A few readers have called my attention to a one-on-one email interview of Alvin Plantinga by Gary Gutting at the “Opinionator” section of the February 9 New York Times. This is (God help us) the first of a series of interviews that Gutting will conduct about religion, and his topic for the first, published last Sunday, was “Is atheism irrational?”

I’m not going to dissect it in extenso, for it’s not worth it, and I’ve had it up to here with Plantinga. Just let me say that this column puzzles me in two ways. First, why is the Times giving Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, so much space to rabbit on about religion? And why do they let him interview one of his colleagues, the notorious Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame? Might there be a touch of good Christian nepotism in that? And where is the atheist “Opinionatory” columnist to counterbalance all the slow-pitch softballs that Gutting gets to throw at the faithful?

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.

If you want to see a thorough takedown of this column, go read the Barefoot Bum‘s post, “Alvin Plantinga on atheism.” I’ll just quote a number of silly things that Plantinga says. The bullet points give direct quotes from Alvin the Apologist:

“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.”

JAC: To most of us, I think atheism is simply the refusal to believe in gods, not the absolute denial that there are any.

“I should make clear first that I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis , John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.”

, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get.” “The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience. Many people of very many different cultures have thought themselves in experiential touch with a being worthy of worship. They believe that there is such a person, but not because of the explanatory prowess of such belief. Or maybe there is something like Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Indeed, if theism is true, then very likely there is something like the sensus divinitatis. So claiming that the only sensible ground for belief in God is the explanatory quality of such belief is substantially equivalent to assuming atheism.”

JAC: Remember that the God that gives us the sensus divinitatis is the Christian God. Obviously, others whose sensi (sp?) tell them of other gods, like Allah or Brahma, are getting a garbled message, as did every religionist before the supposed birth of Jesus. And (Plantinga discusses this elsewhere) what about the atheists? Well, says Dr. Alvin, our sensus divinitatis is broken. In fact, it’s broken in more than half the world’s inhabitants. God didn’t do a very good job when he installed that sensus! As for the second quote, I leave it to the readers, for I am feeling a pain in my lower mesentery.

Gutting then asks Plantinga to give some of those other strong philosophical arguments for God:

“One presently rather popular argument: fine-tuning. Scientists tell us that there are many properties our universe displays such that if they were even slightly different from what they are in fact, life, or at least our kind of life, would not be possible. The universe seems to be fine-tuned for life. For example, if the force of the Big Bang had been different by one part in 10 to the 60th, life of our sort would not have been possible. The same goes for the ratio of the gravitational force to the force driving the expansion of the universe: If it had been even slightly different, our kind of life would not have been possible. In fact the universe seems to be fine-tuned, not just for life, but for intelligent life. This fine-tuning is vastly more likely given theism than given atheism.”

The Bayesian “probability argument” given by Plantinga at the end is specious, for it requires an a priori assessment of the likelihood of the Christian God, which I believe Plantinga sets at 50% (this his flawed default figure for probabilities of things we don’t have any evidence for). But at any rate we all know the counterarguments to the fine-tuning argument for God; Google “Sean Carroll fine tuning” if you haven’t heard them.

There are many other moments of unintended hilarity (for some reason the Times allows Gutting far more space than, say, someone sensible like Paul Krugman), but I’ll leave you with Plantinga’s take on theodicy: why is there evil in the world? His answer is full of LOLz, for he explains that the best of all possible worlds must have evil in it. Where is Voltaire when we need him?

G.G.: “But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?”A.P.: “I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.” [JAC: yes, and maybe the Cubs will win the World Series.]Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures. I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.”

Ergo, Auschwitz: “The World Would Have Been Worse Without It”. Oh, I forgot—those were mostly Jews. You know, the ones who didn’t have the “right relationship to God”.