Book Review
Imperial Science
Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
by Alvin Plantinga
Oxford, 2011
(376 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
Increasingly over the last two decades, Christians have made great strides in taking back science from those who would misuse it as a tool for fostering a naturalistic view of the universe that renders God either non-existent or irrelevant to life on planet earth. Tired of meekly submitting to the oft-repeated but erroneous claim that unguided Darwinian macro-evolution has been "proven," a growing number of Christian academics have thrown down the gauntlet, calling upon materialist scientists to account for the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the universe, the Cambrian explosion, the irreducible complexity of molecular machines, and the front-loaded, information-rich nature of DNA.
Though the positions taken by these brave Christian academics have varied, I think that the most exciting and fruitful work in the field has been done by such intelligent design (ID) theorists as Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, and Stephen Meyer. At grave risk to their reputations, they have questioned the ability of Darwinism to account for the diversity and specified complexity of life and have promoted an open dialogue on issues of origin and causation.
Sadly, ID theorists have been more often attacked than embraced by their academic colleagues. Even more sadly, those colleagues include not only philosophical naturalists but also theistic evolutionists, who accept a supernatural origin for the universe, yet insist that science must confine itself to methodological naturalism. Aware of this refusal on the part of many Christian academics to seriously question the reigning orthodoxy of Darwinian naturalism, I opened the pages of Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies with considerable trepidation.
The Problem with Undirected Evolution
Plantinga, the O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has been a guiding light within academia for decades. He has quite decisively laid to rest the problem of pain as a valid philosophical (as opposed to emotional) defeater of theism and has shown that belief in Christianity, far from being illogical or irrational, is philosophically warranted.
But what, I wondered, would he have to say about the Darwin debates? I am happy to report that, unlike many of his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, Plantinga acknowledges the presence of ID. He quotes Michael Behe's work at some length, and he concludes that irreducible complexity does carry some (if limited) weight as an argument for theism and against undirected evolution.
I emphasize the word "undirected," for Plantinga (who does waver and over-qualify himself on a number of points) makes one point absolutely clear: whereas evolution per se need not be incompatible with theism, undirected evolution is. Indeed, he devotes much of his book to demonstrating that the science of evolution has in no way proven—and cannot prove by the methods of naturalism—that evolution is undirected. The belief that natural selection occurred totally by chance, apart from supernatural guidance—a belief loudly touted by such new atheists as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—"isn't part of evolutionary theory as such; it's instead a metaphysical or theological addition."
A Natural Fit & an Inherent Conflict
As Plantinga is widely regarded as one of the finest living philosophers, his pronouncement in this area carries (or should carry) considerable weight. Plantinga knows the difference between a scientific and a philosophical claim, and he refuses to allow Dawkins and Dennett to pawn off their anti-religious beliefs as scientific fact. More than that, he boldly exposes their rhetorical excesses by comparing them to "a certain kind of religious personality with which we are all too familiar: if you disagree with them, you are not only wrong, but wicked, and should be punished, if not in this world then certainly in the next."
Plantinga's willingness to call Dawkins, Dennett, and other new atheists to task is refreshing and injects some much-needed humor into his book, but his arguments by no means rest on name-calling. To the contrary, with equal doses of courage, clarity, and conviction, he constructs an air-tight case for the natural fit between science and theism and the inherent conflict between science and naturalism.
Those familiar with C. S. Lewis's Miracles will be glad to know that Plantinga provides a full philosophical defense of Lewis's argument that naturalism is self-refuting. It is theism, argues Plantinga, that provides us with a reason why "there is a certain fit or match between the world and our cognitive faculties." It is only because of that fit that science is possible; yet naturalism can neither account for the fit nor give us any reason to believe it exists.
To the contrary, if naturalism is true, we should not trust our cognitive abilities, and thus not trust theories (like naturalism) that are based on them. Furthermore, if naturalism is true, scientists would not have discovered in the cosmos what they have, in fact, discovered: namely, "that our world is mathematically describable in terms of fascinating underlying mathematical structures of astounding complexity but also deep simplicity."
A Much-Needed but Flawed Antidote
Plantinga's central thesis—that theism and science go together, but that science and naturalism do not—is well argued, but the book is still a chore to get through. Though Plantinga wisely puts the more technical parts of his argument in smaller print, and advises non-philosophers to skip over those parts, even the regular parts of the book are overburdened with symbols and formulas that put distance between the book and any reader who is not a trained philosopher.
He also betrays an unwillingness to dialogue fully with ID. Though he gives Behe a hearing, he unfortunately regards Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial as just as contentious a work as those of Dawkins and Dennett. More troubling, he completely ignores the work of William Dembski. An engagement with Dembski's design filter, which provides objective criteria for determining whether a given phenomenon is the result of regularity, chance, or design, would have allowed Plantinga to refine and develop further his philosophical critique of naturalism.
There is another particularly disconcerting aspect of Plantinga's book, and that is the author's (or perhaps his editor's) decision to use "she" almost exclusively as the gender-inclusive pronoun. Of all professors, philosophers are most notorious for playing devil's advocate and for going out of their way to shock and even scandalize their freshman students. Though professors who do this will usually defend their style as a valid pedagogical method, most students see it for what it is: patronizing and a trifle smug. Plantinga's gender-inclusive use of "she" not only perpetuates this tone of philosophical condescension, but also throws over his book the pall of a linguistic agenda that has nothing to do with his thesis.
That and something more. Plantinga's incessant use of "she" to refer to hypothetical scientists skews him away from a vital issue that lurks beneath his book but is never addressed. One of the problems with naturalistic, materialistic science grounded in Darwinism is that it is excessively male in approach. Whereas the masculine mindset seeks a "logical" explanation for everything and desires to categorize things into discrete boxes, the feminine mindset tends to be more holistic, more open to explanations that go beyond facts and figures and charts. Plantinga's inclusive "she" obscures this distinction, one that might have helped him develop a fuller vision of science that does not arbitrarily exclude the intangible.
Despite these flaws, Where the Conflict Really Lies provides a much-needed antidote to new atheists who have enshrined methodological naturalism as a "fact," and to theistic evolutionists who have counseled their fellow believers to simply accept the status quo.
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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