Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

Truth Professor Plonka Defends Delusion Abstract Alvin Plantinga is the greatest living Christian Philosopher, the heir to Augustine and Aquinas, he thinks. He argues like a thumb sucking infant. Plantinga by name, Plonka by nature. Here we review some fatuously childish replies he has for Dawkin's book, The God Delusion. There is no hope of him ever maturing, so readers are invited to send used dummies and Cabbage Patch Dolls to him at Notre Dame, labeled “A Gift from God”, to keep him comforted, as biological science blocks out the gaps for God he hopes and prays he can retain, at least among the ignorant sheep who admire him and pay his wages. © Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Wednesday, 18 June 2008 Alvin Plantinga—Christian Philosopher Confusing Christians with Figures Evolution “God is Simple”, Plantinga Is God Necessary? Anthropic Principle God is the End! Truth and Adaptive Behaviour

Alvin Plantinga—Christian Philosopher Even the cleverest Christians cannot help showing how idiotic and callous they are. A well known Christian apologist called, Alvin Plantinga, John A O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, in Christianity Today, Books & Culture, March/April 2007, wrote a review of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, calling it The Dawkins Confusion. That’s quite a neat joke but he begins: Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God.

One would imagine from this that Dawkins believes in God but does not like him, when he is actually pointing out that the God that the Jews and Christians love and admire, as described in the part of their holy book called the Old Testament, is “the most unpleasant character in all of fiction, jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser, a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal”. The immensely intelligent Christian does not attempt to answer the point, but continues with his own confusion by saying that “Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy”. Here we have one of the cleverest Christians supposedly answering Dawkins’ criticisms of Christian belief yet he cannot comprehend that Dawkins himself is an atheist who does not accept that there is a God. How is it possible for a nonentity to be anyone’s enemy?

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Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

Still, it is hardly surprising. Plantinga, the cleverest of Christians, immediately disparages the suggestion that anyone need fear retaliation from Christians. Does he live in the same world as us? Whole regions of Plantinga’s own country are no go zones for anyone expressing disbelief. In these places atheists and dissenters have been harassed and persecuted for their lack of belief in the loving God, and plenty of them even fear they will lose their jobs or promotional chances by being honest about their convictions. Doctors in the US have been murdered by loving Christians for trying to help women from having unwanted children. Politicians in that Great Christian Society have to utter Christian sounding words and phrases because they know the Christian caucus will unite against them irrespective of their political stance if they were honest about their religion or lack of it. And the utter callous and cynical way the US president started a crusade against Iraq on the pretext that the Iraqi leader had connived in 9/11 when he knew he had not done, and murdered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis as a consequence shows what belief in the Christian God means in reality. This same pious Christian leader, loved by the Christian Right, has reintroduced the methods of the Holy Inquisition into the civilized world, torture and imprisonment without due process, the very things one might have thought the Passion of Christ were meant to highlight as wrongs against God Himself. Plantinga is a Christian, among the cleverest, but none of this even impinges on his clever Christian mentality. Rather, he glibly says US academia is not a dangerous place for people to bash religion, yet some US academic Christians sound fearfully menacing in what they write, and are pleased to use the most intemperate language about their opponents. It is, of course, Christian love, and few Christians have not been professional hypocrites despite the warnings of their incarnated God. Plantinga objects to “the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol” in The God Delusion, but again cannot see the planks in his friends’ eyes but only the motes in his enemy’s. For the analytical mind of the great Christian thinker, religion only has “allegedly baneful effects”. Christian brutality is only alleged brutality. Christians, I suppose, who burnt people slowly to a cinder were only being loving, trying to save their victim’s immortal souls, for their own good, even though they had no idea in fact, and still do not, that anyone has an immortal soul, or one of any other kind. Not only have Christians always been hypocritical, they have generally been utterly insane in their dreadful beliefs, and, like any madman, not one of them knows it, for all of those who ever did, discarded what can only be satanic, if it has any supernatural roots at all.

Confusing Christians with Figures Plantinga objects that Dawkins is not “even handed” in his criticisms of Christianity. Is this more evidence of the incomprehension of these allegedly clever Christian apologists. Why should a criticism be even handed? It is a criticism and so is not meant to be even handed. Criticism is what Christians cannot abide, mainly because so many of them are justified and cannot be answered. They want any criticism to be balanced. Yes, Christianity has led to the cruel murder of millions of innocent people, but it is a comfort to believers fearful of dying! That is the sort of balance they expect, though, of course, not so crudely put, because the putative benefits of this accursed belief can never balance out the enormity of its horrors.

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Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

Because of this, every Christian apologist cannot begin without an ad hominem attack on their opponents, even though they are the first to squawk when an opponent returns the compliment. Needless to say, Plantinga cannot resist saying Dawkins is no better than a sophomore in his arguments, indeed worse than one. A sophomore in the US is someone who is half educated, even though the word is from the Greek for wisdom. So here is Plantinga, admittedly an academic but one of no significant achievement even in Christian circles, attempting to disparage a scientist and science writer of international note for his discoveries and explanations of them. How can anyone take Alvin Plonka seriously? Christians are fond of citing the great British physicist, Fred Hoyle, about the probability of life forming spontaneously on earth being less than that of a jumbo jet being formed when a tornado sweeps through a junkyard. In short, it is so low a probability as to be impossible. Yet life is here, and so it must have been made deliberately and not by accident, and the maker is, of course, God. Well, it is surprising that such a clever man as Hoyle should have left out such matters as catalysis, scale and timescale—the immensely longer time available to the formation of life relative to the formation of a jumbo jet in a short lived tornado episode—but accepting what he said as valid for the sake of argument, Dawkins points out that anything capable of planning and implementing the whole universe must be more complicated and less likely than the universe itself. Yet Christians, even such clever ones as Plonka, have no trouble in conceiving of God existing forever, though they cannot conceive of life arising in the first place. Forever, do not forget, is infinite time, and in infinite time everything happens. In infinite time the monkeys would compose Shakespeare, and the jumbo would be assembled in the junkyard given an infinite number of attempts. Perhaps in infinite time the plenum of God would arise, but first a large number of more likely happenings must have occurred like the spontaneous formation of simple organisms. Science is based on skepticism. One does not consider the complicated as a likely explanation when a simpler explanation suffices, and especially when it requires an even more complicated and therefore unlikely agent. While we test and find credible, explanations that involve no God, God is superfluous. And as the whole Christian account of God is absurd and incoherent, God is not acceptable to anyone not addicted to wishful thinking. The planner must conceive a plan which contains all the information needed to make the thing it is planning. The planner must have in its brain all the information of its creation. But assembling information all together according to the blueprint for an aeroplane is what the supposed tornado did in the junkyard. The more the information brought together, the less likely it is to happen. That is why you have to try hard, to put in effort, to learn things. Humans, Christians boast, are made in God’s image. So, God, in Christian theory, is less probable than the spontaneous creation of the universe, including the life in it. If God exists to make the universe and life, the universe and life must earlier have formed spontaneously.

Evolution Professor Plonka tries to manipulate biological science, notably evolution, into philosophy to try to refute Dawkins over Nature and especially life being designed by

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Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

a super brain called God. Nothing in the vast amount of evidence collected for evolution so far necessitates a supernatural designer. There are problems we have not yet solved, that ID enthusiasts say are suitable gaps for God, but all of these supposed gaps for God in the past have been filled by science given the time and experimental work. Even so, says Plonka, God might be guiding evolution. Maybe, but then He is not what Christians always say He is. Many of Nature’s designs are not optimum ones. God is therefore far from being a perfect designer, if we are to suppose he designed Nature. Nor is He good because Nature is red in tooth and claw! And evolution depends upon the mortal combat of individuals of the different species for the resources of life, including the consumption of other life, and that is hardly good for the poor beast being consumed now, is it? The oft quoted—by Christians —human eye, is badly designed, not being as well designed, for example, as a polypus’s eye. God therefore did not have humanity uppermost in his brain when He designed their eyes. So, given that God is unlikely to have existed before complicated life could have arisen anyway, that evolution does not need God to guide it, and that Nature has every sign of not being well thought out in advance but of having developed by degrees according to random pressures of environment from what went before, why are supposedly clever Christians wasting their thought and effort on preserving the notion of God as the creator? Could it be because the notion of God in the heads of millions of jejune believers is what pays the salary of many of these Christian pleaders, pastors and priests? These devout pleaders are hardly unbiased advisors, are they? They have the same motives as Nigerian sharks selling unbelievable riches to suckers willing to cough up a few thousand dollars in advance. Here they are selling eternal life instead. The scam is no different, just made acceptable to those being duped and the lawmakers by being called religion.

“God is Simple”, Plantinga Plonka assures us that Dawkins is utterly wrong to think God is complicated because a fat monk 800 years ago says so. It turns out that it is highly complicated to explain divine simplicity, but no admirer of Aquinas or Plonka loses any breath about it. Why should explaining something simple be itself complicated. There is no doubt that explaining something impossible must be complicated because the explanation is impossible itself. Plonka is so clever that he knows that Aquinas must have been telling the truth when he averred that God was simple. Simple is the adjective to apply to people who believe all this nonsense, and that is what atheists, careless of the delicate sensitivity of believers, often say about them. They, not any all powerful being actually existing rather than being an all powerful black dot of nothingness inside some Christian’s skull, are simple. God is simple, says Plonka, because he is a spirit and so has no parts. Argumentation at this level in academia is why Dawkins considers theology is no academic subject and should be relegated to carnival booths. Plonka gives us more of the same later. The great Christian thinker explains one impossible concept with another nonexistent one. That is cleverness for you. Naturally, it is clever enough for the flock,

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but should be laughed to scorn by everyone alive who is intelligent. Speculating about the properties of imaginary entities is considered useful by Christians, and supposed Christian philosophers, but no one else. Philosophy, like science, has no value at all unless it is related to what we experience. Christian philosophy, or theology, Plonka is keen to distinguish them, another imaginary exercise for Christians, relate only to the imaginary entities that Christians begin with, and so is part of the same exercise as explaining the simplicity of God as his spiritual nature. Spirit, and therefore God, is in the same waste bin as fairies, orgone, phlogiston, the elixir of life, ether and canals on Mars, and only grifters and the clergy continue to preserve this nonsense in the modern world.

Is God Necessary? The world we experience is—does anyone deny it?—material, and everything we know is taught to us by our experiences in this material world we are brought up in, and live in. Nothing has been provable as being spiritual in this material existence of ours. The spiritual world is therefore imaginary. It exists as a thought in people’s synapses and nothing more. Dr Plonka agrees “it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true, in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God”. Now, that can be nothing other than an admission that Plonka and his professional Christian cohorts are having the sheep for dinner! Our world is manifestly material, and science, using this as a premise has been able to discover in just a few centuries everything that 6000 years of religious belief in spirits had utterly overlooked. The reason is plain. When you are looking for spirits in a material world you are looking for the end of the rainbow. There are none, and it took 6000 years of civilization to realize it only because the professional priests of religion, keen to keep their sinecures, held us back. In short, it was too good a scam to let go of, and Plonka is the last gasp of this tranche of rogues trying to keep their milk cow, God, alive, at least in the heads of simple people with sufficient spare change. God is a spirit and so is simple, Plonka tells us apparently as a serious argument. Spirits are nothing, and nothing could be simpler. Then he tells us that the probability of God existing is not almost 0, impossible, but 1, it is certain! Why? Because God is defined by Christians as necessary! He is being serious! That is his argument. If God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1. … Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable.

The great Christian philosopher makes a qualified statement then forgets the qualification, knowing his dim-witted disciples will not notice. We assume of course, that such a great philosopher noticed what he was doing himself. Yes, we agree that, if God is necessary for us to exist, and we exist, then God does Himself exist. But the assumption is gross. Christians believe that God is necessary so He is! QED. A dunce’s logic.

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Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

Anthropic Principle Now Plonka gets to the Anthropic Principle, something that Christian apologists love, but just cannot understand, except, of course, in the way that suits them. The argument for Christians is the Goldilocks universe—it is just right! It’s as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God. Alvin Plantinga

Why is it as it is, just right for us, like baby bear’s porridge was for Goldilocks. If ours were the only universe, then the argument is powerful. If we knew there only ever could be one universe, then it is designed for life. The trouble is that we have no idea how many universes went before us, maybe an infinite number of them. The importance of this possibility is that we could be aware only of the one universe that produced us. It also just so happens that one consequence of the quantum theory is that not only could there have been innumerable universes before us, but there are innumerable universes existing now! You might say with some conviction that the hypothesis of a God is more parsimonious than the hypothesis of millions of universes, and maybe it is, on the face of it, but the difference is that the multiverse hypothesis has come out of a valid scientific theory, valid because it works extremely well at predicting things that we can confirm. We cannot confirm that there are many other universes, but the success of the quantum theory where we can confirm it, gives us confidence that it is generally true. We have no such basis for believing God. Moreover, Christians hate randomness, but randomness seems to be a feature of our world, and the extension of it to alternative worlds is not such a problem as inventing entities that leave no traces except at the inception of the world. And even that would not be the ever sustaining God that Christians imagine. So, what seems to be a consequence of science as it has emerged is that universes are constantly being born, and each of them is different. The effect on the different universes of the different fundamental constants they are born endowed with is that they have different lifetimes, and so on. Many die off very quickly, many more develop too slowly, and only occasionally is one just right! Just right for what? Why us, of course. All of the universes that are born and are unsuitable, go through a life cycle without producing intelligent life like us. We know, however, that at least one did, because we are here thinking about it. This is what the clever Christian like Plonka cannot get. He says to us that the chance that our universe is fine tuned for us is negligibly small, whereas it is obviously the opposite. It is certain because we are here. Plonka cannot understand that this universe is necessarily right for us because we are here, and any others that are not right cannot have produced intelligent life to think about it. It is just like a race of intelligent fish being amazed that their world had water in it. If their world had been a waterless desert there could have been no fish to be amazed. Plonka says he understands that our universe must have the right conditions for us to live, but the poor dimbo professor cannot see why it should have been ours!

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Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

It still seems striking that these constants should have just the values they do have, it is still monumentally improbable, given chance, that they should have just those values…

He is the sort of man to take a banknote from his pocket and wonder why he had the one with that particular number. It is monumentally improbable until you accept that very large numbers of universes could have existed before one arrived that suited us. Eventually one did, because we are here… One can’t explain this by pointing out that we are indeed here, anymore than I can explain the fact that God decided to create me—instead of passing me over in favor of someone else—by pointing out that if God had not thus decided, I wouldn’t be here to raise that question.

The problem is not analogous to why God created Plonka, but to the reality that God indeed had created Plonka. Had Plonka been an amoeba or a puff of smoke, he could not have been wondering about it. Just tell me how these people get to be university professors!

God is the End! Is it possible that God started life going then left it to evolution? Certainly, it is possible, given that we can justifiably hyothesise a being clever enough to do it—a god—in the first place. Even if we had some basis for supposing such a being possible, it would not help us scientifically to assume that such a being actually did start off life. Science uses Occam’s Razor, fruitfulness and predictive power as principles for determining what it should accept as an explanation. Essentially they tell us to try to explain things with the simplest available explanation useful for predicting events, and that point the way to more explanations. To begin by saying some superpower did everything we experience does none of this, and immediately stops us from learning about our environment. By supposing that the world is explicable in its own right, we have discovered remarkable things. Explanations come to an end. For theism they come to an end in God. Of course the same goes for any other view. On any view explanations come to an end. The materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn’t have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles: they just are.

It is not true that scientists are not trying to explain these particles! They are devising hypotheses that yield fundamental particles and the fundamental constants, but the fact that they have not so far succeeded is set against the imagined fact that God has done, and theologians have granted Him infinite time to do it! Scientists seem to be doing pretty well in only a few hundred years. Maybe—or maybe not—we shall come to a point where something is impossible to explain except by the hand of God. The proponents of ID are trying to say we are already there, but we are far from it. As long as we can fill gaps without having recourse to God, we should do so, and that includes Christians because one thing science has shown is, whatever their supposed God might have ordained, it is certain

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Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

that Nature is capable of being understood. It is our duty therefore to try to understand it. And supposing we get to the point of accepting a superbeing because the evidence points to one, we still can ask the question, “why is there a God?”. That is something that Christians will not ask. It is blasphemy to them, and inasmuch as they tolerate the question at all, it is only to answer that God is everlasting. But once God is accepted as able to exist forever, we have to wonder why other entities, like the multiverse, say, cannot live forever and do the same job as God without being supernatural, or indeed, even thinking. The Christian Einstein, Professor Plonka, tells us “it is uncontroversial that God is a being who thinks and knows”, except that it is only uncontroversial among Christians who think of God as a big human. Others think of Nature itself as being god, and this god does not think and know. It is still a legislator but only in that it is a set of laws that control what happens in the world, not that it consciously ordained them. They are not thought out by any designer.

Truth and Adaptive Behaviour The great Christian thinker ends up being even more ignorant about science than he began. He is quite incapable of understanding that adaptive behaviour in evolution necessarily conditions organisms to their environments. He can readily understand that God has made us fit into the environment that He provided, and for humans this extends to thoughts and beliefs. He cannot get it for adaptation via evolution. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive, but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?

The answer is pretty obvious to anyone really able to think. If our thoughts were not in line with the real world, meaning they were false, then how could any organism survive for more than a brief period before extinction? Idealists, Christians among them, are fond of telling us the world is not what it seems, but they are wrong. To the extent that it matters to us for our survival, the world is pretty closely what it seems. The reason is that had it not been, we should never have survived. If we are of sound mind, we do not jump over cliffs because we know what happens to us when we fall a long way. We do not attempt to walk across rivers. We do not eat poisonous berries. We do not step in front of buses. We have adapted to know the world and its dangers, and equally we have adapted to know its advantages, its fruits and benefits, and what soothes us and what irritates us. The extension of this to beliefs is only slight. I might believe that I can live on fresh air. I might believe that God will answer my prayers for sustenance and refuse ever to work again. I might believe that I can commit a dastardly crime and be forgiven because I repented. I might believe that because I lusted after another man’s wife I should gouge out my eye and cut off my genitals. Beliefs that lead to counter evolutionary consequences will die out as the proponents of the belief kill themselves off. On the other hand, part of the reason Christianity has survived as long as it has is not because of its sanctity but because of its inhuman ruthlessness. For centuries, 8

Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

Christians ruthlessly and cruelly murdered their enemies, including critics within the Church. The effect could only have been that Christians selected themselves for their inhumanity, and if it were to carry on for a sufficiently long period, Christians would end up being ravening wolves, to use a phrase they will recognize. Christ predicted the church would indeed be full of ravening wolves. Perhaps he was a Darwinian! Beliefs must tally adequately with reality or they will eventually be discarded. Plonka uses the word truth, and the tallying with reality is what truth is, though it is not often Christian truth. Maladapted species die out or adapt to some suitable niche within their range. That is what Christianity will do, though, of course, it could take our entire race with it. Some Christians, like the now departed Carl McIntire, boast they want to see Armageddon, the start of a nuclear war, because they will enjoy a front row seat in heaven to see the show! That is no exaggeration, and is a monstrous delusion that could endaneger the whole human race. So, we have to hope it does not include Bush and his insane Christian chums who are eager to start wars all over the place. Plonka ends up ignoring qualifying clauses as usual. If God has made us in His image then our beliefs are certainly reliable. If our beliefs are conditioned by evolution, then they are unreliable: It is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.

Plainly Plonka is speaking about Christians evolving in their dream world and not normal human beings in the real world, so we do have cause to worry. The real world is the reliable guide to reality not dreams about superheroes in the sky, however pleasant they might sound. Yet Plonka thinks that because he has told us evolution is unreliable, the evolutionists’ beliefs must be unreliable too, including their belief in evolution. People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

The Christians’ beliefs are reliable because their superhero, they imagine, is perfect. Now tell me anyone reading this exactly how this is not infantile reasoning. It is far removed even from the sophomore. Infantile is the correct word for it. Please send baby Plonka a dummy to suck, or a used Cabbage Patch Doll to hug. At least he’ll be comforted in life. -oOo-

Dr Michael David Magee Michael D Magee was born in Hunslet, an industrial suburb of Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1941. He attended Cockburn High School in South Leeds. He won a studentship to the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, where he graduated with an 9

Professor Plonka Defends Delusion

honours degree in natural science in 1963. He went on to obtain a PhD degree from the University of Aston in Birmingham in 1967 and a teaching qualification, a PGCE, from Huddersfield before it was a university. He carried out research at the Universities of Aston and Bradford, and at the Wool Industries Research Association, taught in a Further Education College in Devon for seven years and for ten years was an advisor to the UK government at the National Economic Development Office in London. He has written three books, and, mainly in collaboration with Professor S Walker, a dozen scientific papers on the structure and interactions of small molecules investigated using microwave radiation. Working for the government he has written or edited some forty publications on microeconomic issues. He was brought up by Christian parents but was never indoctrinated into one dogma and was able from an early age to make his own judgements about the Christian religion. http://askwhy.co.uk/index.php

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