Published in 2011, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism is a work of philosophical analysis by the influential American philosopher Alvin Plantinga. A leading figure in the fields of epistemology and philosophy of religion, Plantinga is widely known for developing reformed epistemology and for his long tenure at the University of Notre Dame. He was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize in 2017. The book, which originated as his 2005 Gifford Lectures, serves as a comprehensive response to the “New Atheist” movement of the early 21st century, whose proponents—such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett—argued for an inherent conflict between science and religious belief.

Plantinga’s central thesis is that the genuine intellectual conflict is not between science and theistic religion, but between science and naturalism, a worldview he defines as a “quasi-religion.” He argues that alleged tensions between theism and evolutionary science stem from philosophical misunderstandings, whereas a deep, irreconcilable conflict exists between naturalism and science. The book explores themes of The Deep Concord Between Theism and Science, Design Discourse as Modest Support for Theism, and Naturalism’s Internal Contradiction.

Summary

Alvin Plantinga, a prominent American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of religion, advances a single overarching thesis: There is “superficial conflict but deep concord” (ix) between science and theistic religion, and “superficial concord but deep conflict” (ix) between science and naturalism. Theistic religion centers on belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing God who created the world. Naturalism holds that no such being exists. Plantinga argues that while naturalism claims scientific neutrality, it functions as a “quasi-religion” (x) that provides answers to existential questions. The author focuses primarily on Christian theism in the text, but notes that most of his arguments apply equally to Judaism and Islam.

In Part 1, Plantinga examines two widely cited areas of supposed tension between science and religion: evolution and special divine action. He distinguishes several claims commonly grouped under “evolution,” including common ancestry, descent with modification, and Darwinism (the idea that natural selection operating on random genetic mutation is the main driver of evolution). He argues that none of these is incompatible with Christian belief, since God could have guided evolution by causing the right mutations at the right times. What is incompatible with Christian belief is the further claim that evolution is entirely unguided. Plantinga asserts that this claim is a naturalistic philosophical addition, not part of the scientific theory itself.

Plantinga examines the arguments of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who state that evolution and theism are incompatible. He finds Dawkins’s reasoning in The Blind Watchmaker (1986) weak, asserting that his key premises about plausible evolutionary pathways for complex structures amount to guesswork and are unpersuasive. He also posits that Dennett’s arguments rely on similarly weak reasoning and dismiss serious philosophical work on religious epistemology. Plantinga contends that these prominent declarations of incompatibility are a primary driver of widespread American skepticism about evolution, forcing people who believe in God to choose unnecessarily between science and faith.

Turning to divine action, Plantinga addresses the claim that miracles conflict with modern science. He traces this belief to what he calls the Laplacean picture, which combines the laws of classical physics with the metaphysical assumption that the physical universe is causally closed, meaning subject to no outside causal influence. The author claims that this assumption is not part of physics itself but a philosophical add-on. He goes on to argue that the conservation laws in physics apply only to closed systems. Therefore, if God acts in the world, the system is not closed, and no scientific law is violated. Plantinga further argues that quantum mechanics, which assigns probabilities to outcomes rather than predicting unique ones, offers even less basis for objecting to divine action. The author proposes a model called “divine collapse-causation” (116), in which God determines the outcomes of quantum collapses, acting constantly in the physical world without violating any scientific law.

In Part 2, Plantinga identifies areas where science clearly conflicts with Christian belief: evolutionary psychology and Historical Biblical Criticism. Evolutionary psychologists have claimed that morality is an adaptive illusion produced by genetic programming, while the altruism displayed by prominent religious figures such as Mother Teresa reflects “bounded rationality” rather than genuine virtue. Historical Biblical Criticism, which excludes divine acts such as miracles, sometimes yields conclusions at odds with classical Christianity, such as denying the resurrection. Plantinga argues that these conflicts are real but superficial because they do not provide “defeaters” for Christian belief. A defeater is a belief that, once acquired, makes it irrational to continue holding some other belief. The author asserts that the scientific evidence base, constrained by methodological naturalism (the principle that science must not involve God or the supernatural), is only part of the Christian’s total evidence base, which importantly includes faith. That a belief is improbable relative to a subset of one’s evidence does not make it improbable relative to the whole. Plantinga illustrates this with the analogy of a person falsely convicted of a crime: The jury’s evidence points to guilt, but the defendant’s memory of innocence is not defeated by the verdict.

In Part 3, Plantinga argues that science not only fails to conflict with theism but supports it. He examines cosmological fine-tuning: the concept that several basic physical constants must fall within extraordinarily narrow limits for life to exist. The author contends that, from a theistic perspective, this is unsurprising, given God's divine nature as the Creator. However, from an atheistic perspective, the chance of life arising by chance within these narrow limits is exceedingly improbable. After considering objections, Plantinga concludes that the fine-tuning argument offers “some slight support for theism” (224).

Plantinga then examines biological arguments for “design” (the intentional creation and design of life by an intelligent force). The author focuses in particular on the conclusions of biochemist Michael Behe, who identifies molecular structures such as the bacterial flagellum as “irreducibly complex,” suggesting they could not have been created without intelligent design. Plantinga concedes that Behe’s formal arguments are not airtight but proposes that the real significance lies in what he calls “design discourse.” Drawing on Darwin’s admission that the impression of design “often comes over me with overwhelming force” (246), Plantinga suggests that design beliefs are often formed as an immediate form of perception rather than inference. Such basic beliefs can have substantial warrant even without supporting arguments and can be challenged only by defeaters, which, Plantinga argues, Darwinism has not provided at the molecular level.

Plantinga identifies the deepest concord between theism and science in the Christian doctrine of the imago dei, the idea that humans are created in God’s image with a capacity for understanding the world God created. He argues that scientific inquiry requires a match between human cognitive faculties and reality, which aligns with theism, but which naturalism cannot explain. He identifies six areas of concord: the world’s regularity, the concept of natural law, the efficacy of mathematics in describing nature, the success of inductive reasoning, the role of simplicity in theory choice, and the contingency of creation that makes science empirical rather than purely deductive.

In Part 4, Plantinga presents his culminating argument: the evolutionary argument against naturalism. If materialism is true (as most naturalists believe), beliefs are simply brain states with physical properties that cause behavior and mental content that can be true or false. Natural selection favors physical brain states that produce successful adaptive behavior. As long as a belief helps an organism survive and reproduce, its truth does not matter. Therefore, if naturalism and evolution are true, we have no good reason to trust our beliefs. Anyone who accepts this has a defeater for the reliability of all cognitive faculties, including those that produced belief in naturalism and evolution. The conjunction is therefore self-defeating. He notes that Darwin expressed a similar concern, doubting whether convictions developed from the minds of lower animals can be trustworthy at all. According to Plantinga, this defeater cannot be overcome because any attempt to defend the reliability of our minds must already presuppose that our reasoning is reliable.

Plantinga concludes that since naturalism combined with evolution is self-defeating, there is indeed a conflict between science and a quasi-religion. However, it is naturalism, not theistic religion, that stands in conflict with science: “That’s where the conflict really lies” (350).