The End of Christianity (13 page)

Alvin Plantinga is the author of a number of very important books, which include
God and Other Minds
(1967),
The Nature of Necessity
(1974),
God, Freedom, and Evil
(1974), and
Warranted Christian Belief
(2000). He delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures and was described by
Time
magazine in 1980 as “America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God.”
²³
Plantinga served as president of the American Philosophical Association, and president of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He retired in 2010 from being the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Now read what he has to say in reference to Marx and Freud's critiques of religion:

To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him. Suppose it could be demonstrated that a certain kind of complex neural stimulation could produce theistic belief. This would have no tendency to discredit religious belief.…Clearly, it is possible both that there is an explanation in terms of natural processes of religious belief, and that these beliefs have a perfectly respectable epistemic status.
²⁴

Why do I highlight this argument of his? Because time after time, in order to defend what they believe, Christians must continually retreat to what is possible rather than what is probable. So, let's assume in this scenario by Plantinga that there are natural processes that produce religious beliefs, and that neurologists have natural explanations for why people have them. That is, science can explain the brain processes that produce religious faith. (Actually, I think neurology
has
already gone a long way toward explaining religious/paranormal beliefs).
²⁵
Plantinga claims that even if this should prove to be the case, his religious faith could still possibly be true. What should we say to this? We say what is obvious. Yes, it is still
possible
, Alvin. But what has he gained? Nothing at all. For what we want to know is what would be
probable
given an explanation of religious faith in brain processes, not what is possible. If all we had to be concerned about was what is possible, then maybe the Loch Ness Monster exists but is smart enough to escape being detected by us, too. Get the point? But there's more. If Plantinga can say this in defense of his Christian faith, then a Mormon or a Muslim could say the exact same things he did in defense of their faiths, that their religious faiths could still be true despite neurological science. And where does that get us? Nowhere. My claim is that at crucial places in defense of religious faith, believers must punt over and over to what is possible rather than what is probable. My claim is that the more believers must do this to defend what they believe, then the less likely their faith is true.
²⁶
It is utterly unreasonable for apologists like Plantinga to demand that skeptics must prove the Christian faith is
impossible
before they will consider that it's
improbable.
Just think if his banker told him that investing all his money in a particular fund will
probably
bring upon him financial ruin. Can anyone imagine Plantinga investing his money anyway because his banker didn't say it's not possible to invest all his money in that fund without being financially ruined?

If, as Plantinga allows, the evidence from psychology, anthropology, and brain science could explain why Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists believe what they do, then Plantinga is conceding that they believe what they do for exactly the same reasons Christians believe what they do. This, then, would confirm that whatever causes Christians to believe what they do is
verifiably incapable
of reliably causing a true belief at all. Those same causes would just as easily generate one different religious faith as another one, faiths that in many cases believe mutually contradictory things. In fact, given that those same causes cause
thousands
of sects and religions, which must all be false (as at most only one of them can be true), we would here have indisputable proof that these causes are
maximally likely
to produce false beliefs. In the light of this evidence, Plantinga's excuse that “maybe I'm the exception” is simply foolish. The odds against him actually being that exception are thousands to one.

William Lane Craig is a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada after having earned two doctorates. He was my former professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where half of the hours I took for my Master of Theology degree in the Philosophy of Religion were under him. He has impressive evangelical credentials, being known as the foremost Christian debater of our generation who has debated everyone from John Dominic Crossan and Gerd Ludemann to Antony Flew, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Christopher Hitchens, and five of the contributors to this book. Many evangelicals describe him as the leading apologist of our generation. He has authored or edited over thirty works, including
The Kalam Cosmological Argument
(1979),
Reasonable Faith
(3rd ed. 2008),
Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview
(with J. P. Moreland, 2003),
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
(with J. P. Moreland, 2009), and numerous articles.

Now let's consider William Lane Craig's explanation for why there is global religious diversity if there is a hell to pay for people who die outside the Christian faith. He claims, “It is possible that God has created a world having an optimal balance between saved and lost and that God has so providentially ordered the world that those who fail to hear the Gospel and be saved would not have freely responded affirmatively to it even if they had heard it.” Craig argues that if this scenario is even possible, “it proves that it is entirely consistent to affirm that God is all-powerful and all-loving and yet that some people never hear the Gospel and are lost.”
²⁷

Again, there are many things that might be possible, but apologists like Craig and Plantinga seem to resort to that standard escape too many times. Contrary to Craig, when we look at the billions of people who have never been given a chance to be “saved” because of “when and where they were born,” his scenario seems extremely implausible, to say the least. Surely there exists at least one more person among them who would believe if presented with the Gospel. No wonder he only wants to talk about what is possible. When it comes to foreknowing our future, Craig argues that God has
Middle Knowledge
such that he knows “what every possible creature would do under any possible circumstances,” and he would know this “prior to any determination of the divine will.”
²⁸
So despite his protestations to the contrary, isn't it obvious that if Craig's God has this kind of foreknowledge, he could simply foreknow who would not accept his offered salvation before they were even created, and then never create them in the first place so “hotel hell” would never have even one occupant? Why not?

Richard G. Swinburne retired in 2002 as the emeritus professor of the philosophy of the Christian religion at the University of Oxford. Over the past forty years he has written more than a dozen major books, including
The Concept of Miracle
(1970),
The Coherence of Theism
(1977),
The Existence of God
(2nd ed. 2004),
Providence and the Problem of Evil
(1998), and
The Resurrection of God Incarnate
(2003), along with hundreds of articles. He is one of the foremost Christian apologists of our era, clearly the best of the best when it comes to providing an intellectual defense of Christianity, so I'll focus a bit more on him.

In his 2007 book
Revelation
, Swinburne attempts to defend the Christian revelation claim as the one and only true revelation from the one true God.
²⁹
There is so much I'd like to say about his book because a good deal of it is very painful to read. In it we see him being ignorant of his own ignorance, specializing in special pleading, and begging the question too many times for him not to look ignorant. To see this, all we have to do is look at just one of his main arguments. In
chapter 5
, he argues that if God exists he needed to give human beings a propositional (or spoken) revelation. God needed to do this, Swinburne argues, to reveal to us exactly who he is, to explain why the world has so much suffering in it, to tell us what he has done about it, what he expects from us, and to warn us that we will be rewarded and punished based on our response to him. We need this revelation because this is the kind of important information we couldn't learn on our own, he opines.

What Swinburne has done in arguing for this needed revelation is to do what all Christian apologists do (to some degree). He simply takes for granted his particular view of God and this presently existing world to make his case. Then based on what he takes for granted, and with a little sleight of hand, Swinburne goes on to argue that God would need to provide us with a propositional revelation. And, surprise of surprises, Swinburne happily announces in triumph, this is exactly what God did. Did you catch this? Let me explain the trick he just pulled.

What Swinburne has done is nothing less than special pleading with regard to his God and question begging with regard to this present world. The truth is there is little to be surprised about once we grant Swinburne these things for his argument to work. Like all Christian apologists, Swinburne ultimately lacks even a child's imagination. His imagination is stunted by his faith and the need to defend what he believes. So let's backtrack a bit with a better imagination for a minute.

First off, I can easily imagine a different kind of god, one that is much more reasonable to accept than the one Swinburne prays to, who does not need to give us any propositional revelation at all. Swinburne thinks he can successfully defend some of the classical arguments for God's existence.
³⁰
But at best all he ends up doing is showing that the god of his reasoning is consistent with the God of his faith. But just showing that the god of the philosophers is
consistent
with the God of his faith does not show that the God of his faith probably exists. The arguments leading Swinburne to affirm that a god of some kind exists are also consistent with a deistic god who out of boundless love will save everyone in the end regardless of what they believe, or who instead created this world as but nothing more than a scientific experiment and who thinks of us as rats in a maze, wondering what we will conclude about it all and how we will live our lives. The philosophers’ god is also consistent with a divine tinkerer who is learning as he goes by creating one successive universe after another. Alonzo Fyfe conjectured on such a god in these words:

Perhaps I was created by a god who got bored and who was seeking some way to entertain himself. He came up with the idea of creating a planet and populating it with people who[m] he [programmed to] have a strong disposition to accept religious teachings without question. He then went to different groups and said, “You are God's chosen children. You have a right and a duty to rule over the world. All others are infidels who should be either converted or killed.” When he was done, he sat back in [h]is heavenly recliner with his heavenly beer and potato chips and watched the unfolding drama of Survivor Earth, and he saw that it was good. Or, at least, he was entertained.
³¹

We're not done yet, for the philosophers’ god is also consistent with a deity who created the quantum wave fluctuation that produced this universe as his last act before committing suicide. Or a god who
had
to die in order to create the world.
³²
Such a god is also consistent with a creator god who guides the universe ultimately toward an evil purpose, but who has chosen to maliciously present himself as benevolent to trick us. If such a trickster god exists, then all the evidence leading Swinburne to conclude his good God exists was simply planted there to deceive us by that very same God. Based on this alternative god hypothesis alone, the best any believer can claim is agnosticism in the sense of being skeptical of
all
metaphysical affirmations.
³³
Never mind all the others! And yet they're just as possible. I can see no reasonable objection to these other god hypotheses once we allow them into our equations. They are just as possible as
his
god hypothesis. That's why scientists cannot posit god explanations for answers to the origin of the universe. For once we allow supernatural explanations into our equations, any god will do, since there seems to be no way to exclude any.

So much for God. But I can just as easily imagine a different kind of
world
than the present one, which wouldn't require any divine propositional revelation if an omnipotent god created it. By using at least as much imagination as a child's, this is easy to do. If the god that exists is less complicated to understand (as any of the non-triune deities mentioned above would be, or countless others I can imagine), and if he had created us with a greater level of intelligence to understand more of that which god understands, then we would have less trouble believing that he exists and less trouble understanding who he is. At the very minimum, we would be able to understand everything that is important to understand. He could even create us so that this information is automatically imprinted in our brains at birth. Even if not, all god had to do was provide us with sufficient evidence to think he exists in the created world. Then we would at least know he exists, since that's so very important to him (but for what reason escapes me). I have previously suggested the kind of evidence that would convince me that god exists
³⁴
along with several different ways he could've created the world that would all but eliminate both human
³⁵
and animal
³⁶
suffering (sorry, no room to revisit this here—after all, this is the third book in a series). In the end, a miracle-working God could do perpetual miracles that could alleviate this suffering, if for some reason God didn't create the world correctly in the first place. But if god had created the world in any of these ways, there would be no need of a propositional revelation since there would be little, or nothing, that needed an explanation.