Since it is generally rather superficial people who are not deep thinkers who send me hate mail I was trying to think of some way to show the fatal problem for natualism, materialism, atheism, or, rather, the devotees of those ideologies that inevitably lead, when logical rigor is applied to their founding assumptions, that they must undermine the validity of human minds, human freedom, freedom of thought and, most of all, the transcendent aspect of human minds that they are capable of finding the truth about anything. I don't think I'll develop an analogy right now, I tried to earlier and there isn't one I can figure out that's simple enough for the simple mindedness that materialism promotes.
The problem for naturalists, for materialists, for atheists is that if they want to debunk human minds into something like a product of natural selection or material causation, removing any transcendent character that human minds (and I suspect at least many animal minds) have, that includes their minds and the products of those minds which certainly include their ideological assertions. They can't claim the aspects of transcendence that comprise the truth, which is an accurate representation of some absolute external reality, for their ideas, exempting their preferred ideas from the debunking program that is the basic method of naturalism and materialism and atheism because their ideology rejects any transcendent reality for anything, it is a totally and fundamentally monist system of thought. Yet for it to be right their own ideology would have to be wrong. And not only the version of materialism that they prefer but all such ideologies are debunked by their ideological program.
Materialism, "naturalism" if you will, has to be false in order for it to be true. That is only made more evident when natural selection is adopted as one of the major arguments and alleged evidence given for one of those ideological framings. It is ironic that Charles Darwin, himself, the year before he died admitted that natural selection had to debunk the very mind with which it was theorized - perhaps that's part of what led Karl Marx to charcterize the theory as a representation of the typical British vulgar style of scholarship, even as, at first, he recommended it to Engels as useful to their ideological campaign. Later he was more dubious about it, noting that all Darwin did was turn Malthus on its head to try to force all of nature into something like the British class system that had benefited Darwin and his family so much when Malthus' argument was that human society is nothing like nature. And it is ironic that, now, Plantinga has made a fairly persuasive argument using natural selection against the "naturalism" which I think is probably the current most popular name among materialists for their materialism.
The chances of science finding a transcendent truth, under the framing of current atheist culture is vanishingly low if not absolutely nil. That includes just about every argument I've ever encountered for atheism. If they really believed their own ideology they would not only not struggle to convince people of the rightness of their ideas but it would not matter to them even in an emotional way that other people were convinced of it. I think it's a sign of the insecurity of so many atheists who don't really want to believe their own claims and certainly don't like the inevitable results of them that so many of them are proselytizing salesmen who are so incompetent at it that they're like anti-Dale Carnegies, far better at losing friends and influencing people to reject what they have to sell. Though they do appeal to mid-brow snobs who want to be mistaken for the in-the-know sciency class.
I think Vladimir Putin, in his corruption of Russian Orthodoxy and his utter ruthlessness is probably a far more secure kind of materialist, atheist. I think Trump is another, though far, far stupider than Putin. Both of them will use a show of sincerity to mask their real intentions without any regard to intellectual integrity. The category of moral integrity doesn't enter into it, whatsoever.
Update: I suppose I should give you Platinga's longer statement and argument on this.
I don't necessarily agree with all of it but it's worth thinking about what he presents. I do think his basic argument is true and it's something that has been known since at least the late 19th century. As I said, Darwin feared it was true in 1881.
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