A Philosopher Defends Religion

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

Thomas Nagel

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism

by Alvin Plantinga

Oxford University Press, 359 pp., $27.95                                                 

Sijmen Hendriks

Alvin Plantinga, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1995

1.

The gulf in outlook between atheists and adherents of the monotheistic religions is profound. We

are fortunate to live under a constitutional system and a code of manners that by and large keep it

from disturbing the social peace; usually the parties ignore each other. But sometimes the conflict

surfaces and heats up into a public debate. The present is such a time.

One of the things atheists tend to believe is that modern science is on their side, whereas theism is in

conflict with science: that, for example, belief in miracles is inconsistent with the scientific

conception of natural law; faith as a basis of belief is inconsistent with the scientific conception of

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1 van 6 8-9-2012 17:38knowledge; belief that God created man in his own image is inconsistent with scientific explanations

provided by the theory of evolution. In his absorbing new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies,

Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished analytic philosopher known for his contributions to metaphysics

and theory of knowledge as well as to the philosophy of religion, turns this alleged opposition on its

head. His overall claim is that “there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and

theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” By

naturalism he means the view that the world describable by the natural sciences is all that exists, and

that there is no such person as God, or anything like God.

Plantinga’s religion is the real thing, not just an intellectual deism that gives God nothing to do in

the world. He himself is an evangelical Protestant, but he conducts his argument with respect to a

version of Christianity that is the “rough intersection of the great Christian creeds”—ranging from

the Apostle’s Creed to the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles—according to which God is a person who

not only created and maintains the universe and its laws, but also intervenes specially in the world,

with the miracles related in the Bible and in other ways. It is of great interest to be presented with a

lucid and sophisticated account of how someone who holds these beliefs understands them to

harmonize with and indeed to provide crucial support for the methods and results of the natural

sciences.

Plantinga discusses many topics in the course of the book, but his most important claims are

epistemological. He holds, first, that the theistic conception of the relation between God, the natural

world, and ourselves makes it reasonable for us to regard our perceptual and rational faculties as

reliable. It is therefore reasonable to believe that the scientific theories they allow us to create do

describe reality. He holds, second, that the naturalistic conception of the world, and of ourselves as

products of unguided Darwinian evolution, makes it unreasonable for us to believe that our

cognitive faculties are reliable, and therefore unreasonable to believe any theories they may lead us

to form, including the theory of evolution. In other words, belief in naturalism combined with belief

in evolution is self-defeating. However, Plantinga thinks we can reasonably believe that we are the

products of evolution provided that we also believe, contrary to naturalism, that the process was in

some way guided by God.

2.

I shall return to the claim about naturalism below, but let me first say more about the theistic

conception. Plantinga contends, as others have, that it is no accident that the scientific revolution

occurred in Christian Europe and nowhere else. Its great figures, such as Copernicus and Newton,

believed that God had created a law-governed natural order and created humans in his image, with

faculties that allowed them to discover that order by using perception and reason. That use of

perception and reason is what defines the empirical sciences. But what about the theistic belief

itself? It is obviously not a scientific result. How can it be congruent with a scientific understanding

of nature?

Here we must turn to Plantinga’s general theory of knowledge, which is crucial to understanding his

position. Any theory of human knowledge must give an account of what he calls “warrant,” i.e., the

conditions that a true belief must meet in order to constitute knowledge. Sometimes we know

something to be true on the basis of evidence provided by other beliefs, or because we see that it is

entailed by our other beliefs. But not every belief can depend on other beliefs. The buck has to stop

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2 van 6 8-9-2012 17:38somewhere, and according to Plantinga this happens when we form beliefs in one of the ways that

he calls “basic.”

The basic belief-forming capacities include perception, memory, rational intuition (about logic and

arithmetic), induction, and some more specialized faculties, such as the ability to detect the mental

states of others. When you look in the refrigerator and see that it contains several bottles of beer,

you form that belief immediately without inferring it from any other belief, e.g., a belief about the

pattern of shapes and colors in your visual field. When someone asks you whether you have had

lunch yet, you can answer immediately because you remember having had lunch, and the memory

is a belief not based on any other belief, or on perception, or on logical reasoning.

Beliefs that are formed in the basic way are not infallible: they may have to be given up in the face

of contrary evidence. But they do not have to be supported by other evidence in order to be

warranted—otherwise knowledge could never get started. And the general reliability of each of

these unmediated types of belief-formation cannot be shown by appealing to any of the others:

Rational intuition enables us to know the truths of mathematics and logic, but it can’t tell us

whether or not perception is reliable. Nor can we show by rational intuition and perception

that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is.

But what then is the warrant for beliefs formed in one of these basic ways? Plantinga holds that the

main condition is that they must result from the proper functioning of a faculty that is in fact

generally reliable. We cannot prove without circularity that the faculties of perception, memory, or

reason are generally reliable, but if they are, then the true beliefs we form when they are functioning

properly constitute knowledge unless they are put in doubt by counterevidence.

1

 Human

knowledge is therefore dependent on facts about our relation to the world that we cannot prove

from scratch: we can’t prove the existence of the physical world, or the reality of the past, or the

existence of logical and mathematical truth; but if our faculties do in fact connect with these aspects

of reality, then we can know about them, according to Plantinga’s theory.

For example, if our perceptual beliefs are in general caused by the impact on our senses of objects

and events in the environment corresponding to what is believed, and if memories are in general

caused by traces in the brain laid down by events in the past corresponding to what those memories

represent, then perception and memory are reliable faculties, which can give us knowledge even

though we cannot prove they are reliable.

So far we are in the territory of traditional epistemology; but what about faith? Faith, according to

Plantinga, is another basic way of forming beliefs, distinct from but not in competition with reason,

perception, memory, and the others. However, it is

a wholly different kettle of fish: according to the Christian tradition (including both Thomas

Aquinas and John Calvin), faith is a special gift from God, not part of our ordinary epistemic

equipment. Faith is a source of belief, a source that goes beyond the faculties included in

reason.

God endows human beings with a sensus divinitatis that ordinarily leads them to believe in him.

(In atheists the sensus divinitatis is either blocked or not functioning properly.)

2

 In addition, God

acts in the world more selectively by “enabling Christians to see the truth of the central teachings of

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3 van 6 8-9-2012 17:38the Gospel.”

If all this is true, then by Plantinga’s standard of reliability and proper function, faith is a kind of

cause that provides a warrant for theistic belief, even though it is a gift, and not a universal human

faculty. (Plantinga recognizes that rational arguments have also been offered for the existence of

God, but he thinks it is not necessary to rely on these, any more than it is necessary to rely on

rational proofs of the existence of the external world to know just by looking that there is beer in the

refrigerator.)

It is illuminating to have the starkness of the opposition between Plantinga’s theism and the secular

outlook so clearly explained. My instinctively atheistic perspective implies that if I ever found

myself flooded with the conviction that what the Nicene Creed says is true, the most likely

explanation would be that I was losing my mind, not that I was being granted the gift of faith. From

Plantinga’s point of view, by contrast, I suffer from a kind of spiritual blindness from which I am

unwilling to be cured. This is a huge epistemological gulf, and it cannot be overcome by the

cooperative employment of the cognitive faculties that we share, as is the hope with scientific

disagreements.

Faith adds beliefs to the theist’s base of available evidence that are absent from the atheist’s, and

unavailable to him without God’s special action. These differences make different beliefs reasonable

given the same shared evidence. An atheist familiar with biology and medicine has no reason to

believe the biblical story of the resurrection. But a Christian who believes it by faith should not,

according to Plantinga, be dissuaded by general biological evidence. Plantinga compares the

difference in justified beliefs to a case where you are accused of a crime on the basis of very

convincing evidence, but you know that you didn’t do it. For you, the immediate evidence of your

memory is not defeated by the public evidence against you, even though your memory is not

available to others. Likewise, the Christian’s faith in the truth of the gospels, though unavailable to

the atheist, is not defeated by the secular evidence against the possibility of resurrection.

Of course sometimes contrary evidence may be strong enough to persuade you that your memory

is deceiving you. Something analogous can occasionally happen with beliefs based on faith, but it

will typically take the form, according to Plantinga, of a change in interpretation of what the Bible

means. This tradition of interpreting scripture in light of scientific knowledge goes back to

Augustine, who applied it to the “days” of creation. But Plantinga even suggests in a footnote that

those whose faith includes, as his does not, the conviction that the biblical chronology of creation is

to be taken literally can for that reason regard the evidence to the contrary as systematically

misleading. One would think that this is a consequence of his epistemological views that he would

hope to avoid.

3.

We all have to recognize that we have not created our own minds, and must rely on the way they

work. Theists and naturalists differ radically over what justifies such reliance. Plantinga is certainly

right that if one believes it, the theistic conception explains beautifully why science is possible: the

fit between the natural order and our minds is produced intentionally by God. He is also right to

maintain that naturalism has a much harder time accounting for that fit. Once the question is raised,

atheists have to consider whether their view of how we got here makes it at all probable that our

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4 van 6 8-9-2012 17:38cognitive faculties should enable us to discover the laws of nature.

Plantinga argues that on the naturalist view of evolution, interpreted materialistically, there would be

no reason to think that our beliefs have any relation to the truth. On that view beliefs are states of

the brain, and natural selection favors brain mechanisms solely on the basis of their contribution, via

behavior, to survival and reproduction. The content of our beliefs, and hence their truth or

falsehood, is irrelevant to their survival value. “Natural selection is interested, not in truth, but in

appropriate behavior.”

Plantinga’s version of this argument suffers from lack of attention to naturalist theories of mental

content—i.e., theories about what makes a particular brain state the belief that it is, in virtue of

which it can be true or false. Most naturalists would hold that there is an intimate connection

between the content of a belief and its role in controlling an organism’s behavioral interaction with

the world. To oversimplify: they might hold, for example, that a state of someone’s brain constitutes

the belief that there is a dangerous animal in front of him if it is a state generally caused by

encounters with bears, rattlesnakes, etc., and that generally causes flight or other defensive behavior.

This is the basis for the widespread conviction that evolutionary naturalism makes it probable that

our perceptual beliefs, and those formed by basic deductive and inductive inference, are in general

reliable.

Still, when our faculties lead us to beliefs vastly removed from those our distant ancestors needed to

survive—as in the recent production and assessment of evidence for the existence of the Higgs

boson—Plantinga’s skeptical argument remains powerful. Christians, says Plantinga, can “take

modern science to be a magnificent display of the image of God in us human beings.” Can

naturalists say anything to match this, or must they regard it as an unexplained mystery?

Most of Plantinga’s book is taken up with systematic discussion, deploying his epistemology, of

more specific claims about how science conflicts with, or supports, religion. He addresses Richard

Dawkins’s claim that evolution reveals a world without design; Michael Behe’s claim that on the

contrary it reveals the working of intelligent design; the claim that the laws of physics are

incompatible with miracles; the claim of evolutionary and social psychologists that the functional

explanation of moral and religious beliefs shows that there are no objective moral or religious truths;

the idea that historical biblical criticism makes it unreasonable to regard the Bible as the word of

God; and the idea that the fine-tuning of the basic physical constants, whose precise values make

life possible, is evidence of a creator. He touches on the problem of evil, and though he offers

possible responses, he also remarks, “Suppose God does have a good reason for permitting sin and

evil, pain and suffering: why think we would be the first to know what it is?”

About evolution, Plantinga argues persuasively that the most that can be shown (by Dawkins, for

example) on the basis of the available evidence together with some highly speculative further

assumptions is that we cannot rule out the possibility that the living world was produced by

unguided evolution and hence without design. He believes the alternative hypothesis of guided

evolution, with God causing appropriate mutations and fostering their survival, would make the

actual result much more probable. On the other hand, though he believes Michael Behe offers a

serious challenge to the prevailing naturalist picture of evolution, he does not think Behe’s

arguments for intelligent design are conclusive, and he notes that in any case they don’t support

Christian belief, and perhaps not even theism, because Behe intentionally says so little about the

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5 van 6 8-9-2012 17:38designer.

Plantinga holds that miracles are not incompatible with the laws of physics, because those laws

determine only what happens in closed systems, without external intervention, and the proposition

that the physical universe is a closed system is not itself a law of physics, but a naturalist

assumption. Newton did not believe it: he even believed that God intervened to keep the planets in

their orbits. Plantinga has a lengthy discussion of the relation of miracles to quantum theory: its

probabilistic character, he believes, may allow not only miracles but human free will. And he

considers the different interpretations that have been given to the fine-tuning of the physical

constants, concluding that the support it offers for theism is modest, because of the difficulty of

assigning probabilities to the alternatives. All these discussions make a serious effort to engage with

the data of current science. The arguments are often ingenious and, given Plantinga’s premises, the

overall view is thorough and consistent.

The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the

point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which

many of them will not be familiar. Plantinga writes clearly and accessibly, and sometimes acidly—in

response to aggressive critics of religion like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. His comprehensive stand

is a valuable contribution to this debate.

I say this as someone who cannot imagine believing what he believes. But even those who cannot

accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the

deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of

the laws of physics and chemistry, of conscious beings like ourselves, capable of discovering those

laws and understanding the universe that they govern. Defenders of naturalism have not ignored

this problem, but I believe that so far, even with the aid of evolutionary theory, they have not

proposed a credible solution. Perhaps theism and materialist naturalism are not the only alternatives.

1

The details are complicated, and are set out in Plantinga’s three-volume magnum opus, Warrant:

The Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function (both Oxford University Press, 1993) and

Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press, 2000).  ↩

1.

2

This is often the result of sin, though not necessarily the sin of the unbeliever; see Plantinga,

Warranted Christian Belief, p. 214.  ↩

2.

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