Logic and evolution: Plantinga project. God is Back? (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 23, 2020, 11:36 (1221 days ago) @ David Turell

GEORGE: I came across this review on Twitter, which claims that "God is Back"!
It mentions Plantinga whose ideas have been discussed here before.
https://www.newsmax.com/robkoons/theism-atheism-alexander-pruss/2018/12/27/id/896083/

Alexander Pruss however does not seem to have crossed you paths before.
Of course as an atheist I doubt if their arguments are any better than before.
The idea that everything has a cause is questionable to begin with.

DAVID: George, thank you for this interesting website. Pruss has an interesting Thomist approach, which I tend to follow.

Many thanks, George, for your continued interest. As an agnostic, I agree with you about the arguments, as I’ll explain in a moment, but I do think everything has a cause except for the one great problem of how “everything” began!

QUOTE: “Since we know that the universe had a first cause, Collins’s argument gives us reason to think that that first cause is intelligent and purposeful — in fact, that its purposes include the fulfillment of human aspirations for knowledge.
In my own chapter in the book, I build on work by C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga to show that, in the absence of the existence of God, all human knowledge would be impossible. If human thought emerged in a universe without a wise and benevolent creator, then our thought would be, at best, well adjusted for survival and reproduction, but not for truth. In particular, our knowledge of the norms of reason depend on God’s wise benevolence.”

I can accept the argument for a “first cause”, but the rest makes me squirm, even though I am not an atheist. A causeless supreme intelligence is no more likely than a causeless universe of constantly changing matter and energy, in which an eternity and infinity of combinations has eventually thrown together the rudimentary ingredients for life and intelligence. (The big bang theory is irrelevant, since we cannot know what preceded it, if it happened.) The choice then lies between top-down, in which a know-it-all intelligence without a cause (God) engineers the progress from inorganic materials to single cell to human intelligence, and bottom up, in which mindless chance is the cause that initiates the same process. I find both theories equally impossible to believe, which of course is why I remain agnostic. (A third option is a kind of panpsychism, which we needn’t go into here.

I’m a little surprised that David has not pounced on “wise and benevolent” as “humanizations”, not to mention the fact that the history of life has always largely been one of eat or be eaten, which I find hard to equate with benevolence. I don’t know how this can be called “wisdom” either.