Book Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 16:4 (Winter 2012)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Book Reviews

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. By Alvin Plantinga. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 359 pp., $27.95 cloth.

For all the exacting philosophy Alvin Plantinga has brought us, his playfulness stands out in my experience. He is a happy warrior, supremely confident in his native (and regenerate) intelligence, his philosophical acumen, and the truth of Christianity. Thus armed, he takes on skeptics with a cheerful equanimity that must be as maddening and even unnerving to them as it is delightful to his fellow believers.

Those of us who came of age as Christians in philosophy in the 1970s were working more or less as servants in Caesar’s palace. The lords of the manor were skeptics, children of the Enlightenment, offspring of Hume and Kant, of Ayer and Russell—and parents of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett. They ruled and roared in the halls of the philosophical associations and major universities, both here and abroad. Yes, there were articulate saints in the realm, but they were relegated mostly to the back halls, where they could talk among themselves. The places of honor were reserved for such atheists as Quine and Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre.

But somehow, by God’s grace, Christians began to find their voice in the profession, or, more accurately, rediscover and reassert their voice. For their credibility had once for all been established by the likes of Anselm and Aquinas, Descartes and Pascal, Locke and Berkeley, to name a few. Philosophers began to take note of Mavrodes at Michigan, Yandell at Wisconsin, Alston at Illinois, and a cluster of Dutchmen in Grand Rapids, with curious names like Orlebeke, Mouw, Wolterstorff, Konyndyk—and, yes, Plantinga.

Heretofore, the skeptics’ trump card was something like, “Well, I don’t see that.” Hearing this, the earnest believer would take a deep breath and then redouble the effort to please his audience, to make his point. But those of the Plantinga/Mavrodes school would more likely respond with something like, “So sorry to hear that. You may have a personal problem. Your

failure to see it doesn’t entail anything about my ability to see it.” It made for great theater.

Plantinga in particular seemed unimpressed with the conventional wisdom of the philosophical guild. For instance, he thought that the ontological argument (that “the being than which none greater can be conceived” must exist), long relegated to the list of ancient curiosities, deserved respect, so he wedded modal logic to Leibniz’s eighteenth-century talk of possible worlds (as in “the best of all possible worlds”) to resurrect...

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