Why Darwinist Materialism is Wrong

According to a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being.

Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism — or don’t call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of the academy — or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.

The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an idol of the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: “I find this view antecedently unbelievable — a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. . . . I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Nagel is an atheist; even so, however, he does not accept the above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism; far from it. His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist naturalism.

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Alvin Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics. Plantinga is the author of a number of books including, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (Point/Counterpoint), Knowledge of God, God and Other Minds, The Nature of Necessity, and the “warrant” series culminating in Warranted Christian Belief. He has delivered the Gifford Lectures three times, and was described by Time magazine as “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God.”