C.S. Lewis's Argument against Naturalism, part 3

The First Edition of Miracles
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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C.S. Lewis's Argument against Naturalism, part 2

Early Versions of the Argument 

In this post, I will summarize some of Lewis’s essays where he addresses the argument from reason, prior to the publication of Miracles in 1947.

Bulverism
One of Lewis’s first essays devoted to the argument from reason and the issues it raises is “Bulverism,” which was published twice: a short form appearing in 1941, and a longer one in 1944. In it, Lewis takes aim at Freudianism and Marxism, which he perceives to be inherently reductive. Freudians hold (according to Lewis) that all reasoning is the result of psychological conditioning, while Marxists hold that it is the result of social conditioning. As such, all reasoning is “tainted,” either psychologically or ideologically, and this applies to any criticism of Freudianism or Marxism. The implications being that such criticisms are neither rational nor justified, and so can be safely ignored.

Lewis dispatches with such views fairly easily by applying this argument to the Freudians and Marxists themselves: if all reasoning is tainted, then they do not arrive at their doctrines by valid reasoning either, and if this condition allows their critics to be discounted, it allows Freudianism and Marxism to be discounted by the same token. More specifically, Lewis asks two questions: “The first is, Are all thoughts thus tainted at the source, or only some? The second is, Does the taint invalidate the tainted thought -- in the sense of making it untrue -- or not?”{1} Lewis understands the Freudians and Marxists to be answering both of these questions affirmatively. However, since this invalidates their own position -- amounting to an argument that no argument is valid -- he suggests they have to choose another option: either not all thoughts are tainted, or the taint does not invalidate the thought (or both). But if any of these positions is true, it becomes possible for the criticisms of Marxism and Freudianism to be untainted or not invalidated, and so they have to be dealt with.{2}

Lewis’s point is that “you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong.”{3} Take, for example, a man who believes he is rich. We cannot use the fact that he wants to be rich as evidence that his belief is the result of wishful thinking. The psychological motivation to believe that he is wealthy simply does not matter; what matters is whether the man has correctly assessed his accounts. “If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant -- but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought.”{4}

Lewis proposes calling this error “Bulverism” after a fictional character he invents.{5} “Ezekiel Bulver” realized as a young child that “refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.”{6} All sides can engage in such sophistry, since no position excludes its advocates from treating their opponents like unreasonable buffoons. But of course, this does not prove that their opponents are wrong; indeed, it does not even address whether they are wrong. “Bulverism” is essentially the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy, and also shares some similarity with the genetic fallacy. In this scenario, one attempts to refute a position by arguing that its proponents arrived at it by nonrational means.

As Freudianism and Marxism are examples of Bulverism, Lewis sees fit to apply the same conundrum to Bulverism that he did to them. “The forces discrediting reason, themselves depend on reasoning. You must reason even to Bulverize. You are trying to prove that all proofs are invalid. If you fail, you fail. If you succeed, then you fail even more -- for the proof that all proofs are invalid must be invalid itself.” This leaves us with very few choices: “either sheer self-contradicting idiocy or else some tenacious belief in our power of reasoning.”{7}

From this point on, the essay closely mirrors the structure of Miracles. Here, we will just treat the most pressing issue, namely what exactly reasoning consists of. He argues that most of our beliefs are inferences derived from sensory experiences. Therefore, any prospective worldview must make it possible for our inferences to be valid, since that worldview itself would be reached by inference. This forces us to take a step further back: of what does a valid inference consist? Here Lewis makes a distinction between the normal causes present in nature and “a special kind of cause called ‘a reason.’”{8} The former are mechanical and mindless; the latter are inherently rational in nature. In order for our inferences, and hence our reasoning abilities, to be valid, they must be the result of reasons rather than normal causes; and since nature only knows normal causes, our reasoning abilities must transcend nature. The extent to which our beliefs are brought about by normal causes is the extent to which they are not brought about by reasons; and thus the extent to which these beliefs are invalid.

Apparently forgotten is his second question to the Freudians and Marxists: “Does the taint invalidate the tainted thought -- in the sense of making it untrue -- or not?”{9} Does having a nonrational cause for a belief invalidate that belief? Also apparently forgotten is Lewis’s insistence that beliefs be weighed on purely rational grounds, and not on the basis of how an individual came to hold them. These points would come back to haunt him when Elizabeth Anscombe put forward her critique of his argument.

De Futilitate
This essay “is an address given at Magdalen College, Oxford, during the Second World War.”{10} While the majority of it is a sophisticated presentation of the argument from reason, in it Lewis is actually addressing a larger issue: how the picture of the world that modern science paints seems to depict a universe that is utterly futile. This presents a problem of how we should respond to this picture, and Lewis argues that there are really only three ways to do so.

The first is heroic nihilism, such as that proffered by Russell in his essay “A Free Man’s Worship.”{11} The problem with this position is that the standard by which we judge the universe to be futile is, according to this view, just another product of the universe. Choosing to build one’s life on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair” as Russell puts it,{12} is itself one more meaningless and arbitrary act. There is nothing heroic or noble about it -- for the simple reason that, according to this view, heroism and nobility are illusions. “Heroic anti-theism thus has a contradiction in its centre. You must trust the universe in one respect even in order to condemn it in every other.”{13} A foreshadow of this point appears in Lewis’s private journal, written before he was a Christian, where he states that Russell provides “a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty -- that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole. The Promethean attitude would be tenable only if we were really members of some other whole outside the real whole.”{14}

The second way to respond to futility is to deny that the picture modern science paints is accurate. One can do this by denying that the physical world is real (which Lewis equates with idealism and Eastern religions), or by positing a larger world of which this world is a part, and in light of which, changes the picture from one of futility (which he equates with monotheistic religions). Lewis does not go into any more detail about this, but leaves it open.

The third way is the one Lewis wishes to investigate, because he finds it to be the most appealing to our common sense. This is the view that our sense of futility is a category mistake. It is a result of our ability to construct tools, which creates in us the habit of thinking in terms of “means and ends.” We then apply this pattern to the physical universe (which we obviously did not construct), and find that it fails to fit neatly within it. Thus, the universe appears futile.

Lewis has a very high opinion of this view, and argues that it should be accepted. However, it raises the question of how far we can take it. Can we discount all thought in similar fashion, as “merely human”? If we do, the very asking of this question, being a merely human mode of thought, should also be discounted:

There is therefore no question of a total scepticism about human thought. We are always prevented from accepting total scepticism because it can be formulated only by making a tacit exception in favour of the thought we are thinking at the moment. … Whatever happens, then, the most we can ever do is to decide that certain types of human thought are ‘merely human’ or subjective, and others not. However small the class, some class of thoughts must be regarded not as mere facts about the way human brains work, but as true insights, as the reflection of reality in human consciousness.{15}

Of course, this is not to say that people do not make mistakes when they reason, but that the correction of such errors must come from a source beyond the individual mind.{16}

A common candidate offered for this role of true insight is scientific thought. Lewis argues to the contrary, though, that this does not work for the simple reason that science is dependent upon inference, which is a category of logic. Any movement from observation to hypothesis involves some inference. Even observations can be understood this way: we infer an external world as the cause of our sensory perceptions. Of course, Lewis is not challenging whether these inferences are correct and rational; of course they are. His point is that scientific thought presupposes inference, and therefore, logic.

This, in effect, provides us with a better candidate for the role of true insight: logical thought. If logical thought is “merely human,” then all of science is as well, since science is built upon the foundation of logic. Moreover, the thought that logical thought is merely human would be merely human itself, and therefore, not valid. “I conclude then that logic is a real insight into the way in which real things have to exist. In other words, the laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time.”{17}

This leads to two “very momentous consequences,” the first being that materialism is necessarily false. This is because thoughts are about something. Yet if the mind and its thoughts were just physical matter, no such relation would hold: it is nonsensical to say that one piece of matter is “about” another piece of matter. A tree is not about a rock, for example. Moreover, a piece of matter cannot be true or false; it simply is. But again, thoughts can be true or false. Since thoughts have these properties but matter does not, thoughts cannot be explained entirely in terms of the physical matter and energy that make up our brains.

We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter several light-years away that particular relation which we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer’s brain, considered as a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense.{18}

The second momentous consequence is this: if it is true that “The laws whereby logic obliges us to think turn out to be the laws according to which every event in space and time must happen,”{19} it means that logic permeates the universe. There is a correspondence between our minds and the universe, a correspondence that stands in need of an explanation.

Some might try to explain it by arguing that the mind is a product of the universe, an effect of nature. As such, it seems plausible that our patterns of thinking would correspond to it. However, Lewis argues, this is too simplistic.

To be the result of a series of mindless events is one thing: to be a kind of plan or true account of the laws according to which those mindless events happened is quite another. Thus the Gulf Stream produces all sorts of results: for instance, the temperature of the Irish Sea. What it does not produce is maps of the Gulf Stream. But if logic, as we find it operative in our own minds, is really a result of mindless nature, then it is a result as improbable as that. It is … as if, when I knocked out my pipe, the ashes arranged themselves into letters which read: ‘We are the ashes of a knocked-out pipe.’{20}

We are thus forced to conclude that “where thought is strictly rational it must be, in some odd sense, not ours, but cosmic or super-cosmic.”{21} This is inconsistent with any worldview that assigns primacy to matter; but is consistent with any view that denies this. In fact, Lewis gives several possible positions one could develop from this argument. However, this is not as diverse as one might think: all of them fall under the category of the second way by which one could respond to futility.

Towards the end of “De Futilitate,” Lewis applies this argument to ethics in addition to reason.{22} He does this elsewhere,{23} and to aesthetics as well,{24} as Balfour had before him; but this goes beyond our present interests.

Meditation in a Toolshed
In this essay, Lewis uses the image of a beam of light to illustrate the difference between “looking along” and “looking at.” In a dark room, a beam of light from the outside can be very prominent, but it makes a world of difference whether we step into it and see the outside world via the beam -- i.e. by looking “along” it -- or whether we step back from it and just look “at” the beam itself. Similarly, we can make a distinction between the experience of thought and the observations of neurological processes. “The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician’s head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there -- only tiny movements in the grey matter.”{25}

He goes on to point out that the contemporary world has decided that looking at a phenomenon gives the truer or more correct account of that phenomenon. We assume that we learn more about something by studying it from the outside than by experiencing it from within. “Looking at” has annulled “looking along.” However, Lewis raises objections which make it impossible to disregard all inside experiences, and the argument from reason is one such objection.

We can look at thought, or the beam of light, from the side, as it were; but then that looking itself is another phenomenon which, presumably, must be looked at from the side as well; and this third act of looking must also be looked at from the side, ad infinitum. “In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled.”{26}

The solution to this is not to disregard all outside observations as less valuable or true than inside experiences. A woman in love may know more about it than another who has only read romance novels; but she may also be blinded to some realities by her love. Rather, the solution is that we must use both types of looking, and determine on a case-by-case basis whether one type is more correct, or whether both are equally correct in different ways. Lewis’s solution is that we cannot presuppose that one type of looking is inherently superior to the other. This essay foreshadows similar sentiments expressed by Thomas Nagel fifty years later.{27}

Religion without Dogma?
This essay is a critique Lewis wrote of a paper presented to the Socratic Club by H.H. Price defending agnosticism. While Lewis makes many points, one of them is a presentation of the argument from reason.{28} Unlike the other essays we have looked at, here Lewis makes no pretense of objectivity, couching his description in loaded terms and phrases, occasionally bordering on the contemptuous. He emphasizes how the physical laws of causality “never intended” to produce the universe, much less life, the human being, or the human brain; and so our mental activity is the result of “the law of averages” and “random variations.” Organization is matter’s “disquieting disease” and consciousness was “blundered into.”{29}

Lewis takes this biased description and applies it to a very particular target: Price’s composition and delivery of his paper. These events were, on Price’s own view, “the last link of a causal chain in which all the previous links were irrational.” As such, they amount to “a phenomenon of the same sort as his other secretions … no more capable of rightness or wrongness than a hiccup or a sneeze.”{30} But of course, no one, least of all Lewis, took his paper that way. He makes some of the same points he made in earlier essays, such as that any thought “explained, without remainder, as the result of irrational causes” is thereby rendered completely invalid. He also alludes to the difficulty, if naturalism is correct, in ascribing “that wholly immaterial relation which we call truth or falsehood” to the brute physical events that we call our thoughts: “naturalism seems to me committed to regarding ideas simply as events.”{31} Thus, naturalism presents itself as a true system of thought that invalidates all thought and makes the concept of truth nonsensical.

There are two final points to make about this essay. First, while Lewis read it to the Socratic Club in 1946, it did not appear in The Socratic Digest until two years later, in the same volume containing Anscombe’s criticism. In fact, Anscombe’s was the premier essay in that edition, and as such, completely deflated this presentation of the argument.

Second, in his response, Price conceded this point to Lewis.{32}

Shorter versions
Apart from the detailed account of the argument from reason that Lewis gives in Miracles, the essays presented above represent his most extensive treatments of it. It did not form a part of his two most popular theological works, Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain, although in the former, he does give a related argument for the validity of ethics{33} and one of the shorter books Mere Christianity was based on, The Case for Christianity, does have a statement of the argument,{34} but it was removed from the larger work. However, he presented shorter versions of it many other times in his writings and lectures;{35} it even found its way into his fiction.{36}

Notes

{1} 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), 272.
{2} Lewis criticizes Freudianism on other grounds as well (“Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism,” in They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses [London: Bles, 1962], 120-38), although he also states he has “no objection to the inclusion of Freudian explanations provided they are not allowed to exclude all others” (“Behind the Scenes,” in God in the Dock, 247).
{3} Lewis, “Bulverism,” 273.
{4} Ibid., 272-73.
{5} It may also be the case that “Bulverism” is inspired from the French term bouleverser. This means to disrupt or cause distress, but it also means to turn upside down. This could indicate that the person who engages in Bulverism is turning the reasoning process on its head. However, this is pure speculation.
{6} Lewis, “Bulverism,” 273.
{7} Ibid., 274.
{8} Ibid., 275.
{9} Ibid., 272.
{10} Walter Hooper, Preface, in C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), xiii.
{11} Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1917), 46-57. Lewis refers to this essay by an alternate title, “The Worship of a Free Man.”
{12} Russell, “Free Man’s Worship,” 48.
{13} C.S. Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections, 67.
{14} C.S. Lewis, All My Road before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 281 (the entry for Saturday 5 January, 1924).
{15} Lewis, “De Futilitate,” 61.
{16} Ibid., 68.
{17} Ibid., 63.
{18} Ibid., 63-64.
{19} Ibid., 65.
{20} Ibid., 64-65.
{21} Ibid.
{22} Ibid., 67-70.
{23} Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943; New York: Macmillan, 1947), 39-91; idem, Mere Christianity (1952; London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1955), 41-42; idem, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1st ed. (London: Bles, 1947), 43-48, 2nd ed. (London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1960), 38-42.
{24} Lewis, Abolition of Man, 13-35.
{25} C.S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock, 212-13.
{26} Ibid., 215.
{27} Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 13-35.
{28} C.S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” in God in the Dock, 135-38.
{29} Ibid., 136.
{30} Ibid., 136-37.
{31} Ibid.
{32} H.H. Price, “Reply,” Socratic Digest 4 (1948): 98-99. J.R. Lucas (Freedom of the Will [Oxford: Clarendon, 1970], 116 n. 2, 174) refers to Price’s essay as “The Self-Refutation of Naturalism.” This is actually the subtitle for the fourth part of Price’s reply.
{33} Lewis, Mere Christianity, 41-42.
{34} C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity (1942; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 32. Thanks to Victor Reppert for drawing this to my attention.
{35} Lewis, Abolition of Man, 91; idem, “Evil and God,” in God in the Dock, 21; idem, “Miracles,” in God in the Dock, 27; idem, “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” in God in the Dock, 52-53; idem, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections, 72; idem, “The Funeral of a Great Myth,” in Christian Reflections, 89; idem, “Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1949; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 103-104; idem, “Is Theology Poetry?” in Weight of Glory, 135-36, 138-40; idem, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper. (1986; San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987), 73-80.
{36} C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1981), 49-50, 62-63; idem, That Hideous Strength (1946; New York: Macmillan Paperback, 1965), 357-58.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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C.S. Lewis's Argument against Naturalism, part 1

The following series of posts are an adaptation of a thesis I wrote for one of my Master's degrees.
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Introduction and Background

So many books have been written about C.S. Lewis, that there are actually books to simply catalogue them.{1} His influence, however, has been more on the popular level than in academia. This is largely Lewis’s doing: he wanted to write for the common man, the layperson, rather than the scholar. Unfortunately, the result of this has been that professional philosophers and theologians often do not treat him with the seriousness he deserves. Lewis, however, taught philosophy at Oxford in the beginning of his academic career,{2} surrounded himself with philosophers all his life,{3} and had “outstanding philosophical instincts.”{4} Thus, the first chapter of a recent philosophical book defending him is entitled, “Taking C.S. Lewis Seriously.”{5} One of the minor premises in this series of posts is to point to several examples where Lewis anticipates issues that have since come to the fore in analytic epistemology.

Initial statement of argument
One of Lewis’s arguments is that our reasoning capacities cannot be accounted for on naturalistic premises, and so we are forced by the fact that we reason to posit a supernaturalist worldview. His most extensive treatment of this argument is in his book Miracles, but he expressed it many times in his writings. For example:

We are certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected with the brain. The theory that thought therefore is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense, for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction, but of which it would be meaningless to use the words “true” or “false.”{6}

Another example:

Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory -- in other words, unless Reason is an absolute -- all [science] is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.{7}

These two quotes succinctly express the three aspects of Lewis’s argument. First: if matter is all that exists, our beliefs are entirely caused by purely material processes, since there would be no other processes available to cause them. In which case, they are not the result of following the logic of an argument to a valid conclusion. As such, our beliefs are not logical or rational, and are therefore suspect -- including the belief that our beliefs are entirely caused by purely material processes. Materialism is therefore a self-refuting hypothesis: if it were true, we could have no reason for thinking it to be true.

Second: physical events are brute facts, and so it is nonsensical to call them true or false. A physical object is not “about” another physical object. Thoughts, on the other hand, are about things, and can be true or false. Therefore, our reasoning processes are more than physical events.

Third: the pattern our reasoning takes must also be the pattern by which physical reality acts. Lewis sees such a correspondence as enormously implausible on materialistic grounds. For random physical events to produce such a correspondence would be like an explosion producing order; not merely order, but information; not merely information, but information about itself.

Lewis’s argument is thus more modest than similar arguments from consciousness or “noölogical arguments.”{8} In fact, Lewis explicitly states that he is “not maintaining that consciousness as a whole must necessarily be put in the same position [as reason]. Pleasures, pains, fears, hopes, affections and mental images need not. No absurdity would follow from regarding them as parts of Nature.”{9}

Following John Beversluis and Victor Reppert -- a critic and an advocate respectively -- I will refer to this as the argument from reason.{10} This argument can be divided into two parts: the first half argues that nature by itself cannot account for human reason, and the second half argues that something other than nature must therefore be posited. While Lewis took the argument in a specifically theistic direction, he also suggested, “There are all sorts of different ways in which you can develop this position, either into an idealist metaphysic or a theology, into a theistic or a pantheistic or dualist theology.”{11} Because of this ambiguity, here I will only examine the first half of the argument, the refutation of ontological naturalism.

Christian philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe criticized Lewis’s argument at a meeting of the Socratic Club at Oxford in 1948,{12} and Lewis was forced to reformulate it in response to her objections. In this series of posts, I will look at Lewis’s original version of the argument, analyze Anscombe’s objections with the help of several philosophers who have commented on the exchange, and see whether Lewis’s reformulation holds up to scrutiny.

A note on terminology: Lewis originally presented the argument from reason by contrasting valid and invalid inferences, and then moved from this to refer to valid and invalid reasoning in general. Anscombe challenged his use of the terms “valid” and “invalid,” and Lewis, in his response at the Socratic Club,{13} conceded the point, and suggested the terms “veridical,” “verific,” or “veriferous” in its stead (the latter two being neologisms). I think the most appropriate terms for what Lewis is trying to say are “veracious” and “veracity.” Nevertheless, to avoid going back and forth between different terms at different stages of the argument (he also occasionally uses the term “sound”), I will simply employ “valid” and its derivatives throughout, unless a direct quote employs a different term.

Background and sources
Of course, this argument was not original to Lewis. Perhaps the earliest argument that there is something self-defeating about any kind of mechanism or determinism, whether materialistic or otherwise, was expressed by Epicurus when he wrote, “The man who says that all things come to pass by necessity cannot criticize one who denies that all things come to pass by necessity: for he admits that this too happens of necessity.”{14} Consequently, such arguments are sometimes called “Epicurean” arguments.{15}

Similarly, arguments that mind cannot be reduced to matter were made in the ancient world by many authors, such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine.{16} Following the latter, the medievals developed the doctrine of divine illumination, which held that the acquisition of knowledge requires the action of God.{17} In the modern era the irreducibility of mind found expression in the writings of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant, and others.{18} Lewis’s argument about the correspondence between our minds and the universe also has a long history behind it. Thomas Oden cites Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Peirce, Bergson, and others as defenders of it.{19}

While there is thus a tradition behind Lewis’s argument, there are three particular sources that informed him. The first is one Lewis cites in his autobiography:{20} his friend Owen Barfield. Barfield was a theosophist, and while he failed to convert Lewis that far,{21} he did manage to convince him that there is an inconsistency between accepting that mindless matter is the bedrock of reality, and also “that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth.” This, however, seemed inconsistent: “If thought were a purely subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned.”{22} Mind, Lewis concluded, must in some sense be independent of the natural world.

A second source of Lewis’s argument is the philosopher and British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Balfour wrote several philosophical tomes defending the idea that “familiar beliefs” -- beliefs about the validity of ethics, aesthetics, and especially reason -- cannot be justified on materialistic terms,{23} receiving criticism from the likes of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore.{24} Lewis never cites Balfour in his statements of the argument, but he does refer to Theism and Humanism as “a book too little read,”{25} and lists it as one of ten books that exerted the most influence on his thought.{26} Balfour’s impact on Lewis’s version of the argument has only recently been recognized,{27} but it has been sufficient for Theism and Humanism to be republished with the subtitle The Book that Influenced C.S. Lewis.

A third source is G.K. Chesterton. In Orthodoxy (in a chapter entitled “The Suicide of Thought”), Chesterton argues that “If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape.’”{28} Similarly, in an essay entitled “The Wind and the Trees,” Chesterton compares the view that the mind is able to move the body, and therefore transcends the body, to the idea that the wind moves the trees. Just as we see the trees move and posit an unseen force moving them (the wind), so we see the body move and posit an unseen force moving it (the mind). This is the “great human dogma.” On the other hand, “The great human heresy is that the trees move the wind.”{29} This is the view that the body moves the mind, and that everything appearing in the mind is actually a product of the body. In this case, we try to explain the unseen in light of the seen rather than vice-versa. This might be reasonable except for the fact that it leads to the very absurdity that the argument from reason postulates: “The man who represents all thought as an accident of environment is simply smashing and discrediting all his own thoughts -- including that one.” All thinking must therefore “treat the human mind as having an ultimate authority,”{30} and this cannot be done if it is “an accident of environment.”

Lewis revered Chesterton as having “more sense than all the other moderns put together,”{31} and seems to obliquely refer to Chesterton’s essay in the same place where he praises Balfour:{32} “If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”{33}

Of course, Lewis was extraordinarily well read, so these three were not the only influences on his development of the argument from reason. When he needed a succinct statement of it, he turned to J.B.S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”{34} The physicist Arthur Eddington, whom Lewis quotes for different points,{35} also presented a version in his lecture Science and the Unseen World.{36} One wonders whether Lewis had Eddington in mind when he wrote how science had compelled some “modern physicists” to “think about realities [they] can’t touch and see.”{37}

Further influences beyond this, however, are conjectural. Prior to, and concurrent with, Lewis’s original argument (as published in the 1940s), similar arguments were made by H.W.B. Joseph, A.E. Taylor, Wilbur Marshall Urban, and others.{38}

Notes

{1} Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (London: HarperCollins, 1996), 801.
{2} C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955; London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1959), 177-78.
{3} John Beversluis, “Surprised by Freud: A Critical Appraisal of A. N. Wilson’s Biography of C. S. Lewis,” Christianity and Literature 41 (1991-92): 191.
{4} Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 12.
{5} Ibid., 11-28.
{6} C.S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1949; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 103.
{7} C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in Weight of Glory, 135.
{8} Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 160-75; Robert M. Adams, “Flavors, Colors, and God,” in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 243-62; J.P. Moreland, “Searle’s Biological Naturalism and the Argument from Consciousness,” Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998): 68-91; idem, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1987), 77-103.
{9} C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1st ed. (London: Bles, 1947), 32, 2nd ed. (London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1960), 29.
{10} John Beversluis, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 58; Victor Reppert, “The Argument from Reason,” Philo 2 (1999): 33-45.
{11} C.S. Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 65.
{12} G.E.M. Anscombe, “A Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is Self-Refuting,” in The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, vol. 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 224-32.
{13} Ibid., 231-32; C.S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (1970; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 144-46.
{14} Epicurus: The Extant Remains, ed. and trans. Cyril Bailey (1926; New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), 112-13, fragment XL.
{15} Ted Honderich, A Theory of Determinism, vol. 1: Mind and Brain; vol. 2: The Consequences of Determinism (1988; Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 1:360-73, 2:42-52, 2:101-4, 2:153-7; Christopher Hookway, “The Epicurean Argument: Determinism and Scepticism,” Inquiry 32 (1989): 79-94.
{16} Plato, Phaedo §97ff; Aristotle, De Anima III; Plotinus, Enneads IV, vii, §6; Augustine, On Free Choice I-II.
{17} Rudolph Allers, “St. Augustine’s Doctrine on Illumination,” Franciscan Studies 12 (1952): 27-46; Robert Pasnau, “Henry of Ghent and the Twilight of Divine Illumination,” Review of Metaphysics 49 (1995-96): 49-75.
{18} Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2, 6; Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV, iii, §28-9; x, §5-6; 9-11; Leibniz, Monadology, §17; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B419-20; idem, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 64-65; Henry E. Allison, “Kant’s Refutation of Materialism,” The Monist 72 (1989): 190-208; Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments: The Simplicity, Unity, and Identity of Thought and Soul from the Cambridge Platonists to Kant: A Study in the History of an Argument, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol. 13 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
{19} Thomas C. Oden, The Living God, Systematic Theology: vol. 1 (1987; Peabody, MA: Prince, 2001), 147-50.
{20} Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 167-68. Incidentally, this was published several years after Anscombe’s criticisms.
{21} Ibid.; Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 101; 2nd ed., 87.
{22} Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 167.
{23} Arthur James Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt: Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief (London: Macmillan, 1879); idem, The Foundations of Belief: Being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology, 6th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1896); idem, Theism and Humanism: Being the Gifford Lectures (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1915); idem, Theism and Thought: A Study in Familiar Beliefs: Being the Second Course of Gifford Lectures (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1923).
{24} Bertrand Russell, “Mr. Balfour’s Natural Theology,” in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 8: The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, ed. John G. Slater (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986), 99-104; G.E. Moore, “The Value of Religion,” in G.E. Moore: The Early Essays, ed. Tom Regan (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1986), 101-20.
{25} Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” 121.
{26} Lewis, “Ex Libris,” The Christian Century 79 (June 6, 1962): 719.
{27} Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, 100 n. 17.
{28} G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 33.
{29} G.K. Chesterton, “The Wind and the Trees,” in Stories, Essays and Poems (London: Dent, 1935), 183.
{30} Ibid.
{31} Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 171, 178.
{32} In addition to their influence on Lewis, there is an interesting connection between Balfour and Chesterton: they were both founding members of a metaphysical society that met between 1898 and 1908 (Kenneth Young, Arthur James Balfour: The Happy Life of the Politician, Prime Minister, Statesman and Philosopher 1848-1930 [London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1963], 161).
{33} Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” 139.
{34} J.B.S. Haldane, “When I Am Dead,” in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 209; cf. idem, “Some Consequences of Materialism,” in The Inequality of Man and Other Essays (1932; Hammondsworth: Pelican, 1937). Lewis quotes Haldane in Miracles, 1st ed., 28-29, 2nd ed., 19. Ironically, Haldane later changed his mind, retracting precisely this quote (“I Repent an Error,” The Literary Guide 96 [1954]: 7, 29).
{35} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 126, 181, 2nd ed., 108, 155.
{36} Arthur Stanley Eddington, Science and the Unseen World (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 27-38; 50-67.
{37} C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942; Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour & Co., Inc., 1990), 14.
{38} H.W.B. Joseph, “Mechanism, Intelligence and Life,” Hibbert Journal 12 (1914): 612-32; idem, An Introduction to Logic, 2nd rev. ed. (1916; Oxford: Clarendon, 1950), 410-13; idem, Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 8-15; A.E. Taylor, “Freedom and Personality,” Philosophy 14 (1939): 259-80; idem, “Freedom and Personality Again,” Philosophy 17 (1942): 26-37; idem, Does God Exist? (London: Macmillan, 1945), 44n, 112n; Wilbur Marshall Urban, Fundamentals of Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1930), 418-19; idem, Beyond Realism and Idealism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1949), 235-38.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Luke warmism - how scary is global warming?

I've written a blog for Huffington Post on global warming.  When I last wrote about on the matter on this blog, I got some push back on the Quodlibeta forum.

I'm afraid I haven't really changed my mind...

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Further British politics and Italy

For those who are interested, here are my two latest UK politics blogs at Huffington Post:

Why Do the Media Act as a Mouthpiece for Vested Interests and

The Tories have Nothing to Fear Except their own Extremists.  

In other news, after a false start, we now have an Italian publisher for God's Philosophers, D'Ettoris Editori.  A big thank you to them for picking it up.

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Eurosceptics are heading for defeat in the referendum

Another post on UK politics that I blogged at Huffington Post.

Let's imagine that David Cameron has come back from his short holiday in Ibiza refreshed and ready to lance the boil on Europe. He announces that there will be an in-out referendum on the EU this autumn and that he has already squared it with Nick Clegg. "It's time to settle this matter once and for all," he says. "Only the British people can do that." Eurosceptics are delighted. Brussels panics. And, in late October, Britain decides on Europe. The result, I can assure you, would be an overwhelming vote to stay in the EU. Judging by their public utterances, many Eurosceptics imagine that if we have ever get a say on Europe, an "out" vote is in the bag. Well, it isn't. British voters are far more likely to decide on staying in. Let me explain why.

In poll after poll, Europe is far down the list of voters' concerns. Political anoraks like me sometimes find this hard to believe. After all, EU rules affect everything from clean air to the regulation shape of bananas. Nonetheless, most people have no idea who their MEP is, let alone the identity of Britain's Commissioner (admittedly, Baroness Ashton richly deserves her obscurity). Even UKIP supporters are not as obsessed by Europe as you'd expect. And we know what happens in referenda about little known subjects on which the voters care little. Just ask the Liberal Democrats.

Until recently, to be a Liberal Democrat activist was to be fixated by voting reform. When she was out walking the dog, the Lib Dem member was musing on the importance of multi-member constituencies. When his kid was home from school, burbling about what he'd done that day, the Liberal Democrat was miles away, balancing the merits of the single transferable vote over cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping. They thought that the case for PR was obvious. Surely the British people would vote for it given a chance. After all, opinion polls showed big majorities in favour of reform. Well, in May 2011 we got that chance. The result must have been a huge shock to the liberal system. Despite a lead at the start of the campaign and the support of every bien pensant in Islington, voters rejected change by a margin of two to one.

As the Liberal Democrats had discovered, there is a huge inbuilt bias towards the status quo in almost any referendum. On matters that are not everyday concerns to voters, this bias is even greater. The first time many voters will have thought seriously about the subject at hand will be immediately before they vote. They have no time to weigh up the pros and cons, or to decide whether they want to take a leap in the dark. By their nature, referenda are over big issues. Voters simply won't want to take the risk.

It will be the same in a referendum on Europe. True, voters find the EU mildly irritating and they certainly don't want to join the Euro. But faced with the voices of the establishment whispering about three million jobs being dependent on the single market, they'll decide they prefer the devil they know. Life outside is a risk. We could be isolated and lonely. A few Eurosceptics are building an attractive case for a glorious future in the Anglosphere, but it won't make any difference.

There isn't going to be a referendum in the autumn but there will probably be one in 2017. If Eurosceptics want to win that vote, we have to stop fighting with David Cameron and start campaigning now. When the vote comes, people must have already reached a settled decision to vote "out". They need to have conquered their fears about making a big change. Most importantly, they need to have thought about something that they don't usual bother to consider. Otherwise, it's already all over. The Eurosceptic cause will be lost.

Reposted from Huffington Post

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Some Old Articles Back Online

A while back, I took down some of the articles at Bede's Library and jameshannam.com because I was worried it was so long since I wrote them, they'd need serious updating.  I've now accepted that I'll probably never have the time to rewrite them properly.  So, I've given them a read through, corrected some typos and obvious mistakes, and put them back on line.  Therefore, after a gap of a couple of years the following articles and series are now available again.

Emperor Justinian's Closure of the School of Athens

Christianity and Pagan Literature

The Decline and End of Witch Trials in Europe

A Dialogue on Natural Religion

A Seekers' Guide to the Bible

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A Plea from a Grassroots Conservative

Lately, I've been blogging about UK politics at Huffington Post.  Although it is a bit insular, I'll repost here in case anyone is interested.

In common with many Conservative Party members, I want an in/out referendum and expect I'll be campaigning hard for an 'out' vote if we get one. Even more than that, I want a Conservative majority after the next election. Just the thought of Ed Miliband smirking outside 10 Downing Street on 8 May 2015 turns my stomach. Besides, only a Tory majority gets us that referendum. We know now that Miliband is dead against giving the people a say. And Nick Clegg will do anything to protect his Brussels pension fund. We can argue about whether "renegotiate then a referendum" is the right policy.

But never mind that. "Renegotiate then a referendum" is the policy. Whatever the virtues of mandate votes or getting Labour and the Liberal Democrats to vote down a bill in this Parliament, Tories should go out and sell the policy we've got. It's true that David Cameron badly damaged his credibility by breaking his cast-iron guarantee for a vote on the constitutional Treaty of Lisbon (and with hindsight, he must be cursing the day he took that fateful decision). But surely we can all agree he'll never be able to pull a stunt like that again.

So, however much I admire their principles, and conceding that it was backbench pressure that forced Mr Cameron to offer a referendum in the first place, I am beginning to get a tiny bit impatient with the honourable ladies and gentlemen on the backbenches. Admittedly, unlike many Tories, I think that replacing the enormous corporatist quango and public sector retirement scheme, otherwise known as the House of Lords, with just about any alternative is a good idea. I can't see what the fuss is about gay marriage (if it makes a few people very happy and shouldn't bother anyone else, what's the problem?). And just looking at the talented colleagues I work with makes me grateful that some of them are here because of an enlightened immigration policy. I suppose I'm not really UKIP material.

But before my fellow Eurosceptics dismiss me as a pseudo-pinko and the last remaining member of Ken Clarke's fan club, let me say this. My libertarian views are hardly a million miles from those of luminaries of the right such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Daniel Hannan. I admire the radicalism of the government in education and welfare, areas that Mrs Thatcher hardly dared to touch. I applaud this administration's determination to stick to Plan A and get a grip on public spending. I fear desperately that Miliband's cronies will wreak the country just at the moment the Conservatives have been able to transfer the economy out of intensive care.

Elections really are won by the party standing closest to the common ground. This was the case in the 1980s when Mrs Thatcher could offer a robustly rightwing programme because her opponents were marching towards a hallucination of the New Jerusalem. With Miliband leading his troops off stage left while singing the Internationale, we have a similar opportunity. UKIP might hit 5% in 2015, but most of their votes will be in true-blue heartlands where they can't cause much damage. In seats where Labour and the Conservatives are going toe-to-toe, UKIP will be not so much squeezed as squashed between the heavyweights. Their current level of support is unnerving (and they will win the European Elections next year). But listening to some Tory backbenchers, you'd have thought they were blushing debutantes who'd never seen a mid-term protest before.

There are only two factors against the Conservatives. The electoral arithmetic still favours Labour (so thanks guys, for stopping House of Lords reform, even if it wasn't just to spite Clegg). That's water under the bridge. Our other problem is party unity. Voters don't like parties that they perceive to be split. The media, of course, will do everything it can to foster just such a perception. But it's no use blaming journalists - they are just doing their job. Instead, it is up to Tories to starve the story of oxygen. Backbenchers should take a vow of silence on all matters not directly and explicitly linked to their own constituencies. The only exception should be telling anyone who'll listen what wonderful job the Conservative members of the Government are doing. When a local party chairman receives a survey from a mischievous newspaper asking how many members have left in protest of gay marriage, he should steer the relevant email straight towards the recycle bin.

Speaking as a Conservative, the next election is ours to lose. If it means holding our noses, if it means putting some principles into abeyance for a couple of years, even if it means MPs not humouring media starlets who'd be so grateful for a story, then so be it. Every Conservative has a duty to knuckle down and follow our leader. If we do that, there is every chance that come 2020, the United Kingdom (and it will still be united) will be prosperous and free. But if we lose our nerve and give the impression we are an undignified rabble, by the end of the decade we live in a bankrupt country shackled to the European Union's economic corpse.

Reposted from Huffington Post.

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Quote of the Day

Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic, one.

Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology. It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance.

Leon Wieseltier
"Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture: A Defense of the Humanities"

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General Revelation and Science

One of the most frequent and consistent themes throughout the Bible is that creation and its elements reveal God's existence and nature. Numerous passages say that some of God's characteristics, such as his righteousness and faithfulness, are expressed in creation. Some say that virtually everyone has some knowledge of God, because nature overwhelmingly testifies to his existence and action. Long passages on this include Job 38-40, Psalm 104, and Acts 17:23-31. Shorter examples include Job 12:7-10; Psalm 19:1-4; Psalm 85:10-11; Psalm 97:4-6; Habakkuk 3:3; Acts 14:16-17; Romans 1:18-20; and many others. According to the entry for "Creation" in The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery:

The same view of creation that empties nature of divinity also makes it a revelation of God and leaves it filled with pointers to God. The fact that all things find their origin in the creative work of God means that everything, in some way, bears witness to the creation and is revelatory of the Creator. According to the Bible every rock and tree and creature can be said to testify of God, declare his glory and show forth his handiwork (Ps 8:1; 19:1; 104; 148). We might accurately speak of the creation as divine messenger (cf. Ps 104:3-4). (Italics added; cf. C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 69-71)

Or as the Belgic Confession, one of the first Protestant confessions written (in 1561), puts it:

We know him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse. Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.

This is one aspect of what is called "general revelation", that is, revelation that is available to all people in all times (another aspect being the human conscience). This contrasts with "special revelation" which is only revealed to some people in specific times (this would include the Bible and the life of Jesus). While a handful of theologians have tried to deny the doctrine of general revelation, such as Barth and some Dutch Reformed theologians, they did not do so because of the biblical evidence, but rather because their theological systems did not allow for any knowledge of God that does not come through special revelation. Their attempts to get around the numerous biblical statements that creation does reveal the truth about God to everyone who has ever lived are extremely forced, and represent a primary weakness of their otherwise brilliant theologies.

Here are the logical steps by which creation reveals God:

1. Creation reliably testifies about itself.
2. Therefore, creation reliably testifies about itself when it shows itself to be created and ordered.
3. Therefore, we can know from creation that there is a Creator and Orderer.

Point 1 must be true in order for point 2 to be true; or conversely, if point 1 were false, then point 2 would be false as well. Creation could not reliably testify about itself when it shows itself to be created if it didn't reliably testify about itself. The former (point 2) is a sub-category of the latter (point 1). Similarly, point 2 must be true in order for point 3 to be true. If creation did not reliably show itself to be created and ordered, then our belief derived from our experience with creation that there must be a Creator and Orderer would not be valid, since it would be based on unreliable grounds.

Now, Scripture only explicitly states point 3. But point 3 presupposes point 2, and point 2 presupposes point 1. Therefore, the idea that the interaction of everything in the universe points to God presupposes that every individual element of creation can be trusted to display the truth about itself. This extends to every level of creation, and thus is true of recent scientific discoveries unknown in previous times. For example, the incredible degree of fine-tuning that the universe must have in order for life to be possible was unknown for most of human history; the space-time density, for example, must be fine-tuned to within one part in 10¹²⁰ in order for any kind of physical life to exist. But the fact that this property wasn't even discovered until the 20th century doesn't mean that it doesn't show itself to come from God's hand and display his glory. In fact, the degree of complexity necessary for the occurrence of life is one of the most commonly cited evidences that the universe was made by an intelligent agent.

I should point out that this doesn't necessarily mean that we infer the existence of a Creator and Orderer from the order we find in nature. It can mean that, but it can also refer to the fact, as Alvin Plantinga points out in Warranted Christian Belief, that when we see a beautiful landscape we immediately and spontaneously form beliefs about God. Nature, then, doesn't have to function as a premise for an inference, but merely as the grounds for a belief, where "grounds" is understood simply to refer to the experience that produces the belief. In a similar way, when I see a tree in front of me, I spontaneously (i.e., non-inferentially) form the belief "There's a tree in front of me". The experience of the tree is the ground for the belief, but it does not function as the premise of an argument -- I don't infer the existence of the tree from the fact that I am experiencing it.

Part of the reason the doctrine of general revelation is interesting is because it seems to sanction physical science. Physics, chemistry, biology, and similar sciences are the systematic analysis of nature. Since nature is a revelation from God, these sciences are the systematic analysis of God's general revelation; in a similar way, theology is the systematic analysis of God's special revelation. Of course, the analyses may be flawed for any number of reasons, for both the scientist and the theologian. But this doesn't give us room to just reject them out of hand. It seems that the Christian is obligated, from the Bible itself, to accept the findings of science -- although not uncritically, of course. That's an important point: there is space for the believer to disagree with the prevailing interpretation of God's revelation, whether the interpreters are theologians or scientists. But this is an exceptional situation; it can't be appealed to in order to reject a source of revelation in its entirety.

One issue that general revelation raises is whether general revelation functions as an independent source of revelation, or whether it must be interpreted or filtered through the lens of special revelation before its testimony can be trusted. Some Christians, such as young-earth creationists, claim that the testimony of general revelation only holds when it is understood from within a biblical perspective. This is an attempt to avoid having to take contemporary science seriously by claiming that it is misinterpreting the testimony of nature.

I'll go over one of the primary texts for general revelation in order to respond to this charge: Romans 1:18-20. This passage begins with the following statement: "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness..." Some understand this last phrase to essentially overturn the doctrine of general revelation. While creation testifies to God, this knowledge is suppressed; and so whatever witness creation displays is ignored.

But what exactly is being suppressed here? Go back to the three steps by which creation bears witness: 1, it reliably testifies about itself; 2, therefore it reliably testifies about itself when it reveals itself to be created and ordered; 3, we believe in the existence and action of God because of this order. Do those who deny God's existence deny that the universe reliably presents itself to us (point 1)? Well, apart from a few philosophers and some insane people -- and yes, there is some overlap between those categories -- the answer is obviously no. Do they deny that the universe is ordered (point 2)? Well, again, apart from lunatics, philosophers, and lunatic philosophers, the answer is of course not. What they deny is that we can validly know God's existence from this order (point 3). In other words, the suppression that Romans 1:18 speaks of is not a suppression of the facts of nature, it is a suppression of the move from the facts of nature to the existence of a Creator: it is a suppression of the recognition that there must be a God. There is nothing in this passage, or any other passage in the Bible, to suggest that our observations of the universe can't be trusted to reveal the truth about the universe. Nor is there anything to suggest that most of our inferences from these observations can't be trusted. It's only when it points to God that it becomes suppressed.

The passage continues in verses 19 and 20 by stating "...since what may be known about God is plain to them [men], because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

This passage makes several claims. Since I've already used numbers, here I'll use letters:

a. The testimony of creation is available to all people at all periods of human history. This is evident from the statement that this testimony has been present “since the creation of the world.” Therefore, this witness was available to people who lived in times prior to the Bible's composition, and who had no special revelation from God; as such, it was and is available to those in post-biblical times who lived in places where they did not have access to special revelation, as well as those who live in such places today.

b. The testimony of creation is a reliable revelation of God; or, in other words, creation reveals the truth about God. This is evident from the statements that creation's testimony reveals "what may be known about God", and that it reveals "God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature".

c. The testimony of creation is clear and understandable. This is evident from the statements that it has "been clearly seen", "understood", and "is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them".

d. God holds people responsible for their response to the testimony of creation. This is evident from the statement that they "are without excuse".

Thus, people who have never heard the gospel message and never read a Bible verse (point a) still have some true knowledge of God through his creation (point b) which communicates to them clearly and understandably (point c), and they are held accountable for their response to it (point d).

So, if people who have never received any special revelation from God are still given clear and true communication of who God is from creation and are held accountable for their response to this communication, what does it mean? It means that creation is an autonomous witness to God, and its testimony is valid independently of the Bible. It does not have to be interpreted through the lens of the Bible before it can be considered to be a valid and reliable revelation from God. The only alternative to this is simply unsound: if we deny this it could be claimed that, by not having access to special revelation, those who have not heard the gospel simply didn't have access to the right filter or lens or interpretative framework from which they could accurately interpret creation's testimony. But this contradicts the claim that creation's testimony is understandable (point c) to those who do not have special revelation (point a). Moreover, even if we ignore this for the moment, we have to remember that God is just. He would not hold people accountable for their response to something (point d) that he never gave them access to. In order for creation to be a true and trustworthy revelation to those who don't have any other revelation -- as the Bible says it is -- its validity must hold independently of the Bible.

So I think the Bible requires the believer to accept the testimony of creation, even when that testimony is a very specific article of knowledge or something only recently discovered. Since science is the systematic analysis of God's general revelation, the believer should accept the findings of science -- again, not uncritically. The believer can't say "I accept the Bible, but not science", since the requirement to accept the testimony of creation comes from the Bible.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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