Alvin Plantinga

So why must a scientist proceed in accordance with methodological naturalism? Michael Ruse suggests that methodological naturalism or at any rate part of it is true by definition: Furthermore, even if Scientific Creationism were totally successful in making its case as science, it would not yield a scientific explanation of origins. Rather, at most, it could prove that science shows that there can be no scientific explanation of origins. The Creationists believe that the world started miraculously. But miracles lie outside of science, which by definition deals only with the natural, the repeatable, that which is governed by law.37 By definition of the term 'science' one supposes; Ruse apparently holds there is a correct definition of 'science', such that from the definition it follows that science deals only with what is natural, repeatable, and governed by law. (Note that this claim doesn't bear on the suggestions that a Christian scientist can propose hypotheses involving such 'religious' doctrines as, say, original sin, and can evaluate the epistemic probability of a scientific hypothesis relative to background belief..

Can belief in God be rationally justified? Reviewing in detail traditional and modern arguments for and against the existence of God, Professor Plantinga concludes that they must all be judged unsuccessful. He then turns to the related philosophical problem of the existence of other minds, and defends the so-called analogical argument against current criticisms. He goes on to show, however, that although this argument affords us the best reasons we have for belief in other minds, it finally succumbs to the same malady that afflicts the teleological argument of God.

A common contemporary claim is the conjunction of metaphysical naturalism—the idea, roughly, that there is no such person as God or anything at all like God—with the view that our cognitive faculties have come to be by way of the processes to which contemporary evolutionary theory direct our attention. Call this view ‘N&E’. I’ve argued elsewhere that this view is incoherent or self-defeating in that anyone who accepts it has a defeater for R, the proposition that her cognitive faculties are reliable, which then gives her a defeater for any proposition she believes, including, of course, N&E itself. The argument for, in turn, depends essentially on the proposition that P is low or inscrutable. To support, I divided N&E into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subcases, arguing that in each subcase Si, P is low or inscrutable. I won’t repeat this argument here, but I do want to focus on a certain essential aspect of the argument for.