NYTimes | This is the first in a series of
interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The
interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus
professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former
president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American
Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of “Where the
Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.”
Gary Gutting: A recent survey by
PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of
philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the
view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of
theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think
philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis?
Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of
philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among
philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as)
the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to
be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic
religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other
academics don’t know?
What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to
other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic
arguments — arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a
considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers,
reject these arguments as unsound.
Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for
atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard
Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and
arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify
your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not
enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if
indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks
there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number
of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that
there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead
be agnosticism.
In the same way, the failure of the theistic
arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for
agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would
presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you
have strong arguments or evidence.
