Required Reading: Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

For a quick preview of the book, see John Wilson’s interview with Plantinga in Christianity Today.

In this interview, Plantinga’s quiet insistence on the compatibility of Biblical Christianity with human evolution raises once more the old question: Do the LOUDEST people insist on the fact that evolution and biblical religion are incompatible, while the SMARTEST people find  lots of room for the two to agree?

As Plantinga puts it:

There’s no real conflict, [between religion and evolution] even though conflict has been alleged by people on the Right as well as on the Left. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and a host of others claim that there is outright conflict between evolutionary theory and belief in such a person as God, who has created and designed the living world. At the other end, there are Christian thinkers, too—like Phillip Johnson—who think there is irreconcilable conflict between the scientific theory of evolution and Christian belief.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Richard Dawkins and Phillip Johnson are both smart people and terrific polemicists.  But in his other works, Plantinga’s brand of careful consideration and his thorough, quiet, deliberative method have resonated with me in a much more profound way. When in doubt, it seems to be a fairly reliable guide that the person with the greatest certainty is usually not the most careful, most dispassionate seeker of truth.

As Plantinga says in this interview, “to argue for it [the relationship between evolution and naturalism] properly is quite complicated; it’s hard to do in a brief compass.”  So maybe the best thing for all of us to do is to quit talking so much about it, and start with a more careful reading of books like Plantinga’s new one.