Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies. Chapter 10 Summary.
Again the following contains summary notes on our GCU discussion last fall of the concluding chapter of Plantinga’s important and immensely challenging book. The provocative title of this chapter is: “The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism”. Having demonstrated that the so-called conflict between Christian theism and science is rather superficial and that there is deep concord between science & theism, Plantinga goes a step further. He reveals the deep unease, discord, even conflict between naturalism and science. P(R/N&E) is low (the probability of reliability of our rationality, given an embrace of naturalism and evolution is low). https://ubcgcu.org/2013/08/17/alvin-plantainga-ubc-october-2013/
Many of our colleagues take naturalism and science as appropriate intellectual bedfellows, working “hand-in-glove”. But Plantinga argues that naturalism (which includes materialism) is in conflict with evolution, a main pillar of contemporary science. The argument centers on the status of our cognitive faculties: those faculties, or powers, or processes that produce beliefs or knowledge in us (e.g. perception, memory, a priori intuition, introspection, testimony, induction). His argument concerns the question of the reliability of cognitive faculties (reliability of cognitive content) if we espouse naturalism and unguided evolution together. The probability is very low. Can we get to true belief, reliable knowledge by this path? Again it is an argument from coherence (or rather, in this case, incoherence). One of the philosophy PhD students in the group astutely noted that the philosophical argument reductio ad absurdum is also at play. We recommend that you read the entire chapter to get the full impact and clarity of his articulation on the matter. This was the cutting edge of Plantnga’s talk on October 2 at Scarfe 100 UBC. It is helpful to note that Plantinga is considered one of the top twenty Christian scholars in the world.
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are poorly formulated and outright inadequate. In particular, Craig deals with what Dawkins calls the main argument of his book – the “who designed the designer” objection. Among other things, Craig points out that: “In order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don’t need to be able to explain the explanation. In fact, such a requirement would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed.”1In chapter two, J.P. Moreland deals with The Image of God and the Failure of Scientific Atheism. He explains that atheism and/or naturalism cannot give an account for five particular (and crucially important) features of human persons, what Moreland calls the “five recalcitrant features of the image of God.” These five are consciousness and the mental, free will, rationality, unified selves, and intrinsic, equal value and rights. He concludes that “given the epistemological and Grand Story constraints placed on the scientific naturalist ontology, not a single one of these five fits naturally in a non-ad-hoc way.”2 Like much of Moreland’s work, it is profound and fascinating; a mere listing of his five points does no justice to the depth of content he provides for each. 
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