Plantinga began his paper, for reasons I now forget, with the claim that there are 11,000 professional philosophers in the US and 400 in the UK. I don't know how this works out proportionally per population, but it might go some way to explaining why American PhD candidates tend to talk to you at conferences about their relation to the 'job market', whilst UK students just stare into their pints. I get the impression that becoming a philosophy lecturer in America may not be viewed as quite the incomprehensible suicidal career choice it is in Britain (if, indeed, it could ever be described as a 'choice'). But I suppose there must be a fair few hundred unemployed philosophy PhDs skulking around libraries/bookshops/psych wards in the US too.

Judging by the intellectual standards of the conference, however, it wouldn't be hard to reinvent oneself as a theologian - nothing that came up was in any way more difficult than the A level syllabus we teach to 16-18 year olds (and, indeed, many of the criticisms presented were much the same as the students intuit using only their 'pure faculty of reason').

So, anyway, k-punk reports on the theism conference so I don't really have to, which is just as well as I fell asleep in at least three of the papers, committed conference-goer that I am.

I have some problems with his concluding paragraph, however (see the discussion below), which mirrors certain debates recently circulating around the fetid air of Infinite Thought Towers:

Ultimately, it was clear from yesterday's papers that theism and its discontents remain in a kind of twentieth-century gentlemanly stand-off. Literal belief in the personal, interventionist God who listens and acts is countered by a disenchanted assertion of secularism or by a faith that has disavowed literal belief. Within Spinoza, Lacan, Zizek and Badiou lie the philosophical resources from which a modern naturalistic religion that offers a way out of this impasse could be built (my italics)

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In Plantinga's paper, naturalism was presented, unusually, as the opponent of science, the former allegedly taking up a form of machinic immanentist hyper-atheism that denies for all eternity that there could ever be a theological explanation for any event, law, regularity or exception. No God or anything like God. Science proper, however, according to Plantinga, doesn't draw such dramatic anti-theological conclusions - it merely makes these kinds of explanations improbable (but, ta da, this is just what makes miracles miraculous). Naturalism, he claims, tries to answer the same questions as religion: where we come from (yet this question is surely refused by naturalism), prospects after death (minimal!), what is 'real' (nature and what we can understand thereof). But this is perhaps to neglect the dysteleological stance at the heart of many kinds of naturalism: mechanistic pantheism still scares the theists more than we might believe. So much so that they can't accept what it means in extremis (i.e. in reality...)

There is something downright weasely about Plantinga's separation - just because the myriad reductions of science don't themselves draw conclusions about how our misconceptions and intuitions must be dispelled, this is not to say that naturalistic conclusions don't follow from the knowledge garnered from such research (and are perhaps left to be drawn out by an anti-foundational naturalistic philosophy). In creating such an artificial separation, however, Plantinga preserves room for a kind of theism that doesn't have to draw naturalistic conclusions: e.g. with regard to collapse theories, God could be the cause of the collapses, and of the way in which they occur (Plantinga actually argued this): 'But very many philosophers, theologians and scientists who are wholly aware of the quantum mechanics revolution still apparently find a problem with miracles and special divine action generally'. No kidding....!

It's hardly the case that scientific reduction, for all its 'indifference' to human worries and concerns, would logically or reasonably permit such theological hyper-speculation. If there is nothing in science that 'conflicts' with special divine action (e.g. miracles), this is not because the two are in any way compatible, it's simply to assume something intransigently at the outset (e.g. that miracles 'happen', and that God directly intervenes in the world, both demonstrated by the Heidelberg Catechism, apparently), and ignore the fact that there are meta-scientific (or philosophical) descriptions to be drawn out of scientific reduction that do indeed have severe consequences for philosophy and theology:

philosophical ontology can neither ground nor disregard the ultimately physical description of the universe provided by the natural sciences (Ray Brassier from alien theory).

As a way out of the dichotomy of, on the one hand, belief in a personal God and, on the other, a form of secularism or disenchanted religion, k-punk proposes instead 'a modern naturalistic religion', which would presumably combine Spinozist determinism, the 'wisdom' or knowledge that would result from properly understanding and organising encounters, and some aspects of the other three thinkers (Zizek, Lacan, Badiou). What puzzles me is precisely how the materialism of the former is to be aligned with the explicit anti-naturalism of the latter (well, who can really conclude anything about Zizek, but certainly for B and L). Is there not a kind of conflation of materialism and naturalism in this Deistic call for a new kind of 'religion'?

How can one be a materialist and at the same time, an anti-naturalist, as I would argue Badiou is? Take the status of thought and the cosmos in Badiou's work. Is there any attempt to account for the genesis/structure of either in a naturalistic (ethological, neurological and/or Spinozist) way? No. Thought is radically disjunct from any naturalistic account thereof, just as ontologically there can be no cosmic monism (multiples of multiples never equal 1). Religion is always an attempt to reintroduce the question of meaning (thus, non-coincidentally, what is the meaning of theism), and 'natural religion' is perhaps the worst combination of ontological universe-acceptance and theological hermeneutics. To be continued...