There is No Conflict Between Science and Faith

A Must Read: Plantinga’s Gifford Lectures: “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2012/12/a-must-read-plantingas-gifford-lectures-where-the-conflict-really-lies-science-religion-and-naturalism/

 

by Roger Olson

December 7, 2012

Comments

 

A Must Read: Plantinga’s Gifford Lectures: Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism.

 

Recently I wrote about a long forgotten and neglected theology book that has fortunately been taken out of the “cemetery of forgotten books” and republished (Adrio König’s Here Am I!) right now I am about half way through a book that should never suffer that fate (and need such a resurrection). Well known Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga delivered Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews University in 2005; Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011) is based on those lectures. Plantinga states his central thesis thus:

 

“there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion,

but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.” (p. ix)

 

Obviously, since I have not finished the book (it’s not an easy read and must be read slowly) I cannot review it thoroughly. My intention here is only to recommend it. I also confess that I’m not expert enough in either philosophy or science to evaluate it thoroughly competently. All I can say is that I have so far not found any flaw or fault in Plantinga’s arguments and would like to know what those are if anyone thinks he or she has found one or more. For the most part, the author is providing philosophical arguments to support what I and most other conservative (very broadly defined) Christians have always believed -

 

that there is no essential conflict between true science, that is science

when it is true, and essential, that is “mere,” Christian theism.

 

I picked up this book with a bit of reluctance for two reasons. First, I’m not that excited about apologetics or philosophical theism. My own theological orientation trends more toward what evangelical theologian Donald G. Bloesch infelicitously called “fideistic revelationism” or “revelational fideism” (I don’t remember which but either phrase could describe it).

[*fideism. noun. "exclusive reliance in religious matters upon faith,

with consequent rejection of appeals to science or philosophy."]

That is, I tend to agree with

 

• Pascal about the God of the philosophers not being the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”

 

and with

 

• Kierkegaard that authentic Christianity is always a leap of faith, a risk, involving commitment that transcends reason.

 

However, I also tend to think that Christianity cannot be irrational and that the proper role of apologetics is to demonstrate that. There I agree with, for example, Hans Küng in Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. Küng argues that belief in God, especially the Christian God, is not amenable to rationalism. That is, there are no (and need not be) absolute, knock-down, drag-out proofs of God’s existence such that anyone who thinks otherwise is being irrational. However, Küng argues, and I agree, that, overall and in general, believing in God is more consistent with reason insofar as nihilism is not an option than atheism. I think reason can be an ally of Christian faith in removing the false stumbling blocks modernity has put in the path to faith.

 

Plantinga’s book is of that nature. That is, it does not seem to be an exercise in critical rationalism (a lá Popper) or even foundationalism but an exercise in Reformed epistemology. According to Plantinga, it can be shown rationally that belief in God is rationally justified basic belief that needs no proof (like belief in other minds) and that so far, anyway, nothing true in philosophy or science has undermined belief in God.

 

Plantinga’s basic argument can be summed up this way: All the alleged scientific and philosophical arguments against belief in God and miracles are presuppositional and perspectival. Nothing that is truly scientific about science, for example, undermines belief in God or miracles. All that atheists can base allegedly scientific arguments against God on are philosophical, “worldviewish,” metaphysical add ons to science that carry no more weight than belief in God itself. The same can be said for miracles. Nothing about either Newtonian science or quantum physics really conflicts with belief in miracles. All the objections raised against miracles, including those by modern naturalistic theologians (e.g., Bultmann), are of a non-scientific nature.

 

Ultimately, what Plantinga is demonstrating step-by-step, very logically, is that there is no real conflict between real science and Christian theism, including miracles but only between naturalism and Christian theism and that not only is naturalism not essential to science, it is actually in conflict with science!

 

Now, as I said, all I really want to do here is recommend Plantinga’s book. I’m not going to get into the details of his arguments. I happen to think they are valid. But I do want to mention one specific point he makes on pages 52-54. In this section of Chapter 2 “Evolution and Christian Belief” Plantinga asks (and answers) “Why Do People Doubt Evolution?” Here he suggests that one major reason is because leading evolutionists have wrongly linked evolution with naturalism such that (they have implied if not outrightly stated) the two are inseparable. Leading evolutionary theorists and popularizers of evolution have wrongly taught that in order to accept evolution one must reject God as playing any role in designing and guiding the processes of emergence of life forms. Because this idea, that either atheism or deism is necessary for belief in evolution, has caught on, the believing public has to a very large extent reacted against evolution. “The vast majority of Americans are Christians, and many more (some 88 or 90 percent, depending on the poll you favor) believe in God. But when that choir of experts repeatedly tell us that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, it’s not surprising that many people come to believe that evolution is incompatible with belief in God, and is therefore an enemy of religion.” (p. 53)

 

Anyone who knows anything about Plantinga and his careful, precise, step-by-step way of arguing a point knows that I cannot begin to do justice to his arguments (stated overly simply above) here. I strongly recommend that people read the book; in my opinion, it completely clears away the rubble of false stumbling blocks to faith in God and miracles put there by naturalistic scientists, philosophers and theologians. It does not and does not intend to “prove” the existence of God or miracles. But it demonstrates that there is a large element of fideism involved in the arguments against God’s existence and miracles. There are, in other words, identifiable unsupported presuppositions smuggled into the arguments against them. Plantinga reveals what they are and shows they are not necessary to the integrities of science, philosophy or theology.

 

I’m sure someone will be tempted to remind me (or tell me, as if I didn’t know) that Plantinga is a Calvinist. Indeed. He’s even a supralapsarian! And he implies that all Christians (meaning, of course, all real Christians) embrace meticulous providence. (He quotes from the Heidelberg Catechism as if that were the doctrinal standard for all Christians.) But, I have never said or implied that Calvinists are wrong about everything; I have learned much from and appreciated the writings of many Calvinist authors and theologians. It’s the aggressive Calvinists who teach (directly or indirectly) that only Calvinism is authentic, biblical Christianity that I oppose. I also oppose Calvinism as it relates to soteriology, but that’s not the subject of Plantinga’s book and his arguments are not tied to it.

 

Now, as often, I have to stop and tell a story. I’ve lived long enough in this world of theology to have a lot of them to tell! (I could tell, for example, about the two world class theologians who argued with each other standing right in front of me. One of them was drunk and cursed the other one out. Or I could tell about the world class theologian who said very publically about theology “After all, it’s all just guess work.”) One time I saw and heard Plantinga attempt to engage in “dialogue” with Paul Holmer, a Wittgensteinian fideist or at least postliberal theologian. Never have I witnessed a better example of “two ships passing in the night.” It was an amazing spectacle of the proverbial “whale” and “elephant” attempting to meet. Two giants of Christian thought and they might as well have each been speaking in tongues to each other. Very obviously, neither one could make any sense of the other one because of their radically different presuppositions and methods of thinking and talking about God. For example, in true Kierkegaardian fashion, for Holmer, God can never be an object. It’s not just that we should never “make” God into an object; God cannot be an object so that when we attempt to talk about God in objective language we are not talking about God. Absolutely no light was shed on the subject of God or theology in that failed attempt at dialogue—except that there are, unfortunately, apparently, incommensurable ways of thinking about God and “God-talk” in contemporary Christian theology. And the problem for me was that I could sympathize with both. Cognitive dissonance to the max!

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

ADDENDUM

* * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

*John Caputo wrote an article that basically said that it is harder to prove ones atheology than it is that of faith. That the burden of proof for unbelief is so extensive that a true atheism essential is nonexistent - Towards a Radical Theology, Not a Radical Atheism: A Review of Modern Atheism, Atheology and Divine Inexistence:

"I think, and Watkin seems to agree, that there are no non-circular arguments against the existence of God, if by God we mean a being outside space and time. If that is what a radical atheism would mean, there is no such thing (243, n.3). What resources could we ever marshal to show what there is not in a world beyond space and time? If it is "difficult" enough to try to prove that something is there, it is even harder to prove there is not."

 

- R.E. Slater
 

 

 For Further Reference See Also:

 

 

Differences between Evolutionary Creationism

and Darwinian Scientific Naturalism

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2012/01/differences-between-evolutionary.html

 

 

 

 

 

Emergent Christianity and a Calvinistic Philosopher's Assertion

for Theism and Evolution (re Alvin Plantinga)

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/12/calvinistic-philosopher-asserts-theism.html

 

Adam Bird for The New York Times. The

philosopher Alvin Plantinga, whose new

book is called “Where the Conflict Really

Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.”

 

John Caputo: Towards a Radical Theology, Not a Radical Atheism: A Review of Modern Atheism, Atheology and Divine Inexistence

Christopher Watkin

Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux

Published: June 07, 2012

Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism: Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 281pp., $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780748640577.

Reviewed by John D. Caputo, Syracuse University and Villanova University

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/31269-difficult-atheism-post-theological-thinking-in-alain-badiou-jean-luc-nancy-and-quentin-meillassoux/

Being an "atheist" is not a simple matter. When Derrida says that there are "theological prejudices" imbedded in "metaphysics in its entirety, even when it professes to be atheistic", he means that when metaphysics poses as the supreme authority that pronounces "there is no God," it simply reenacts the role of God. It leaves the "center" standing and reoccupies it with other metaphysical pretenders to the throne: Man, History, Science, Reason, any version of Žižek's "Big Other." That is nothing more than a palace coup that leaves the palace system standing.

Such atheism, which a lot of us would call "modernist," Watkin says, "imitates" theism and is "parasitic" on the very framework it purports to negate. Atheism, he argues, is "difficult," a difficulty Nietzsche proposed to meet when he said "God is dead," where "God" meant not just the Deity but the whole system of "values," of "truth" and the "good," from Plato to the present, every attempt to establish a center, a foundation of knowledge and morals, including modern physics, which is also an "interpretation." Watkin thinks this atheism is exposed to a "difficulty" of its own, which he calls its "ascetic" approach, because it calls upon us to make do with the resulting debris or "residue" of lost foundations (the "death of God"), to live with finitude and imperfection, giving up on a satisfying transcendence, and putting up with an unsatisfying immanence (133). It does not really annul the place of God but merely leaves it empty (6-7), like Camus' "absurd man" shaking his fist at the void. This is an atheism that regrets that it is right.

The ascetic version faces a further difficulty: once we undermine foundations, we have undermined any foundational argument against the old God. That binds the hands of atheism, preventing any knock-out atheistic blow, thereby leaving the barn door open to religious faith. Kant was being a perfect Pauline-Lutheran Protestant when he said that he found it necessary to delimit knowledge in order to make room for faith. The "difficulty," in short, is that atheism needs foundationalism to cut off the escape route of faith, but foundationalism reenacts and repeats theism. Either concede our irreducible finitude, which leaves the infinite inaccessible and a possible object of faith, or somehow scramble over to the side of the infinite and cut off the escape route of faith, which runs the opposite risk of playing God. That explains "post-secularism," the postmodern "return of religion": once modernity is delimited and the metaphysical gunfire over God subsides, a postmodern version of classical religious faith is free to raise its hoary head. This "colonisation" of modern atheism by religion has particularly gotten Watkin's goat (239).

Watkin proposes a way out of this dilemma -- if not, we will never be rid of religion and all its resulting woes -- under the name of what he calls a "post-theological integration." This means, in Lyotard's words, inventing a new ("post-theological") game and not being content with a new move in the age-old game (theism versus atheism). Is there a way to think "after God" or "without God" that does not act as if it is God (parasitism), while not giving up on the ideas of truth and justice (asceticism), meaning that it can be "integrated" with ideas normally associated with God? (13) A lot depends on what Watkin means by "integration," which runs its own risk of aggression and colonization -- playing with religion and explaining it to itself. Philosophy (father) knows best, knows better than religion what religion is talking about. Philosophy knows that things would be "better" -- it's the "consensus" (239) -- "without" God and religion. A lot also depends on "without," a venerable word of Meister Eckhart's Latin (sine) and German (ohne) vocabulary, meditated upon at length by Heidegger and Derrida (sans). When it comes to being an atheist, who is without sin (sine peccato, anamartetos)?

Watkin takes up Alain Badiou ("axiomatic atheism"), Jean-Luc Nancy ("atheology") and Quentin Meillassoux ("divine inexistence"), each of whom he thinks has just such a post-theological project in mind. The French focus omits not only Nietzsche but also Žižek, but it has the advantage of including Nancy -- instead of simply writing off deconstruction as (like God) dead and restricting the debate to the new or "speculative" realists -- along with a brief but illuminating discussion of Jean-Luc Marion. The problem is interesting, the question is very nicely framed, and the architecture of the book is impeccable (without sin). We can be especially grateful to Watkin for providing exemplary expositions of these authors, especially Nancy, an exceptionally elusive and allusive writer who requires a reading in French. The book is filled with subtle and complex commentaries to which no review can do justice. Difficult Atheism represents a sophisticated contribution to the debates that have arisen in the wake of the "theological turn", and it merits careful study by anyone interested in these issues.

Badiou's attack is directed against "ascetic" atheism, postmodern post-Kantian skeptics about "truth." His atheism is straightforward: theism is false; atheism is true. The dichotomy stands and one branch is broken off. By insisting upon our "finitude," the postmoderns allow the "infinite" (God, the One) to flourish like a poisonous mushroom in the dark soil of the "inaccessible." So Badiou reclaims the infinite for philosophy, stiffens the spines of the philosophers about truth, leaving the old God nowhere to hide while affirming truth and justice. Nothing is left over; nothing can escape the light of the Idea. This is done by invoking a specific version of set theory which wrests the infinite from the One of the Platonic-Christian tradition and transfers it to multiplicity. But, Watkin points out, Cantor was a Roman Catholic who distinguished a numerical infinity (the transfinite, quantitative multiplicity) from the "absolutely infinite" being of God (divine simplicity), which is neither numerically finite nor numerically infinite and as such the province of theology. There is nothing in mathematics which authorizes mathematics to speak about what is not mathematical to begin with. That is the very move Badiou wants to cut off. All Badiou can do with Cantor's distinction is to brush it off and declare "The One is not" an axiomatic decision (27-29). Ontology just is mathematics, adopting a posture often struck in Vatican encyclicals and in the Bible belt under the name of the "Word of God."

Nancy directs his attack against the sort of straightforward modernist or "imitative-parasitic" atheism we see in Badiou. As a deconstructionist, Nancy undercuts the "binary opposition" between theism and atheism (132), treating atheism as the flip side of onto-theo-logy. Theism and atheism are mirror images. He situates himself on the terrain of the "finite," which helps us avoid pretending that we are God, as Badiou has done. That is why Nancy speaks of a deconstructive "atheology," not "atheism." Nancy describes an infinite "open" which is only ever partially filled by any finite construction, an unbounded "sense" which cannot be saturated by any determinate "signification." There is no ahistorical arche or telos that shuts down or "axiomatizes" the open. The notion that something ahistorical breaks in upon the historical and henceforth changes everything -- the way the matheme ruptures the mytheme for Badiou -- is the very gesture of "Christianity," of the Incarnation, or what Nancy calls the "Christmas projection" (37). So it is Christianity that needs deconstruction.

But to deconstruct something is to open it up, not close it down. Deconstruction is un-closing, dis-enclosing. While Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity will give no comfort to the Vatican or Nashville, it will expose a sens deep within Christianity that "Christianity" (a signification) tends to close off. As Derrida points out, that attaches hyperbolic importance to Christianity itself, culling the wheat from the chaff, the spirit from the dead letter. This is made clear by the history of Derrida's word déconstruction, which translates Heidegger's Destruktion, which in turn translates what Luther called the destructio of medieval metaphysical theology in order to recover the pristine heart of the New Testament, which itself translates apolo in I Cor 1:19, which translates Isaiah 29:14. Heidegger's Destruktion retrieves the truth (aletheia) in metaphysics from which metaphysics itself is barred. Watkin concludes that Nancy's deconstruction is "parasitic" upon Christianity and not genuinely post-theological (39-40). Neither Badiou nor Nancy escapes parasitism. Each one convicts the other.

But is not Nancy's "repetition" of Christianity without Christianity exactly what an "integration" ought to be? Might we not distinguish a flat-footed parasitism from an ironic, conscious and creative one? Is there not an illusion embedded in speaking too strongly of the "post"-theological as if the theological could be over and done with? We cannot pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and create de novo. We begin where we are, with the languages and traditions we have inherited, which we seek to re-think and re-open. The idea is not to decontaminate ourselves from these traditions but to transform them, to recover what is going on in them, without being trapped by them. Sometimes Watkin speaks of the post-theological as if "God," "theology" and "religion" were like AIDS, and the post-theological question is how we wipe out this threat. The post-theological is said to "reoccupy" and "integrate" with theology in order to subvert it.

Is philosophy then aggression, a force of "occupation," a hostile military takeover which "exploits the resources" of religion (99)? That would succeed only in being "integrated" with theological imperialism! What is the difference between the "post-secular colonisation" of atheism and the "post-theological occupation" of theology -- other than whose side one is on? Or is philosophy a repetition that will always be hyperbolic about something -- otherwise it would be "ahistorical" -- writing sous rature, deploying paleologism and a logic of the sans (Derrida's religion sans religion), as Watkin explicitly points out (79-80)? That is a much more delicate operation than the one Watkin ascribes to Badiou -- as if religion were an object exposed to the light of the Idea and the "philosopher" were the "master" who can explain religion to itself, while mocking its self-understanding as a mere "fable." But any idea, "theological" or "post-theological," is at odds with itself and is moved by its own internal tensions. A deconstruction tracks the way things are always already invaded by their other, always divided internally, but it is not exploitation, aggression, occupation, a plundering of religion or the work of art -- merci à Dieu!

At this point, Watkin is convinced we have reached a draw: neither position has found its way clear to post-theology. Badiou makes a primal decision about the axiomatization of being, declaring that the One is not, which even if historically "motivated" is a contestable faith that mathematical thinking is "better." Nancy is likewise unable to escape the shadow of theology, distinguishing a determinate belief (croyance) in a determinate "principle" (or signification) from a deeper but divided faith (foi) (in sens). This faith is not opposed to reason but is a keeping faith with or being "true" (treu) to reason that supplements reason. Reason needs such faith in order to function, given its own insufficiency, so that reason is never more "reasonable" than when it recognizes that it needs the supplement of faith. A self-sufficient reason is idolatry; true reason is unclosed, incomplete, insufficient, exposed to faith (115-16). Nancy calls this "atheology," the affirmation of the unprogrammable, un-axiomatizable, sens of the "world." But this, Watkin thinks, only continues to privilege Christianity. Atheism may be not only difficult but "incompletable" (121), led back to a Gödelian place: atheism cannot complete itself (Badiou) without becoming inconsistent, and it cannot be consistent (Nancy) without being incomplete (123).

Enter Meillassoux, who claims to provide an atheism both consistent and complete. Using Badiou's critique of finitude, Meillassoux attacks Kantian "fideism" (denying knowledge to make room for faith) and gives philosophy unlimited authority over God, rationalizing revelation -- not eradicating it -- not unlike Spinoza or Hegel. Philosophy denies both the transcendent God of theism and the God-less immanence of atheism, but in its place it produces a new God of its own construction, an "inexistent" God. Philosophy is not experimental science, whose methodological limits (finitude) play into the hands of religious faith, but neither is it classical metaphysics, which posits a necessary being. Hence it assumes a "speculative" form which denies the assumption that we are forced to choose between the contingency of the many (postmodernism) and the necessity of the One (God) (metaphysics). Readers of theology will notice that "voluntarist" or "divine will" theology, God as necessary, transcendent and inscrutably free to alter the laws of nature and morality, does service for "God" at large for Meillassoux. The "speculative" position is to assert the necessity of contingency, the necessity that everything is contingent, which Meillassoux calls the principle of the "factial" (le factual). It cannot be that the contingency of things is itself contingent.

This principle is argued for by an odd sort of tables-turning method of "conversion" (162). A minus (reasoning to a necessary being falls into infinite regress, explaining one contingent thing by another) becomes a plus: this failure is a direct insight into the non-necessity of any one being and of the necessity of the contingency of every being, which eliminates the need for faith (146). Being unable to come up with a sufficient reason for any being is an insight into the impossibility that any particular being could be necessary (147). What's ultimately "wrong" with God for Meillassoux is that we are forbidden to ask where God came from. Or again: the "strong correlationists" maintain that reality could always be otherwise than the way we have constructed it in language or consciousness. That is not the skeptical relativism it wants to be, but an intuition that it is inescapably necessary that things could always be otherwise than they are.

Finally, his amazing reading of Hume: the inability to find the necessary relationship between the antecedent and the consequent is an intellectual insight into the real lack of causal necessity, thereby switching the "non-reason" from us (skepticism) to the things themselves (realism). Meillassoux is not saying that the natural world is chaotic but that it is subject to a non-observable (speculative) contingency (143). There are laws and regularities and even causal connections in nature, but they are all contingent. Gravity is a law, but it is not necessary. It is thinkable that tomorrow there will be no gravity. Chaos is disorder, but radical contingency is a "hyperchaos," meaning that disorder may be destroyed by order just as easily as order may be destroyed by disorder. From the principle of "insufficient reason" (there being no sufficient reason for any particular thing) we can conclude to the necessity of contingency (145) and to the principle of non-contradiction, for if a thing were both itself and its contradiction it would already be any "other" that it could become; it would then be an unchangeable and necessary being. But every being is contingent.

None of this means that Meillassoux is done with God. Far from it -- he is the most "aggressive" (231-32) of all when it comes to post-theological "integration." After dispensing with the God of the ontological argument, God as an ens necessarium, it remains possible that God might happen to come about, even if God happens not to exist now. God's current inexistence does not exclude a possible future existence. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary that God (like everything else currently inexistent) might possibly exist later on. Why Meillassoux would ever be led to say such a thing -- he is nothing if not bold -- brings us to the question of justice, the other idea (along with truth) with which post-theology wants to "integrate itself," and to the age-old problem of evil. Justice demands we supersede both classical theism (because it affirms a God who permits the worst injustices) and classical atheism (because it allows the injustice done to the dead to go unrepaired) by positing the hope for the possible emergence in the future of a God who will raise the dead and reward them for their hitherto unrequited suffering by way of a Christ-like figure called the "Child of Man." Like an odd Hegelian, Meillassoux wants to "occupy" everything that (the Christian) religion has to say! That yields a "philosophical divine" (207), a God, religion and resurrection in which we may hope strictly within the limits of reason alone, of the principle of necessary contingency.

Watkin thinks that Meillassoux's principle of the necessity of contingency undoes itself. Given the unbroken rule of contingency, any such necessity would have to be temporally qualified as "according to the presently prevailing standards of rationality" (151). Maybe tomorrow morning what is judged rational or just today will be judged irrational and unjust, while what is irrational and unjust will be judged rational and just. The very notions of thinking and rationality, of necessity and contingency are all contingent and subject to change in the future. If they are not, then they are necessary and exempt from the principle of the factial. Meillassoux either erects a God-like idol out of thinking and rationality (parasitic atheism) or requires an act of faith that reason will not mutate under the force of hyperchaos (ascetic atheism) (155).

In Nancy, justice comes down to a "call" that for Watkin is too weak to be effective and to be effective would require miming a divine injunction. Badiou tells us his view of justice is motivated by his personal experience of the events of May, 1968, which compares to his view that his axiomatic decision to say that ontology is mathematics is motivated by the demands of modernity; while biographically interesting, this lacks the universality politics demands. Badiou bases his atheism on an axiomatic decision; Nancy builds faith into the very idea of reason; and Meillassoux, resisting both moves, attempts a demonstration of his founding principle, but the demonstration requires faith. Taken together, all three thinkers posit an axiom, a call or an intuition in which we must just have faith (233-34), which are considered eo ipso "good" and are given a pass on having to further justify themselves. He concludes with Fichte's remark that the kind of philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. Philosophy always risks such circularity, which is the ultimate difficulty in becoming an atheist.

But what goes around comes around. Watkin worries that the "colonisation" of atheism by "post-secular" theology ends us up back in theology, not atheism. That is evidently bad because, well, atheism is "good." But what is so good about atheism? Why is atheism not just as good-and-bad as theology, where it all depends upon how theologians and atheists behave both as thinkers and social agents? Why should we seek a "post-theology" that purges both the imitation and the residue of theology from atheism? Because atheism is good and a radical clean-sweep atheism is even better. The "post" in Watkin's post-theology is like Žižek's reading of the Hegelian dialectic as a double no: atheism means no God; post-theology means no God, not even a trace of God.

But why is "post-secular" theology not "good?" It belongs to a progressive wing of theology eager to absorb the insights of radical thinkers from Nietzsche to Žižek in order to engage in serious self-criticism and to undermine the demonization of atheism by theology. If we criticize theologians for not reading such writers, are we then to criticize them when they do? Postmodern theology results in a searching criticism of the violence and fundamentalism of religion from within theology itself, which is vastly more effective than any external criticism of theology. If we test the idea on Watkin's terms, by its pay-off in terms of justice, post-secular theology enacts an auto-deconstruction of theological imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, drawing upon a theology of peace and justice stretching from Amos to Martin Luther King (which is why religious people are so regularly found working among the most destitute people on earth) and calling down upon itself the fire of conservative religious authorities. If such theological thinking were the coin of the realm in religion today, religious violence would not be in the headlines.

That being said, I do in part share Watkin's concern with post-secular theology, although that may come as a surprise to him, since Watkin numbers me among the post-secularists he criticizes, which I attribute to a rather glancing look at my work. I regard the "post-Kantian" version of postmodern theology as an attenuated or abridged edition of postmodernism; it is good but it could be better. It regards postmodernism as the contemporary version of "apologetics," cutting off reductionistic critiques of religion and allowing classical religious orthodoxy to stand untouched. A more searching version of postmodern theory requires a more searching (and post-Hegelian) criticism of what is going on in religion and theology. That requires a careful historical and critical study of the Scriptures, of the history of theology and of what we are talking about when we westerners speak in Christian Latin of "religion." The result would take the form, in my view, of an exposition (an expounding and an exposing) of the "events" that take place in religion -- events of promising and hoping, giving and forgiving, mourning and recalling, justice and hospitality, and the like. It would expose a deeper "faith" (foi) which runs beneath the "confessional beliefs" (croyances), where both "theism" and "atheism" are treated as croyances, while faith has to do with a deep-set affirmation or desire of something we desire with a desire beyond desire, a desire that overtakes us all, theists, atheists or still trying to decide.

I think, and Watkin seems to agree, that there are no non-circular arguments against the existence of God, if by God we mean a being outside space and time. If that is what a radical atheism would mean, there is no such thing (243, n.3). What resources could we ever marshal to show what there is not in a world beyond space and time? If it is "difficult" enough to try to prove that something is there, it is even harder to prove there is not. But I do think that the good old God of St. Augustine and his two-worlds theory has run its course, that it has earned our "incredulity," to stick with Lyotard's precisely chosen word, an incredulity that is very often found among the theologians themselves. That, however, is a long way from giving up on God, or more precisely on the name (of) "God," or more precisely still the "events" that take place in and under the name (of) "God."

Pursuing what I call a "radical theology," I want to be "after" God in as many ways as possible, not only after/post the dualism of The City of God but also after/ad the name of God that gives words to a desire beyond desire, which Derrida has subtly if enigmatically set loose in texts like "Circumfession." This eccentric restaging of Augustine's Confessions is a deeply nuanced deconstruction of Christianity and even more so of his own Judaism, "haunting" the religious beliefs it repeats, making them tremble while also suggesting they contain something they cannot contain. Deconstruction is not "critique" but an oblique affirmation. Derrida does not try to "occupy" the Confessions like a conquering colonial army but to "repeat" religion "without religion," according to the subtle logic of the sans, thereby exposing the structure of a more profound foi that is going on in the Confessions while not being held captive by its doctrinal croyances. Deconstruction is not "occupying;" it is reading, slowly and meticulously.

Once the binarity of theism and atheism is displaced, once the grip of these "-isms" is broken, then thinking and acting after God can begin, as free from theism as from atheism, but also, apace Watkin, as free from atheism as from theism.

I'm Not Compelled By Your Argument

I kept hearing the statement "I'm not compelled by your argument" ringing in my ears and thinking to myself, really? Did you just read what I wrote or did you just skim through what you thought I wrote? And did you take the time to compare the past many articles I have labored through these past many months and years before impulsively proclaiming a verdict as my judge-and-jury on a subject matter you really didn't want to hear or think about in the first place because it differed from your own personal view of the world? And was probably not a subject of special burden that had burdened you like it had me for decades - having been considered-and-rejected innumerable times before then re-considering it time-and-again - until finally concluding that I should share my discoveries without the doubt or distress that has plagued me for so many years. Making me wonder, when hearing your words of adamant proclamation, whether "there is really any room left for thinking Christians?" Apparently, according to your more informed estimations, "most thinking Christians are those that reinforce you're previously established beliefs and expectations to a previous body of dogmatic co-commitments you had arranged in your mind from long ago. So that those that don't fulfill these self-serving personal categories are immediately thrown under the bus and labeled heretical."

At the last, "Do I really care whether you're compelled or not." Really, its your life to throw away as you wish. Or to hold on to the fantasies you find comforting to believe. It's as if I were back watching my favorite TV show Lost and suddenly seeing the survivors of the TransOceanic wreckage vanish or die at the slightest hairbreath of an internalized existential decision they had just made. A decision that became immediately apparent by observable word and deed. And each time that I watched the suddenness of this externalized phenomena remove another stand-in (or unfortunate cast member) I thought to myself, "My, the hand of death is quick and decisive!" (I was one of those few who still clung to  the original first year theory despite denials to the contrary by Abrams, Lindelof, and Cuse). Fearfully, the death theme of Lost continues throughout this wide, wide world today - where death-like decisions occur all too frequently in spur-of-the-moment decisions, leaving a living soul in a comatose condition hardened and seared by their own illusions of life. So that not even God Himself could break through to such hearts at these times.

So why should it be my burden to be moved at the hands of an Almighty God who continues to pound away at the fortresses of our darkened hearts? I thought the OT prophets were dead. And it certainly didn't do Jesus any good dying at the hands of His religious convictors. Certainly the early Church had also paid a heavy price for its beliefs demanding personal introspection and self-doubt. So let's just say right now that as Christians we're committed to a living faith, and not a living religion filled with sacrosanct dogmas and its holy altars of untouchables. Not even Jesus could break through the religious barriers of His day, and I highly doubt we can do any better before those who remain uncompelled. So pray then to be students of the living Word and try to discover a way to always hold within yourself a healthy reserve of self-doubt coupled with a listening, discerning heart. I don't believe God has stopped speaking yet. And I fully expect God to be using even now living prophets and servants of Jesus to tell the story of the Gospel as fully and completely as they can. Revelation has not ended. No, for we serve a self-revealing God ceaseless in His activity, abandoned to His creation, unbounded in His imagination, and rueful towards any craven idols clutched to our breasts. Even our dogmas. This is our Savior-Redeemer.

 

 

So let's look at another, more startling disciple of existential rhetoric. A Mr. Richard Dawkins whom I haven't thought about in a long time. And to judge by his speeches feels deeply moved to declare just what he thinks about Christianity (or "religion" in general). A faith that he seems to despise for its many sins and hypocrisies. And yet, at first blush, many of his arguments seem at the surface true... and certainly can give one pause to think through just what-and-why we are doing what we are doing as Christian faithful. To that end I give Mr. Dawkins thanks for his insights, though I would wish it less zealous, less ruthless, perhaps more compassionate. How he got to this space in life is anybody's guess... perhaps he, like so many we meet in life, simply wish to reinforce their own diminished view of the world and in the bargin gain some sympathetic listeners to their tales of distress and woe. Perhaps this demeanor resulted from early childhood idealisms gone horribly wrong. Or, cherished loved ones tragically lost. Or even, circumspect agony incited by watching and reading of so many ghastly wars and useless  global sufferings. Perhaps all of these and none of these provided Mr. Dawkins with his present day scripts of blatant atheism and God-filled objections to organized religion.

 

 

But no matter Mr. Dawkin's inner private demons, I would like to provide a short clip of his view of the God of the Old Testament and simply ask how we should we respond? Are we compelled by his arguments? Are we moved to envision a better form of faith than presently practiced? To practice a faith more wholistically compelling than being presently observed by the wide-awake world? For regardless our faith differences the body of Christ bears responsibility for the message and ministry of the Gospel of Jesus as we have embraced it. Let us then pick a spot or two and simply try to work on Mr. Dawkin's griefs and laments a bit better than it has been in the long ages of the Church when grace, mercy, peace and forgiveness came through Jesus. Let it begin with prayer and from there see where it can spill over in the goo of life.

 

And with that introduction here it is... expect in this version to be offended, shocked and angered. Mr. Dawkins wants you to feel this way. He wants you to be introspective and to do something about it. For followers of Jesus our choice is simple. Learn to love our neighbor better than we have. And if we can't then ask God to put a little love into the doctrines of your church gospel. If we don't change than Mr. Dawkins message is what he expected it to be all along - simply a cliche for the larger ills of life we wish to do little or nothing about. In the end, "Let the world be compelled by your lifestyle, by your love for others, and certainly, by your argument as a Jesus bearer!"

 

R.E. Slater

November 16, 2012

The God of The Old Testament

is Arguably the most Unpleasant of all Fiction

 

 

[YT] "Richard Dawkins presents his view on the Old Testament God.

This has been considered the most controversial part of his book and

due to that he has also received some death threats and menaces from

some fundamentalists christians. A very christian gesture, indeed!"

Features » December 8, 2006

The Godless Fundamentalist

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2933/

 

In The Root of All Evil, biologist Richard Dawkins reveals his own lust for certainty

 

BY Lakshmi Chaudhry

 

Religion fucking blows!” declares comedian Roseanne Barr in her latest HBO special. Her pronouncement, both in its declarative certainty and self-congratulatory defiance, could easily serve as the succinct moral of Richard Dawkins’ documentary, The Root of All Evil.

 

The big-screen version of a two-part British television series follows the noted biologist as he embarks on a global road-trip to the veritable bastions of theological conviction–the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a Christian conservative stronghold in Colorado Springs, a Hassidic community in the heart of London–bullying, berating and heckling the devoutly faithful he encounters along his way.

 

Confronting cancer patients who have traveled to Lourdes in hopes of a cure, Dawkins tells the viewer in the first scene, “It may seem tough to question the beliefs of these poor, desperate people’s faith.” By the end of the documentary, Dawkins’ bravado is not in doubt. When talking to Ted Haggard, a New Life Church pastor (more recently infamous for his predilection for crystal meth and gay prostitutes), after witnessing one of his sermons, Dawkins tells him, “I was almost reminded of the Nuremberg rallies … Dr. Goebbels would have been proud.” To a hapless guide at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, he taunts, “Do you really believe that Jesus’ body lay here?” And then there’s his remark–“I’m really worried for the well-being of your children”–to a Hassidic school teacher, Rabbi Herschel Gluck, whom Dawkins accuses of brainwashing innocent kids.

 

As he storms his way around the world in the state of high dudgeon, Dawkins’ attitude can be best described as apocalyptic outrage. The effect is in turns bewildering, embarrassing, grating and even unintentionally comic, as we watch the distinguished Oxford University Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science channel his inner Borat. When the astonished rabbi exclaims, “You are a fundamentalist believer,” even a sympathetic, true-blue San Francisco audience cannot help but chuckle in assent.

 

As his rabbinical nemesis rightly suspects, Dawkins’ fondness for sweeping generalizations reflects his own deep-seated fundamentalism, a virulent form of atheism that mirrors the polarized worldview of the religious extremists it claims to oppose. “They condemn not just belief in God, but respect for belief in God. Religion is not just wrong; it’s evil,” writes Gary Wolf in his Wired Magazine cover story, “The New Atheism,” whose leading exponents include–in addition to Dawkins–Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor at Yale, punk rocker Greg Graffin and Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. These are the self-styled “Brights,” the moniker of choice for Dawkins to describe “a person whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements.”

 

The “bright” worldview is also remarkably free of complexity. Dawkins’ view of faith can be summed up thus: Religion is dangerous because it requires that we suspend our powers of reason to place our faith in the shared delusion that is God. This, he asserts, is the first step on that “slippery slope” to hatred and violence.

 

When we cede our “critical faculties” to believe in the idea of a higher power, Dawkins claims, we are immediately invested in a panoply of increasingly ludicrous propositions: that the Virgin Mary ascended directly to heaven, Moses parted the seas, God created the world in seven days, or beautiful virgins await good Muslims in heaven. Why not, he asks, believe in fairies or hobgoblins?

 

Faith, in his universe, is interchangeable with superstition, eccentricity, madness, and, at its most benign, infantilism. Religious conviction is a marker of human backwardness, both in a historical and psychological sense. According to Dawkins, human beings invented religion as a “crutch” for ignorance. Without science to help us understand the world around us, we turned to gods/faith/superstition to cope with our sense of helplessness. Today, religion remains a source of succor to those unable to outgrow their childish desire to see the world in terms of “black and white, as a battle between good and evil”–unlike atheists who are “responsible adults and accept that life is complex.”

 

“We’re brought from cradle to believe that there is something good about faith,” says Dawkins, as he compares this belief to “a virus that infects the young, for generation after generation.” Fortunate are the “responsible adults” who grow up to shake off these beliefs, unlike the rest of humanity who remain trapped in their infantile desire to be taken care of by an all-powerful deity.

 

Unlike fairytales, however, our religious beliefs are not harmless, says Dawkins, they instead lay the foundation for the murder and mayhem inevitably wreaked by true believers. His evidence: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the 9/11 attacks, and less spectacular crimes against humanity like suicide bombers, anti-abortion killers, and so on.

 

This broad-stroked caricature of faith is delivered with a breathtaking disregard for historical context, in which social, political or economic conditions are simply ignored or discounted. “[Dawkins] has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information,” writes Marilynne Robinson in the November Harpers’, while reviewing his bestselling book, The God Delusion. And on screen he is no different. Of course, there are sound political causes for the Palestinian conflict, Dawkins hurriedly acknowledges–only to assert in the same breath that the real culprit is religion, which teaches its adherents to think, “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

 

Not unlike the religious simpletons he claims to disdain, Dawkins sees the world in terms of a battle of Good vs. Evil, cloaked here as Science vs. Religion. Where Religion is corrupt, tyrannical and false, Science offers intellectual integrity, freedom and truth. As Robinson notes, Dawkins fails to acknowledge Science’s less admirable achievements, be they eugenics, Hiroshima, or the more mundane travesties committed by unethical doctors or fat-cat researchers in service of corporate funding.

 

“Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime,” Robinson writes.

 

In this version of atheist theology, Science attains the same status as Dawkins’ loathed “alpha male in sky,” whose laws rule all things known and unknown. If we do not quite understand how the universe was created or the human brain works–or the competing, contradictory claims about the virtues of, say, table salt–all we need to do is wait and keep faith in the scientific method, which will reveal all in good time. The ways of Science are no less sacred or mysterious than that of God.

 

Like his fellow fundamentalists, Dawkins has no use for moderation or its practitioners. The people of faith featured in his documentary are strict, true believers, who adhere to the most rigid interpretations of their respective faiths. There are no Muslim doctors, church-going geneticists or Catholics who support abortion rights. Anyone who believes in evolution and God is just as deluded or in denial, and, as he tells Wired, “really on the side of the fundamentalists.”

 

Nothing less than a complete renunciation of all things spiritual will suffice. “As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers,” he writes in The God Delusion, in an eerie echo of President Bush’s post-9/11 point of view: “You’re either with us or against us.”

 

It would be silly to argue that the new atheists’ crusade is as dangerous as the so-called war on terror, but that crusade does give aid and comfort to fundamentalists everywhere by affirming their view of faith: one, science and religion are mutually opposed and exclusive worldviews; two, religion is immutable and outside history; and therefore, three, the Bible (or the Quran, for that matter) must be taken literally, and is not open to interpretation. For both camps, ignoring one law or moderating a single injunction is the first step toward rejecting the faith in its entirety.

 

This great war of ontologies, seductive though it may be in our beleaguered times, becomes immediately absurd if we remind ourselves of one simple fact: Science and Religion are historical in the richest sense of the word. They both inform and reflect our changing ideas about ourselves and the world around us. From the practice of throwing a woman on her husband’s funeral pyre in India to determining intelligence by the shape of person’s skull in Europe–both of which seem hateful today–religious and scientific beliefs ebb, rise and transmute themselves over time. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the vast bulk of what we call History, which the Brights seem just as willing to rewrite as their theological adversaries.

 

As innately human endeavors, religion and science are therefore as unreasonable, noble, immoral, kind, tyrannical, odious, compassionate–in other words, irredeemably human–as the people who literally embody them. Yes, the laws of nature and those of God might still exist without human beings, but there would be no one to name or know them as such, or act on that knowledge. Taken together, they express our need to both submit and to control, to know and to believe, to be in the visible world and to transcend it.

 

That the vast majority of us would find it difficult to choose between the two should be hardly surprising. The antidote to fanaticism is not a new puritanism of reason, but the contradictory, ambiguous, compromised reality of ordinary human experience.

 

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

 

Lakshmi Chaudhry, a former In These Times senior editor and Nation contributing editor, is a senior editor at Firstpost.com, India's first web-only news site. Since 1999 she has been a reporter and an editor for various independent publications, including Alternet, Mother Jones, Ms., Bitch and Salon.

 

Emergent Christianity and a Calvinistic Philosopher's Assertion for Theism and Evolution

Reading through the NYT article below reminded me of the several themes we have been discussing these past many months concerning the Emergent Christian faith and the world's (and church's, for that matter) many interpretations of realism. One of those themes explored is the belief in God (theism) within late 20th Century Postmodernism leading towards an era (perhaps) of Authentication for the early 21st Century. As versus the atheistic and agnostic counter positions which would include the evolutionary Darwinian philosophy of naturalism.

Clearly Evolutionary Creation does not require the view of Darwinian Naturalism to be held as a plausible view of biblical creation. It has been shown in many articles the appropriateness of a theistic view as related to this subject.* In fact, the onus is actually on the competing views of atheism and agnosticism to show the validity of their arguments. It is but left for the theist to assert his interpretation of scientific results and make argument where and when necessary (as Mr. Plantinga illustrates below in his most recent book).

Further, we have asserted here the general support of all scientific study and research without finding it necessary to "modify" those results towards a Christian philosophy (counter to neo-evangelicalism and Christian fundamentalism's more lingering resistance and doubts). We are comfortable in accepting all theories and postulates. And are confident that within science itself lies the necessary mechanisms for debate, doubt, synthesis, and restructuring through continuing examination, resultant corollaries with newer, displacing, scientific theories. (Interestingly, this also has been occuring within the branch of Theology as well!)

Consequently, it is left to the Christian faith to theologically (NOT scientifically) interpret those results (in terms of metaphysics, ontology, epistemologies, etc). Organizations like Biologos have been doing just that. So too have religious departments been working with both their philosophic and scientific counterparts towards a fuller understanding of God's universe from our many temporal, and limited, understandings. Article after article has been posted here showing the great amount of effort that has been occurring through postmodernistic cultural inquiries and study, by debate and argument, by prayer and prayerful insight. The Christian knows that God is true and that His creation will reveal God's many wonders and splendors despite occurrences of non-Christian interpretation. Good scientific research will eventually verify this belief as is even now being shown in recent discoveries.

Lastly, it is true that Emergent Christianity is allowing for a broader, more moderating version of Christianity than has been found to either the right or to the left of its position. First and foremost is its postmodernistic vision of today's global cultural outreach. The Christian faith has much to offer the world's many religions and cultures. Why? Because Jesus' Gospel will emancipate and deeply enrich every participating religion and culture that chooses to follow Him. What Emergent Christianity does not require is the forcing of the Christian faith upon others. It is respectful of every man and woman's free will of choice, and subsequent interpretation of Jesus to himself and his culture which follows a good, studied discernment of Scripture and doctrine.

Nor does Emergent Christianity force its culture upon its adherents. Every culture is left to freely adapt and assimilate itself to its best understanding of Christ as presented by postmodernism's re-constructive theologic work currently being undertaken throughout universities and emergent churches regarding who Jesus is, how we may comprehend Him, His Word, and ourselves. And as distinct from the many barriers of common Christian folk religion, religious dogmas, restrictive worship styles, and personal faith practices. Emergent Christianity seeks a truer form of personal liberty in each one of these areas as testimony to God's love and grace.

Moreover, Emergent Christianity desires to worship-and-work as one unified body with other similarly committed Jesus followers by seeking communal unions as can be found in the broad spectrum of conservative Christians to practising progressive Christians.  However, Emergent Christianity is also willing to be abandoned by both ends of this spectrum if,  while pursuing its own version of a loving, more realistic faith, than (i) what the religious right is offering; or, a better, more firmer ground of truth, than (ii) what the religious left is offering. Emergent Christianity seeks association with Evangelicalism in all its many forms (including Calvinism) as much as it seeks unity with the many denominational expressions of the Progressive Christianity. But in the realisation that each-and-all participating groups must be willing to change and adapt to either a more loving, or a more biblical, theological interpretations-and-practices than are presently being observed. And to adopt those interpretations-and-practices which would lead to a better, more wholistic, foundation of Christianity unity, and fellowship, as honoring to Jesus, our Savior and Lord, in concerted missional outreach to the postmodern world.

R.E. Slater

December 15, 2011

*per Evolutionary Creationism:

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/11/evolution-is-god-just-playing-dice.html,

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/11/gods-role-in-creation.html,

http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/11/misconceptions-about-evolutionary.html

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Books

Philosopher Sticks Up for God
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/books/alvin-plantingas-new-book-on-god-and-science.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: December 13, 2011

Adam Bird for The New York Times. The

philosopher Alvin Plantinga, whose new

book is called “Where the Conflict Really

Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.”

There are no atheists in foxholes, the old saying goes. Back in the 1950s, when the philosopher Alvin Plantinga was getting his start, there were scarcely more religious believers in academic philosophy departments.

Growing up among Dutch Calvinist immigrants in the Midwest, Mr. Plantinga

Had he not transferred to Calvin College, the Christian Reformed liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Mich., where his father taught psychology, Mr. Plantinga wrote in a 1993 essay, he doubted that he “would have remained a Christian at all; certainly Christianity or theism would not have been the focal point of my adult intellectual life.”

But he did return, and the larger world of philosophy has been quite different as a result. From Calvin, and later from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. Plantinga has led a movement of unapologetically Christian philosophers who, if they haven’t succeeded in persuading their still overwhelmingly unbelieving colleagues, have at least made theism philosophically respectable.

“There are vastly more Christian philosophers and vastly more visible or assertive Christian philosophy now than when I left graduate school,” Mr. Plantinga said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Grand Rapids, adding, with characteristic modesty, “I have no idea how it happened.”

Mr. Plantinga retired from full-time teaching last year, with more than a dozen books and a past presidency of the American Philosophical Association to his name. But he’s hardly resting on those laurels. Having made philosophy safe for theism, he’s now turning to a harder task: making theism safe for science.

For too long, Mr. Plantinga contends in a new book, theists have been on the defensive, merely rebutting the charge that their beliefs are irrational. It’s time for believers in the old-fashioned creator God of the Bible to go on the offensive, he argues, and he has some sports metaphors at the ready. (Not for nothing did he spend two decades at Notre Dame.)

In “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism,” published last week by Oxford University Press, he unleashes a blitz of densely reasoned argument against “the touchdown twins of current academic atheism,” the zoologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, spiced up with some trash talk of his own.

Mr. Dawkins? “Dancing on the lunatic fringe,” Mr. Plantinga declares. Mr. Dennett? A reverse fundamentalist who proceeds by “inane ridicule and burlesque” rather than by careful philosophical argument.

On the telephone Mr. Plantinga was milder in tone but no less direct. “It seems to me that many naturalists, people who are super-atheists, try to co-opt science and say it supports naturalism,” he said. “I think it’s a complete mistake and ought to be pointed out.”

The so-called New Atheists may claim the mantle of reason, not to mention a much wider audience, thanks to best sellers like Mr. Dawkins’s fire-breathing polemic, “The God Delusion.” But while Mr. Plantinga may favor the highly abstruse style of analytic philosophy, to him the truth of the matter is crystal clear.

Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image, “is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism,” with its random process of natural selection, he writes. “Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called ‘the scientific worldview.’ ”

Mr. Plantinga readily admits that he has no proof that God exists. But he also thinks that doesn’t matter. Belief in God, he argues, is what philosophers call a basic belief: It is no more in need of proof than the belief that the past exists, or that other people have minds, or that one plus one equals two.

“You really can’t sensibly claim theistic belief is irrational without showing it isn’t true,” Mr. Plantinga said. And that, he argues, is simply beyond what science can do.

Mr. Plantinga says he accepts the scientific theory of evolution, as all Christians should. Mr. Dennett and his fellow atheists, he argues, are the ones who are misreading Darwin. Their belief that evolution rules out the existence of God — including a God who purposely created human beings through a process of guided evolution — is not a scientific claim, he writes, but “a metaphysical or theological addition.”

These are fighting words to scientific atheists, but Mr. Plantinga’s game of turnabout doesn’t stop there. He argues that atheism and even agnosticism themselves are irrational.

“I think there is such a thing as a sensus divinitatis, and in some people it doesn’t work properly,” he said, referring to the innate sense of the divine that Calvin believed all human beings possess. “So if you think of rationality as normal cognitive function, yes, there is something irrational about that kind of stance.”

Longtime readers of Mr. Plantinga, who was raised as a Presbyterian and who embraced the Calvinism of the Christian Reformed Church as a young man, are used to such invocations of theological concepts. And even philosophers who reject his theism say his arguments for the basic rationality of belief, laid out in books like “Warranted Christian Belief” and “God and Other Minds,” constitute an important contribution that every student of epistemology would be expected to know.

But Mr. Plantinga’s steadfast defense of the biochemist and intelligent-design advocate Michael Behe, the subject of a long chapter in the new book, is apparently another matter.

“I think deep down inside he really isn’t a friend of science,” Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, said of Mr. Plantinga. “I’m not objecting to him wanting to defend theism. But I think he gets his victory at the level of gelding or significantly altering modern science in unacceptable ways.”

Mr. Dennett was even harsher, calling Mr. Plantinga “Exhibit A of how religious beliefs can damage or hinder or disable a philosopher,” not to mention a poor student of biology. Evolution is a random, unguided process, he said, and Mr. Plantinga’s effort to leave room for divine intervention is simply wishful thinking.

“It’s just become more and more transparent that he’s an apologist more than a serious, straight-ahead philosopher,” Mr. Dennett said.

When Mr. Plantinga and Mr. Dennett (who said he has not read Mr. Plantinga’s new book) faced off over these questions before a standing-room-only crowd at a 2009 meeting of the American Philosophical Association, the event prompted ardent online debate over who had landed better punches, or simply been more condescending. (A transcript of the proceedings was published last year as “Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?”)

Mr. Plantinga, who recalled the event as “polite but not cordial,” allowed that he didn’t think much of Mr. Dennett’s line of reasoning. “He didn’t want to argue,” Mr. Plantinga said. “It was more like he wanted to make assertions and tell stories.”

Mr. Plantinga and Mr. Dennett do agree about one thing: Religion and science can’t just call a truce and retreat back into what the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called “non-overlapping magisteria,” with science laying claim to the empirical world, while leaving questions of ultimate meaning to religion. Religion, like science, makes claims about the truth, Mr. Plantinga insists, and theists need to stick up for the reasonableness of those claims, especially if they are philosophers.

“To call a philosopher irrational, those are fighting words,” he said. “Being rational is a philosopher’s aim. It’s taken pretty seriously.”