Where the Conflict Really Lies: A Book Reflection

Have you heard of Alvin Plantinga? Before marrying a certain someone, I had not, aside from a singular mention in an undergraduate apologetics class. Yet, now I know that he is one of the preeminent living Christian philosophers, and while I still find most philosophy books difficult to work through, I found Where the Conflict Really Lies quite accessible. I'd love to share the key points and surprises from my 2023 read with you all. As a reminder, here's the general outline of this post: I will . . .

1. Contextualize the author's writings as a whole (bibliography)
2. Bring the author's major ideas to the present day
3. Comment on major sections of the book, or important chapters, depending on organization

Plantinga's Other Writings

Alvin's life work has been to show, philosophically, that religious belief is rational. The titles of his book-length works show this pretty well!

1. Advice to Christian Philosophers
2. Does God Have a Nature? (Aquinas lecture #44)
3. Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality
4. Faith and Philosophy
5. Faith and Rationality (editor)
6. God and Other Minds
7. God, Freedom, and Evil
8. Knowledge and Christian Belief
9. Reason and Belief in God
10. Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (coauthored with Daniel Dennett)
11. The Knowledge of God
12. The Nature of Necessity
13. The Ontological Argument
14. The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship
15. Warrant and Proper Function (Warrant #2)
16. Warrant: The Current Debate (Warrant #1)
17. Warranted Christian Belief (Warrant #3)
18. Where the Conflict Really Lies

Goodreads lists some additional works, but these are translations (mostly into Spanish) of some of the above. Plantinga's work is in the analytical philosophy tradition, which among other things means that his writing style includes definitions of every term used, in precise language that may or may not be comprehensible to the non-philosophical reader. Later this year, I will post on essential "beginner" (i.e., my level) philosophical vocabulary, but to start you off, here are some of the confusing titular terms with extremely brief definitions:

• Metaphysics: in modern times, usually referring to the nature of being/existing (oversimplified).
• Modality: another flexible word, typically meaning "possibility" (logical or actual).
• Necessity: related to "modality." For now, think of it in the common sense, i.e., something that must or must not be.
• Ontological: relating to the study of things that exist (as opposed to epistemology, the study of knowledge or how we know things).
• Warrant: over-simply, the link between belief and knowledge, and the logical way(s) of expressing or claiming this link.

Plantinga's Major Ideas

My primary Internet source is a Crossway article, and additional material is from Husband.

Plantinga practices and has practiced his Christianity within the Dutch Reformed and Christian Reformed traditions. What are some key features of these theological traditions that can give us hints about his worldview?

• Both are in the Reformed (Calvinist) branch of Protestantism; Dutch Reformed originated in South Africa and was adopted in the Netherlands, rejecting Arminianism but centuries later merging with the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Calvinism centers on the sovereignty of God and a logical organization to doctrines.
• Notably, the Christian Reformed Church seceded from Dutch Reformed to be more separationist (no hymns, no accommodation to surrounding culture, no open communion). A congregational/synodical model of governance is used. This reflects a higher priority on congregational autonomy and a lower priority on episcopal authority.
• Preaching is from the lectionary, in the Protestant tradition. This reflects a higher priority placed on the text of Scripture and a lower priority placed on ecclesiastical authority or tradition.

After studying at Calvin College (now University), among other places, he returned there to teach for a while before completing his professorial career at University of Notre Dame. What are some features of these schools' philosophy departments that can give us additional clues?

• Calvin University was originally a merged liberal arts school and seminary (Calvinist tradition); it has emphasized terminal degrees (Ph.D.) for its faculty since 1888 and allowing women students since the early 1900s (before women's suffrage). Like other denominational universities, it requires active Christianity of its faculty and encourages student participation in chapel.
• UND was founded somewhat later and is rooted in the Roman Catholic intellectual stream. It has one of the top-ranked philosophy graduate programs in the United States; key foci in its research entail a sacramental worldview where God works through means.

Given this background, the Crossway author identifies three of Plantinga's most important ideas, arranged chronologically (and thus potentially in logical order, given how he uses writing to develop his ideas):

1. A sound argument for God's existence is not an essential requirement for a person's rational belief in Him.
2. To properly connect knowledge and warrant, one's cognition must be reasonably functional, and the person must be within a conducive knowledge-seeking (epistemic) environment.
3. Christian belief is intellectually acceptable.

Let's unpack each of these.

Requirements for Rational Belief in God

Plantinga's argument here is based partly in logic and partly in reality--how people actually go about believing in things. He notes that God, if He exists, is at minimum a mind. Are there logical arguments to demonstrate that other minds besides our own exist? There are, but none lack holes or flaws. However, each person (with the possible exception of a few hardcore solipsists) still does believe to some degree that other minds exist. Therefore, Plantinga concludes that having a great argument for God's existence is not a requirement for people to believe in Him.

Epistemic and Cognitive Environment

Plantinga wrote a trilogy on warrant--the best non-philosophical way I can think of to express what "warrant" is that it is a sometimes-invisible link between the evidence you use and the claim you are making. In other words, warrant spells out why your chosen evidence is actually relevant to your claim. Warrants can be based in logos (reasoning/logic), ethos (the shared or assumed-shared ethical leanings between you and your audience), or pathos (the emotional state you would like your audience to share).

Within one of these books, another concept he talks about is "proper function." This is needed to solidify the connections between what you know and the warrants you use to connect to claims. For truth to consistently emerge when using warrants and knowledge, he posits that the thinker's cognitive status must be reasonably intact--not perfect, but the executive functions and sensory perception shouldn't have any glaring flaws in them. The other piece in the recipe is the epistemic environment--given how I think about how-I-know and what-I-know, I will make better or worse connections among my knowledge, warrants, and claims.

Christianity and Intellectualism

I haven't read nearly enough of Plantinga's works to find out where all he argues that Christian belief is intellectually acceptable. (I do know that he goes in a slightly different direction from Pascal's wager.) However, a big barrier for some is the perceived lack of a great or "perfect" argument that the existence of any deity is more rational than the nonexistence of a deity. As Plantinga established, perfect arguments for God's existence aren't a logical requirement for belief that at least His mind exists.

Another way of stating that is that Christian belief is "properly basic." Contrary to evidentialism, allowing for some "basic" beliefs that are held without "adequate" supporting evidence actually works better logically than requiring every claim or belief to have evidence supporting it. The TGC article linked in this paragraph further summarizes and restates Plantinga's multi-pronged argument for the intellectual acceptability of Christian belief.

Conflict Walk-Through

The subtitle of this book ("Science, Religion, and Naturalism") hints at Plantinga's thesis. Put shortly, science and religion are not in conflict. However, religion and methodological naturalism (superimposed on science) are in conflict.

Published in 2011 (Oxford University Press), the book has 3 parts: Alleged Conflict (chapters 1-4), Superficial Conflict (chapters 5-6), Concord (chapters 7-9), and Deep Conflict (chapter 10) packed into 350 pages.

Alleged Conflict

Key thinkers and writers Plantinga names and engages with here are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Paul Draper, and Philip Kitcher. Bullet points cannot do justice to the pages of argument/claim dissection Plantinga lays out for each:

• According to Dawkins, the universe has no design. However, this is not an inevitable conclusion of ToE. A logical hole is pointed out on p. 25: claiming that "p is astronomically improbable" does not logically yield "p."
• According to Dennett, ToE rules out a god (i.e., a mind directing evolution). He cherry-picks theistic arguments to engage with. Plantinga begins by reminding the reader that "true" is not the same as "just possible."
• According to Draper, there is no evidentialist argument that supports ToE over theism. Plantinga's focus here is working out probabilities involved in arguments.
• According to Kitcher, providentialism (a piece of Chrisitan belief) does not fit with ToE. Plantinga shines in the areas of the problem of evil and possible worlds, which address this claim.

His stated focus in the book is more on generic theism rather than on Christian theism, for reasons that become apparent once one dives into the logical steps he walks through. He notes that there are varied definitions of Christian belief depending on one's tradition (e.g., Heidelberg Catechism, 39 Articles) as well as varied definitions of Evolution (intentionally capitalizing to denote the theory that has been refined since Darwin first outlined it).

Six key claims of the Theory of Evolution (abbreviated ToE here and E in his book) are:

1. The earth is ancient. This claim conflicts only with young-earth creationism.
2. Evolution generally proceeds in a progressive direction.
3. Descent with modification explains most of the variety in living organisms.
4. Common ancestry is a feature linking various organisms to each other.
5. Naturalistic mechanisms drive Evolution. If one specifies unguided naturalistic mechanisms, then this claim is the only one truly conflicting with theistic belief.
6. Naturalistic origins explain the history of organisms on earth.

The section concludes with a bit on quantum theory, indicating that the universe is more likely open (to external action) than closed, rendering the apparent contradiction between divine action and determinism less certain.

Superficial Conflict

Areas of apparent (not true) conflict between science and religion are evolutionary psychology and biblical scholarship. Essentially, the statement "God acts" doesn't specify the mechanism, leaving the logical/rational person more free to consider how the statement interacts with other statements.

Per evolutionary psychology, ToE explains human behavior but not religious beliefs and practices (although it does explain some interpretations of religion). The only thing I want to highlight from this section is a footnote on p. 144: "Of course there are conflicts between science and particular religious beliefs that are not part of Christian belief as such: belief in a universal flood, a very young earth, etc."

Biblical scholarship is divided chronologically into Biblical commentary (pre-Enlightenment) and historical Biblical criticism (post-Enlightenment), which goes beyond commentary in some ways. A highlight from this chapter is that there are multiple approaches to historical criticism, the Duhemian variant is far less problematic for Christian belief because it stipulates that data used must be fairly well accepted by the relevant scholarly community already.

Concord

Two major areas in this section are fine-tuning and design discourse, and the deep roots of science (primarily pre- but also post-Enlightenment). Pertaining to fine tuning, Plantinga discusses objections to the argument(s) including the anthropic principle, and engages with various replies to Behe's design argument. The bottom line in this section is that there is no Darwinian undercutting defeater for religious belief.

Other resources address the second focus area admirably. Suffice it to say, I deeply appreciate Plantinga's descriptions of Christian theism's integral involvement in founding principles of science as we know it. These include imago Dei, the match between the world and our cognitive faculties (thus making science possible), reliability and regularity of the world as a whole, mathematics, and the ability to learn from experience.

Deep Conflict

It is important to note that science/ToE, and naturalism are superficially concordant, which makes their deeper conflict the more serious because most people don't think through the full logical and reality implications of accepting both. There is a difference between truth (including logical noncontradiction) and the sensibility of accepting 2 different things such as ToE and naturalism.

I recommend you read this chapter after the rest of the others (as opposed to one person I know who read only the last chapter and came to a conclusion opposite of Plantinga's). The argument focuses on the basic reliability (leading to associated true beliefs) of one's cognitive faculties, especiall memory, perception, and sympathy. Plantinga asserts that (1) Darwin's doubts are correct and that (2) since beliefs have some neurophysiological content, the probability of having many beliefs be simultaneously true is quite low.