The Truth About Pascal's Wager

One of the most popular arguments for God, among those who claim not to believe in Him, is something often called "Pascal's Wager."  Ascribed to the great scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal, generally by people who have never read him, this is the idea that even if there is no decent evidence for God, or if the evidence flows against Christianity, you should believe anyway, because the consequences of being wrong (hell) are so severe, and of being right (heaven) so wonderful, if you lay your stash on the "Yeah God!" slot, and gamble all you got on Christ in the great gaming casino of life.  

Grayling on the Grill: Inauspicious Beginnings

A. C. Grayling

Since The Truth Behind the New Atheism came  out in 2007, I have sometimes noted that practically the only skeptics who seem able to argue well for the Gnu position all seem to have philosophical training.  Philosophers come in all shapes and sizes, also in temperament and worldview, but generally know how to think critically, make distinctions, follow a logical argument (and recognize when an argument is not logical), and even occasionally separate argument from ego, and admit to errors. 

For this reason, I had some hope for A. C. Grayling's The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism. 

Now I've read the first 200 words or so, and am feeling my first qualms. 

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. 

Power Corrupts Whom?

The Christian historian John Acton is best known today for his axiom:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Doubtless his choice of wording was patriarchal, reflecting the male power structure of his own day.  Or is it patriarchal of me, to think women are as liable to corruption as men?  (I was just reading an Amazon thread by a poster who said he was taught in his Catholic Sunday School that more women will be in heaven than men, because they are more moral.  I've heard that from men, too, incredibly enough.) 

But the question I would like to ask in this blog is, if Acton is right, as I believe he is, then who is most susceptible to corruption in modern society?  Who has the most power over others? 

The Unreason of Rationalists: Massimo Pigliucci

Yesterday the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, a well-known atheist (he has debated William Lane Craig, for example), did something admirable and useful: he posted a list of unreasonable arguments he often encounters within the "Community of Reason."  Then he offered several suggestions about how skeptics (and one could easily add, the rest of us) ought to conduct discourse, even on the Internet.  Some of these suggestions might be reduced to the form, "Scientists and philosophers need one another."  Amen! 

Jay Budziszewski: What We Can't Not Know (5th most popular)

"Pure Gold." 

87 + / 7 -

I have read hundreds of books on religion, morality, and philosophy, but Budziszewski has taught me much that I did not know, or at least realize. C. S. Lewis' Abolition of Man is wise warning to an age in which we tinker with the formula for man: but Budziszewski  goes beyond Lewis.

Eighth Best Review: Martin, The Case Against Christianity

Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity


"Nice Try, No Cigar" (***) 80 + / 55 -

This book is a well-written and systematic argument against the Christian faith, mostly from the point of view of Biblical criticism and philosophy.  Dr. Martin's writing is disciplined and readable, though not as lyrical as, say, that of Bertrand Russell. Unlike some skeptical writers, he has done a bit of homework, quoting Plantinga, Habermas, and Kierkegaard, for example. (Though he seems to have missed others that he really should have read.) His tone is fairly genial.

Martin's argumentative method is to throw lots of arguments up and see what sticks. (Could the resurrection be caused by the indetermidacy principle of quantum physics? Or by Resurrecting Finite Miracle Workers [RFMW]?   I'm sure the little buggers are glad to finally get an acronym!) The more you know about the subjects he covers, however, the less seems to stick. And the more slides off, the more you wonder if Martin has got some of the mud in his own eyes.

Martin's first main argument, against the historicity of Jesus, is so weak, and Martin appears so unconscious of that weakness, that it undermines his credibility. He'll start an argument with, "Some scholars believe. . . " and end it (same sentence) "clearly, then. . ." What kind of argument is that? An argument is not as strong as the sum of its dependant clauses! A piece of speculation (often very wild) by an unnamed "scholar" seems to set up like concrete in Martin's mind in the space of a few clauses into fact. If my father built houses that way, he would have gotten into a lot of trouble during the last earthquake in Seattle!

Argument from silence is another of Martin's favorite weapons. "Surely if X believed or knew Y he would have said so." Generally, though, such arguments are fallacious, because you can only with great caution infer that an event did not happen because someone failed to mention it.  Also, the epistles to which Martin appeals in this regard, are short and on other subjects. (Such as Christian living.)  One fact most such arguments seem to overlook, is that we have a book in the New Testament -- Acts -- which tells the story of the early Christian church, while saying almost nothing about Jesus' life -- even though its author had just written the Gospel of Luke!  And most of the rest of the New Testament is written by Luke's main protagonist in Acts, St Paul, who would probably have had most of the eyewitness contacts Luke relied upon, and more.  So this sort of Argument from Silence really means nothing at all.  It is evident that early Christians could know a lot about the life of Jesus, without referring to it all the time, when they're talking about something else.  (As, indeed, can we.)

In any case, the Gospels do relate Jesus' life. Many wise Christian scholars, and even many non-Christians, have repeatedly pointed out the characteristics of the Gospels that mark them as historical. (See my Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus for one approach, citing many anti-Christian scholars to make some key points, and Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses for a very different, but also legitimate, approach.)  But Martin does not seem very aware of long-standing historical arguments for the Gospels, or of the qualities in the Gospels that make them credible.

Martin believes that the differences among Gospel accounts of the resurrection are a strong argument against it. What do you think skeptics would say if they agreed on all points? "Conspiracy!" And rightly so. As prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi said of the Manson case, when the killers prepared beforehand what to say, "The stories tallied perfectly," But when you have honest witnesses, "There will always be left over evidence that just doesn't fit." And the prosecutor in the Columbine case said, "Any time you have a tramautic situation, even if only one person is killed, every testimony is different." So it appears to many that the superficial differences, but underlying agreement, of the NT records, are very impressive evidence for the truth of the resurrection. But Martin does not even consider this perspective.

Martin's argument against Paul's testimony that 500 witnesses to the resurrection were mostly still alive, is breathtaking. "The fact that 500 people reported seeing a resurrected man would surely have attracted wide attention and come to the attention of. . . historians."  Therefore, since we didn't have any clear secular references to that, this report must be false, and Paul an unreliable witness!

This is only a touch less ludicrous than Jesus Mysteries, that argues against the existence of Jesus since Roman historians don't mention him much, and then turns around and notes that they don't say much about Christians at all until 250 AD! But if the community itself was ignored when it had hundreds of thousands of members, why should a single incident within that community be recorded when the membership was still just a few thousand? In fact, from my studies in China I know that remarkable things can happen among a disfavored group (Christians, again) with little or no mention of those events in the  press.  One would never know the story of how tens of millions of Chinese have become Christians in China, from casually following the Chinese press, still less if one were only given a small sample of politically-conscious contemporary Chinese historians during the Deng era.  From many such specious arguments, Martin proves to his own satisfaction that the Gospels are unreliable, but to mine that (at least) he is out of the loop when it comes to historical evidences.

If you want philosophy, Martin might help a bit more, but even here I find some of his arguments rather
contrived. For example, I guess the tension Martin describes between Scripture and theory of salvation arises because he is concerned with philosophizing about salvation for others, rather than gaining it for himself. But the Bible explicitly limits itself to aiding in the latter, not the former, enterprise. And Martin has overlooked other Scriptural principles on this topic, such as that we are judged by the light given us, and that God, not man, is the judge. Martin might have come to a better understanding of the issue by reading C. S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. Its too bad that he nowhere mentions the most influential Christian thinker of the 20th Century, and unfortunate for his argument.

So if you're in the market for arguments against Christianity, what you get here for the most part is quality in terms of style, but quantity as to substance.

Coyne vs. Plantinga, Bambi vs Godzilla

Dr. Coyne marshals his forces
for the attack. 

Jerry Coyne attacking Plantinga on philosophy / theology! What next, is Bambi going to have another go at Godzilla?   Or will Flower the skunk step into the breach?  

Before reading Coyne's comments this morning, I first reread an old piece called "Response to Behe's Critics, IIA and IIB," that I posted a few years ago on Amazon, which analyzed Coyne's review of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution.  In those posts, I listed some two dozen dubious arguments Coyne advanced, many of which involved logical errors, or just plain misreading Dr. Behe.  Number 20 seemed particularly portentious:

(20) Coyne: "Science long ago dispensed with the notion of a scala natura: a progressive ladder of life with humans at the top."

DM: "This is confused. If we talk about value and meaning, that is a philosophical, moral, or religious question, not a scientific one. Fortunately most scientists are well-rounded and human enough to recognize that in fact, some organisms are more significant than others. (At least after office hours.) If we're talking about complexity or intelligence, then even science can recognize a scale in nature. But Coyne seems to be artificially narrowing the subject to the criterion of adaptability, or how long a species has evolved."

Coyne: "So what scientific reason can there be for singling out just one species as the Designer's goal? How do we know that the goal was not butterflies or sunflowers?"

DM: "When scientists ask such stupid questions, I despair of common sense in the Academy. If science cannot tell us that people are more significant than sunflowers, that only goes to show the limits of science, not that Pascal and petunias are morally equivalent. A scientist with no theology ought at least to supplement his intellectual diet with a little philosophy."

Now, reading Coyne's "Sunday Sermon" this morning, it seems Coyne has "followed my advice," and added "a little philosophy" to his intellectual diet.  But he eats too fast, and fails to properly digest what he reads.  The results are not pretty:

"I don’t think many theologians have ever faced serious opposition to their ideas, at least on the debate platform."

I'll be happy to debate you on my ideas, Dr. Coyne, if you would like to remedy that alleged defficiency.   

"Today, my brothers and sisters, I’d like to speak briefly on Plantinga’s evidence for God’s existence, at least as laid out in his chapter “Reason and Belief on God”, pp. 102-161 in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (James F. Sennett, ed., 1998, Eeerdmans Publishing Co.). That chapter itself is taken from a book edited by Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff: Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (1983, University of Notre Dame Press). "

An excellent essay.  Only, it is emphatically NOT about "Plantinga's evidence for God's existence," as Plantinga explains right away:

"In this essay I want to discuss a connected constellation of questions . . . Must one have evidence to be rational or reasonable in believing in God?" (Faith & Rationality, 16)

In fact, Plantinga makes no effort at all in this essay to give "evidence" for God's existence, nor does he promise to.  Coyne thus appears, from the very beginning, to have misconstrued the purpose of the essay he purports to be criticizing. 

Coyne continues:

"As we know, there’s no good empirical evidence for God’s existence . . . "

Coyne is preaching to the other flowers on the forest floor, here.  Considered philosophically, it is hard to know how anyone could possibly know that "there's no good empirical evidence for God's existence," still less be so smug about it.  Has Dr. Coyne checked all the planets in every galaxy, for such evidence?  Or even interviewed everyone on this planet?  One should be more cautious about claiming universal negatives.

In fact, Coyne apparently has not even bothered to read the places where Plantinga really does offer evidence for Christianity. 

This, at any rate, is a statement of dogmatism, not what Plantinga might call "the deliverances of empirical reasoning."  Or perhaps Coyne takes the lack of evidence for Christianity as "properly basic?"   

"After reviewing the history of theological evidentialism, beginning with Aquinas, Plantinga presents his own argument: that belief in God is a properly basic belief. A “properly basic belief” is one for which one doesn’t need evidence, for it is manifest to the senses immediately."

This, too, grossly mistates Plantinga's argument.  Plantinga explicitly says that one can only define "properly basic" beliefs inductively, not with an a priori definition.  Even the "foundationalist" definition of proper basicality that he give on page 75, then dismisses, does not assume that the properly basic object is "manifest to the senses immediately:"

"For any proposition A and person S, A is properly basic for S if and only if A is incorrigible for S or self-evident to S."

This Coyne misconstrues as Plantinga's own definition:

"Plantinga is fond of using philosophical logic to “clarify” ideas like this, and so this is how he defines his term:

For any proposition A and person S, A is properly basic for S if and only if A is incorrigible for S or self-evident to S. (p. 150)

But this is NOT Plantinga's definition of Proper Basicality.  Plantinga explains this in the immediately prior sentence:

"The modern foundationalist's criterion for proper basicality, for example, is doubly universal:"

Plantinga then gives this definition, and explains, in the following pages, why he finds the whole foundational argument wobbly.  To represent this as Plantinga's own definition, betrays a grotesque misreading of the text.

Coyne is also capable of purely philosophical misconstrual:

"Here are some examples of beliefs that Plantinga considers “properly basic,” i.e. beliefs for which one doesn’t need evidence. I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether evidence is unnecessary here:

1. I had breakfast this morning
2. I see a tree
3. That person is in pain
4. And, of course, there is a God"

Here, Coyne's misunderstanding is almost quaint.  Coyne is intruding into an ancient discussion, with Descartes and Kant and numerous other philosophers, over what we know, and how we know it.  (See comment section below, for more specific context, from philosopher Randal Rauser.)  Plantinga recognizes, from his long acquaintance with careful reasoning on the subject, that it is harder to support facts we "all know" in the naive sense, our sense impressions, for instance, or our memories, or the intuitive leap that allows us to recognize that other people share our feelings, with strict, evidential reasoning, without begging the question.  But Plantinga is assuming more careful thought on his reader's part.  He does not seem to anticipate a reader like Coyne, who is evidently not familiar with that conversation, and takes sense and cognitive construals naively for granted in a way that careful philosophers dare not.

Coyne barges in like an Enfante Terrible, posing the questions of an amateur, indeed begging his reader to ignore careful thought, and go with their (uninformed) gut intuition.  This is, of course, very much what non-biologists do, when they say, "But look at how complex the eye is!  I'll leave it to the choir to judge whether or not it was designed -- but obviously it was!" 

At one point, admittedly, Coyne does recognizes difficulties with naively accepting sensual data:

"But of course what is “evident’ to one person may not be so for others; for example, you may be deluded about whether you had breakfast, and the tree you see may be a hallucination. This is especially true for belief #4 above. How does Plantinga get around that? By asserting that the grounds for belief may differ from person to person and from community to community:

Accordingly, criteria for proper basicality must be reached from below rather than above; they should not be presented ex cathedra but argued to and tested by a relevant set of examples. But there is no reason to assume, in advance, that everyone will agree on the examples. The Christian will of course suppose that belief in God is entirely proper and rational; if he does not accept this belief on the basis of other propositions, he will conclude that it is basic for him and properly so. Followers of Bertrand Russell and Madelyn Murray O’Hare may disagree; but how is that relevant? Must my criteria, or those of the Christian community, conform to their examples? Surely not. The Christian community is responsible to its set of examples, not to theirs. (p. 151)

"I find this evasive, self-serving, and intellectually indefensible. What he is saying is that what counts as “grounds” (i.e., evidence) . . . "

By persisting in conflating "evidence" and "grounds for belief," Coyne gives evidence that he needs to begin by studying Philosophy 101, not by attacking Alvin Plantinga. 

" . . . for God for some people won’t—and needn’t—count for others. That, of course, is a big difference between science and theology."

But it is not.  I have grounds for thinking I see a bare, leafless aspen tree outside my office window, right now.  Dr. Coyne may think he has no such grounds.  He may in fact have no such grounds.  He may in fact have no such tree. 

So what follows about the grounding of my belief in the tree?  Very little.  Similarly, if I think faith in God is grounded for me, or if indeed it is grounded for me, or even if God has indeed revealed Himself to me, say by sending an angel to liberate me from prison, it hardly follows that Dr. Coyne will necessarily admit that, not, perhaps, sharing those grounds.  Even if faith in God is grounded for Dr. Coyne, it is also possible he denies that grounding, perhaps for reasons Plantinga (and St. Paul) mention at various points. 

"Of course this argument can be used to support all kinds of nonsensical beliefs. Plantinga brings up one: belief in The Great Pumpkin, of Peanuts fame . . . And what, exactly, is that relevant difference?

Thus, for example, the Reformed epistemologist may concur with Calvin in holding that god has implanted in us a natural tendency to see his hand in the world around us; the same cannot be said for the Great Pumpkin, there being no Great Pumpkin and no natural tendency to accept beliefs about the Great Pumpkin. (pp. 151-152).

"What a tangled thicket of logic we must make our way through here!"

Here one almost sympathizes with Dr. Coyne.  He does, indeed, seem to find Plantinga a "tangled thicket."  Perhaps he is doing his best to follow an abstract logical argument, maybe for the first time since his undergraduate days, and is finding, to his surprise, that his best is not quite enough. 

What follows are Coyne's attempts to hack through that thicket:

"First of all, not everyone has a natural tendency to see God’s hand in the world . . . "

Plantinga didn't say that exactly.  He said some people may think (hinting that he is sympathetic) that God has implanted an awareness of Him in us.  It would not at all follow, in Plantinga's view, that given sin, everyone would retain that awareness in its full and least ambiguous form.  (In our interview, indeed, Dr. Plantinga noted that he wished his own awareness were keener than it is.)   

"and even if they do, how does Plantinga know that that tendency was implanted by God, rather than having been taught to credulous children by their parents or preachers?"

How does Coyne know that it wasn't implanted by God, perhaps at times by means of parents and preachers?  (Though developmental psychologist Olivera Petrovich finds that it even seems to turn up among young Japanese children who are not so taught.) 

"Is there really a “natural tendency” to accept beliefs in God without having been taught them?"

Probably.

"And which God?"

The Creator God.  The God who demands justice.  The St. Paul /Calvin /Plantinga model nicely accounts for polytheism, if that is the alternative Coyne is heading towards. 

When I asked Dr. Plantinga if he felt the discovery of belief in God like the Christian God in primitive cultures could be taken as evidence for this view, he agreed that it can.  And as I have argued here a couple times before, I think it can. 

"And on what basis does he say “there is no Great Pumpkin”?

Presumably, he has no Sensus Cucurbitus Majorus, and does not think anyone else does, either. 

"There is a natural tendency among Muslims to accept a God different in nature from the God of Christians: that is the Islamic “basic belief.”

I doubt it.  I think, from experience, that most or many Muslims believe in the Creator God in a similar way to Christians, even if they discount evidence that he has revealed himself uniquely in Jesus Christ.  (And here, I think Plantinga would also talk about evidence.) 

"And how does one adjudicate among competing existence claims—about Jesus versus Mohammed, for example? According to Plantinga, you can’t: each community has its own “basic beliefs” that can’t be argued against. It’s madness. It’s no way to find out what’s true."

Here, again, Dr. Coyne seems simply confused.  Alvin Plantinga is not saying that evidence has nothing at all to say about Christian or Muslim beliefs.  He is talking specifically about belief in God. 

The title of the essay, indeed is "Reason and Belief in God."  Philosophers tend in my experience to be careful with words and titles.  Much of Coyne's confusion could be cleared up if he simply bothered to read more carefully. 

I think that faith in Jesus as Christ can be much more direct than historical skeptics assume, and can in fact sideswipe a lot of the attacks by the Bart Ehrmans and John Crossans of this world.  This will be the crux of my contribution to Faith Seeking Understanding. 

But that is not because there is no evidence for Jesus, it is because the evidence is plain enough that ordinary readers can easily pick up on it.  Even a deer, after all, recognizes a tiger, whether or not he can defend his perception to the American Zoological Association. 

The point here, though, is that just because Plantinga claims some parts of the Christian faith may be properly basic to some people, it does not follow that they cannot be rationally questioned, or that other parts may not be properly basic, or to all people. 

"What we have instead are such beliefs as:

1. God is speaking to me
2. God has created all this,
3. God disapproves of what I have done,
4. God forgives me, and
5. God is to be thanked and praised.

Coyne might, for instance, have noticed that all of these sentences begin with the word "God," not with the words "Jesus Christ."

 "Remember, these are incorrigible beliefs: beliefs that it is impossible to hold without them being true!  I find this unbelievable, for all the propositions adduced above presume that God exists, so you know who is speaking to you, you know who has created all this, and you know who is forgiving and loving and yet demands to be thanked and praised. How can you use those “basic beliefs” to support the notion that “God exists” if they all presume that God exists? How can you intuit, for example, that “God is to be thanked and praised” unless you have a basic belief that there’s a God in the first place?"

Here is where Dr. Coyne should have paid closer attention to Plantinga's earlier arguments. 

My immediate sensory experience might be represented, in Plantinga's terms, as "I am being appeared to treely," or "I am being appeared to aspenly." 

It involves an intuitive jump -- not an argument! -- from that appearance, to "An aspen tree is standing in the late February sunshine outside my window." 

This would remain the same if I were to cut the tree down and take it en masse to a botanist.  "I am being audibly appeared to botanist-calling-it-aspen-ly," might describe my immediate sense impressions.  I intuit the botanist's mind, as I intuit the tree itself, by means (in these cases) of sense impressions and rational (but not provable) extrapolation. 

Suppose God speaks to humanity through Nature. 

How do we know this is not true?  How does Coyne know this is not true?  It seems to work, for billions of people.  And many people for whom it does not seem to work, often seem quite hostile to the idea of God, as St. Paul predicts, like Dr. Coyne himself. 

"And of course none of this justifies (nor does Plantinga attempt to justify) the” basic beliefs” in Plantinga’s own brand of Christianity, including his beliefs in the divinity of Jesus and the beneficence of God. Or are those not basic beliefs, but beliefs lifted from scripture?"

That is not the subject of this book.  Again, Plantinga nowhere that I know of, claims that every Christian belief is "properly basic." 

"To paraphrase Orwell, one has to be a theologian to believe things like this: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Obviously untrue.  Ordinary people do often believe in God as Plantinga describes, and justifiably so, Plantinga is beginning to convince me.  Coyne does not seem to have made any arguments that even hint that he is wrong. 

Also, again, Dr. Plantinga is a philosopher, not a "theologian."

But if we're looking for Orwell quotes, how about this one?

"For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on.  And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforst were rewarded, and down we came.  But unfortunately there had been a little mistake: The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed wire . . . It appears that amputation of the soul isn't just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out.  The wound has a tendency to go septic." 

Arrogance is, perhaps, the name of the particular form of septus that describes a person who has had success in one field, and then assumes, without warrant, that that success allows him to take on and defeat opponents in entirely unrelated fields, without studying that field first, or even reading his opponent's argument carefully. 

And it is multiply clear that Jerry Coyne has not begun to read Alvin Plantinga accurately.  He is like Bambi butting his antlers on the bottom of Godzilla's foot, not having even stepped back to survey the entire creature he wants to butt antlers with, before going on the attack.

Alvin Plantinga on the Social Character of Philosophy

I interviewed Alvin Plantinga yesterday morning by phone for our new book, Faith Seeking Understanding.  I was particularly glad that Dr. Plantinga agreed to participate, not only because he is probably the leading Christian philosopher of our time (the interview gave me the chance to read more of his work than I had, previously), but also because he has thought about St. Anselm and this great concept of "faith seeking understanding" in particular depth. 

It proved a lively conversation, which I think will furnish a fitting climax to Faith Seeking Understanding. 

I'll save specific quotes for the book.  But one general theme interested me for the implications it holds for "how we know things." 

I asked about the social character of philosophy.  Dr. Plantinga answered, no, philosophy is not just a matter of holing up in your den with a pile of books, but is a social enterprise, a great conversation through the centuries.  Descartes might seem to be an exception.  But even he was educated by the Jesuits, and sent his ideas around to friends for criticism. 

Think about the implications this has for those who worship science, who say science is the only real or worthy or truly useful way of ascertaining the facts.

Science is, of course, a highly useful enterprise.  But it is a less direct, less basic, epistemology than pure logic or math, or the kind of logical philosophy in which Dr. Plantinga and those with whom he carries out the "Great Conversation" are engaged.  If anything, logic is to biology or physics what they are to history or law: a more direct and certain way of knowing things.  Yet it is still an eminently social enterprise, a mutually-correcting and stimulating conversation.

What does that mean for the common breed of logical positivists who run so deep and heavy in the herd of New Atheists? 

We rely on other people for almost everything we know, from the name of the state we live in, to the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus.  History, which we as Christians rely so much upon, is part of a natural continuum of epistemologies, that in essence is really no different from the sciences, and is connected to philosophy and even the trust we place in our own minds.  This is what separates civilization from barbarism: not that we refuse to believe anything that hasn't been adequately proven by the "scientific method," but that we reasonably rely on one another (as well as the impulses that happen to come to us individually) to discover and sift the facts. 

And there really is no way of getting away from that, and remaining part of human civilization.  Even the Unabomber, after all, trusted the Post Office.   

Footnote: a conversation at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, a couple weeks ago, with a young student from China:

"So, what are you studying?"

"Philosophy."

"What in particular?"

"I'm taking classes here in philosophy of quantum mechanics, and mathematics."

"Hmmn.  Have you read Alvin Plantinga?"

"He's my teacher!"

"Really?  I'm just reading his Warranted Christian Belief."

"It was reading that book that led me to Christ!"

Peter Atkins: thank God for philosophy!

"Science uber alles!"

Before traveling to Asia, someone pointed me to a recent debate between John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, and Peter Atkins, the fire-breathing atheist and chemist at the same university.  During the debate, Dr. Atkins made the following astounding comment, in reference to Anthony Flew's conversion to theism:

"He's a philosopher.  And philosophers don't really understand the nature of the world.  Scientists understand the nature of the world.  Philosophers are pessimists, always putting (limitations on) knowledge . . . Worst of all are theologians, because they add obfuscation . . . Scientists are coming to give the real answers, the evidentially-based answers, the reliable answers." 

Someone described Atkins as "arrogant" and "condescending" in this debate, and I can see that.  What is more astounding to me, though, is the naive and unself-critical character of these comments.  Surely an educated man should know better than to say such silly things. 

Atkins is not the only one.  Adulation of scientists and the scientific method is one of the defining characteristics of the New Atheism, along with scorn for supposedly lesser modes of knowing, like philosophy, history, and of course theology.  The same attitude oozes from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion like carbon compounds from the La Brea tar pits.   

But scientists should, I think, thank God for philosophers.  First, because science grew out of philosophy historically.  Secondly, because science depends on philosophy to think.  And third, because those scientists who seem to most scorn philosophy, still make use of it in their arguments, though often poorly.  If they were to recognize the importance of philosophy, perhaps they would make better use of it. 

(1) Science grew out of philosophy.   Modern science first appeared (depending on whom you ask), either in Ancient Greece about the time of Aristotle, or in Medieval Europe some time between the 13th and 17th Centuries.  In both cases, science grew like a shoot off the trunk of philosophy -- and also theology. 

In The Christian Delusion, skeptic Richard Carrier marks Aristotle as the beginning point of ancient science:

"The truth is that the Greeks and Romans achieved tremendous and continual advances in science and mathematics after Aristotle.  Aristotle's generation marked only the beginning of the history of ancient science -- almost every amazing thing they discovered came after him.  And they discovered a lot." (Christian Delusion, 400, Carrier's emphasis)

Aristotle, of course, was the third great philosopher in a lineage from Socrates to Plato and on. 

Carrier then described a "sample" of scientific work from this time forward, beginning with Aristotle, the philosopher.  His next two examples are successors of Aristotle, lying therefore in the same lineage that began with the philosopher, Socrates. 

"Eureka!"  Archimedes figures
how to use water displacement
to test the gold content in the
king's crown, and expresses
 the spirit of Greek science,
with one fine word.

One might argue that Socrates was too theoretical and focused on society, and Aristotle and like-minded Greeks helped create something more practical by focusing on how things work in nature.  But there seemed to be no sharp divide in the ancient world.  The habit of thinking systematically about the nature of things, seemed to encourage and lead to empirical study of the artifacts of nature. 

Unexpectedly, Carrier also admits that theology was instrumental in the origin of ancient science:

"Most intellectual polytheists believed in a Creator who had intelligently ordered the cosmos, that this order could be discovered by the human mind, and that such discovery honored God.  Scientists like Galen and Ptolemy were thus motivated to pursue scientific inquiry by their religious piety, exactly as Stark claims Christians were, and for exactly the same reasons." (Ibid, 407)

Stark, however, was referring to the rise or rebirth of modern science in Europe, beginning in the Middle Ages.  He details the religious affiliation and depth of piety of the key founders of modern science in his book, For the Glory of God.  Most, he finds, were pious Christians, either Protestant or Catholic.

A number of books have told in more detail the story of how Medieval philosophy led to the birth of modern science.  A balanced account I recently read was James Hannam's The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution.   Hannam, a British historian of science, shows that the origins of European science cannot be separated from either philosophy or theology.  One can see the connection in a comment by John Buridan, whom Hannam describes as "the most remarkable philosopher of the 14th century (my emphasis):"

"In the celestial motions, there is no opposing resistance.  Therefore, when God, at the creation, moved each sphere of the heavens with just the velocity he wished, he then ceased to move them himself and since then those motions have lasted forever due to the impetus impressed on the spheres."  (Hannam, 180)

Kepler and Newton clearly saw astronomy as a field of theology.  Robert Boyle helped invent Dr. Atkins' own field of chemistry -- when he wasn't sponsoring new translations of the Bible.  So if he were properly grateful, Dr. Atkins might thank theologians for inventing his craft, not simply accuse them of obscuritanism. 

(2) Science depends on philosophy to think. 

Philosophy, according to Funk & Wagnall, is in its first two meanings:

"1. The inquiry into the most comprehensive principles of reality in general, or of some limitted sector of it such as human knowledge or human values." 

2. "The love of wisdom and the search for it." 

The second meaning here explains the etymology of the word: "philo," or "love," of "sophia" or "wisdom." 

Obviously, no good scientist should object to the love of wisdom.  (However much bad scientists, or bad men who do science, may despise it in practice.)

Science is, in the normal manner of speaking, one particular kind of inquiry into the principles of reality, or some limited sector of it.  The same dictionary gives as its first two definitions of "science" the following:

(1) "Any department of knowledge in which the results of investigation have been logically arranged and systemetized in the form of hypothesis and general laws subject to verification." 

This broad definition might include law, history, and theology, as well as some forms of "philosophy."

(2) "Knowledge of facts, phenomena, laws, and proximate causes, gained and verified by exact observation, organized experiment, and ordered thinking."

This more narrow definition is what distinguishes the chemistry of Atkins or the zoology of Dawkins from "philosophy" or "theology" in the academic sense.  But notice that science involves not only "observation" and "experiment," but also "ordered thinking."* 

Ordered thinking is precisely what philosophers attempt to do.  And philosophy is defined, above, as inquiry into principles of reality -- which of course is also the goal of science.  So science can be seen as a compartment of philosophy. 

A more specific compartment of philosophy is epistemology, the art of knowing, and of knowing what we know.  (As the Chinese philosopher Confucius put it.)  Wikipedia rightly describes epistemology as a field of philosophy:

΅Epistemology . . . (from Greek επιστημη (epistēmē), meaning "knowledge, science" λογοσ meaning "study of") is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge." 

Anthony Flew has, for many decades, approached reality as a careful thinker.  In my own on-line debates, I have often found a higher quality to arguments made by academic philosophers than by scientists or other scholars.  Whether atheist or Christian, philosphers are trained to think clearly.  In my experience, this training makes a real difference. 

Atkins complained about philosophers placing limits on what we can know.  In fact, of course, science itself is finding such limits, as Atkins knows.  But the scope of knowledge is indeed a branch of philosophy.  It is also absolutely essential to any careful and respectable science.  Perhaps one of the reasons the New Atheists so often make such foolish and grandoise claims about areas of knowledge of which they are largely ignorant, is because they fail to attend to the limits of their own knowledge.  Perhaps scientific stardom has become a kind of drug for some of them, which having been indulged, predisposes them to such bombastic rants as Dr. Atkins indulges in, above.   

No science is possible without philosophy, since science is a special form of philosophical reasoning.  Sciences like biology and physics are less immediate and certain than some other forms of philosophy, like pure logic and mathematics. They carry the advantage of touching (by faith in our senses) objects in the real world, and the disadvantage of being less sure (because our senses can be deluded).  On the other hand, the physical sciences are more immediate than history, or other disciplines that depend on human testimony (which can also be deluded), like sports-casting, dating, or finding after-Christmas bargains on-line.  But the physical sciences do not tell us everything we need to know, either, which is why "faith" in other people, and ultimately in God, is so important.  Theology is, in part, the art of testing that faith.   

So Atkins is just confused.  C. S. Lewis said, "We need good philosophy, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy exists."  Scientists like Atkins depend on bad philosophy, because they forget that good philosophy exists and is a necessary component of good science.   

(3) Scientists who most scorn philosophy, still make use of it when they argue.

I've often noticed this, especially after my 2007 book, The Truth Behind the New Atheism, came out.  There is a scientist who posts on the Amazon forum for that book, who calls himself "Scientific Mind."  Almost all his arguments against religion appear to be philosophical (in an often remarkably amateurish sense), or historical, not scientific.  The same is true of Richard Dawkins.  He might scorn theology, philosophy, even history, yet he frequently makes arguments from those fields to support his points.  In fact, I've never met one of these scientific atheists, who did not step into a phone booth and turn himself into an amateur (and often poor) philosopher, as soon as he began to attack religion.

Imitation is, they say, the sincerest form of flattery.  But I would rather Dr. Atkins take the following saying to heart, even if it is by a mere philosopher: 

"Know thyself."   

Footnote: Writing on Thanksgiving, 2011, I'm thankful today for many things, not least for family, exciting work, the beauties of mountains and forest and sea.  I'm also grateful for the many brilliant philosophers, theologians, and scientists I've been privileged to learn from.  I'm grateful for the wise thinkers -- belonging to these three, and other fields -- who are contributing to our upcoming book, Faith Seeking Understanding.  I'm also thankful for those of you who occasionally read my blog, and comment thoughtfully on the ideas posted here. 


(*There is a broader and older sense in which science is almost a synonym for philosophy -- that which is known, that which we try to know, and how we seek knowledge of it -- "systematic knowledge in general," as Funk & Wagnall put it in their 4th definition.)