Where the conflict really lies
Where the Conflict Really Lies is a two part thesis by Alvin Plantigna in which he attempts to vouchsafe rational grounds for theistic belief against the apparent opposition from biology, physics and cosmology. The first part of this thesis seeks to establish that there are no definitive scientific defeaters for theism; the second part, which is both more ambitious and more interesting, argues that there is such deep conflict between atheism and science that belief in God is actually more rational.
The book was apparently written for students of philosophy but most of its content and all of its arguments (ignoring the occasional salvo of propositional calculus) are accessible to the average reader. In his reply to biology, for instance, Plantigna simply argues that evolution does not disprove the existence of a creator if we allow, with him, that science only assumes it is an unguided process. [1] Nor do the conservation laws of physics preclude miracles; or rather, they only preclude miracles for closed systems but divine intervention, almost by definition, breaks that closure. And then there is the more recent model of the universe urged on us by quantum physics which is, according to Plantigna, even less hostile to the belief in God. [2] The second half of the book, as mentioned, argues for the rationality of theism. Here cosmological fine tuning makes an inevitable appearance and even the arguments from design are given a brief and cautious treatment. But then Plantigna points out something interesting: The assumption that cognition and the beliefs it generates are purely the result of environmental adaptation undermines both cognition and belief of every kind—including, ex hypothesi, the very assumption that they are the result of adaptation. And this is because the content of a belief is not required to conform to absolute truths about reality in the naturalistic model of evolution but only to produce behaviors that increase the fitness of an organism. [3] Darwin himself was troubled by this problem. “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy,” he wrote in a private correspondence. “Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” And as Plantigna explains, it is a problem that can never be definitively resolved owing to the inescapable circularity of its premises. Any theory p which purports to disprove the unreliability of human cognition is itself a product of the cognition whose unreliability it seeks to disprove. Theists, of course, avoid such epistemic entanglements because God has created their cognitive faculties not to increase their reproductive fitness but in order that they might discover ultimate truths about Him and the universe. Another interesting argument in part two concerns what Eugene Wigner called, “the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences,” or, more generally, the remarkable regularity and lawfulness of the universe and its consequent amenity to rational scrutiny. Why should the universe be describable by elegant mathematical equations that fall within human understanding? In theory there are infinite alternative universes which, lacking the obvious regularity of our own, would require mathematical descriptions far beyond the limits of human intelligence. Atheists, as in the case of cosmological fine tuning, must view this as an astounding stroke of serendipity and invoke a multiverse and the anthropic principle to circumvent its prohibitive improbability. Theists, again, impute this to the workings of a rational creator who placed us in a world that is amenable to our reason so that we might come to know Him. Medieval theologians referred to this as the adequatio intellectus ad rem: the adequation of the intellect to reality. For me, however, the most interesting argument in Plantigna’s book was also the least likely to be so: A philosophical defense of a knowledge of God through faith. The atheistic complaint about faith is that it makes claims that are not borne out by evidence or by reason. Plantigna responds to this by noting that there are many warranted sources of knowledge in addition to reason and we do not impose the same requirement on them.
Faith, in Plantigna’s defence of it, is not an obtuse ipse dixit but a faculty of spiritual apprehension—a sensus divinitatis, in the words of John Calvin—whose universality across all human cultures is suggestive and which is no more to be summarily dismissed than other “suprarational” sources of knowledge, such as intuition, memory, or even perception.
No atheist on earth is going to read this book and come away convinced of God’s existence. But I think it has to be regarded as a success insofar as it achieves its goal of vouchsafing a rational basis for theism—or at least a basis that is not completely irrational. You might even argue that Plantigna has grossly overstated his case. After all, it could have been far more easily achieved against far, far greater opposition: Even if scientists found irrefutable evidence that God does not exist, a determined theist could make the undisprovable objection that such irrefutable proof proves nothing. God Himself may have intentionally designed the universe in such a way that it is possible to disprove His existence in order to exercise the suprarational faith of His creations. 1. The scientific claim is that the rich variety of life on earth was produced by natural selection blindly winnowing random genetic mutations. But in fact there is (and Plantigna is careful to quote authorities) no firm evidential basis in science for the “randomness” of mutations. The blindness of evolution is therefore akin to teleology: Both are metaphysical assumptions.
2. This section includes, among other things, a hypothetical quantum mechanical account for the transformation of water into wine by Christ—provided by an atheistic but rather sporting physicist. 3. Clearly survival requires cognitive devices that in some way track crucial features of the environment and are appropriately connected to intention and muscular reflexes. But there is no necessary annexation between those cognitive devices and substantively true beliefs about the world. It is enough that the belief prompts a behaviour that happens to increase fitness. This, says Plantigna, is the “crushing skepticism” to which the naturalist is committed. 4. Thomas Reid expressed the problem by saying, "If a man's honesty were called into question, it would be ridiculous to refer to that man's own word whether be be honest or not." In a like case it is absurd to, "prove by reasoning that reason is not fallacious." |
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