"Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things." - Hippocrates of Chios (c. 470-410 BCE)
Plantinga's argument is that it is as possible to believe in God as it is to believe in anything else.
The question is then whether a belief in God - or the Christian God - can be considered rational; and whether it can be compatible with the scientific method.
The key is provided by Plantinga's statement:
"The theist has an easy time explaining..."
That sums up the danger of religion imposing itself on science perfectly: God did it. All you scientists, thinkers, philosophers, artists, and seekers of truth. You can go home, because God did it.
All human development has happened because people have been prepared to challenge the simple explanation that God did it. Philosophy, art, music, science, technology and medicine would all not exist if we had just accepted the notion that God did it.
It was left to the Islamic world to lead the way in scientific advance - until religious dogma took over there. Trevor Major, writing in the Apologetic Press explains:
"Some Muslim leaders, like some of their counterparts in early medieval Europe, had a low regard for the study of nature. Academic pursuits were tolerated, but learning was divided into traditional studies based on the Qur’an, and 'foreign' studies based on knowledge obtained from the Greeks. Although there were Arabic rationalists, there were also those who saw in this rationalism a threat to the authority of the holy writings. A conservative reaction in the late tenth century, together with a decline in peace and prosperity, impeded further scientific advance in the Muslim world... According to the emerging Islamic orthodoxy, man was not a fully rational creature, and no room was allowed for a purely rational investigation of God’s creation..." [tm]
But even where scientific advance was promoted by the Christian church, advance has often taken second place to dogma.
Before Isaac Newton (1643-1727 CE), the accepted wisdom was that things fell to Earth because God wanted them to... If Newton had accepted that "God did it", he never would have discovered gravity. However, his insistence that "God" caused Gravity meant that he:
"opposed any attempt to give a mechanistic explanation of chemistry or gravity, since that would diminish the role of God. He consequently conceived such a hatred of Descartes, on whose foundations so many of his achievements were built, that at times he refused even to write his name..." [ma]
Newton's insistence that the mechanisms behind science should not be explained held our understanding back by several centuries.
