My friend Philip Kitcher (a philosophy professor at Columbia who also teaches courses on James Joyce!) has written a new book, Life After Faith: the Case for Secular Humanism, based on his Terry Lectures at Yale. After dismissing religions as fairy tales (not his language. for he’s a gentleman), Kitcher gets down to his real issue: how can atheists fulfill the human needs that are met by religion?

I read Kitcher’s book in galleys and thought it was quite good, though I don’t necessarily agree that it’s incumbent on nonbelievers to outline a program for replacing the so-called spiritual needs of humans. It’s my view that those needs, insofar as they exist, will find their outlet naturally, as rivers find the fastest course downhill. That, at least, has been the case in Scandinavia, where the many nonbelievers seem to have their needs met without the “Sunday Meetings” that atheists attend in the US. But I don’t fault Philip for trying, and at least it defuses the theists who accuse us of always destroying and never building.

But I digress. What I want to report is that Kitcher’s book has been reviewed by, of all people, Calvinist philosopher and theologian Alvin Plantinga, who has spent his dotage (and much of his active life as a Notre Dame professor) defending religion and arguing that it’s rational to believe in God. (I have a few choice words about Plantinga in The Albatross.) And Plantinga’s review, in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, is more or less what you’d expect.  In short, Alvin doesn’t go after the book’s main message—how nonbelievers can find the comfort that others find in faith—but tries instead to refute Kitcher’s dismissal of religion as fiction.

The existence and work of Plantinga is the best argument I know against teaching the philosophy of religion. Here we have a distinguished scholar of religion, one recognized for his work on philosophy alone, at least judging by the fact that he was a regional president of the American Philosophical Association. Yet Plantinga’s work on religion, though couched in academic-y prose, modular logic, and symbolic logic, is thin, tendentious, and easily refuted by anyone with two neurons to rub together.

And so it is with his dismissal of Kitcher’s atheism. I’ll single out just one or two of Plantinga’s philosophical missteps.

Plantinga first goes after Kitcher’s claim that the diversity of religions in the world, many having absolutely incompatible doctrines with others, is an argument against the truth of religious claims. Here’s how Plantinga (somewhat accurately) characterizes Kitcher’s claims:

As far as I can make out, Kitcher’s argument is two-fold. First, Kitcher is impressed by the fact that “we find an astounding variety in religious doctrines. Impersonal forces, sacred places, ancestors, ghosts, spirits, demons and a wide variety of deities have all figured as supposed manifestations of the transcendent” (p. 7). So the first point seems to be that there is great religious diversity: there are very many different religions, and they frequently contradict each other. He is also impressed by the fact that religion is apparently culture-bound in a significant way. What religious opinions a person has seems to depend, at least in part, on when and where that person is brought up: “To face it clearly is to recognize that if, by some accident of early childhood, he had been transported to some distinct culture, brought up among aboriginal Australians, for example, he would now affirm a radically different set of doctrines” (p. 8).

And here’s Plantinga’s “refutation” of that argument:

True, if I had been brought up as an Australian aboriginal, I would probably not hold the religious beliefs I do hold; no doubt I would not so much as have heard of those beliefs. But, once more, isn’t the same true for Kitcher? If he had been brought up as an Australian aborigine, he would not have held the philosophical and religious beliefs he does hold — including his skeptical beliefs about religion. But what follows from that? Surely not that the beliefs he does hold are almost certainly false. And doesn’t the same go for the religious believer? If she had been brought up as an Australian aborigine, she would not have believed in God; but why should she conclude that her present beliefs are false and that there is no such person as God?

So first, neither the variety of religious opinion nor their relativity to cultural circumstance shows that these opinions are all almost certainly false.

Now you don’t have to be a sophisticated thinker to see the problem with Plantinga’s “rebuttal”. Kitcher is not making a claim about reality, but raising doubts toward other people’s claims about reality. Yes, if Kitcher had been raised in Saudi Arabia, he’d likely be a Muslim and not an atheist (there’s strong artificial selection against nonbelievers on the peninsula). But there’s no parity between holding a belief because you were brainwashed by the locals, and doubting beliefs because you’re rational.

The important thing, though, is that it’s more than the diversity of conflicting arguments that shows one’s faith to be false. It’s the point that John Loftus made with his Outsider Test for Faith: the diversity of faiths, and the fact that one’s religion is almost always the dominant religion in one’s birthplace, means that one should be suspicious of the criteria used to uphold one’s faith. If you think your faith is right and other faiths are wrong, Loftus argues, then you should apply to your own beliefs the same scrutiny you apply to other peoples’. When you do that, you must perforce see that the evidence for the veracity of your beliefs is as nonexistent as is the evidence for the many religions you reject. In other words, you must reject all faith until some evidence accrues that points to one religion as being more truthful than the others.  And that—not simply the diversity of faiths and their dependence on geography—is why one should reject all religions. This is the argument Kitcher is making.

Plantinga pulls the same stunt for philosophy:

Kitcher’s book is an exercise in philosophy. The variety of philosophical belief rivals that of religion: there are Platonists, nominalists, Aristotelians, Thomists, pragmatists, naturalists, theists, continental philosophers, existentialists, analytic philosophers (who also come in many varieties), and many other philosophical positions. Should we conclude that philosophical positions, including Kitcher’s low opinion of religious belief, are all almost certainly false? I should think not. But then wouldn’t the same be true for religious beliefs? The fact that others hold religious opinions incompatible with mine is not a good reason, just in itself, for supposing my beliefs false. After all, if I were to suppose my views false, I would once more be in the very same position: there would be very many others who held views incompatible with mine.

The problem is that a lot of the philosophy limned above does not make empirical claims about reality. Existentialism, for instance, is a worldview, not a claim about what is real. Likewise for many ethical systems, like utilitarianism or Rawls’s ideal contractarianism. You can’t say that they can be dismissed simply because some conflict with others, for evidence cannot be brought to bear on the issues. And those philosophical positions that do make such claims (i.e., naturalism), should be subject to evidential scrutiny; and if they fail, they should either be shelved or considered unverified.

Two more points. Plantinga also tries to refute Kitcher’s variety-of-beliefs argument by saying that, well, maybe the details of religions vary, but they all believe in a God, so isn’t that some sort of evidence for the divine?:

Here we should distinguish particular religious beliefs, for example belief in God, from whole systems of religious belief, for example the 39 articles of Anglicanism or the Heidelberg Catechism. Such whole systems are incompatible with each other; but many such whole systems agree on some very important points — the existence of the God of theism, for example. At that level there is vastly less diversity. So Kitcher’s first argument wouldn’t apply to belief in God.

Well, it’s questionable whether polytheism is evidence for God, since it has more than one God, and clearly for Plantinga the monotheistic view is the right one. (Also, whether you’re a monotheist or a polytheist still depends on geography. If you’re raised in south India, you’re likely to believe in many gods.) Further, even for God alone one still requires evidence—evidence that we atheists simply don’t see.

But Plantinga tries to get around that, too, by invoking his infamous sensus divinitatis (“sense of the divine”) that he’s always used as evidence for God. That is, because many people feel that there is a God, that counts as at least some evidence that there really is one. Here’s what Alvin says about that—it’s his classic argument that it is not irrational to be religious:

Apprised of the apparent relativity of her religious and philosophical beliefs to her circumstances of place, time and culture, [the religous person] carefully reconsiders them. It seems to her that she is sometimes in contact with God when she prays; she can’t see how there could be genuine right and wrong apart from God; on many occasions it has seemed to her that there must be such a person as God and that she is in God’s presence. Of course she might be mistaken; but isn’t she entirely rational, entirely within her epistemic rights in continuing to believe?

It seems. . . it seems. . . it seems. It seems, therefore it is. Is that rational? I don’t think so. For one’s desire to believe in God, which comes from brainwashing by others when one is young, doesn’t count as evidence. Those religious feelings aren’t independent, as Plantinga seems to think, of one’s desires. As Voltaire pointed out in 1763, “The interest I have in believing in something is not a proof that the something exists.” And what, for crying out loud, are the “epistemic rights” that Plantinga touts? The right to believe whatever nonsense you want? Fine, let people so believe. But that doesn’t mean that those beliefs are rational, or should be respected by those of us who feel that strong beliefs should be supported by strong evidence.

I’m afraid that the score of this bout is Kitcher 7, Plantinga 0.

h/t: Mark