Plantinga on Dawkins

I just came across a review by Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished Christian philosopher, of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. It's a fun read, and Plantinga does a good job of skewering Dawkins' woefully overrated "Who designed the Designer?" objection against theism. Here's Plantinga's summary prior to his examination of the particulars of Dawkins' main argument:

[O]ne needn’t look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen and vitriol is astounding (could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?). If Dawkins ever gets tired of his day job, a promising future awaits him as a writer of political attack ads.

Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he’s a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores.

On the whole, I think Plantinga does a good job of showing that Dawkins' main argument against theism is completely without force. More specifically, he shows that the only way to make the argument logically strong is to either (a) straw man the theistic position by assuming that God is a complex material object, or (b) beg the question by presupposing the materialist thesis that mind cannot be explanatorily basic.

Plantinga closes with a brief presentation of his famous "evolutionary argument against naturalism" to suggest that Dawkins' materialism may actually be incompatible with scientific rationality.