Curious about Plantinga's book "Where the Conflict Really Lies"

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

Great to see you here @LTBaxter. Before I dive in, I thought you might want to see this relevant exchange first.

@Philosurfer

From the best of YECs (e.g., Todd Wood, Kurt Wise, Paul Garner), what i hear is that the Bible becomes part of the data set for their understanding of “science.” What is the reasonable response to this?

This is definitely a big question to untangle in the public forums as well as the professional literature. Alvin Plantinga probably has the most distinguished voice, academically and popularly, as to how one can unlock the Scriptures as an evidence base or data set with which to engage the natural sciences (with special emphasis on the biological sciences). His argument is broad enough to work with TE/EC, ID, YEC, and Swamidass (since he insists on being distanced from all those other positions)

@nwrickert

I’m not sure how that can work. Quite simply, scientists will not consider scripture as evidence about the world (as distinct from evidence about culture and historic cultures).

@swamidass

I agree and this is where I deviate from Plantinga. Because he does not well delineate what is part of science and what is not, his suggestion becomes unhelpful, and even counter-productive. What he was missing was The Rules of the Game.

I would propose that:

1. In Science, Scriptural manuscripts are valid evidence about the world in science like any other document, such as texts of the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and so on. Science can legitimately, for example, ask questions about the carbon dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the evolution of scripts, and so on are legitimate questions for science.
2. In Science, Scriptural manuscripts is valid evidence as a non-inspired source of information about the past. In the same way we can study the march of Hannibal through the Alps with Elephants, considering what was mythic and reality.
3. Outside science, we can include Scriptural revelation as evidence as we build more complete views of the world.
4. There might be opportunity for legitimate questions to be raised from contemplation of #3 to be addressed in purely scientific ways in science.

The issue I have with Plantinga’s work is that he does not make the distinctions between scientific and theological thinking clear and this makes his proposal unworkable.