Alvin Plantinga on atheism

In Is Atheism Irrational (mentioned by 3quarksdaily who appear to have a real beef against atheism), Gary Gutting interviews Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga on the philosophical status of atheism. Plantinga's arguments for the irrationality of atheism, which he defines as "the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions." Plantinga's critiques of atheism, however, are at best weak and sometimes fallacious.

Plantinga first asserts that most philosophers, even believers, reject the traditional theistic arguments for the existence of God as unsound. Plantinga, however, claims that merely the failure of these arguments does not provide sufficient grounds for atheism. Gutting mentions Plantinga's argument that the question of theism is similar to the question as to whether there are an even or odd number of stars in the universe. Plantinga believes this similarity is better than Russell's Teapot because we have "a great deal of evidence against teapotism," albeit indirect, whereas we have no evidence for or against the evenness of the number of stars. Hence, the proper response is agnosticism rather than atheism. However, Plantinga fails on a number of counts here.

First, he misrepresents Russell's argument. Russell adds to his argument, "But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved [by direct observation], it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense." Russell is not talking about an abstract question of epistemology, but addressing the assertion of social and cultural privilege on the basis of unfalsifiable propositions.

Second, the even-number-of-stars (ENS) analogy fails to capture the scope and character of religious belief. ENS is a very simple, prosaic, even trivial proposition that has no implications at all on the character of the universe; there is no indirect evidence we could use to adduce any probability other than 50%. Religion is not so simple nor prosaic. Does Plantinga really want to claim that religion is as simple, prosaic, and trivial as ENS, without any conceivable indirect consequences?

Finally, the strict distinction Plantinga makes between agnosticism and atheism is a straw man. As Russell elaborates, "I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla." Russell, like many other atheists, consider atheism not a philosophical position but a practical position. Atheism need only be philosophical agnosticism applied to positive claims made without evidence.

Plantinga goes on to say,

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.

Let's try to take this statement apart. Plantinga sharply distinguishes arguments on the one hand, and experience or sensation on the other hand. According to Plantinga, belief in God rests on the same foundation as "belief in other minds, or belief in the past," none of which require argument to believe.

Plantinga seems to be using "argument" in more restricted sense than the common definition as "a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition." We can easily create arguments based on experience; science is nothing but arguments from experience. Plantinga seems also to distinguish direct sensory experience ("sensus divinitatis") from "experience," which is presumably indirect. But drawing an indirect conclusion from experience requires argument. Belief in other minds and belief in the past both require argument, based on experience, to rationally establish. Even establishing the existence of a sensus divinitatis (direct sensory apprehension of God) requires an argument to establish that it is indeed a sense rather than a purely internal mind (brain) phenomenon. Plantinga is just speaking nonsense here, presumably to insulate his position against any kind of argument.

Although Plantinga denies that arguments are unnecessary for belief in God, he offers a few anyway. (Why? I don't need to argue that we can all see the tree in my back yard; if you are in doubt, come and look.) He starts with the Fine Tuning argument: "[T]he 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." Plantinga does not seem to understand that at best, the Fine Tuning argument is controversial, and probably proves the opposite: given fine tuning, atheism (naturalism) is vastly more probable than theism, because a God could create intelligent life given any physics, whereas life can exist naturally only in a fine-tuned universe.

Gutting simply accepts the strength of the Fine Tuning argument, but implies that a fine-tuning God "fall[s] far short of . . . an all-perfect God." In response, Plantinga defends Christianity with an obvious fallacy of the excluded middle: "[Y]our qauestion makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin and suffering." The grammatical error aside ("best" is a superlative; there can be only one best possible world), the argument against an all-perfect God requires us only to say that this exact real world is not the best; while it's possible arguendo that the best possible world contains some sin and suffering, it could contain less sin and suffering than this one. An all-perfect God would, at best, create only the best possible world, even if He would create any imperfect world at all. If this is not the best possible world, an all-perfect God is either does not exist or the concept is vacuous.

Plantinga has an odd notion of what a good world is:

he 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.

Really. If this is the best possible world, I don't understand anything at all about good.

It's hard to see Plantinga as saying anything but that a world with the Holocaust, millennia of war, human-induced famine, genocide, rape, murder, torture is not only good but best; if those horrors had not happened, the world would have been worse, because God would not have suffered. At least Plantinga is clear: this is the sort of world that Christianity offers. I want none of it.

Gutting notes that atheists justify their disbelief by the assertion that God does not have explanatory power. Plantinga deflects this challenge by noting that lack of explanatory power does not justify disbelief. Plantinga argues that we are not justified in disbelieving in the existence of the Moon, for example, merely because it is no longer considered a good explanation for lunacy. But Plantinga seems to ignore that the existence of the Moon still retains considerable power to explain why we see a big round object in the sky that seems to correlate with the tides.

Plantinga then goes argues two ways in which God does have explanatory power. The first is religious experience. This argument would have considerably more force if religious believers all believed in the same God, rather than gods that always resemble their own cultures and justify their idiosyncratic social norms and political power structures.

Plantinga repeats Thomas Nagel's ad hominem speculation that atheists disbelieve in God because we don't want there to be a God. Plantinga asserts that theism poses a "serious limitation of autonomy." Plantinga is completely contradicting himself here; above, he argues that this is the best of all possible worlds because we have the maximum amount of autonomy, sufficient autonomy to inflict the worst sort of harm, suffering and pain on other human beings. Precisely what limitations on autonomy does theism impose? It is true, however, that atheists object to the limitations on our autonomy imposed by human beings who claim to be speaking for God, but I cannot imagine objecting to any limitations on my autonomy that a truly just and loving God would impose, any more than I object to the (rational and justifiable) limitations on my autonomy imposed by the state.

Gutting asserts (without mentioning, much less citing, any source) that materialism is a "primary motive" for atheism. I have no idea where he gets this from; having read a considerable amount of atheist philosophy, I have never seen this argument; it cannot possibly be "primary." I don't even know what Gutting means by "materialism"; in the 19th 19th century idea that nothing exists but atoms in motion, materialism has been long since debunked by science. Gutting here offers Plantinga an opportunity to expound on one of his favorite theories, that evolution is incompatible with materialism. Plantinga declares that he cannot give a full account of his argument in the article (or anywhere else; the full account is only in his book, which I might look at later) but his summary is so full of holes I can't imagine even the full treatment can fill.

Briefly, Plantinga argues that the content of a belief is distinct from its neurological properties, and that content has no causal effect. Two different neurological beliefs could have identical causal effects but different content. Because content has no causal effect, evolution cannot select for content. Therefore, the content of our belief in evolution was not selected for, therefore we have no reason to believe the content of our belief in evolution is true.

This argument, however, has a number of flaws, not only that no one is really a "materialist." What, precisely, does Plantinga mean by the content of a belief? If the content of a belief has no causal effect, then a naturalist would claim then that by definition we cannot determine what the content of a belief is, much less determine whether it is true. Indeed, the naturalist would say that "existence" cannot properly be applied to anything with no causal effect: the existence of a thing with no causal effect is indistinguishable from its nonexistence.

But perhaps "content" is epiphenomenal or emergent, in the same sense that the roundness of an inflated basketball is emergent or epiphenomenal: it is not the roundness per se that causes a basketball to bounce regularly, it is the atoms in the basketball that causes it to bounce regularly. However, the roundness of a basketball is fully determined by the arrangement of the basketball's atoms; change their arrangement to something not round, like an (American) football, and the ball will no longer bounce regularly. Thus, if the neurological properties of a belief determine the content of a belief (e.g. we cannot say that two identical neurological beliefs have different content), and evolution can select on the causal properties of a belief, then evolution does affect the content of belief, albeit indirectly. So Plantinga's argument simply fails.

I've been following Plantinga's evolutionary argument for many years, and he has not, to my knowledge, substantively altered his summary to address any criticism; the summary he offers to Gutting is substantively identical to summaries I read years ago. This is the best sophisticated philosophy that the theists have, and it's nothing but a mass of sloppy reasoning that an economist can demolish in post.