-philosophers like Dawkins) make de facto objections to theism? Of course they do. In fact, in the near future, I’m going to discuss a very strong one – stronger perhaps than even the evidential problem of evil. I actually think that Russell was implicitly making just this sort of argument in the very quote that Plantinga and Russell chose to deride. In the meantime, I submit that the Russell/Dawkins sound bite is too short to express their full thoughts on the matter, which probably are more like “Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence for your existence to counter the evidence against it!” Plantinga has made an illustrious strawman here, and it would seem that Gutting has facilitated.

Are Atheist Philosophers Really Irrational?

The NY Times interview begins with Gutting acknowledging a recent PhilPapers survey finding that almost three quarters of philosophers accept or lean towards atheism. Plantinga suggests that is the case because these philosophers find the arguments for God’s existence unsound. He then suggests that atheism is an irrational position to hold on such a basis, for the failure of theistic arguments should only lead to agnosticism (withholding belief either way, I suppose). On that, I tend to agree with Plantinga, but why does he think that that is all that supports the atheism of the majority of philosophers? While Plantinga claims that atheism is a position that requires arguments and evidence of its own, he seems to completely fail to consider that the majority of philosophers may actually be atheists on the basis of specifically atheistic evidence and arguments. Furthermore, what evidence does Plantinga provide to support his belief that atheist philosophers make the erroneous assent to atheism merely on the basis of rejecting theistic evidence and arguments? The answer, I regret to inform you, is absolutely none. This is pure speculation on Plantinga’s part.

While Plantinga admits that none of the theistic arguments is “conclusive”, does he think that the majority of philosophers who reject them are irrational to do so? I’ll let you be the judge of how Plantinga answers that question in this interview, but he does say the following about them elsewhere: “These arguments are not coercive in the sense that every person is obliged to accept their premises on pain of irrationality”

So Plantinga doesn’t think that the majority of philosophers are irrational to reject theistic arguments, but he does think that they are irrational to go beyond agnosticism and accept atheism on that basis … but then he doesn’t provide any evidence to support the idea that they do.

Amazingly, Gutting then shifts the discussion to how some non-philosophers support their atheism. But this can’t possibly address the opening question! Philosophers develop expertise in rational thinking and strive, first and foremost, to be rational. That’s what philosophy is all about. It is startling that the majority of philosophers are atheists so Gutting was right to begin there, for if the widely held atheism of philosophers is irrational, then the rationality of atheism itself would seem to stand little hope. Atheists should shift gears and merely say that they are agnostic. Unfortunately, Gutting utterly fails to actually go there, but he nevertheless manages to leave the reader with the impression that even atheist philosophers are unjustified in getting beyond agnosticism.

What might the evidence and arguments for atheism look like? Plantinga  mentions the unimaginable ubiquity of worldly evil and suffering throughout time as evidence - "maybe the only evidence", he says - against God’s existence. Is it wrong to be astounded by two distinguished philosophy professors with expertise in religious epistemology failing to acknowledge the existence of more atheistic arguments than the evidential problem of evil (POE)?

At least Plantinga recognizes the tremendous weight of the evidential POE when he says, “it makes sense to think that the probability of theism, given the existence of all of the suffering and evil our world contains, is fairly low.” He goes on to say, “But of course there are also arguments for theism. Indeed, there are at least a couple of dozen good theistic arguments. So the atheist would have to try to synthesize and balance the probabilities. This isn’t at all easy to do, but it’s pretty obvious that the result wouldn’t anywhere nearly support straight-out atheism as opposed to agnosticism.”

Really? I suppose that it depends on what one might mean by “fairly low” and “straight out”. If one is rational to think that the probability of theism is “fairly low” on evil/suffering (as Plantinga claims), and one is not irrational in rejecting the theistic arguments (as Plantinga has also claimed elsewhere), then, while I agree that balancing the probabilities after all of these arguments is difficult, it seems to me that one could remain completely rational in continuing to believe that the probability of theism is low, and that would count as atheism if not “straight out” atheism, whatever that is.

Have Gutting and Plantinga so far shown that the majority of philosophers ought to be agnostic on the question of theism, and that they are irrational in their assent to atheism? Of course they haven’t. To do this, they’d have to accurately identify the atheistic evidence and arguments, which are multiple - not just the POE - and they’d have to show that one could not rationally weigh the strength of these arguments against the theistic evidence and arguments and conclude that atheism seems more likely. They have not done this. All we’ve received in this interview is Plantinga’s personal speculation that the majority of philosophers merely reject theistic arguments to erroneously move beyond agnosticism.

Now comes the really amazing part. Despite having just discussed the powerful atheistic force provided by the evidential POE, Gutting asks, “If, then, there isn’t any evidence to support atheism [emphasis mine], why do you think so many philosophers – presumably highly rational people – are atheists?”

Is Gutting so desperate to paint atheism as irrational that he gets a mental block when evidence for atheism is presented? And why doesn’t Plantinga correct Gutting and point out that they just did discuss strong evidence for atheism? Instead, Plantinga speculates that most philosophers accept atheism because, “of the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism.” Those philosophers just want to be free! It couldn’t possibly be that they rationally accept atheism because they reject theistic arguments and find atheistic arguments like the evidential POE and others more compelling, could it? Not for these 2 distinguished Christian philosophers from Notre Dame, it would seem.

In case you couldn't tell, I was pretty disappointed with the first two thirds of this interview. Gutting should have gone right for the money, which is Plantinga’s Evidential Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). The EAAN is a clever argument that I like quite a bit and it could give pause to atheists who accept unguided evolution and think that they’re rational to do so. But before I discuss the EAAN, I’ll comment on where the conversation went next: is God like a celestial teapot?

Is Atheism Irrational?

A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Gary Gutting, a Catholic philosophy professor at University of Notre Dame (which is also Catholic) published in the NY Times Opinion Pages an edited email interview he had with Dr. Alvin Plantinga, who is also a Christian philosophy professor from Notre Dame. This, the first of a number of interviews by Gutting about religion, was provocatively titled: “Is Atheism Irrational?”

In the next few posts, I’ll be responding to what I consider to be some of the amazing claims that seem to be made in this interview, but why should anybody care about what Plantinga has to say in the first place?

Atheists are frequently criticized for failing to address sophisticated arguments, so Plantinga’s opinions are important because he arguably represents the pinnacle of sophisticated – philosophically sophisticated - Christian apologetics.

So please have at the interview, and ask yourself if you agree that atheism (as opposed to agnosticism or even theism) is an irrational belief. I’ll share my thoughts about Plantinga’s views this week.