Reading http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/sep/27/philosopher-defends-religion/ was a rather odd experience this week, mixed in with Sam Bacile, the Salafists, the zombies, and whatever.
The review is by a non-believer (Thomas Nagel) who finds the book, written by a believer (Alvin Plantinga), very interesting, even though he doesn't believe it. Plantinga's day job is analytic philosophy, so he gets very precisely into what he thinks it is that his faith and his beliefs do for him. Finally, the main argument is sort a grand slam of creationism: we wouldn't be able to correctly figure out how the world works if the deity, more specifically the deity that Plantinga believes in, wasn't helping us along the way. Why would natural selection by itself care anything about the truth? As the reviewer says: "The interest of this book, especially for secular readers, is its presentation from the inside of the point of view of a philosophically subtle and scientifically informed theist—an outlook with which many of them will not be familiar." -- rec --
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