Monday, March 28, 2005

Baptist Zoos

I found an interesting review of Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, written by Alvin Plantinga

Darwin, Mind and Meaning

Dennett doesn't confine himself to matters just of theoretical interest. He sees serious religion as steadily dwindling with the progress of science, but suggests that we should keep a few Baptists and other fundamentalists around in something like cultural zoos (no doubt with sizable moats to protect the rest of us right-thinking nonfundamentalists). We should preserve a few Baptists for the sake of posterity--but not, he says, at just any cost. 'Save the Baptists', says he, 'but not by all means [Dennett's emphasis]. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world.' Save the Baptists, all right, but only if they promise not to misinform their children by teaching them 'that 'Man' is not a product of evolution by natural selection' and other blatantly objectionable views.

Plantinga is a brilliant philosopher. His reformulation of the ontological proof for the existence of God is especially challenging.

Another provocative essay is his Naturalism Defeated

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