Apparently Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett debated a week ago at a meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. An anonymous individual live-blogged it somewhat hyperbolically (“The tension between the titans fills the room”) but the account is worth a read, even if it is clear that the blogger is biased towards Plantinga. Apparently Plantinga attempted to defend Behe and Dennett slapped him around for that.
Short anonymous blogger: Dennett was snarky, nasty and didn’t take Plantinga seriously.
That’s the sort of thing that would get PZ’s blood boiling!
There - apparently - will be audio posted at some stage.
More like this
Christianity Today has published this lengthy review of The God Delusion. The review's author is Alvin Plantinga, who is often described as America's foremost philosopher of religion.
If the assertion, “Science and religion are incompatible,” simply means, “It is highly unreasonable to accept simultaneously the claims of modern science and the claims of traditional Christianity,” then I agree with it. The trouble is that the word “incompatible” is vague.
The more sophisticated creationists like to toss the name "Alvin Plantinga" into arguments — he's a well-regarded philosopher/theologian who favors Intelligent Design creationism, or more accurately, Christian creationism.
My essay on the nature of science has provoked this limp response from macht, over at Telic Thoughts.
The audio is linked in a comment on that thread now. It's an MP3 here.
I guess I don't see the point in debating cdesign proponentsists creationists. It seems like a big waste of time.
Dennett is a 'titan' of philosophy? News to me.
Interesting conversation on the debate at blog.talkingphilosophy
Plantinga is a "philosopher"? That's news to me! Just another one of those "western philosophers" who have claimed 'philosophy' for theology.
@ Rimpal
That's a bit of a stupid comment. Plantinga - whether you agree with his religious beliefs or not - *is* a well respected philosopher. Your comment merely illustrates you know nothing about "western" philosophy (whatever you mean by that).
I listened to the debate. It seemed that Dennett's response and most of the Q and A strayed from (what I took to be) the key issues. For instance, do we have a defeater for all of our beliefs given Naturalism and Evolution?(as Plantinga argues). Dennett mentions a function of the human brain that destroys faulty cognitive faculties (ones that produce false beliefs) but does such a function of the brain plausibly arise from naturalistic evolution? A full human brain has a hard enough time ascertaining truth, is there really a function of the brain that knows truth so well that it destroys faulty cognitive faculties? Perhaps. However, the existence of such a function seems much more likely on Theism than on Naturalism.