In this post I will address Lewis’s most extensive pre-Anscombe statement of the argument from reason. Miracles is about more than this argument of course, but it played a pivotal role therein, particularly in chapter three: “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist.”
The definition of naturalism
Since the argument from reason claims that ontological naturalism is false, it is necessary to begin by defining our terms -- or, more accurately, defining Lewis’s terms: what did he mean by “naturalism”? This is a tricky concept to define. The editors of a recent collection critical of ontological naturalism left it to each individual contributor to define their target.{1} Many dictionaries and encyclopedias define it as the rejection of the existence of God or any spiritual reality: essentially, as anti-supernaturalism. This leads to a sort of house of mirrors, where we can never find the actual concept being reflected.
Lewis gives several sentences using the terms “nature” and “natural” and from these, defines it as that which occurs “on its own,” or is “going on of its own accord.” When we say, “The dog in his natural state is covered with fleas,” we mean the state the dog is in unless some other party steps in and alters it. When we say we love to get away from it all and “be alone with Nature,” we mean we like the part of the world where people have not assisted or impeded the processes otherwise taking place.{2}
According to naturalism, therefore, nature as a whole is going on of its own accord. “Nature” in this case, means the total, interlocking system of events, in which each individual event is dependent on other events, and ultimately, on the whole. So naturalism is, “the doctrine that Nature is a closed, interlocked system.”{3} Augustine Shutte summarizes Lewis’s definition well: “By naturalism, he means the view that the universe is an ultimately homogeneous mechanical system in which everything that happens, human thought and action included, depends on something else happening within the system and ultimately on the whole system of completely interlocking events.”{4}
“Thus,” Lewis argues,
no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, action “on its own,” is a privilege reserved for “the whole show,” which he calls Nature.{5}
Lewis further characterizes naturalism by contrasting it with supernaturalism. For the supernaturalist, nature is derivative. Both views agree that there is a basic fact that we can’t get behind, but the naturalist thinks this fact is nature, while the supernaturalist thinks it is God. He compares this with the difference between democratic and monarchical forms of government: in the former cases we have a certain kind of equality, in which no aspect of existence is more central than any other. In the latter cases, we have a central figure around which everything else revolves. He points out that some have suggested that supernaturalism is really a projection of monarchical societies onto the universe. However, Lewis argues, this cuts both ways: naturalism could just as easily be a projection of democratic societies onto the universe.
He also points out that the difference between supernaturalism and naturalism is not quite the same as that between belief and disbelief in God. There are some concepts of God that would fit within naturalism. An emergent God, for example, would be produced when the universe had “evolved” to a certain point, and as such, would be a product of it. Nature would still be “the whole show” and this God would merely be a part of it. The type of God that is inconsistent with naturalism would be a primordial God, one that existed before nature and which produced it.
Indeterminism and the sub-natural
He begins the third chapter by discussing quantum indeterminacy to see whether this already creates a problem for naturalism. The subatomic particle “moves in an indeterminate or random fashion; moves, in fact, ‘on its own’ or ‘of its own accord,’” independently of the interlocking system. If this account is accurate, it seems to already demonstrate that there is something other than the system. Lewis has serious doubts as to whether this picture is correct, and at any rate, completely uncaused events would not really be transcendent or supernatural. It would not be a matter of adding something to the system, but of taking something from it: namely, causality. He proposes calling this the sub-natural.{6}
If we accept this interpretation of quantum phenomena for the sake of argument, however, it does not help matters much. Having our beliefs be completely uncaused does not do much to recommend them. Some determinists drive this point home: either our beliefs are determined or they are undetermined. In the former case, there is at least the possibility that they are determined by the correct processes that lead to valid beliefs. If they are undetermined, on the other hand, there is no such chance. Our beliefs would not be determined -- not by the truth, not by logic, not by anything that could potentially make them valid.{7}
But we must remember Lewis’s distinction between normal causes and “a special kind of cause called ‘a reason.’”{8} It is not a question of whether our beliefs are caused or not; it is a question of whether they are caused by the right thing (a reason). In other words, the problem the argument from reason raises is that a belief must be rationally directed if it is to be valid; not merely directed (determinism) or undirected (quantum indeterminacy).{9} This is why William Hasker defines mechanistic causation and explanation as essentially nonteleological.{10}
Others, after Lewis, have recognized this point as well. Karl Popper, for example, has defended an argument very similar to Lewis’s.{11} Yet he recognizes that if “indeterminism is true, then sheer chance plays a major role in our physical world. But is chance really more satisfactory than determinism?”{12} He concludes, “indeterminism is not enough.”{13} William Davis, leading up to his defense of a similar argument,{14} repudiates the false dichotomy between determinism and indeterminism as well: for the determinist, “The alternatives … would seem to be that we are either robots, moving along in mechanically predetermined groves [sic], or else we are berserk robots, acting spontaneously and causelessly. … If something isn’t a machine working according to causal laws, why then it must be a broken machine working erratically.”{15}
Perception and inference
Lewis goes on to argue that inference must be valid in order for us to know anything. This is because we infer everything from our sensory experiences. Lewis makes clear that he does not mean that we begin as children with these experiences and infer the world from them actively, but that any defense of a belief must start from our sensory experiences and work outward via inferences.
In his critique of Lewis and the argument from reason, Beversluis sees this point as pivotal.{16} He argues that Lewis is adopting a phenomenalistic view of perception in which “we never directly perceive material objects … or other persons.”{17} We only perceive our sense data and infer the existence of material objects and other people from these data. According to Beversluis, such a view is not only “very unintuitive”: it is false. We do, in fact, directly perceive such things. He thinks this explains why Lewis is arguing about miracles from a philosophical standpoint rather than a factual one: “he held that no factual questions can be settled by appeals to experience, that all factual beliefs depend on reasoning, and that it is therefore only by drawing inferences that we are justified in believing in the existence of anything -- not only in miracles, but in tables, chairs, our families, and friends.”{18}
Is Beversluis’s criticism correct? It is certainly possible to understand Lewis in this way, but there are several points to make. First, such phenomenalistic views of perception are an expression of extreme skepticism, which tries to limit the objects of knowledge as much as possible. Such attempts often use scientific discoveries of the many steps involved in our perception: in sight, for example, light must first strike an object, then traverse the distance between the object and our eyes, the light then refracts off the lens to create an image on the retina, etc. We may realize now that these processes do not entail there being a barrier preventing us from directly perceiving objects, but this was a common skeptical tactic. As such, it seems reasonable that Lewis is accepting the view thought by many to be most hostile to the view he is defending (supernaturalism) in order to demonstrate that he is not taking any shortcuts. He is granting the view of his opponents for the sake of argument. As Shutte writes, this is “a Humean theory of knowledge which I suspect [Lewis] imagines would be shared by most determinists of the type he is concerned to refute.”{19}
Second, “Lewis does not need to deny, and does not deny, the legitimacy of experiential knowledge, and what he says seems perfectly compatible with the idea that we perceive physical objects directly, without performing inferences in so doing.”{20} So even if Lewis did hold the theory that Beversluis attributes to him, “the argument can be formulated in such a way as to avoid any commitment to such inferential theories.”{21} According to Hugo Meynell, “the notorious philosophical issue of the existence of sense-data is not directly relevant to the point which Lewis was making.”{22} While I tend to agree with Beversluis’s interpretation of Lewis, I think it is possible to understand Lewis as saying the world as a conceived whole is what is inferred, not the specific details of the world, the objects, that we perceive directly. And naturalism is precisely the view that the natural world as a whole is “going on of its own accord.” Accordingly, naturalism requires us to make inferences from our sensory perceptions to the world. Therefore, the validity of naturalism -- which is Lewis’s target, after all -- is dependent on the validity of inference.
Third, Lewis’s version of the argument from reason was greatly influenced by Arthur Balfour’s, and Balfour went into some detail on the physical and physiological processes involved in our sensory perception.{23} As with Lewis, it is unclear whether Balfour thought these details prevented us from directly perceiving objects; but for the sake of argument, let us assume he does. We can nevertheless take Lewis as following Balfour generally, without necessarily assuming that he is following him here.
The argument
After this, Lewis gets down to brass tacks. If our beliefs about the world are only “the way our minds happen to work,” if they do not have some connection to the world outside our minds, then knowledge goes out the window, and science with it. From this it follows that
A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound -- a proof that there are no such things as proofs -- which is nonsense.{24}
Since we cannot avoid this, we have to posit a worldview which allows our reasoning to be valid. To illustrate this, Lewis looks at two possible ways a belief might be formed: a man might believe a dog dangerous based on observation and evidence; or he might believe it because he has a phobia about dogs. In either case, he arrives at the same belief, but in the first case, it has a rational cause, while in the second it has an irrational cause. A belief that is the result of evidence and valid argument is rational, whereas a belief that is the result of the mere association of concepts is irrational. From this, Lewis states as a rule that, “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes,”{25} and appeals to common use to establish it: if we know someone has an irrational cause of their belief -- if we know their belief that the bathtub is full of snakes is due to the fact that they are suffering from delirium tremens -- we do not give any credence to it.
Since we already apply this rule to each belief in isolation, we must, Lewis argues, apply it to our beliefs as a whole. If all of our beliefs have irrational causes, then all of our beliefs are invalid. Therefore, any worldview which suggests that our reasoning capacities are ultimately the product of irrational causes amounts to “a proof that there are no such things as proofs.”{26} Our reasoning capacities would not be reliable, and of course, this would apply to the formulation of the worldview in question, which would be, therefore, unreliable itself.
The point, of course, is that naturalism is precisely a worldview that entails our reasoning processes being the product of irrational causes. One’s beliefs are determined, not by following an argument to its logical conclusion, but by the chemical processes in the brain, or the psychological processes in the subconscious; in which case, they are the product of irrational causes. So, according to naturalism, “The finest piece of scientific reasoning is caused in just the same irrational way as the thoughts a man has because a bit of bone is pressing on his brain.”{27} And again, if no beliefs are rational, this would mean that belief in naturalism is not rational; thus, it refutes itself.
Another way of putting this is that by giving a complete explanation in terms of irrational causes, the naturalist has left no room for reasons to play a role in the formation of beliefs, including their own belief in naturalism. The reason for this is that, as Lewis writes elsewhere, “Where a clear and simple explanation completely covers the facts no other explanation is in court.”
… If we had noticed that the young men of the present day found it harder and harder to get the right answers to sums, we should consider that this had been adequately explained the moment we discovered that schools had for some years ceased to teach arithmetic. After that discovery we should turn a deaf ear to people who offered explanations of a vaguer and larger kind -- people who said that the influence of Einstein had sapped the ancestral belief in fixed numerical relations, or that gangster films had undermined the desire to get right answers, or that the evolution of consciousness was now entering on its post-arithmetical phase.{28}
Thus, insofar as the naturalist purports to give a complete explanation of our beliefs, and insofar as this explanation has no recourse to grounds or evidence, our beliefs would never be based on grounds or evidence. Including belief in naturalism.
The uniformity of nature
In the thirteenth chapter of Miracles Lewis returns to the argument, focusing on the issue of the correspondence between nature and the mind. Specifically, he addresses our belief that the universe behaves uniformly. Appealing to Hume, he argues that experience alone cannot provide us with grounds for accepting the uniformity of nature. All of our observations are only a fraction of all the events that occur in the universe. Noting that our observations confirm the uniformity of nature does not help unless we assume that the future will resemble the past, and that nature behaves the same way when we aren’t looking at it as it does when we are -- and these assumptions are just the uniformity of nature under different names. So experience presupposes the uniformity of nature; without this presupposition, the fact that something has happened millions of times in the past does not make it one whit more probable that it will happen that way again in the future. This means that it would be a circular argument to think that experience could demonstrate nature’s uniformity.{29}
To resolve this, Lewis suggests that we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking what right we have to believe in nature’s (general) uniformity, we should ask why we do in fact believe it. He identifies three causes for it, two of which are nonrational. The first is simply habit: we expect new situations to resemble old ones. The second is that we cannot plan for the possibility that nature will not behave uniformly, so we ignore it as a possibility; and if we routinely ignore something we forget that we are ignoring it. Both of these causes could just as easily build false beliefs as true ones.
There is, however, a rational cause (or at least, a non-nonrational cause) for our belief in nature’s general uniformity: an “innate sense of the fitness of things.” A random universe would not merely be uninhabitable but repugnant. This may sound subjective and aesthetic, but science proceeds with such an innate sense insofar as it examines the irregularities in order to show how they really were not irregular after all. “The whole mass of seemingly irregular experience could never have been turned into scientific knowledge at all unless from the very start we had brought to it a faith in uniformity which almost no number of disappointments can shake.”{30}
Is this belief in the inherent fitness of things reliable? We cannot say that it is confirmed by experience unless we add that such experience will continue into the future; which is the presumption of uniformity again. Ultimately, Lewis argues, it comes back to our metaphysics, whether we are naturalists or supernaturalists. If naturalism is true, our belief in the fitness of things is just something about us, about the way our brains happen to function, a byproduct of evolution that need not be true. Thus, science cannot presuppose both naturalism and uniformity. They are at odds with each other.
In this, Lewis is anticipating Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” by about half a century.{31} Moreover, this concept of fitness raises some interesting issues that seem to anticipate developments in 20th century analytic epistemology. Lewis is a traditionalist, and generally argues from the perspective of the foundationalist theory of knowledge and the correspondence theory of truth; and it seems evident that he does so here as well: our belief in the uniformity of nature is true insofar as it corresponds to the actual state of the universe. The criterion of “an innate sense of the fitness of things,” however, strikes me as a shift from the correspondence theory to the coherence theory; our beliefs about the universe are true insofar as they cohere, or “fit,” with our other beliefs. Lewis is not abandoning the correspondence theory but, by employing both criteria, is supplementing it.
Lewis’s response to objections
There are, of course, objections to the argument from reason, and Lewis treats many of them in Miracles. I have chosen to discuss the following objections for two reasons: they help clarify the argument from reason, and they are the most obvious and prominent objections that are made against it. Lewis discusses other objections that can be made against his argument or its consequences, objections that are philosophical or theological or “common sense.” He dedicates chapter nine, “A Chapter not strictly Necessary,” to an aesthetic objection which he once held himself and has great respect for. Nevertheless, the two treated below are sufficient for our present purposes.
One of the most common objections forms a part of chapter three: evolution guarantees that most of our beliefs are valid. Just because our beliefs are formed irrationally it does not follow that they are false. The man with an irrational phobia might be afraid of things that are actually dangerous. “Now individuals whose thoughts happened, in this accidental way, to be truer than other people’s would have an advantage in the struggle for existence. And if habits of thought can be inherited, natural selection would gradually eliminate or weed out the people who have the less useful types of thought.”{32}
Lewis’s response to this is that our beliefs in evolution, heredity, and natural selection can only be valid if we start from the assumption that our reasoning is trustworthy. Thus, this claim that evolution guarantees the validity of our beliefs amounts to an argument that arguments are valid. This may seem better than the alternative; but of course, an argument that presupposes the point it sets out to prove is circular, and therefore invalid.
It is at this point in the argument that even Lewis’s admirers often think he has made “one of his rare missteps.” He has argued that we must posit a worldview that allows our beliefs to be valid. Yet when the naturalist tries to show how evolution would allow this, Lewis rejects it. Wouldn't his response equally refute his position? Both he and the naturalist, after all, are “taking the trustworthiness of reason as a given, and seeking an explanation for that agreed-upon fact.”{33}
If this were the case, I think Lewis’s response to this objection would fail. But I think a more sophisticated argument can be teased out of his comments. His point in this criticism is that evolution allows our beliefs to be true as a byproduct of the struggle for survival. However, reason simply will not fit in the back seat: “The validity of thought is central: all other things have to be fitted in round it as best they can.”{34} In suggesting that evolution could guarantee the validity of our beliefs, the naturalist is making this validity a side effect. It would be an accidental aspect of our thought. This, however, is not enough: it must be an essential aspect. Otherwise, a given belief may be true, but we would not believe it because it is true. We would believe it because it is useful for us to believe it in order to survive or propagate -- or at least because it was so useful to our evolutionary ancestors.
This objection suggests that truth and usefulness coincide, but there are two significant problems with this: first, such a correspondence is highly doubtful. It is fairly easy to think of some true beliefs that are not useful, or some false beliefs that are. The correspondence of truth with usefulness is especially doubtful in the realm of abstract thought, which is the only realm where the critic can employ this objection. How exactly would a capacity for abstract thought bestow any advantage in survival? Not all of our beliefs are relevant to our actions, and not all of our actions are relevant to our survival and propagation. Moreover, our actions are not just based on beliefs but on a system of beliefs plus desires. Such a system has to be adequate for survival, but that is possible even if the beliefs are false. As long as the beliefs allow the individual to survive, it would have the same effects as a true belief. Evolution does not provide enough control on our belief-forming capacities to ensure their truth.
Lewis grants that evolution would provide for our beliefs to be true for the sake of argument, but others have challenged this. For example, Stephen Stich, an eliminative materialist, has argued that our reasoning processes are radically unreliable, despite the control evolution has exerted on them,{35} and no one could mistake him for an advocate of the argument from reason.{36}
The second problem with this objection is the one already mentioned: unless we adopt a pragmatic theory of truth, such a correspondence between truth and usefulness is insufficient, since it would only ever allow our beliefs to be accidentally true. In epistemological terms, evolution may allow our beliefs to be true; but it would not provide any truth-tracking element that connects the belief to what makes it true. Traditionally, this truth-tracking element has been called justification, but there are currently many other candidates. Evolution, in other words, could never allow us to have any knowledge of anything, since it would only allow us to have true beliefs; and it is universally recognized that merely having a belief be true (accidentally) does not qualify it as knowledge. If I believe that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon because my horoscope says so, I cannot be said to really know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, even though it is true that he did. So long as we need more than just true belief in order to have knowledge, evolution would not allow us to really know anything -- including the theory that naturalism is true, or evolution itself.
Plantinga’s version of the argument from reason appeals to this situation as well.{37} Plantinga points to Darwin’s own concern, “whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”{38}
Of course, in all of this, Lewis is not suggesting that the theory of evolution is incorrect; indeed, he assumes it is, both in Miracles and elsewhere.{39} Rather, he is arguing that evolution is insufficient to account for the validity of our reasoning processes.
Another possible objection one might raise to Lewis’s argument is the obvious fact that our ability to reason is affected by the physical state of the brain. Drunkenness and death are perhaps the two most obvious examples. Doesn’t this demonstrate that our beliefs are determined by such physical conditions?
Lewis’s response is that this demonstrates that our reasoning processes are conditioned by the brain’s physical circumstances; it does not demonstrate that they are originated by them. This is exactly what we should expect: Lewis is not arguing that our capacity to reason demonstrates that we are purely nonphysical entities. Insofar as we are physical, we would expect our physical state to play a role in our belief-forming capacities. The point of the argument from reason is that these capacities cannot be reduced to purely physical processes (i.e. irrational processes), just as the voice we hear and the image we see on the television cannot be reduced to the working of the set itself. “Of course it varies with the state of the receiving set, and deteriorates as the set wears out and vanishes altogether if I throw a brick at it. It is conditioned by the apparatus but not originated by it. If it were -- if we knew that there was no human being at the microphone -- we should not attend to the news.”{40}
Again, Lewis anticipates later philosophical discussions. The present point is very similar to a thought experiment by Richard Taylor,{41} who argues that if, while riding a train, we look out the window and see a message (“The British Railways welcomes you to Wales”) written on the side of a hill in white rocks, we could either conclude that the rocks were put there intentionally in order to communicate a message, or that they came into that configuration by purely mechanical processes. Taylor’s point is not which of these scenarios is more likely. His point is that if, for the sake of argument, we accept the mechanistic explanation, we would have no reason for accepting the message the rocks convey. We would have no reason to think we actually were entering Wales, or even that such a place exists. In order to accept the message, we have to reject the mechanistic explanation in favor of the teleological one. Similarly, our sensory and reasoning capacities cannot be accounted for on purely mechanistic principles, since this would disallow us from accepting the messages they convey. Plantinga later cites Taylor and Lewis as two anticipations of his evolutionary argument against naturalism.{42}
The third chapter of Miracles was the primary text Anscombe used in her critique of the argument from reason at the Socratic Club in 1948. This will be the subject of the next two posts in this series.
Notes
{1} William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000), xi.
{2} C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1st ed. (London: Bles, 1947), 15-16, 2nd ed. (London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1960), 9-10.
{3} E.L. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science: Some Questions in Their Relations (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1957), 214.
{4} Augustine Shutte, “The Refutation of Determinism,” Philosophy 59 (1984): 481.
{5} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 17, 2nd ed., 11.
{6} Ibid., 1st ed., 24, 2nd ed., 17.
{7} Adolf Grünbaum, “Causality and the Science of Human Behavior,” in Herbert Feigl and May Brodbeck, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953), 775-7; D.M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 200.
{8} C.S. Lewis, “‘Bulverism’: or, The Foundation of 20th Century Thought,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (1970; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 275.
{9} In his critique of Lewis, John Beversluis argues that “To say that something is fully explicable in purely causal terms is only to deny that it is random, unintelligible, the result of ‘blind caprice.’ It is not to deny that other noncausal considerations are relevant or that they can provide complimentary explanations of a different logical type” (C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985], 73). By making a dichotomy between being “fully explicable in purely causal terms” and being “random, unintelligible, the result of ‘blind caprice,’” he seems to be agreeing with those critics who misunderstand the argument from reason to mean that in order for an act of reason to be valid, it must be uncaused (rather than that it must be rationally caused). But the remainder of his critique reveals that Beversluis was under no such illusion.
{10} William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 62-63.
{11} Karl R. Popper, “Of Clouds and Clocks,” in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 206-32; idem, The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism (1956; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), 81-85; Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977), 75-81; Anthony O’Hear, Karl Popper, The Arguments of the Philosophers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 145; Peter Glassen, “O’Hear on an Argument of Popper’s,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (1984): 375-77; O’Hear, “Reply to Glassen,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (1984): 377-80.
{12} Popper, “Of Clouds and Clocks,” 226, italics in original.
{13} Ibid. 232; idem, “Indeterminism Is Not Enough: An Afterword,” in Open Universe, 113-30.
{14} William H. Davis, The Freewill Question (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 71-85.
{15} Ibid., 17.
{16} Beversluis, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, 58-83. All references to this work are to the first edition. He has since published a second edition with significant alterations, particularly in the chapter on the argument from reason. As this series of blogposts is based on a thesis I wrote prior to the second edition's publication, I am working exclusively from the first edition.
{17} Ibid. 60-61.
{18} Ibid. 61-62.
{19} Shutte, “The Refutation of Determinism,” 482.
{20} Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 57 n. 17.
{21} Ibid., 57.
{22} Hugo Meynell, “An Attack on C.S. Lewis,” Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991): 310.
{23} Arthur James Balfour, Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915), 149-74.
{24} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 26, 2nd ed., 18-19.
{25} Ibid., 1st ed., 27, italics removed.
{26} Ibid., 1st ed., 26, 2nd ed., 18-19.
{27} Ibid., 1st ed., 28.
{28} C.S. Lewis, “On the Transmission of Christianity,” in God in the Dock, 115.
{29} Of course, the irony of this is that Hume turned around and assumed the uniformity of nature in order to refute the occurrence of miracles (Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 2nd ed., ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge [Oxford: Clarendon, 1902], X, § 86-101). This seems very inconsistent on his part, and Lewis takes him to task for it (Miracles, 1st ed., 122-25, 2nd ed., 105-108).
{30} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 126, 2nd ed., 109.
{31} To just give the initial and latest references: Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 216-37; idem, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 307-50. See also James Beilby, ed., Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2002).
{32} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 29.
{33} Richard Purtill, C.S. Lewis’s Case for the Christian Faith (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 26.
{34} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 30, italics added.
{35} Stephen Stich, “Could Man Be an Irrational Animal? Some Notes on the Epistemology of Irrationality,” in Hilary Kornblith, ed., Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 256-60; idem, The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 55-74.
{36} Of course, Stich does not suggest that his own reasoning processes are radically unreliable, at least not those he employed in forming this theory. This is a particularly blatant example of the difficulty of accounting for valid reasoning in naturalistic terms.
{37} See note 31.
{38} Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 219; Charles Darwin, Letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an Autobiographical Chapter: Vol. 1, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), 316. Interestingly, Darwin was not writing this as a caveat to his beliefs about evolution, but rather to his belief “that the Universe is not the result of chance.”
{39} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 25-26, 135, 146, 166, 179; 2nd ed., 18, 115, 125, 142, 154; idem, The Problem of Pain (1940; New York: Macmillan Paperback, 1962), 72-84; idem, “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 82-93.
{40} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 50; 2nd ed., 44.
{41} Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, rev. ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 114-19.
{42} Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, 237 n. 28.
(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)
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