<https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/09/27/philosopher-defends-relig
ion/?pagination=false> September 27, 2012 issue

# A Philosopher Defends Religion: Alvin Plantinga’s ‘Where the 
Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism’

> by Thomas Nagel

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 knowledge; 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 39
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
somewhere, 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](#fn-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](#fn-2)^ In addition,
God acts in the world more selectively by "enabling Christians to see
the truth of the central teachings of the 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 cognitive 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 designer.

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.