Perceiving design

Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies:

Perceiving Design?

In this chapter and the last we have been thinking about fine-tuning arguments for design, and Behe's biological arguments for design. We have been calling them, naturally enough, "arguments." But perhaps there is a better way to think about what is going on here. You are hiking up Ptarmigan Ridge towards Mt. Baker in the North Cascades; your partner points out a mountain goat on a crag about two hundred yards distant. She thus gets you to form a belief—that there is a mountain goat there. But of course she doesn't do so by giving you an argument (you are appeared to in such and such a way; most of the time when someone S is appeared to that way there is a mountain goat about two hundred yards distant in the direction S is looking). Perhaps what is going on in the arguments like Behe's, as well as the fine-tuning arguments of the last chapter, can be better thought of as like what is going on in this sort of case, where it is perception (or something like it) rather than argument that is involved.²⁰

Where do we go from here?

A big part of the world has gone crazy. By “big part of the world”, I mean, “lots of people, and lots of institutions”. We know that.

They have rejected God and adopted a form of man-made morality which holds that every person and every culture should be “equal” (a form of morality which is clearly on display in universities and magnified by the media), in such a way that dissenting from this morality can cause you to lose a Facebook or Twitter account, or a job, or a wife and custody of a child, or your life.

How are Christians to deal with this?

Not long ago, Rod Dreher proposed “The Benedict Option”, which he summarized as “communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life”.

I don’t think that is good enough. On the other hand, I’ve long been impressed by Alvin Plantinga’s advice in his “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (from the 1984 essay). While this advice is specific to philosophy students, I think it has broader application for those of us in other situations:

What was Job thinking?

According to Alvin Plantinga:

There are at least two ways to understand Job. On the one hand, it seems that his problem is intellectual: he can't see what reason God could have for permitting this suffering (or visiting it upon him); he infers that probably God doesn't have a reason. But the point is that Job's suffering comes to him for reasons entirely behind his ken, reasons having to do with the relation between God and creatures he knows nothing about. 

Alternatively, we could understand Job like this. He doesn't really doubt that God has good reasons for what he does or permits; after all, being omnipotent and omniscient and all that great stuff, he would have good reasons, wouldn't he? But Job simply hates what God is doing (or permitting) and becomes furious with God: "why did I have to suffer for those no doubt dandy ends of yours?…I don't give a fig for your reasons, and I loathe what you are doing!" Here Job doesn't really doubt that God has good reasons, but he doesn't care; he mistrusts God, is wary of him and his no doubt magnificent aims and ends. He hates what these aims and ends require of him; he feels like rebelling against God, telling him off, telling him to go fly a (no doubt splendidly magnificent) kite. Alvin Plantinga, "Reply to Tooley's Opening Statement," Knowledge of God (Blackwell 2008), 182-83. 

Plantinga on the life of faith

Outside my study window at home there is a kind of ravine with lots of beautiful trees in it and birds flying around and the like. Those things I think are used by God to sort of help us see his presence, and the like. God sometimes also comes to people–for example Jonathan Edwards, seems often to have a very vivid appreciation of a very vivid sort of personal relationship with God. And people often talk about a personal relationship with God. I think for many people,  though, there isn't a whole lot of that. It isn't that you just sort of do anything like perceive God–maybe under some relatively rare circumstances–but during much of one's life, it seems to me, you sort of coast on a kind of momentum. You've got this strong inclination to believe in God, which is much stronger on some occasions than it is on others for many people, including myself. But there are these dry periods that many Christian saints have talked about. Periods when the heavens are as brass and when it seems God isn't present. And this shows up in the Psalms, "God, why are you so far from me?" and the like. It seems to me there's a kind of persistence that a believer in God needs, a kind of living on past capital, so to speak.

The experience of reading the Bible is for me crucial. I mean, reading the Bible–maybe not every part, but many parts–is a powerful impetus to belief in God, to renew belief in God, and the like. And also going to church and listening to sermons. Sometimes sermons work in the wrong direction…but I think such things as regular Bible reading, regular prayer, regular church attendance, regular talking if you can with other Christians and the like. J. Walls & T. Dougherty, eds. Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God (Oxford 2018), 458-59.

"Our reasoning capacities are highly unreliable"

"Adventures in Branch-Cutting" by Prof. James Anderson.

Longing for a better country

So. A Wrinkle in Time just came out. I remember reading and enjoying the book...when I was in elementary school. I'm not sure how the book would hold up as an adult! I presume poorly.

Not to mention it sounds like Madeleine L'Engle was a theologically liberal Christian.

Judging by the trailer, the movie seems awful to me. I especially don't like how it looks. Its aesthetics or style. I really don't need to see Oprah try to act either. I don't plan on watching the movie.

That said, some of the first books I ever read in English were written by professing Christians (loosely defined). For example, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, A Wrinkle in Time, Bridge to Terabithia. I don't recall what drew me to these sorts of books. However, I remember being enchanted by them. More than enchanted.

I think a commonality between such books for me was they opened up a reality beyond the reality of what one could see or hear or otherwise sense with the senses. Such books made me consider there might be something beyond the mundane reality of sights and sounds. At least on an emotional level. I hoped it was the case.

I believe these books are classified as fantasy. But sometimes fantasies can point us to a truer reality. Maybe this is a touch too Platonic.

I suppose what I'm feebly attempting to get at is C.S. Lewis' idea of Sehnsucht. As he wrote in Mere Christianity:

Most of us find it very difficult to want 'Heaven' at all - except in so far as 'Heaven' means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognise it. Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.

I don't know how reasonable Lewis' Sehnsucht or "joy" would be as a philosophical apologetic. I believe Alvin Plantinga somewhere calls it Lewis' argument from nostalgia, but at the same time notes it's not a well-formed argument. Something along those lines.

Nevertheless, I do think it's emotionally resonant, and in that respect it might be effective on some people to some degree. Perhaps it's more effective on those who already believe and assent, but who haven't trusted Christ and committed themselves to him.

The argument from reason

Elizabeth Anscombe, then an up-and-coming Catholic philosopher, had a celebrated disagreement with C. S. Lewis at the Socratic Club. As a result, Lewis reformulated one of his arguments in Miracles. Years later, Anscombe offered her assessment of Lewis's reformulation:

There is one thing I will say, which is that there is a quotation by J. B. S. Haldane...The quotation runs like this: "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true...and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

Now I want to consider the quotation all by itself. Let us suppose that it makes sense to say that mental processes–and this means everything they are inclined to call mental processes–are determined, determined wholly, by the motions of atoms in one's brain. That is, let us forget about the difficulties that might be raised about this. I mean the difficulties of taking about mental processes and when they are supposed to be determined.

In order to keep any such difficulties out of view, let us consider an analogous supposition, namely that it makes sense to say that linguistic marks–that is, marks that are parts of a language as they occur in a printed book–are wholly determined by the machinery that printed the book. Well, it might be a book. I don't think this book [in my hand] has got any pencil notes in it or anything that might be linguistic matter that isn't printed.

This analogue has the advantage of certainly making sense, that is, that the linguistic marks occurring in this book are wholly determined by the machinery that printed the book. And indeed, it's got the advantage of not just certainly making sense, but of being true. Only we wouldn't dream of saying: if that is true, we have no reason to suppose that any of the things said in the book are true or are false, or anything like that.

Well, this illustrates the way in which a thought–a thought that somebody puts forward–trades on a mysteriousness about its objects. In the case of Haldane's remark, the mysterious objects are "mental processes"; "If every bit of every mental process is determined by motions of atoms, then I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true". If we change the example to something lacking the mysteriousness of "mental processes", for example to the existence of the print in a printed book, as I have in my analogue, then we observe two things. First, that the supposition that this is wholly determined by the machinery, the printing machinery, is true. And second, that that has no bearing whatever on whether anything said in the book is true, or whether we have reason or no reason to think so. Elizabeth Anscombe, "C. S. "Lewis's Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles." Roger White, Judith Wolfe, & Brendan Wolfe, C. S. Lewis and His Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society (Oxford University Press 2015), 15-16.

I think both she and Lewis are right in different respects:

i) She's right to point out that determinism as such doesn't undermine reason. It depends on what lies behind the determinate outcome. And her example nicely illustrates why it would be fallacious to infer that determinism per se undermines reason. 

ii) However, I don't know that Lewis intended to show that determinism in general undercuts reason. In context, he's targeting atheism. He uses Haldane's statement as a frame of reference. Haldane was an atheist. Lewis's contention, as I see it, is that determinism in combination with naturalism undercuts reason. In particular, that blind physical determinism undercuts reason.

I think his intuition is sound, and subsequent philosophers like Victor Reppert (i.e. the argument from reason) and Alvin Plantinga (i.e. the evolutionary argument against naturalism) have developed more sophisticated versions of his rudimentary argument. 

Letter to a young philosopher

https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/4537/letter-to-a-young-philosopher/

Atheism and its discontents

I recently got into a debate with a former evangelical Christian turned atheist. Here are some bits and pieces from my replies I thought might be helpful to some. Apologies if there's still a lot of filler or fodder in here as I wasn't necessarily all that discriminating in what I left in or took out. Also sorry I don't have the time to better organize this (e.g. topically). It's mostly just a quick copy and paste job in chronological order. And keep in mind I'm not a biblical scholar, theologian, or philosopher so I'm open to correction.

Mass extinction

In response to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, it's common for Darwinians to counter that the very fact that species survive and thrive is evidence that natural selection selects for true beliefs or reliable instincts. If, say, gazelles were inattentive to movements in the high grass (caused by stalking lions), or inattentive to warning calls by birds (who can spot stalking lions in the high grass), &c., that species would become extinct. 

Now, whatever we make of that response on its own grounds, Darwinians (e.g. David Raup, William Provine, Stephen Jay Gould) commonly deploy another argument as evidence for naturalistic evolution: mass extinction. The claim is that given the randomness of survival, and the terrifying attrition rate, this just isn't what we'd expect if there's a wise, benevolent, and provident God. 

Once again, whatever we make of that contention on its own grounds, it seems to be in strident tension with the response to Plantinga. And course, that's in part because it was kicking around before Plantinga's argument. So it didn't anticipate his argument.

The point, though, is that it's hard to see how Darwinians can simultaneously appeal to survival to deflect Plantinga's argument while also, in a different context, pointing to mass extinction. Indeed, they commonly say that something like 99.9% of all species became extinct. 

Journeys of faith

At Harvard I encountered serious non-Christian thought for the first time–for the first time in the flesh, that is; I had read animadversions on Christianity and theism by Bertrand Russell (Why I am Not a Christian) and others. I was struck by the enormous variety of intellectual and spiritual opinion at Harvard, and spent a great deal of time arguing about whether there was such a person as God, whether Christianity as opposed to Judaism (my roommate Herbert Jacobs was the son of a St. Louis rabbi) was right and so on. I began to wonder whether what I had always believed could really be true. At Harvard, after all, there was such an enormous diversity of opinions about these matters, some of them held by highly intelligent and accomplished people who had little but contempt for what I believed. On the one hand I began to think it questionable that what I had been taught and had always believed could be right, given that there were all these others who thought so differently (and were so much more intellectually accomplished than I). On the other hand, I thought to myself, what really is so great about these people? Why should I believe them? True, they know much more than I and have though much longer: but what, precisely, is the substance of their objections to Christianity? Or to theism? Do these objections really have much by way of substance? And if, as I strongly suspected, not, why should their taking the views they did be relevant to what I thought. The doubts (in that form anyway) didn't last long, but something like the bravado, I suppose, has remained.

The two events that resolved these doubts and ambivalences for me occurred during my second semester. One gloomy evening (in January, perhaps) I was returning from dinner, walking past Widenar Library to my fifth-floor room in Thayer (there weren't any elevators, and scholarship boys occupied the cheaper rooms at the top of the building). It was dark, windy, raining, nasty. But suddenly it was as if the heavens opened; I heard, so it seemed, music of overwhelming power and grandeur and sweetness; there was light of unimaginable splendor and beauty; it seemed I could see into heaven itself; and I suddenly saw or perhaps felt with great clarity and persuasion and conviction that the Lord was really there and was all I had thought. The effects of this experience lingered for a long time; I was still caught up in arguments about the existence of God, but they often seemed to me merely academic, of little existential concern, as if one were to argue about whether there has really been a past, for example, or whether there really were other people, as opposed to cleverly constructed robots.

Such events have not been common subsequently, and there has been only one other occasion on which I felt the presence of God with as much immediacy and strength. That was then I once foolishly went hiking alone off-trail in really rugged country south of Mt. Shuksan in the North Cascades, getting lost when rain, snow and fog obscured all the peaks and landmarks. That night, while shivering under a stunted tree in a cold mixture of snow and rain, I felt as close to God as I ever have, before or since. Alvin Plantinga, "A Christian Life Partly Lived," K. Clark, ed. Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers (IVP, 1993), 50-52.

I don’t have a radically different assessment of all that in my revivified state than I did when I was wandering in the wilderness. The main bar to faith was rather the Freudian idea that religious faith is a wish fulfillment–more specifically, an attempt to cling to childish modes of relating to the world, with the omnipotent daddy there presiding over everything. A powerful case can be made for the view, which is not necessarily tied to the complete Freudian package, that the most important psychological root of religious belief is the need that everyone has for such a childish relationship with a father figure. Be that as it may, I had been psyched into feeling that I was chickening out, was betraying my adult status, if I sought God in Christ, or sought to relate myself to an ultimate source and disposer of things in any way whatever. The crucial moment in my return to the faith came quite early in that year’s leave, before I had reexposed myself to the church or the Bible, or even thought seriously about the possibility of becoming a Christian. I was walking one afternoon in the country outside Oxford, wrestling with the problem, when I suddenly said to myself, "Why should I allow myself to be cribbed, cabined, and confined by these Freudian ghosts? Why should I be so afraid of not being adult? What am I trying to prove? Whom am I trying to impress? Whose approval am I trying to secure? What is more important: to struggle to conform my life to the tenets of some highly speculative system of psychology or to recognize and come to terms with my own real needs? Why should I hold back from opening myself to a transcendent dimension of reality, if such there be, just from fear of being branded as childish in some quarters?" (Or words to that effect.) These questions answered themselves as soon as they were squarely posed. I had, by the grace of God, finally found the courage to look the specter in the face and tell him to go away. I had been given the courage to face the human situation, with its radical need for a proper relation to the source of all being. William Alston, "A Philosopher's Way Back to Faith," T. Morris, ed. God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason (Oxford, 1996), 22. 

Is atheism irrational?

An interview with Alvin Plantinga.

The case against reality

http://www.gregwelty.com/2016/05/the-case-against-reality/

Life After Faith

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/54977-life-after-faith-the-case-for-secular-humanism/

HT: Paul Manata

Omelianchuck on the Free Will Defense

http://www.gregwelty.com/2014/07/adam-ochuck-on-my-objection-to-the-free-will-defense/

Adventures in evolutionary psychology

Jeff can't seem to make up his mind on whether evolutionary psychology is a reliable or unreliable belief-producing process. 

On the one hand:

 HADD is an acronym which stands for “Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device.” HADD is a theory in the cognitive science of religion which says that most humans seem to be hard-wired to believe that agents explain various facts; this tendency seems to include all sorts of invisible agents, including God, gods, ghosts, and so forth. 

Here’s one reason to think (3) is true, what I call the “HADD Produces Many False Positives” argument. This argument focuses on the letter “H” in the acronym HADD: most humans not only have a mental tool called an “agency detection device” (ADD), but this device is literally hypersensitive. Given ambiguous information, most human brains have a tendency to err on the side of assuming that an agent–maybe even an unseen or invisible agent–is responsible for the ambiguous information. This mental tool has survival value because it causes people to be on guard against potential predators. Furthermore, it’s better for ADD to err on the side of false positives than on the side of false negatives. So because HADD generates so many false positives, it is unreliable. On the assumption that naturalism is true (and humans are the result of unguided evolution), this is just what we would expect. If naturalism is true, nature is “blind” and so is indifferent to our beliefs about a non-existent God.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2014/02/28/is-hadd-evidence-against-theism-part-1/

On the other hand:

 

This is Plantinga’s well-known “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism” (EAAN).

1. The basic problem with the argument is that it’s false that “Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.” Rather, as Draper pointed out in his debate with Plantinga, “More generally, the long term survival of our species is much more to be expected if our cognitive faculties are reliable than if they are unreliable, and that entails that the long term survival of our species is strong evidence for R.”

2. Furthermore, “In addition, it is very unlikely that belief-producing mechanisms that do not track the truth would systematically promote survival in a very diverse and often rapidly changing environment.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2014/02/23/plantinga-on-the-alleged-irrationality-of-atheism/

Irrational atheism

I'm going to comment on this post by atheist Jeff Lowder:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2014/02/23/plantinga-on-the-alleged-irrationality-of-atheism/

While I agree that atheism (the belief that God does not exist version) does have a burden of proof, atheism doesn’t have nearly the same burden of proof as theism. Why? Because theism has a lower prior probability than naturalism and naturalism entails atheism.

He doesn't explain or defend his claim that theism has a lower prior probability than naturalism. Perhaps, though, he intends the reader to infer that his subsequent reasons in this post bear out the claim. 

His “two dozen or so” theistic arguments, philosophically speaking, consist of practically everything but the kitchen sink as evidence for theism. 

There's a grain of truth to that, but it's misleading. These are lecture notes. They don't profess to detail the arguments, but to give the audience an overview. Even in the text, Plantinga refers the reader to more detailed expositions. 

Plantinga knows very well that atheists have offered serious arguments for atheism, including the argument from nonculpable nonbelief (aka “divine hiddenness”),

And what's the argument? Schellenberg begins by claiming:

This claim is not hard to substantiate, and is not itself resisted by many. As support, consider those who have always believed in God and who would love to go on believing in God but who have found, as adults, that serious and honest examination of all the evidence of experience and argument they can lay their hands on has unexpectedly had the result of eroding their belief away. These are individuals who were happy and morally committed believers, and who remain morally committed but are no longer happy because of the emotional effects of an intellectual reorganization involving the removal of theistic belief. 

Perhaps even more convincing support for the existence of nonresistant nonbelief is provided by all those--both at the present time and throughout the past--for whom theistic belief has never been a live option. In some such individuals, quite other beliefs, supported by authority or tradition or experience, have held sway instead of theism.

Unfortunately, this interprets the motives of the atheist or apostate from the biased viewpoint of an atheist. A very charitable interpretation which credits the apostate or atheist with the best of intentions. But, of course, that begs the question. That's hardly how the Bible views unbelievers.  

Schellenberg goes onto claim:

In others, the basic conceptual conditions of so much as entertaining the idea of a being separate from the physical universe who created it, and who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good and loving in relation to it, have never been satisfied.

Once again, that claim takes for granted an atheistic view of the natural evidence (or lack thereof) for God.  

Schellenberg goes onto claim:

If there is a perfectly loving God, all creatures capable of explicit and positively meaningful relationship with God who have not freely shut themselves off from God are in a position to participate in such relationships--i.e., able to do so just by trying to.

Readers will notice, first of all, a link being forged between perfect divine love and the availability of relationship with God…A perfectly loving God--if those words mean anything--would, like the best human lover, ensure that meaningful contact with herself was always possible for those she loved.

That description is generally consistent with freewill theism. However, it lacks traction for Reformed theism, where God's redemptive love is confined to the elect. In Calvinism, not only does God not intend to make everyone have a positive relationship with him, but he intends that some (the reprobate) not have a positive relationship with him. He predestined them to be unbelievers. So, in Schellenberg's formulation, the divine hiddenness argument is, at best, an argument against freewill theism rather than Reformed theism. It doesn't even scratch the surface of Reformed theism. 

the evidential argument from biological evolution, 

And what's the argument? Jeff says:

Many conservative Christians and lay atheists alike claim that if biological evolution is true, then God does not exist. 

Really? The actual claim of many conservative Christians is that biological evolution (e.g. macroeverolution, universal common descent) is incompatible with biblical theism, not theism in general. So Jeff presents a false dichotomy. If his actual target is biblical theism, then he needs to reformulate his argument.

and the evidential argument from mind-brain dependence. 

And what's the argument? Jeff says:

All healthy human beings have minds, including rich conscious experiences and personalities.

What about Jerry Coyne's contention, shared by many many secularists, that our sense of self is a "neuronal illusion"? What about Alex Rosenberg's eliminative materialism?  

Scientific evidence shows that human consciousness and personality are highly dependent upon the brain. In this context, nothing mental happens without something physical happening. That strongly implies that the mind cannot exist independently of physical arrangements of matter. In other words, we do not have a soul.

i) That ignores evidence for mind/brain independence, viz. veridical NDEs, veridical OBEs, psi, postmortem apparitions, the hard problem of consciousness. 

ii) In addition, even if embodied minds are dependent on brains, it hardly follows that minds are still dependent on brains when they are separated from brains. 

And this is exactly what we would expect if naturalism is true.

What about Christian physicalists like Kevin Corcoran, Joel Green, Peter van Inwagen, Trenton Merricks, Nancey Murphy, Lynne Rudder Baker? 

(I'm not endorsing physicalism. I'm just drawing attention to another one of Jeff's stimulative expectations.) 

But if nothing mental happens without something physical happening, that is evidence against both the existence of souls and the existence of any being who is supposed to have a disembodied mind, including God. 

Notice the blatant equivocation, where he fallaciously moves from nothing mental happens without something physical happening in reference to humans to God. Jeff's analogy might be valid for Mormonism, but it's hardly valid for Christian theism. 

Naturalism is logically incompatible with disembodied minds, e.g., souls, ghosts, spirits, demons, angels, gods, God, etc. 

Now he expands the candidates for discarnate minds to include angels and demons. But what if there's evidence for angels (e.g. angelical apparitions) and demons (e.g. possession)? 

If human minds were independent of the physical brain, then brain injuries should not have much, if any, impact on mental activity since, ex hypothesi, mental activity does not occur in the brain to begin with. 

If you damage a receiver (e.g. a television), you can't access the signal, even though the source of the signal is independent of the receiver. An outside observer has no way of knowing if mental activity is still occurring, inasmuch as the patient's brain/body is the medium by which he observes mental activity in the patient.

As Paul Draper has argued, “if theism does make it likely that some human beings have a properly functioning sensus divinitatis, then it makes it likely that everyone has one or at least that everyone who is not resistant to belief in God has one, which, pace John Calvin, is not what we observe.”

But in Calvin, the senses divinitatis is offset by the noetic effects of sin. 

Furthermore, as Draper goes on to point out,… the cognitive science of religion is not wholly supportive of Plantinga’s position. Human beings instinctively believe in all sorts of invisible agents, not just in gods and certainly not just in a single creator-God let alone the specific creator-God of metaphysical theism. So we seem to have a broad sensus actoris instead of a narrow sensus divinitatis.

Since the Christian worldview includes other invisible agents besides God (i.e. angels, demons, ghosts), how does that observation count against the senses divinitatis? 

As Keith Parsons has argued, the non-existence of the sensus divinitatis is evidence for the non-existence of God.My argument is simple. I think that Alvin Plantinga is right. If God exists, humans will very likely possess a sensus divinitatis, a God-detecting faculty, which, when functioning properly and in the appropriate circumstances, will present us with warrant-basic (both warranted and epistemologically basic) awareness of his existence. If this is so, and if God does exist, then humans, provided that their sinfulness has not impaired the proper functioning of their sensus, will have a warrant-basic awareness of God’s existence. On the other hand, if there is no God, it is extremely unlikely that humans would possess a cognitive faculty that would produce the warranted (but false) belief that God exists. In this case, evidence that belief in God is not caused by a warrant-conferring cognitive faculty, but rather is generated by a noncognitive process that does not confer warrant on that belief, will, ipso facto, constitute evidence against the existence of God. An atheological argument can therefore be set out semi-formally like this:1) If God exists, then humans very likely possess a sensus divinitatis, a cognitive faculty which, when functioning properly and in the appropriate circumstances, produces the warrant-basic belief that God exists.2) If there is no sensus divinitatis, then God probably does not exist, unless the background probability of his existence is very high.3) It is not the case that the background probability of God’s existence is very high.4) There is no sensus divinitatis.5) Therefore, God probably does not exist.

That argument is obviously vulnerable at two keys points:

provided that their sinfulness has not impaired the proper functioning of their sensus 

It is not the case that the background probability of God’s existence is very high

Persons needs to defend both assumptions. 

First, the only intelligent life we know of is human and it exists in this universe. As Paul Draper explains:“while it may be true that on single-universe naturalism the existence of anything as impressive as human beings is very unlikely, it is also true that on theism the existence of intelligent beings as unimpressive and flawed as humans is very unlikely. 

Draper needs to explain in what sense humans are unimpressive and flaws. According to Christian theology:

27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being[d] might boast in the presence of God (1 Cor 1:27-29). 

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us (2 Cor 4:7). 

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me (2 Cor 12:9).

Continuing with Draper:

There are indefinitely many different kinds of creatures that an omnipotent being would have the power to create and that, other things being equal, would be more valuable to create than humans. 

Angels are more "impressive" than humans. 

Further, given that human beings do exist, it is certain on single-universe naturalism, but not on theism, that they exist in this universe (i.e., in the one universe that we know to exist).”

There are Christians (Don Page, Jeff Zweerink) who subscribe to a multiverse.

Second, intelligent life is the result of evolution. Given that intelligent life of some sort exists in some universe, the fact that it developed as a result of biological evolution is more probable on naturalism than on it is on theism.

What about theistic evolutionists like Don Page, Rupert Sheldrake, Francis Collins, Alexander Pruss, Alister McGrath, Michael Behe, Michael Denton, Karl Rahner, Conway Morris, Stephen Barr, Zach Arden, Dennis Venema, B. B. Warfield, Nicholas Rescher, William Hasker, Richard Swinburne, and Peter van Inwagen–to name a few? 

(I'm not endorsing theistic evolution. I'm just pointing out that what's obvious to Jeff isn't obvious to many very intelligent theists.)

This argument assumes the truth of biological evolution; for a defense of that assumption, see the Talk.Origins archive. To be sure, biological evolution is logically compatible with theism; God could have used evolution to create life. But if theism were true, God could have also used many other methods to create life, methods which are impossible if naturalism is true. 

Which is precisely what young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists argue for: fiat creation, special creation. 

In contrast, if naturalism is true, evolution pretty much has to be true. 

In the contingent sense that given naturalism, then naturalistic evolution is the only game in town. That, however, isn't evidence for either naturalism or naturalistic evolution. 

Definitions 

supernatural person: a person that is neither a part nor a product of the physical universeperfect person: perfect in power (omnipotent), perfect in knowledge (omniscient), and perfect in moral goodness (morally perfect). God: a perfect supernatural person

That's not a definition of theism, per se. Rather, that's a definition of classical theism or perfect being theology.  

Logical Form
(1) Evolution is antecedently much more probable on the assumption that naturalism is true than on the assumption that theism is true.(2) The statement that pain and pleasure systematically connected to reproductive success is antecedently much more probable on the assumption that evolutionary naturalism is true than on the assumption that evolutionary theism is true.(3) Therefore, evolution conjoined with this statement about pain and pleasure is antecedently very much more probable on the assumption that naturalism is true than on the assumption that theism is true. [From 1 and 2](4) Naturalism is at least as plausible as theism.(5) Therefore, other evidence held equal, naturalism is very much more probable than theism. [From 3 and 4](6) Naturalism entails that theism is false.(7) Therefore, other evidence held equal, it is highly probable that theism is false. [From 5 and 6]

How is premise #2 much more probable on the assumption of naturalistic evolution rather than theistic evolution–much less fiat creation or special creation? If God designed the human race to sustain its existence through sexual reproduction, then making sex enjoyable will incentivize reproductive success. 

Third, so much of the universe is hostile to life. Given that intelligent life of some sort exists in some universe, the fact that so much of our universe is highly hostile to life–such as containing vast amounts of empty space, temperatures near absolute zero, cosmic radiation, and so forth–is more probable on naturalism than it is on theism.

Unfortunately, Jeff fails to explain how his conclusion follows from his premise. It's like saying that because Antarctica or Death Valley is inhospitable to human life, therefore, naturalism is more probably than theism. 

What is lame is Plantinga’s rather uncharitable representation of the evidential argument from the history of science. 

Here Jeff falls back on his old discredited post, which he had to patch up several times in the face of trenchant criticism. 

This ignores the evidence from the testimony of other atheists, including myself, who say that they wish that theism were true.

What's the evidence that Jeff wishes theism were true? He spends all his time attacking theism. 

This is Plantinga’s well-known “Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism” (EAAN).1. The basic problem with the argument is that it’s false that “Given materialism and evolution, any particular belief is as likely to be false as true.” Rather, as Draper pointed out in his debate with Plantinga, “More generally, the long term survival of our species is much more to be expected if our cognitive faculties are reliable than if they are unreliable, and that entails that the long term survival of our species is strong evidence for R.”2. Furthermore, “In addition, it is very unlikely that belief-producing mechanisms that do not track the truth would systematically promote survival in a very diverse and often rapidly changing environment.”

i) Why does Jeff think most organisms even have beliefs or cognitive faculties? If they can survive without beliefs or cognitive faculties, then they can survive without true beliefs or reliable cognitive faculties.

ii) What about Darwinian philosophers (e.g. Daniel Dennett, Alex Rosenberg, Paul and Patricia Churchland) and evolutionary biologists (e.g. Jerry Coyne) who deny that humans have beliefs or cognitive faculties? 

iii) Don't Darwinians like David Raup believe species have an extremely poor survival rate?

A-moonism

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/is-atheism-irrational/

Naturalism and Nihilism

http://www.andrewmbailey.com/ap/Naturalism_Theism_Supervenience.pdf

Games scientists play

http://www.andrewmbailey.com/ap/Games_Scientists_Play.pdf