Lord, please make me stupid, like Alvin Plantinga.

Lord, please make me stupid, like Alvin Plantinga.  Don't make me smart, like John Loftus. 

Amen. 

Why Plantinga's EAAN Fails (I think).

Last Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks beat the Arizona Cardinals 58-0.  Isn't a rout by your team a grand and marvelous thing?  I called my younger brother up, and we agreed Dad, a dedicated Seahawks fan, would have really enjoyed that game. 

Something seems to have somehow been programmed into our brains that delights in crushing, easy victories.  The New Atheists have a dozen sure-fire, slam-dunk arguments against Christianity that they regularly use, and John Loftus is inventing new ones every month or so.  When I was a boy, I thought Noah's Ark had been found on Mount Ararat.  Wouldn't that be wonderful if it had been?  See!  There's the elephant's stall!  What's an elephant doing at 15,000 feet? 

Slam dunk!  Christianity is utter foolishness.  The Bible is proven beyond all doubt.

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen is standing in the line for a movie by Marshall McCluhan, and gets into an argument with a Columbia professor who is also in line.  Just then, McCluhan himself wanders by, and jumps in on Allen's side, telling the prof, "You know nothing about my work!"  Allen turns to the camera and says, "Don't you wish life was like that?" 


Alvin Plantinga

Greater minds than mine seem to succomb to this desire.  Take, for example, a "slam dunk" argument against naturalism, put forward first by C. S. Lewis, then by Alvin Plantinga, in more detail.  I'm one of Lewis' biggest fans.  And there is no doubt that Plantinga is a great thinker, with a perspective on faith quite different from that of Lewis.  If the two agree on anything, how likely that what they agree on is wrong?

Yet I think what Plantinga calls the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism is, in fact, mistaken.