 Alvin Plantinger is a leading American philosopher from the University of Notre Dame, where he is something of an institution having been there since 1982. He is especially well known for his work in the philosophy of religion, and it's fair to say that Plantinger is one of the key reasons why we are experiencing a renaissance of interest in a philosophical defence of Christianity. His argument, made in the 1970s, that established that there is no logical inconsistency in believing in an all-powerful, loving God, despite the reality of suffering, was something of a turning point in philosophy. Plantinger has written numerous books and people write books about him and his work. I was fortunate enough to meet him at Notre Dame, where we talked about God, Richard Dawkins and personal faith. Do you see this as a last gasp of intellectual scepticism, or is it the renaissance of unbelief? I don't think it's the last gasp of anything. Unbelief has been with us since the days of the Old Testament. The psalmist says, the fool hath said in his heart there is no God. So apparently there was atheism then, and there has been atheism, I guess, ever since. Of course it rises and falls, and more or fewer people are involved in it, and it's different in different parts of the world. So I don't think it's the last gasp of anything. I don't know if it's much of a renewal of anything either. It seems to me that current versions of atheism allow the four horsemen of atheism, Dennett and Dawkins and Pitchens and what? And Harris. And Sam Harris. It seems to me their arguments are somewhat inferior to those of atheists maybe 50, 60 years ago. You've argued that naturalism cannot be rationally believed, a novel argument, I guess, to Sam. Why can't it? Well that's sort of a complicated argument, but the basic idea is, if you are a naturalist, you'll also be a materialist about human beings. You'll think human beings are material objects, that there isn't any immaterial soul or self or person or ego. And you'll think that a belief is something like a structure of neurons in your nervous system or in the brain and the like, which will have two kinds of properties. The belief will have neurophysiological properties and in virtue of having those it can cause behavior of various kinds. But the belief will also have a content property, it'll be the belief that P for some proposition P. If you accept naturalism and materialism, that combination, then it seems to me you'll have to take it for any particular belief, the probability that it's true is about a half, it could as likely be true as false. All you really know is that the creatures in question have evolved so that they act adaptively, they act behavior-adaptively, but it doesn't matter what the beliefs, what beliefs they've got are. And if that's the case, then the probability that one's beliefs are reliable will be low. Given naturalism and evolution, that probability is low. So there's a sense of not being able to trust your own cognitive thoughts. Yeah, your own cognitive faculties, right. But some might say, well, why should I trust my cognitive faculties that point me towards belief as well? Well, all I say is if you don't believe in God or if you are a naturalist and you also accept evolution, then you've got a reason not to think your faculties are reliable. If you're not like that, if you just, like everybody, just take it for granted that your faculties are reliable, that seems to be perfectly sensible. But if you combine that with accepting naturalism and evolution, then that combination isn't sensible. Well, I've got to be able to point out, instead of saying, OK, let me find the evidence, say, well, hold on, evidence assumes logic. That's correct. And logic is only consistent with the God of the Bible. That's right. Or, hey, give me proof of, hold it, proof assumes logic. And logic is only consistent with the God of the Bible. Well, you see, science is their God in this situation, yet they cannot account for the fundamental assumption of science. Now, I'm going to ask you to put your thinking caps on for a minute here.