naturalism

Plantinga Drains Russell’s Teapot

Alvin Plantinga on Russell’s teapot, from a 2014 interview by Gary Gutting:

G.G.: You say atheism requires evidence to support it. Many atheists deny this, saying that all they need to do is point out the lack of any good evidence for theism. You compare atheism to the denial that there are an even number of stars, which obviously would need evidence. But atheists say (using an example from Bertrand Russell) that you should rather compare atheism to the denial that there’s a teapot in orbit around the sun. Why prefer your comparison to Russell’s?

A.P.: Russell’s idea, I take it, is we don’t really have any evidence against teapotism, but we don’t need any; the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and is enough to support a-teapotism. We don’t need any positive evidence against it to be justified in a-teapotism; and perhaps the same is true of theism.

I disagree: Clearly we have a great deal of evidence against teapotism. For example, as far as we know, the only way a teapot could have gotten into orbit around the sun would be if some country with sufficiently developed space-shot capabilities had shot this pot into orbit. No country with such capabilities is sufficiently frivolous to waste its resources by trying to send a teapot into orbit. Furthermore, if some country had done so, it would have been all over the news; we would certainly have heard about it. But we haven’t. And so on. There is plenty of evidence against teapotism. So if, à la Russell, theism is like teapotism, the atheist, to be justified, would (like the a-teapotist) have to have powerful evidence against theism.

Plantinga goes on to discuss whether there is such evidence, whether there are any good arguments for or against atheism, and whether theistic beliefs need to be justified by philosophical arguments. He concludes with a nice summary of his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.

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A Reductio of Naturalism

Keep Calm and Study PhysicsLet’s define Naturalism as the view that everything is either physical or causally dependent on the physical. On this definition, Naturalism encompasses both “hard naturalism” (strict reductive physicalism) and “soft naturalism” (which allows for some non-physical things such as minds, provided those non-physical things are causally dependent on physical things).

For completeness, let’s also define physical as a catch-all term for those entities and properties recognized by modern physics (subatomic particles, forces, etc.) or any reasonable refinement thereof (i.e., any refinement that doesn’t introduce radically different ontological categories). On this view, whatever is physical must be spatiotemporal.

I now offer a reductio ad absurdum of Naturalism, as defined above, which deduces the non-truth of Naturalism from its truth.

  1.  Naturalism is true. [assumption for reductio]
  2. If Naturalism is true, then Naturalism is possibly true.
  3. If Naturalism is possibly true, then, necessarily, Naturalism is possibly true.
  4. Necessarily, Naturalism is possibly true. [from 1, 2, 3]
  5. There is at least one necessary truth. [from 4]
  6. There is at least one necessarily true proposition. [from 5]
  7. Necessarily, if some proposition P is true, then P exists.
  8. If some proposition P is necessarily true, then P necessarily exists. [from 7]
  9. There is at least one necessarily existent proposition. [from 6, 8]
  10. There is something that does not exist contingently. [from 9]
  11. If Naturalism is true, then everything that exists, exists contingently.
  12. Not everything that exists, exists contingently. [from 10]
  13. Naturalism is not true. [from 11, 12]

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The Atheist’s Guide to Reality

The following is the unabridged version of a review published in the Christian Research Journal 36:3 (2013). Thanks to CRI for permission to post it here.


Christian philosophers have been developing and refining arguments for the existence of God since the earliest times, but it’s not often one comes across a convinced atheist making a powerful philosophical case for the existence of God. Yet that’s precisely what we find—quite contrary to the author’s intent—in Alex Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.

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Stephen Hawking Versus God

The news outlets are abuzz with reports of some provocative claims made in Stephen Hawking’s latest book, The Grand Design, which is due for release on Tuesday. For obvious reasons I haven’t yet read the book, so I don’t know the broader context of his claims or how he supports them. However, since the claims in question have been widely quoted, and several folk have already asked me about them, I’ll offer a few tentative comments (with all the necessary caveats assumed).

Here are Hawking’s statements as reported by the Telegraph (and by numerous other outlets):

Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.

It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.

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