Recommended Reading: “Where The Conflict Really Lies” (Alvin Plantinga)
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
(Emeritus Professor Alvin Plantinga)
ISBN13: 9780199812097
ISBN10: 0199812098
Oxford University Press, Hardback, 376 pages (Nov 2011)
This book is a long-awaited major statement by a pre-eminent analytic philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, on one of our biggest debates — the compatibility of science and religion. The last twenty years has seen a cottage industry of books on this divide, but with little consensus emerging. Plantinga, as a top philosopher but also a proponent of the rationality of religious belief, has a unique contribution to make. His theme in this short book is that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord.
Plantinga examines where this conflict is supposed to exist — evolution, evolutionary psychology, analysis of scripture, scientific study of religion — as well as claims by Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Philip Kitcher that evolution and theistic belief cannot co-exist. Plantinga makes a case that their arguments are not only inconclusive but that the supposed conflicts themselves are superficial, due to the methodological naturalism used by science. On the other hand, science can actually offer support to theistic doctrines, and Plantinga uses the notion of biological and cosmological “fine-tuning” in support of this idea. Plantinga argues that we might think about arguments in science and religion in a new way — as different forms of discourse that try to persuade people to look at questions from a perspective such that they can see that something is true. In this way, there is a deep and massive consonance between theism and the scientific enterprise.
About the Author
Alvin Plantinga is O’Brien Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame. He is the author of: Essays on the Metaphysics of Modality, The Nature of Necessity, Warrant and Proper Function, Warrant: The Current Debate, Warranted Christian Belief, and Science and Religion: Are they Compatible? (with Dan Dennett).
I argue that there’s no real conflict between evolutionary theory — that is, the scientific theory of evolution apart from any naturalistic spin — and what C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity”. There’s no real conflict, even though conflict has been alleged by people [on both sides of the philosophical divide]. But I don’t think there is [a conflict]. What current scientific evolutionary theory says is that the living world has come to be via a certain process of natural selection operating on some form of genetic variation. And it’s clear that God could have made the living world that way if he wanted to. What Christianity tells us, what theistic religion generally tells us, is that God has created the world and created human beings in his image. He could have done that through a variety of means.
Interview with Alvin Plantinga, “Conflict Resolution”, Christianity Today (Dec 2011, p.67)
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