On God-Belief
Jul 26th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 1 Comment |
To balance out the cursing kitteh in my previous post, here’s a video (h/t Tim) of the pastor/author Timothy Keller, discussing his book, The Reason for God, at Google:
I’ve only made it to 42:07, but after my most recent article, some of you might be in the mood for thinking more about why people do and don’t believe in God (whether or not I can offer you a full summary or “thumbs up”/”down”).
(Not like you’d have to have read my article to be interested in the subject, of course!)
Alvin Plantinga gave this talk at Messiah College quite a few years ago now. He has now finally published it, in the July-August 2008 edition of Books & Culture. His point is simple: Naturalism and Evolution can’t both be rationally believed in, since Naturalism is self-defeating. If Evolution and Naturalism are both true, then there is no basis to affirm (the belief) that our reasoning about their truth can be trusted. Or for that matter, that any beliefs can be trusted, seeing that on that assumption, beliefs are nothing but neurons firing. This doesn’t get us all the way to theism, but the rest of Plantiga’s argument takes us a little further.
Alfred North Whitehead was right: All of Philosophy is footnotes on Plato. Plato resisted reductionism, being both idealist and realist, raising the problem of “the one and the many,” a fine treatment of which is found in an appendix to Christian author Rousas John Rushdoony’s 1959 book By What Standard?, which was reprinted in 1983. Neither Plato’s First Cause nor his Demiurge get us all the way to the Christian God, but he takes us a little of the way.
It sometimes seems that the current crowd of New Atheists — Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchings — didn’t pass Philosophy 101.