THE CITY

Winter 2015
As Plantinga puts it, “God created both us and our world in such a
way that there is a certain fit or match between the world and our
cognitive faculties…a match that enables us to know something,
indeed a great deal, about the world--and also about ourselves and
God himself.” 29
Why should there be this strange resonance between man’s
rationality and the deep structure of the natural world if there is no
real design behind things? Naturalistic evolutionary explanations are
woefully inadequate; the aptitude for higher abstract mathematics,
for example, has no discernable survival value, and, as Plantinga has
humorously noted, no apparent sexual selective advantage, either:
“What prehistoric female would be interested in a male who wanted
to think about whether a set could be equal in cardinality to its power
set, instead of where to look for game?” 30 The alternative naturalistic
thesis, that this higher aptitude is a spin-off of the evolutionary
process, “sounds pretty flimsy, and the easy and universal availability
of such explanations makes them wholly implausible” says Plantinga. 31
However, positing an intelligent designer of both man and the rest
of the world has great explanatory power; it brings a coherence
to the entire picture. The harmony between man’s aptitude for
mathematics-driven scientific discovery and the applicability of
mathematics to the cosmos loses none of its grandeur, but much of
its mystery in light of a three-way resonance between God’s mind,
the mind of man, and the created order.
Today’s defendants of the design argument would greatly benefit
from an awareness of Reid’s approach. The inclusion and development
of Reidian ideas in the works of eminent philosophers, such as Alvin
Plantinga, attest to Reid’s enduring value for the project of natural
theology. Humean objections turn out to lack much of the force
that has been attributed to them and contemporary accusations of
question-begging are effectively dissolved. Reid’s common sense
epistemology, his arguments for the reliability of human cognition,
the nature of the material world (the living and nonliving parts), and
what we can know about the nature of the Creator based upon the
created order bring a remarkable coherence to the design paradigm.
29
Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 269.
30
Ibid., 287.
31
Ibid.
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