Reader Mark called my attention to the fact that John Templeton Foundation (JTF) has bestowed its annual Templeton Prize on someone who’s not only a deeply misguided religious philosopher, but also has promoted intelligent design and criticized naturalism. Yes, it’s Alvin Plantinga, an 84-year-old emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and also a professor at Calvin College (he’s a Calvinist of sorts). I’ve written about Plantinga and his claims a lot on this site (go here to see what I’ve said): his main schtick is to claim that it’s not irrational to believe in God; that therefore it’s rational to believe in God; that the existence of God is a “basic belief” that doesn’t require empirical justification; that such belief comes from a divinely installed sensus divinitatis that allows us to detect truth; that because the truth-detector has to come from God, what it finds, like scientific “truths”, is incompatible with pure naturalism; that evolution was guided by GOD AND SATAN; that the God who installed our sensus is none other than Plantinga’s Christian God (surprise!); and that the presence of atheists, Hindus, Jews, and the majority of people with “false beliefs” simply had broken sensuses, which were due to, yes, the actions of SATAN!

Indeed, Plantinga does believe in the Hornéd One. Here’s a quote from his 2011 book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, explaining why there is undeserved evil in the world (my emphasis):

But any world that contains atonement will contain sin and evil and consequent suffering and pain. Furthermore, if the remedy is to be proportionate to the sickness, such a world will contain a great deal of sin and a great deal of suffering and pain. Still further, it may very well contain sin and suffering, not just on the part of human beings but perhaps also on the part of other creatures as well. Indeed, some of these other creatures might be vastly more powerful than human beings, and some of them—Satan and his minions, for example—may have been permitted to play a role in the evolution of life on earth, steering it in the direction of predation, waste and pain. (Some may snort with disdain at this suggestion; it is none the worse for that.)

Yes it is the worse for that, for where’s the evidence for Satan? That’s some scholarly theodicy, no? And for such lucubrations, Plantinga got £1.1 million—more than a Nobel Prizewinner.