Plantinga’s Selective Theism: The Circular Reasoning at the Heart of Where the Conflict Really Lies
For more than 30 years, Alvin Plantinga has argued that the guiding hand of the Christian God was necessary for evolution by natural selection to produce reliable human cognitive faculties that produce a majority of true beliefs. This paper focuses on two of the many problems with Plantinga's argument. First, Plantinga's explication of what it means for "our cognitive faculties" and "beliefs" to be "reliable" is woefully inadequate in scientific terms. Second, even if we give Plantinga's shaky cognitive science the benefit of the doubt, my analysis of Plantinga's selective theism reveals that his argument is circular. I discuss a mainstream version of Christian theism that leads to a conclusion about the expected reliability of our cognitive faculties under theism that is the opposite of Plantinga's, undermining his claim of a "deep concord" between theism and science.