These are just three emails I’ve gotten in the last week. Plantinga-lovers are especially incensed:

“Fr. Aidan Kimel” commented on “The bland leading the blind: A conversation between Gary Gutting and Alvin Plantinga“:

Tom, you are quite right. Plantinga is a sophisticated philosopher and cannot be judged on the basis of an interview in which he is attempting to communicate his arguments at a popular level. Before ridiculing the man, one should first read, and understand, his substantive writings. His argument about atheism vs agnosticism is a minor point–more important to philosophers than anyone else. Yet folks here are jumping on Plantinga as if he is guilty of extreme stupidity. Before making such a judgment, go immerse yourself in analytic epistemology. Only then will you be qualified to have an opinion. I am personally not sure what to make of Plantinga’s free-will defense of theism, but since few on this blog have actually read what he has written–and what he has written on this topic is philosophically IMPORTANT–it really doesn’t matter. The ignorance of science geeks is astounding. Personally, I am uncomfortable with Plantinga’s constant phrasing of God as “a” being. I can use this language, of course, but I remain uncomfortable with it, for reasons I have cited over at my blog: http://goo.gl/L723sJ. David Hart has written eloquently on this question, but the omnipotent Coyne has already dismissed Hart without even having read him.

The Father is wrong that I didn’t dismiss Hart without having read him. I dismissed what I discerned of his views in a summary of his article by someone else, but emphasized that I hadn’t yet read his book. I have ordered his book and will read it. But I have to say this—I don’t think, based on other things I’ve read, that Hart makes a slam-dunk case for God. Hart’s book is just the next in an endless line of references that theologians present you, sequentially, as “the best arguments for God.” When you find flaws in one, they simply proffer another. It’s like the mythical hydra: when you knock off one head, another crops up.

There must be a name for this kind of strategy, one that mirrors the “first cause” argument.

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“mmanry,” who cited the website Life Bible Kids, also commented on “The bland leading the blind: A conversation between Gary Gutting and Alvin Plantinga“:

“Second, why is Alvin Plantinga famous, or even have a job? The arguments he makes are so palpably foolish that any freshman philosopher can see through them. Yet thousands of Christians regard him as a guru.” Jerry, you prove over and over again that you really don’t have any understanding of Plantinga and philosophy at all. Why is it that you believe that you are the “enlightened one” and Plantinga is not? Even Thomas Nagel agrees with Plantinga on certain points. Let’s be honest, I think most people would trust Nagel over you in a philosophical debate any day. Stick to biology.

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In response, let me just list a selection of things I’ve read by Plantinga:

Dennett, D. C., and A. Plantinga. 2010. Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? Oxford University Press, New York.

Plantinga, A. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. Oxford University Press, New York.

Plantinga, A. 2001. When faith and reason clash: Evolution and the Bible. Pp. 113-145 in R. T. Pennock, ed. Intelligent design creationism and its critics: Philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Plantinga, A. 2011. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Plantinga, A., and J. F. S. (ed.). 1988. The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI.

Plantinga, A., and N. Wolterstoff. 1991. Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN.

I think that qualifies as a decent background in Plantinga. And really, he’s not hard to understand. He’s just hard to swallow.

I might add that real, card-carrying philosophers violently disagree with Plantinga, and in fact Nagel is an outlier. See, for instance, Dan Dennett’s evisceration of Plantinga in their jointly-published book cited above.

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Finally, “George”, who cited an Anti-ageing website, commented on “A new year of creationist nonsense“:

“Did the Civil War happen? You obviously weren’t there to see that…” No, BUT we have written accounts of the event from people who WERE there! This then is a weak argument. There are no written records from millions of years ago, and the fossil record can and will be interpreted in a way that will protect the evolutionists theories. Evolutionists always invoke “creationism” and religion, when making their arguments, as if the only reason ANYONE would challenge macro-evolution is a on a RELIGIOUS basis. That assertion is totally false! Evolution (macro-evolution) can and should be challenged purely on a scientific basis. How else COULD it be challenged? We need to get beyond the nonsense that all sorts of dire things will happen if people do not believe in macro-evolution. Medicines would not suddenly cease to work, genetics and biology would no more be threatened by a valid refutation of macro-evolution, than physics was destroyed because quantum physics supplanted Newtonian physics. Macro-evolution is scientific dogma, and is defended by the scientific establishment, just as religion defended their concept of the Earth as the center of the solar system before Galileo proved it incorrect. The difference is that science doesn’t burn you at the stake if you disagree, and I concede that for the evolution heretics, that is of course a very big difference.

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There’s not much to say about this except to show once more the obdurate and willful ignorance of creationists. We have tons of fossil “transitional forms” that testify to “macroevolution,” which is a nebulous term roughly meaning the evolution of one “kind” of plant or animal into a different “kind”. But under anyone’s definition birds and reptiles are different kinds, and we have the transitions from the latter to the former. Ditto for reptiles and mammals, fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, and terrestrial artiodactyls (even-toed mammals) into whales. To argue that we interpret the fossil record “in a way that will protect the evolutionsts [sic] theories is to argue that evolutionists (including the religious ones!) are in some kind of conspiracy to protect a flawed theory. But why would religious scientists like Ken Miller, Francis Collins, and all the folks at BioLogos do that?

The “we weren’t there to see it, so it didn’t happen” argument against evolution is becoming more and more popular. It behooves all of us to understand how it’s refuted by the data.

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