Hi Ephraim:
I could never believe my eyes when I discovered your blog just moments ago, in that someone from that part of the world, be it Eritrea or Ethiopia, is sharing his reflections on the subject matter that you're doing. I said "That part of the world" to share my surprise since I've never come across a person from "that part of the world" discuss these issues, at a level I can imagine that you would, given your academic background. Good job Ephraim on starting this blog!
I go under a pen name but I'm from Ethiopia. My academic background is in philosophy with a research interest in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, in particular, the philosophy of physical cosmology, philosophy of time, and other areas of research interest in philosophy such as epistemology and metaphysics and the philosophy of language and logic and metaphilosophy.
It was interesting to learn that you’ve studied with A. Guth whose name I’m very familiar with as a matter fact. I do not have any background in physics mind you but then I can follow the philosophy of physical cosmology with its implications for theism and atheism. I'm not sure whether you're familiar with this book: Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology by William L. Craig and Quentin Smith (Oxford UP, 1993) the former a theist and the latter an atheist. I've studied with both of them. You can find their respective web sites here:
William Craig http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/articles.html but you find his articles on the subject of your discussions here: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/existence.html I'm sure that you'll be interested in his works other than cosmology.
Quentin Smith http://www.qsmithwmu.com
I hope that the next time you share your reflections I'll try to share some thoughts by way of comments. For now I can say this: I do sharply disagree with your take on the supernatural dimension and other posts such the bigger arrogant. I want to see good arguments when you share about the conclusions that you've shared in the above mentioned posts of yours. I do not know what to say to your posts as they are now.
Cheers,
Alethia

Hi Ephraim:

I've been looking forward to reading your further thoughts on the issues that you've shared to which I've provided one response on your blog plus more by way of emails to you personally though I've never heard anything back either way.

Posting on your blog has been a difficult thing for some technical issues; this is another attempt and hope to read your further  thoughts on the topic you seem to think you've real, serious interest in and to which you'd like to have reactions.

Waiting to read your responses.

Cheers,

Alethia

Hi Ephraim:

Now I’d like to say something by way of a response to your initial response to Plantinga’s response to Dawkins.

1) First off, yes, I do not want for us to get technical in our discussions in order to aim at those who do not have academic background in philosophy to be part of this discussion since this is a popular (or semi-popular (?) level exchange of ideas.

a. Having said that we need to be very careful as to how to handle our exchanges in that some people enjoy speaking in a vague and ambiguous manner and want and expect others to clearly follow their ideas! However, popular understanding of fundamental issues need not or should not be excuses for promoting ideas that are confused and useless. I bet those science popularizers and anti-religious polemicists like Dawkins are masters of what I’m trying to warn us here under this very point.

b. What you say here, I’m afraid, is an example of what I just wanted to communicate under (a): I quote you: "Lastly on Plantinga, his God's complexity argument is utterly pointless; it reads more like a religious writing than a critical one. First of all, Dawkins makes clear he is arguing against God as understood by mainstream religion (not some original cause that plays no meaningful part). And in that sense, he, i.e. God, is "complex".

c. I cannot take your point above under (b) seriously for: 1) I’ve every reason to doubt whether you’re aware of the debate about the concept of God according to classical theism, which is called the doctrine of divine simplicity which is what Platinga is referring to; 2) If you knew what such arguments are about you’d not say something like what you said, that is, under (b) just quoted; 3) If you take Dawkins’ understanding of God, which he attributes to the popular understanding, you’ve just made a mistake in buying such understanding for such understanding of God is not the only one; nor is it essentially the classical concept of God to which Plantinga was referring. Example: ask a popular understanding of any high level theoretical entity in quantum physics and see how the general population, the target of pop science would respond. Analogously, you can’t conclude from a popular understanding of what God is that God is complex or even simple. This is a classic case of committing a fallacy called straw man. One does not argue against the mush less nuanced concept of God in popular imagination while the really nuanced concept of God has been debated among professional philosophers and theologians whose job is to do such a thing among others. Nor can you properly turn to a scientist for such Judeo-Christian understanding of God. At any rate, though I’m not attributing such a fallacious reasoning to you at the moment I’m however suggesting to you that Dawkins is just doing that and is, I bet, a master of such fallacious reasoning; if you endorse Dawkins in his take on who God is hence you’re much closer to committing the same fallacious reasoning. Fallacious reasoning and basing one’s work largely on such reasoning is a sure way of becoming a "successful" popularizer of more professional work in science, as is so common, for there are not much strictures of academic canon to hold such works in scrutiny.

2) When you say, "Lastly, how does he [Plantinga] get away with "... of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts." What exactly is sprit?".

a. I do not think you got the point Plantinga was making in the following quote from his piece I sent you. ‘Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true."

b. Plantinga was not so much defining what a spirit is as your question was intended to make a point as if Plantinga was simply trying to get away with saying that God is a spirit. Plantinga, of course, believes that if classical theism is true then God is a spirit, but his point rather was trying to show that Dawkins is committing another fallacy called question-beginning by simply taking materialism to be true in a debate about theism by practically defining any non-material entity out of existence. That is Dawkins’ problem and I’m afraid that you seem to believe what Dawkins says is true because you seem to be biased in favor of what you think science is, the question to what we’ll return at some point in the future. I hope that we care more about the propositions being debated in most or all of what we mean to share here.

c. If your understanding of the nature of God is colored by what the populizers of anti-theistic writings such as Dawkins’ I really want to challenge you to leave behind such works which could easily be full of straw men and take advantage of a much more serious work that is rightly and properly the subject of debate among more careful writers among philosophers of religion in the analytic philosophy of religion tradition, esp., of the last several decades.

d. I want to leave you for now with a rather long quote for you to ponder on what the philosopher Quentin Smith says about academic philosophy of religion in contemporary academia; Smith is among the leading atheists of our time (he’s still officially an atheist though he claims otherwise in person). I quote from his "The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism" (Philo, 2001): Perhaps no one has ably and extensively defended atheism in our time as much as Smith has done and it’s well worth heeding his meditation on the theism/atheism debate among philosophers:

"The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view. This book, followed seven years later by Plantinga’s even more impressive book, The Nature of Necessity, made it manifest that a realist theist was writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Grünbaum, and other naturalists. Realist theists, whom hitherto had segregated their academic lives from their private lives, increasingly came to believe (and came to be increasingly accepted or respected for believing) that arguing for realist theism in scholarly publications could no longer be justifiably regarded as engaging in an "academically unrespectable" scholarly pursuit.

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion, such as Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Philosophia Christi, etc. Philosophia Christi began in the late 1990s and already is overflowing with submissions from leading philosophers. Can you imagine a sizeable portion of the articles in contemporary physics journals suddenly presenting arguments that space and time are God’s sensorium (Newton’s view) or biology journals becoming filled with theories defending élan vital or a guiding intelligence? Of course, some professors in these other, non-philosophical, fields are theists; for example, a recent study indicated that seven percent of the top scientists are theists.[1] However, theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work. If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected, requiring them to write secular articles if they wanted to be published. If a scientist did argue for theism in professional academic journals, such as Michael Behe in biology, the arguments are not published in scholarly journals in his field (e.g., biology), but in philosophy journals (e.g., Philosophy of Science and Philo, in Behe’s case). But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, "academically respectable" to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today. A count would show that in Oxford University Press’ 2000–2001 catalogue, there are 96 recently published books on the philosophy of religion (94 advancing theism and 2 presenting "both sides"). By contrast, there are 28 books in this catalogue on the philosophy of language, 23 on epistemology (including religious epistemology, such as Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief), 14 on metaphysics, 61 books on the philosophy of mind, and 51 books on the philosophy of science.

And how have naturalist philosophers reacted to what some committed naturalists might consider as "the embarrassment" of belonging to the only academic field that has allowed itself to lose the secularization it once had? Some naturalists wish to leave the field, considering themselves as no longer doing "philosophy of mind," for example, but instead "cognitive science." But the great majority of naturalist philosophers react by publicly ignoring the increasing desecularizing of philosophy (while privately disparaging theism, without really knowing anything about contemporary analytic philosophy of religion) and proceeding to work in their own area of specialization as if theism, the view of approximately one-quarter or one-third of their field, did not exist. (The numbers "one-quarter" and "one-third" are not the result of any poll, but rather are the exceptionless, educated guesses of every atheist and theist philosophy professor I have asked [the answers varied between "one-quarter" and "one-third"]). Quickly, naturalists found themselves a mere bare majority, with many of the leading thinkers in the various disciplines of philosophy, ranging from philosophy of science (e.g., Van Fraassen) to epistemology (e.g., Moser), being theists. The predicament of naturalist philosophers is not just due to the influx of talented theists, but is due to the lack of counter-activity of naturalist philosophers themselves. God is not "dead" in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments."

Hope now that you can see what Plantinga has been doing as the philosopher whose work has shaped the contours of philosophy of our time in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of religion.

Cheers,

Alethia