(July 4, 2012 at 12:04 pm)Epimethean Wrote: Plantinga is interesting, but really rather a Platonist. His god as the creator of all abstractions notion seems to require massive semantic manipulation to work. Not that he isn't brilliant. Certainly Plato was, as were Augustine, et al. Worth reading, but fraught with necessarily esoteric problems which seem best suited to obfuscating the problem against which atheism reacts, namely a lack of evidence for god or gods.
I agree with the resemblance to Plato--I'm inclined toward abstraction myself--but I think that if theism turns out to actually be important, it's going to be precisely because of a lack of evidence for it.
That is, if theism is to have importance, it can't be because it's really just a subset of science. Otherwise, it's really just undiscovered science. If it's going to truly be important, and important in the way that theists generally believe that it's important, it will have to be an account of reality that is consistent with science (i.e., does not deny rationality or our knowledge of the universe) and yet gives an account that science cannot. Pretty much Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria.
At least, that's my suspicion.
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
