C.S. Lewis's Argument against Naturalism, part 6

In earlier posts in this series I presented C.S. Lewis’s argument from reason, G.E.M. Anscombe’s objections to it, and my response to Anscombe. In this post I’ll go over Lewis’s response to Anscombe

The Second Edition of Miracles
Lewis changed the title of the third chapter of Miracles, from “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” to “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” His revision of the argument from reason deals with several of Anscombe’s criticisms, such as his conflation of the nonrational with the irrational (which he accommodates by simply substituting the former term for the latter), and the paradigm case argument. His primary revision deals, appropriately, with Anscombe’s primary criticism: the claim that explaining a belief in terms of grounds or causes are two distinct types of explanations that are not in competition with each other.

Causes and grounds
As Lewis puts it, we use the word “because” in two different senses: to indicate a cause-effect relation (“He cried out because it hurt him”) and to indicate a ground-consequent relation (“It must have hurt him because he cried out”). The former is a dynamic connection -- his being hurt is what caused him to cry out -- while the latter is a logical one -- his crying out is our ground for believing that it hurt him.

He further emphasizes this by giving two illustrations of it: first, just as we can use the term “because” in two different senses, so we can use the word “follow” in two different senses. We can use it in a temporal sense (“B followed A”), which corresponds to the cause-effect relation; and we can use it in an eternal or logical sense (“B follows from A”), which corresponds to the ground-consequent relation. The first describes an accidental relation, while the second describes a necessary one.

The other illustration he offers is to point out that acts of thinking, i.e. inferences, are unique: they are about something other than themselves, and as such, can be either true or false. This is not true of other events, or even of other acts undertaken by a subject. Inferences, then, can be understood in two different senses: they can be seen as subjective physical, physiological, and psychological events in the brain (cause-effect), or as insights into something other than themselves (ground-consequent).

The problem comes in when we recognize that if a belief could be fully accounted for by a cause-effect relation, there would be no room left for the ground-consequent relation to play a role in reaching the belief. How could having or not having a ground-consequent relation have any bearing on the belief? It would be held regardless, because

… if causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not. … But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?{1}

Thus, contra Anscombe, Lewis argues that these two types of explanation are in competition with each other. If the grounds of a belief have nothing to do with one’s coming to hold that belief, then the grounds are simply irrelevant. One would hold the belief whether it had grounds or not, because it has been caused.

Yet Lewis also recognizes that both relations need to apply to a belief in order for it to be valid. It needs a ground-consequent relation in order to be epistemically justified; without it the belief would not be derived from a reason, and so would not be valid. The ground-consequent category must be valid and accepted in order for inference and human knowledge to be valid and accepted. However, the belief also needs a cause-effect relation in order to take place at all; even if we ignore the principle of causality for the sake of argument, any belief that just spontaneously appeared in the mind without any cause could not make any claim to being valid, since it would not be derived from a reason.

In order to resolve this, Lewis argues that the ground-consequent relation and the cause-effect relation must coincide. They must be united into a single explanation in order for a belief to be valid. In other words, the ground of the ground-consequent relation must also be the cause of the cause-effect relation -- not merely by being the ground for it (because then every possible conclusion would be caused) but by being seen to be the ground for it. “If you distrust the sensory metaphor in seen, you may substitute apprehended or grasped or simply known. It makes little difference for all these words recall us to what thinking really is.”{2}

This “seeing to be” is essentially any truth-tracking element that connects the knowledge of something to that which is known. For Lewis, it is similar to the correspondence theory of truth: the degree to which a belief corresponds to what is known is the degree to which what is known is known. If the belief were totally explicable by something other than what is known, it does not qualify as knowledge. In the same way, “the ringing in my ears ceases to be what we mean by ‘hearing’ if it can be fully explained from causes other than a noise in the outer world -- such as, say, the tinnitus produced by a bad cold.”{3} Once we have factored the tinnitus out of the equation, whatever is left over is what qualifies as real, valid hearing. Similarly, valid knowledge is what is left over once we have factored out causes of a belief other than what is known (as a cause). Thus, any account of our reasoning capacities that does not provide for them to be connected to what is known is essentially an argument that no argument is valid, and is therefore self-refuting. It is comparable to saying, “I heard that everything we hear is produced by tinnitus.”

After this analysis, one could be forgiven for taking Lewis’s point to be that naturalism is somehow inconsistent with the correspondence theory of truth,{4} or with his account of how the ground-consequent and cause-effect relations apply simultaneously to the same belief. However, his argument is much more basic than this: naturalism is the view that everything can be accounted for by natural processes. But natural processes only provide cause-effect relations, never ground-consequent ones. This further explains Lewis’s rejection of Anscombe’s claim that more than one type of explanation can apply to the same belief: according to naturalism, naturalistic explanations are the only ones available. It is all well and good to argue that one type of explanation of a phenomenon does not rule out another, but only as long as one accepts both types of explanation. Lewis’s point is that naturalists do not. For the naturalist, natural explanations are the only ones allowed; and natural events progress according to cause-effect relations rather than ground-consequent relations. As such, naturalism cannot account for ground-consequent relations. Yet without them, no belief, including the belief that naturalism is true, could ever be epistemically justified, and could only be true by chance.

It is not enough simply to say that different “full” explanations can be given for the same event. Of course they can. … The question that is still open is the question of whether the kinds of mental explanations that must be offered in any face-saving account of rational inference are compatible with the limitations placed on causal explanations by materialism. If not, then there is a conflict between the existence of rational inference and materialism. This means that materialism refutes itself if it presents itself as a rationally inferred belief (or a belief that depends crucially on the existence of rational inference).{5}

The evolution of reason
Having reworked his argument, Lewis finds it necessary to rework his response to one of the possible objections to it: namely, that evolution can account for our reasoning processes to be (generally) valid. Those early human ancestors whose beliefs accurately corresponded to the world were those who stood a much greater chance of survival. So over time, those who reasoned more and more correctly passed on these capacities to their offspring more readily.

Leaving aside the assumption this scenario makes -- that a capacity for abstract thought would have a positive impact on an organism’s chances of surviving and producing offspring -- this requires us to believe that thoughts, before natural selection touched them, were not originally rational. They were, instead, merely subjective events, responses to stimuli. However, the relation between response and stimulus is not the same as the relation between knowledge and the truth known. An organism with a fully developed eye is not any closer to knowledge of light than an organism that merely has a light-sensitive spot. No improvement of a response to a stimulus could ever lead to genuine knowledge.

Perhaps adding more to the equation will help. In addition to a mere biological capacity, there is also experience and expectation, instruction and tradition. So our ancestors could learn from their experiences to expect things to be a certain way, and could then pass this gleaned information on to their descendants. They learned from experience that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

But expectations like this may only be fulfilled accidentally. As such, they do not connect what is known to the knowing of it; beliefs formed in this way would not be epistemically justified. Reason and inference come in precisely when we look for the nature of the connection, to see if the fulfillment of an expectation is essential to it or not. Moreover, such a scenario could not apply to logical axioms. “My belief that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another is not at all based on the fact that I have never caught them behaving otherwise. I see that it ‘must’ be so.”{6}

A third potential escape route might be to reject truth and affirm pragmatism. Reason is merely useful as aid to practice, and is not meant for speculation. But of course, naturalism is the product of speculation. It goes far beyond our experiences, both individually and collectively, to say that the universe is all that exists. Nature is an abstraction, not something presented to the senses. Naturalism is something some people infer, not something some people experience or practice. Moreover, it is a universal negative, and a universal negative is not something that can ever be experienced.

Lewis concludes his rewrite of chapter three by contrasting the naturalist with the supernaturalist. The latter is guilty of many of the same things as the former: one cannot experience supernature anymore than nature. The supernatural is also an abstraction, going beyond our sensory experiences.{7} The difference between the two is this: first, the supernaturalist is not guilty of a universal negative, like the naturalist; and second, the supernaturalist is not advocating a worldview which calls the validity of such abstractions into question.

The paradigm case argument
What of Anscombe’s (and Antony Flew’s) criticism that by erasing the distinction between valid and invalid reasoning, Lewis has emptied these concepts of meaning? That he is posing a skeptical threat argument akin to radical skeptical claims like Descartes’s evil genie or Nozick’s brains in vats? Victor Reppert argues that Lewis’s argument in the second edition of Miracles is no longer in a skeptical threat format, but a best explanation format.

Neither the first edition argument nor the second is, I believe, a pure case either of a Skeptical Threat Argument or of a Best Explanation Argument. However, the earlier edition seems to correspond more to the Skeptical Threat argument than does the second. In the first edition we have the suggestion of an argument like this: “If thoughts are produced by irrational causes, then beliefs are likely to be false. What if all beliefs were produced by irrational causes? Then we would have no knowledge. And if Naturalism is true that has to be the story. So we’d better not accept Naturalism.” In the later edition we are simply told that in order for rationality to be possible two systems of connection, the Ground-Consequent system and the Cause and Effect system, must coincide, and this is possible only if naturalism is false. Thus the revised edition corresponds more closely to the Best Explanation Argument.{8}

In other words, the version of the argument from reason in the second edition argues what is necessary for our knowledge to be valid, and then shows that naturalism cannot meet these requirements. Thus, it is not presenting the absurdity that all of our beliefs might be invalid. If this were a problem (and I have argued in the previous post that it is not) it can be, and has been, resolved by reforming the argument to meet it. Reppert concludes, “It seems to me that Anscombe’s Paradigm Case argument is ineffective against this sort of argument.”{9}

Conclusions
Anscombe argued that, “if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they are genuinely his reasons, for thinking something -- then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements we make about him.”{10} However, the argument from reason is precisely the claim that, if naturalism is true, these conditions do not hold.

1. A man could not have reasons, because his mental processes are dictated by purely natural processes that care not a whit for logic and rationality.

2. Even if a man could have reasons, he could not have good reasons. Whatever beliefs he reached would be brought about by cause-effect relations (such as association of ideas) because naturalism precludes the ground-consequent relation. Even if the beliefs were true, they would only be accidentally true.

3. Even if there were good reasons for a man to hold a belief, they could not be his reasons. They played absolutely no role in his coming to hold that belief, and if they did not exist, he would hold the belief anyway, since the natural processes responsible for his coming to hold any given belief would be operable regardless. As such, how exactly could any good reasons that might exist for the belief be rightfully called “his”?

Anscombe’s claim that reasons are not what bring about beliefs, but “are what is elicited from someone whom we ask to explain himself”{11} seems plainly false. At least some of the time, we arrive at a belief as a result of a reason. This is what we usually think reasoning consists of. We can, of course, distinguish reasons and causes in general; but to completely disconnect reasons from the occurrence of a belief is not only wrong, it is fatal for our claims to be reasoning beings.

Any adequate account of the relation between reasons and causes must provide an account of the role that convincing plays in our cognitive economy. The idea of being convinced by something seems to imply that reasons are playing a causal role. Anscombe is attempting not merely to distinguish, but to divorce reasons-explanations from causal explanations, considering the former to be noncausal explanations. And insofar as she is divorcing these types of explanations, her critique of Lewis is faulty. If reasons cannot be part of the explanation of how we come to hold beliefs as a matter of personal history, then human rationality as we ordinarily understand it simply does not exist.{12}

That Lewis thought the argument from reason survived Anscombe’s criticism is demonstrated by his inclusion of it in his final book, published posthumously:

No Model yet devised has made a satisfactory unity between our actual experience of sensation or thought or emotion and any available account of the corporeal processes which they are held to involve. We experience, say, a chain of reasoning; thoughts, which are ‘about’ or ‘refer to’ something other than themselves, are linked together by the logical relation of grounds and consequents. Physiology resolves this into a sequence of cerebral events. But physical events, as such, cannot in any intelligible sense be said to be ‘about’ or to ‘refer to’ anything. And they must be linked to one another not as grounds and consequents but as causes and effects -- a relation so irrelevant to the logical linkage that it is just as perfectly illustrated by the sequence of a maniac’s thoughts as by the sequence of a rational man’s.{13}

Anscombe herself thought that the second version was “much less slick and avoids some of the mistakes of the earlier one; it is much more of a serious investigation. … The argument of the second edition has much to criticize in it, but it certainly does correspond more to the actual depth and difficulty of the questions being discussed. … The fact that Lewis rewrote that chapter, and rewrote it so that it now has these qualities, shows his honesty and seriousness.” She even acknowledges that how the grounds of a belief are connected to its actual occurrence remains an unresolved problem.{14}

Several years after Lewis’s death, a “rematch” of sorts was arranged by the Socratic Club, with Anscombe defending her own position, and J.R. Lucas defending Lewis’s. When the smoke cleared, the argument from reason was still standing tall.{15} And perhaps the most ironic twist in the Lewis-Anscombe debate is that Anscombe’s husband, Peter Geach, seems to have agreed with Lewis.{16}

Notes
{1} C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 2nd ed. (London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1960), 20.
{2} Ibid., 21, italics in original.
{3} Ibid., 22.
{4} Of course, according to Lewis’s argument, naturalism is inconsistent with the correspondence theory of truth. By disallowing the ground-consequent relation, naturalism disallows the connection between what is known and the knowing of it.
{5} Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 68-69.
{6} Lewis, Miracles, 2nd ed., 24.
{7} However, this does not mean that the effect of a supernatural event cannot be experienced with the senses. “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested” (Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., [London: Bles, 1947], 72; 2nd ed., 64).
{8} Victor Reppert, “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19 (1989): 37 n. 21.
{9} Ibid., 39.
{10} 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), 229.
{11} Ibid.
{12} Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, 65.
{13} C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), 165-66. For another post-Anscombe version of the argument, see A Grief Observed (1961; San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989), 41.
{14} Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, ix-x.
{15} J.R. Lucas, “The Restoration of Man,” Theology 98 (1995): 451.
{16} Peter Geach, The Virtues: The Stanton Lectures 1973-4 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 26-28, 48-53; Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, 45 n. 1.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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C.S. Lewis's Argument against Naturalism, part 5

An Analysis of Anscombe’s Criticisms
In the previous post I looked at G.E.M. Anscombe’s critique of C.S. Lewis’s argument that naturalism is self-defeating and culled six specific arguments from it. In this post, I’ll go over these arguments one by one.

Point 1: Conflating nonrational causes
Anscombe argues that Lewis had given examples of nonrational causes which lead to false beliefs in order to demonstrate that such causes are unreliable. It does not follow, however, that just because some such causes do so, all do. Indeed, we only know that his particular examples are problematic because we have observed them causing unreliable beliefs.

This point is correct. In order to move from the nonrational cause of a belief to the falsity of that belief, we would have to include another premise: namely, that beliefs caused by nonrational processes are false. This, however, is not the case: sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. But to simply point to the cause as nonrational does not by itself demonstrate that the belief is therefore false.

However, Lewis is not merely arguing that nonrational causes would lead to false beliefs, but to unjustified beliefs. Saying that some of our beliefs so caused may turn out to be correct does not address the point that this would be an accidental aspect of the belief instead of an essential one.

Anscombe’s point seems to be that we need an example of a physical process leading to a false belief before we can therefore conclude that that particular process is inconsistent with reasoning. This spills over into point 3, addressed below. For now, I will just point out that Lewis’s argument is that we need a foundation for our reasoning capacities that is unimpeachable. By showing examples of nonrational causes bringing about false beliefs, he is demonstrating that such causes are not unimpeachable, and thus cannot function as this foundation. It would be akin to finding a contradiction in basic logic or mathematics; such a discovery would demonstrate that logic or mathematics cannot be the foundation of our rationality, it does not provide us with the solid base upon which we can base our claims to knowledge. We would not conclude that just because mathematics only leads us to false beliefs occasionally that this does not prove to be much of a problem.

Point 2: Conflating nonrational with irrational
Antony Flew follows Anscombe in this criticism, and takes it to be a knockdown refutation of Lewis’s argument:

Lewis is too carefree in his talk of “rational” and “irrational.” Why must atoms, or systems of neurons, or whatever may be the terms of the scientific explanation of my mental processes, be either rational or irrational? Can they not be just non-rational -- things to which the rational/irrational distinction does not apply? Lewis would surely not say that atoms were immoral. But then, must they be moral? Of course not. Lewis would say the distinction did not apply. He would be quite right. In the same way, the rational/irrational distinction does not apply to the sort of things in terms of which “naturalists” would give their causal explanations of mental processes. But since atoms are neither rational nor irrational, the argument breaks down, for the causes by which the “naturalist” explains his own thinking are no longer irrational and the “naturalist” thesis no longer refutes itself. A chain of argument is as weak as its weakest link.{1}

It is certainly true that Lewis conflates irrational and nonrational causes in his treatments of the argument from reason; Arthur Balfour does as well. If Lewis’s argument were that a belief is irrational if it has an irrational cause, then this criticism would indeed refute it. But I do not think this is Lewis’s argument. He is, rather, arguing that in order for a belief to qualify as rational, it must have a rational cause. Therefore, any cause that is not rational, whether it be irrational or nonrational, would not lead to a rational belief. Even if the belief were true, it would not have been arrived at by a rational process. Thus, this objection is irrelevant; as long as nonrational causes are not rational causes, then beliefs caused by them would not be rational. In other words, Lewis is inferring the nature of the cause from the nature of the effect. If the effect is rational, the cause must be as well. Anscombe and Flew mistakenly think he is inferring the nature of the effect from the nature of the cause. They have it precisely backwards.

It should also be pointed out that Lewis had already noted the difference between an irrational and a nonrational cause elsewhere. A physical event is not rational in a different sense than a paralogism; it “does not rise even to the dignity of error.”{2} That is, it is not about anything, and so the appellations of truth and falsehood simply cannot be applied to it (although propositions about it obviously could). This reflects Lewis’s second form of the argument from reason (see part 1). So it seems that nonrational causes are in an even worse state than irrational causes. Far from refuting Lewis’s argument, appealing to the difference between irrational and nonrational causes increases the difficulty.

Point 3: The paradigm case argument
Lewis had argued that, because we can ask whether a particular belief is valid, we can also ask it of all of our beliefs taken together. However,

it is a complete mistake to think that if it is sensible to ask a question about a particular case of something (perceptions, pieces of thinking, etc.) it follows that it is sensible to ask the same question of all those particular cases taken as a class. It is wise and proper to ask of any given piece of reasoning, “Is this valid?” But it is not profound, but preposterous, to ask, with Lewis, “Is human reason valid?”: for some pieces of reasoning are, and some are not, sound.{3}

According to this objection, the claim that all reasoning is invalid is nonsensical, because “we could have the concept ‘valid argument’ only if we had drawn a contrast between valid and invalid arguments, and in order to do that we would have to come in contact with at least one instance” of each.{4} According to Flew, suggesting that all reasoning is invalid is like suggesting that all sensory perceptions are hallucinations. This would empty the concept of hallucination of all meaning, since it obtains its meaning by the contrast between it and a real perception.{5} This is very similar to certain skeptical problems, such as Descartes’s evil genie or Nozick’s brain in a vat.

Victor Reppert, a strong proponent of Lewis’s argument, thinks this objection hits home. He calls it a “Skeptical Threat Argument,” and he is “not optimistic” about them.{6} If Lewis’s argument is that

If naturalism is true, nonrational processes cause all of our beliefs.
If nonrational processes cause all of our beliefs, none of them are rational.
Naturalism is a belief.
∴ Belief in naturalism is not rational.

then this objection applies. A naturalist could simply respond that it is not necessary to show that our reasoning processes are rational, for the same reason that it is not necessary to show that we are not constantly being deceived by an evil genie, or that we are just brains in vats being manipulated to think that there is an external world. Such radical skepticism is refuted by the fact “that we have overwhelmingly strong reasons for acknowledging the ‘validity of reasoning’ -- that is, for acknowledging that people do sometimes reach conclusions because of good reasons they accept, and that they are rational in doing so -- and that, therefore, any argument to the contrary must be based on a mistake or trick of some kind.”{7} As such, “no absolute security against such doubts is available from any quarter, and … even if it were available it is not needed.”{8}

There are two responses that can be made to this. The first is that this objection does not apply to Lewis’s argument, and the second is that, even if it does, Lewis’s argument can be reformulated to meet it.

The first response was made by Ernest Gellner in his reply to Flew’s paper.{9} Gellner concedes that just because a question can be asked of a member of a class it does not follow that it can also be asked of the class itself. Yet the opposite is not true: that because a question can be asked of a member of a class, it cannot be asked of the class. Perhaps it can, perhaps it cannot. Flew’s example of hallucination is an example where it cannot. If all perceptions were hallucinations, the concept of hallucination would become meaningless, because its meaning is derived from its contrast with a real perception. This “contrast theory of meaning” is sometimes true, but we must beware of “the dangers of applying it indiscriminately.”{10}

The question is, does it apply to our beliefs? Gellner thinks not. The claim that if we can ask whether one belief is determined by nonrational causes, we can therefore ask it of all of them, is a perfectly coherent claim. This is because the concept of our beliefs being determined is not based on the contrast between determined and undetermined beliefs. Rather, it is based on “the presence of a causal mechanism; hence not by contrast but by a correlation that might be absolute and universal,” and “the tests for confirming this would not become unworkable by being applied to the totality.”{11}

Gellner thus makes two points: contrast is not the only way we can understand concepts in general; and contrast is not how we understand the concept of determinism in particular. Unfortunately, however, he has chosen the wrong target: the question is not whether we can understand determinism without reference to contrast, but whether we can understand the nonrational without reference to contrast. From an etymological standpoint, it looks as though we cannot: “nonrational” obtains its meaning from its contrast with “rational.” It is the negation or absence of the rational.

Another example may shed some light on this. As Flew writes, we would not call brute physical events moral or immoral because this distinction simply does not apply to them.{12} They are amoral or (to be consistent) nonmoral. Now the question is: does the concept of the nonmoral obtain its meaning from its contrast either with the moral or with the moral-immoral distinction? I am not convinced that it does. We are simply not applying the concept of morality to nonmoral events or entities. We understand what such entities are, and if someone were to ask whether they are moral or immoral, we would know that this concept has nothing to do with them. Our recognition that morality has nothing to do with nonmoral things does not increase or alter our knowledge of them.

Now let us return to Lewis’s argument. He states that nonrational processes could never give rise to rational processes. Here, he is clearly contrasting the nonrational with the rational. However, the question is not whether we can contrast the rational and nonrational, but whether the nonrational obtains its meaning from this contrast. Again, I am not convinced that it does. His second version of the argument from reason is that physical events are brute facts that are not “about” anything. The true-false distinction does not apply to them. So if they make up the whole of reality, the true-false distinction does not apply to anything. This is not only problematic; it is incoherent, since one would then have to ask whether it is true that the true-false distinction does not apply to anything.

Since the issue of contrast and meaning is likely to be controversial, let us grant for the sake of argument that we do need the contrast between the rational and nonrational in order to understand what we are talking about. Let us assume that it is exactly parallel to Flew’s analogy of hallucination. What then? Say that Lewis’s argument is that, if naturalism were true, it would lead to the conclusion that none of our perceptions are real, all are hallucinations. However, this is incoherent; a hallucination does not mean anything without the contrast of a real perception. Could not Lewis say, “Precisely! If naturalism were true, it would lead to an absurd conclusion like this. Therefore, naturalism is not true”?

Or put it in Anscombe’s terms: she argues that we need examples of valid and invalid reasoning in order to understand what we are talking about. Lewis’s argument, though, is that if naturalism were true, we would not have examples of valid reasoning. If we need an example of it in order to make sense of the concepts, and naturalism does not provide us with an example, it would follow that naturalism does not allow us to make a distinction between valid and invalid reasoning. Since it is obvious that we do have such examples and can make such a distinction, naturalism is false.

Let me this another way: the point to the skeptical threat argument is that the suggestion that our reasoning faculties are completely unreliable is like other radical skeptical claims, such as that we are brains in vats being made to think there is a physical world, or there is an evil genie who makes us add numbers incorrectly. Such claims are so outlandish that they need not be addressed. We do not feel threatened by them because we do not take them seriously.

But Lewis is not asking us to take radical skeptical claims seriously. He is telling us that the reason why we cannot accept naturalism is precisely because it leads to a radical skeptical claim. Of course we cannot seriously consider the possibility that all of our beliefs are invalid. That’s the point.

If it is suggested that radical skeptical claims are not merely incredible but incoherent, and therefore an argument cannot refer to them, the response would be that it is a valid argument to say that a position leads to an incoherent situation and should be rejected as a result. This is the very definition of a reductio ad absurdum argument. Lewis’s claim is that naturalism leads to an incoherent scenario in which none of our beliefs would be rational, and should therefore be rejected.

This leads us to the second response to this objection. Even if we grant that Lewis’s argument is invalid because of the paradigm case / skeptical threat objection, it can be reformulated to accommodate it. Reformulating the argument, however, is the subject of the following post in this series, and so will be left until then.

Point 4: Naturalism does not preclude logical explanations
By this, I take Anscombe to be saying that a person having a belief and expressing that belief and arguments for it in speech or writing is not inconsistent with naturalism. Which step does the naturalist deny? That people have beliefs? That people speak? These are both “natural” processes. Lewis seems to be arguing against a form of naturalism that no one actually holds.{13}

In the second form of the argument from reason, Lewis does question whether physical processes, which are not about anything, could ever give rise to processes that are, such as beliefs. As such, it is questionable whether naturalism can accommodate the occurrence of beliefs, since beliefs are about things. Even if he were to grant the possibility of beliefs in a naturalistic world, such beliefs would never be the result of rational processes. Given naturalism, if someone were to give a rational argument for a belief, that argument played no role in their coming to hold the belief in question. That is the problem naturalism presents for our knowledge.

To state this another way, it might be possible, in a naturalistic world, for someone to state a valid reason for a true belief, but it would be akin to a zombie giving a reason. The reason played no part in the formation of the belief, and it would be difficult to say that the zombie truly “believes” anything. As William Hasker writes,

… consider a possible world that is physically exactly similar to the present world, but in which the natural laws establishing psychophysical connections do not obtain. In such a world all the physical facts, and with them the entire physical course of events, are exactly as in the actual world: the complete absence of mentality makes no difference whatever. Similarly, we may consider a possible world physically identical with the actual world, but in which mental properties are redistributed in as bizarre a fashion as one might wish: this world is still indistinguishable from our own in all physical respects. Could there be a more dramatic demonstration of the fact that, given the closure of the physical, mental facts are irrelevant to the physical course of events? … The entire process [of reasoning] makes no sense at all, except on the assumption that a person’s awareness of reasons and her knowledge and application of principles of rationality make a difference to the conclusions that are accepted.{14}

I think Lewis would also argue that a naturalistic explanation could provide for everything in a belief except the meaning. For example, a poem can be analyzed as black marks on a white sheet of paper, but it is questionable whether such an analysis would ever arrive at the meaning of the poem.{16} To go back to one of Lewis’s examples, we could analyze a news broadcast in terms of the functioning of the television set. Yet if that was all there was to it, we would not be able to put any stock in the message it conveys.

Point 5: Back to Bulverism
Lewis had denounced those who dismiss beliefs allegedly derived from irrational sources. Yet his whole argument is dependent on the claim that in order for beliefs to be rational, they must have rational sources. However this is not how we judge whether an argument is valid. This criticism is a striking one, and on the surface seems perfectly justified. Lewis does appear to commit his own fallacy of Bulverism, i.e. the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy, when he writes that all people dismiss a belief once we know it is the result of a nonrational cause.

If the additional premise -- that nonrationally caused beliefs are invalid -- is accepted by Lewis’s opponents, then his argument still works. The Freudians and Marxists, for example, hold (according to Lewis) that one can refute a belief by showing it to have nonrational sources. As long as they still maintain that such beliefs are invalid, then their own beliefs fall along with them. Not all naturalists think that having a nonrational cause of a belief thereby invalidates it, though. In order to hold his ground, Lewis would have to demonstrate how having a nonrational cause for a belief makes that belief invalid. Lewis, however, would probably argue that he has demonstrated this. His argument is that in order for a belief to qualify as rational, it has to have a rational cause. So by definition, a nonrational cause would not allow the belief to be rational.

This, nevertheless, just avoids the problem: the formation of a belief has nothing to do with its validity. It simply does not matter whether it has rational, irrational, or nonrational causes. To dismiss a belief because of its causes is precisely the Bulverism fallacy. What matters is whether the belief can be demonstrated true upon further examination.

There are two responses to this: first, the Bulverism fallacy argues that we cannot determine a belief’s truth-value based on its cause. However, it has nothing to do with whether a belief is epistemically justified. Justification, warrant, or any truth-tracking element, connects a true belief to what makes it true -- and the claim of the argument from reason is that this connection is an inherently rational one. Therefore, a nonrational cause could never bring about an epistemically justified belief, regardless of whether that belief was true or not. Nonrational causes could, at best, bring about true belief. Yet all epistemologists acknowledge that we need more than just true belief in order to have knowledge. Insofar as a belief that is just accidentally true does not qualify as knowledge, nonrational causes can never bring about knowledge.

Second, the reason Bulverism is a fallacy is because we are able to take a belief out of its historical context (where it may have nonrational causes) and into a logical context. If this abstraction were impossible, the assessment of a belief independent of its causes could not be made. The only standards by which we could then judge the rationality of a belief would be the inherently nonrational standards of how the belief was caused.

To put it in Flew’s terms, the Bulverism fallacy applies to individual beliefs because of the possibility of this movement from “historical” causes to “logical” grounds. However, it does not apply to our beliefs taken as a whole, because, by definition, such a whole could not be taken out of its context into another one. Any given context would be a part of the whole already. In which case, we would never be able to examine a belief’s validity, because any test would also have nonrational grounds, and any test of the test would as well, ad infinitum. So if rational processes never enter into the equation, how can any belief ever be rational?

This latter point, I take it, is Eric L. Mascall’s argument in his defense of Lewis against Anscombe.{16} He thinks Anscombe’s contention, that an argument’s validity is independent of its formation, “is, I think, a good one, but only so long as we exclude from the sphere of application of the naturalistic theory the examiner’s conviction of the validity of his examination.”{17} He illustrates this with a parable about a man who has a deep hatred for a particular bishop. The man justifies his hatred with a syllogism, that some churchmen are alcoholics; the bishop he hates is a churchman; therefore, the bishop he hates is an alcoholic. A psychoanalyst examines the man and determines that his hatred is based on an unpleasant event in his childhood. The man can then say that the cause of his belief is irrelevant; what matters is whether he can prove it upon further examination, and his syllogism does just that. However, the psychoanalyst is also a logician, and he proceeds to point out that the man’s syllogism has an undistributed middle, and such syllogisms are invalid. The man, however, responds that, “the widespread belief in the invalidity of syllogisms with undistributed middles is simply caused by something in people’s genetic inheritance.”{18} In other words, this belief also has a nonrational cause. At no point can we step out of the circle of nonrational causes in order to test a belief’s validity, because any proposed test would be produced nonrationally as well.

Mascall concludes that any plausibility such determinism may have “is due, I would maintain, to the fact that when it is asserted an escape-clause is either explicitly included or, more often, implicitly assumed. It is held to apply to volitions and attitudes, but not to ratiocination; or, if it does apply to ratiocination in general, it does not apply to the ratiocination which its propounder makes use of in arguing for its truth.”{19}

Augustine Shutte later comments on “the sequence of Lewis’s article followed by Anscombe’s reply and then Mascall’s comments on both.”{20} He quotes Mascall’s parable in its entirety, and argues that if our convictions about the validity of logic are the product of nonrational causes, we cannot use logic to verify the validity of a given argument. Anscombe might respond, however, that she is not speaking of convictions. This, however, “assumes that the rules determining validity can be defined in total abstraction from real events, psychological or otherwise, and yet must be regarded as normative for events and processes in the real world, namely those that constitute thinking and arguing.”{21}

Whether we think the arguments of Mascall and Shutte can avoid the skeptical threat objection mentioned above is another issue. Reppert argues that they do not.{22} But they can avoid the charge of Bulverism. The circumstantial ad hominem fallacy assumes that we can abstract a belief from its nonrational causes and judge its truth on purely rational grounds. Insofar as this abstraction is impossible, this fallacy cannot be applied. Plus, it has no bearing on whether a belief is epistemically justified. Therefore, appealing to Bulverism cannot refute Lewis’s claim that if all of our beliefs are derived from irrational or nonrational sources they are all invalid. Shutte concludes that, “Lewis’s argument against determinism has been vindicated.”{23}

Point 6: Distinguishing between causes and grounds
By equating the irrational with the nonrational, Lewis had confused the grounds of a belief (which are rational or irrational) with the causes of a belief (which are nonrational). This is partially because both grounds and causes are given to answer “why” questions, and begin with “because.” However, this is a confusion of thought. These are two completely different types of explanation. By confusing them, Lewis has mistakenly thought that they are in competition with each other. They are not.

It was to this objection, Anscombe’s primary one, that Lewis addressed his revision of the argument, which will be presented in the next post. For now, I will just reiterate Lewis’s comments after Anscombe read her paper at the Socratic Club. He argued that the grounds of a belief could function as its cause. In fact, unless the grounds do so, the belief would not have been reached rationally. This foreshadows a similar claim made by Donald Davidson in 1963.{24} As Shutte puts it,

Lewis is entitled to claim that if the causes of a person’s holding a belief do not include the actual grasping of the logical link between premise and conclusion as holding between that belief and another then his holding of the belief will be unreasonable. Hence, if all the causes of all beliefs are of a natural or deterministic kind, then no rationally held beliefs will occur. And, hence, no one will ever be justified in claiming any belief to be true, determinism included.{25}

Another point is noteworthy: this criticism is based on Anscombe’s Wittgensteinian belief that different types of explanations are different language games that do not conflict. However, another follower of Wittgenstein disagreed with this assessment. In his essay “The Conceivability of Mechanism,” published after Lewis’s death, Norman Malcolm defended a view very similar to Lewis’s, and according to the final footnote of that article, Anscombe herself reviewed it before its publication.{26} The point being that a fellow Wittgensteinian did not think the concept of language games allowed us to make such a sharp dichotomy between causes and explanations.

A biographical note
From the foregoing discussion, it should be evident that I think Lewis’s original argument largely survives Anscombe’s criticisms. Biographers have sometimes argued, though, that Lewis did not think so, and that he felt personally humiliated by her analysis. Some go so far as to suggest that he abandoned writing apologetics altogether,{27} and took up children’s literature as a result.{28}

There are a few points to make in response. First, John Beversluis, one of Lewis’s most trenchant critics, who had repeated this claim himself,{29} later concluded that it was inaccurate, irrelevant, and presumptuous.

… the myth that Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics overlooks several post-Anscombe articles, among them “Is Theism Important?” (1952) -- a discussion of Christianity and theism which touches on philosophical proofs for God’s existence and their relevance to the religious life -- and “On Obstinacy in Belief” (1955) -- in which Lewis defends the rationality of believing in God in the face of apparently contrary evidence (the issue in philosophical theology during the late 1950s and early 60s). It is rhetorically effective to announce that the post-Anscombe Lewis wrote no further books on Christian apologetics, but it is pure fiction. Even if it were true, what would this Argument from Abandoned Subjects prove? He wrote no further books on Paradise Lost or courtly love either.{30}

Second, such speculations about Lewis’s motives are extraordinarily tone-deaf. One of his most popular essays is “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” in which he makes the point that reviewers of his own writings and those of his friends have often tried to reconstruct their motives. According to Lewis, such attempts were universally incorrect; he could not recall a single accurate statement.{31} For biographers of Lewis to make such attempts themselves in light of Lewis’s explicit claim that “the results are either always, or else nearly always, wrong,”{32} either demonstrates that they were unfamiliar with this essay or that they chose to ignore it. Neither case is responsible. He even explicitly asks readers of Mere Christianity to refrain from speculating about his motives.{33}

Third, Anscombe herself was not aware of any such reaction on Lewis’s part, and neither were their mutual acquaintances. She recalled the meeting as “an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms,” but suggests that those who think Lewis felt shocked or humiliated by the encounter are evincing “an interesting example of the phenomenon called ‘projection.’”{34}

Fourth, Lewis obviously did not abandon apologetics or the argument from reason: he recognized that Anscombe’s criticisms deserved a full response,{35} and to this end, rewrote the third chapter of Miracles, publishing it in 1960. To this I turn next.

Notes

{1} Antony Flew, “The Third Maxim,” The Rationalist Annual 72 (1955): 64.
{2} C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943; New York: Macmillan, 1947), 30.
{3} Flew, “Third Maxim,” 65.
{4} Victor Reppert, “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19 (1989): 37.
{5} Flew, “Third Maxim,” 64-65.
{6} Reppert, “Lewis-Anscombe Controversy,” 37.
{7} William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 68.
{8} Reppert, “Lewis-Anscombe Controversy,” 37-38.
{9} Ernest Gellner, “Determinism and Validity,” The Rationalist Annual 74 (1957): 69-79. Although Gellner’s essay is essentially a critique of a critique of Lewis, he never mentions Lewis by name. Flew responded to Gellner (Flew, “Determinism and Validity Again,” The Rationalist Annual 75 [1958]: 39-51), and brought up the Lewis-Anscombe debate elsewhere in his writings as well (idem, “A Rational Animal,” in A Rational Animal and Other Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Man [Oxford: Clarendon, 1978], 92-99; idem, The Logic of Mortality [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987], 84).
{10} Gellner, “Determinism and Validity,” 72.
{11} Ibid., 70-71.
{12} Flew, “Third Maxim,” 62.
{13} Actually, eliminative materialists hold that beliefs are just a part of “folk psychology,” and can therefore be eliminated. So they do deny that people have beliefs. I will address this in the final post of this series.
{14} Hasker, Emergent Self, 71, 73, italics in original.
{15} Cf. Arthur Stanley Eddington, Science and the Unseen World (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 63-67.
{16} E.L. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science: Some Questions in Their Relations (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1957), 212-19.
{17} Ibid., 215.
{18} Ibid., 216.
{19} Ibid., 216.
{20} Augustine Shutte, “The Refutation of Determinism,” Philosophy 59 (1984): 481. Although he is writing nearly a quarter century after the second edition of Miracles was published, Shutte is working from the first edition.
{21} Ibid., 487.
{22} Reppert, “Lewis-Anscombe Controversy,” 37-38.
{23} Shutte, “Refutation of Determinism,” 487.
{24} Donald Davidson, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,“ in Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 3-20.
{25} Shutte, “Refutation of Determinism,” 484-85.
{26} Norman Malcolm, “The Conceivability of Mechanism,” The Philosophical Review 77 (1968): 72 n. 14. Malcolm was later critiqued by Alvin Goldman (“The Compatibility of Mechanism and Purpose,” The Philosophical Review 78 [1969]: 468-82), defended, with qualifications, by Jaegwon Kim (“Mechanism, Purpose, and Explanatory Exclusion,” in Supervenience and Mind [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995], 237-64), and then defended without qualification by William Hasker (Emergent Self, 64-68).
{27} Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Their Friends (1978; New York: Ballantine, 1981), 238-39; Michael White, C.S. Lewis: The Boy Who Chronicled Narnia (London: Abacus, 2005), 174-75.
{28} A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 210-15, 220, 225-27.
{29} John Beversluis, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 66; idem, “Beyond the Double Bolted Door,” Christian History 4/3 (July, 1985): 29.
{30} John Beversluis, “Surprised by Freud: A Critical Appraisal of A.N. Wilson’s Biography of C.S. Lewis,” Christianity and Literature 41 (1991-92): 192. The essays he cites are C.S. Lewis, “Is Theism Important?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (1970; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 172-76; and idem, “On Obstinacy in Belief,” in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays (1960; New York: Harvest Book Paperback, 1973), 13-30.
{31} C.S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 158-61. Alternatively titled “Fern-seed and Elephants.” This apologetical essay was a lecture delivered in 1959, over a decade after Anscombe’s lecture at the Socratic Club, further demonstrating that Lewis did not abandon apologetics in the wake of Anscombe’s critique.
{32} Ibid., 161.
{33} C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; London: Collins, Fontana Paperbacks, 1955), 6-7.
{34} G.E.M. Anscombe, The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, vol. 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), x.
{35} C.S. Lewis, “Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger,” in God in the Dock, 179.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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C.S. Lewis's Argument against Naturalism, part 4

In the first three posts of this series, I presented C.S. Lewis's argument from reason, which argues that naturalism is self-defeating. In this and the following post, I will present the objections raised against it by Elizabeth Anscombe.

A Summary of Anscombe’s Criticisms
G.E.M. Anscombe, a Christian philosopher and student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, presented a paper critical of Lewis’s argument from reason, as presented in his book Miracles, in February 1948 to the Socratic Club in Oxford, and which was published later that year as the premier essay in The Socratic Digest. She was not the first to criticize Miracles,{1} but the objections she raised were by far the most significant. Her essay primarily argues that Lewis employs terms with dubious definitions, and when they are corrected, the argument no longer holds.

Irrational and nonrational
Anscombe quotes Lewis’s dictum that “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.”{2} However Lewis chose examples where the natural processes which influence someone to reach particular beliefs are known to mislead him into false beliefs (such as delirium tremens). It simply does not follow from this that all natural processes do so. “A causal explanation of a man’s thought only reflects on its validity as an indication, if we know that opinions caused in that way are always or usually unreasonable.”{3} “… it is only because we already know that men with delirium tremens see things that are not there … that we dismiss a man’s belief by ascribing it to delirium tremens.”{4}

Part of the problem here is that Lewis uses the term “irrational” in too broad of a sense. An irrational cause for a belief would be an invalid argument that lets one believe what one wants to believe. On the other hand, when we say that a belief is caused by something like delirium tremens, these are not irrational in the same sense as the former causes are. Rather, “they are conditions which we know to go with irrational beliefs or attitudes with sufficient regularity for us to call them their causes.”{5} Such natural causes may be “non-rational” in the sense that they are just bare facts rather than propositions, and as such, have no truth-value. This is not the same thing as being irrational, however. By conflating irrational causes and nonrational causes, Lewis has committed a category mistake, and this calls his argument into question.

Anscombe illustrates this with Lewis’s example of a man afraid of a dog. If a man says a dog is dangerous and, when asked how he knows, gives insufficient grounds for this belief, it is irrational. However, if a man says a dog is dangerous and, when asked how he knows, begins to tremble and shake his head, his belief is not based on insufficient grounds: it is completely groundless. It is caused by some event in his past or some dysfunction of his psyche, and so is nonrational rather than irrational.

Paradigm case
Anscombe goes on to challenge Lewis’s claim that we have to believe in the validity of reason. “You can talk about the validity of a piece of reasoning, and sometimes about the validity of a kind of reasoning; but if you say you believe in the validity of reasoning itself, what do you mean?”{6} Here, Anscombe is challenging Lewis’s claim that if we can call an isolated belief irrational if it springs from irrational causes, we can equally call all of our beliefs irrational if they are all the result of irrational causes.

Her point is that in order to understand valid reasoning, we would have to have an example of it.{7} As such, to question the validity of all reasoning appears nonsensical, since it would imply the possibility of there being no valid example of reasoning, and so no concept of valid reasoning could ever be formed. Moreover, part of our understanding of valid reasoning comes from contrasting it with invalid reasoning. Yet we would need at least one example of each in order for such a contrast to take place. “Anscombe here is employing the Paradigm Case argument, an argument against the possibility of meaningfully raising certain skeptical questions.”{8}

Antony Flew -- an atheist philosopher who participated in the Socratic Club, and even took part in a debate on Christianity and Plato later that month -- illustrates this by comparing it to hallucination. There is nothing problematic about asking whether a particular perception is hallucinatory or real. “But it is preposterous to ask whether all perceptions taken together are hallucinatory. The term ‘real perception’ and the term ‘hallucinatory perception’ derive their usual significance from their mutual contrast, and from the tests used to decide which is applicable.”{9} Suggesting that all perceptions might be hallucinations is not just a ridiculous claim: it is incoherent. “Hallucination” does not mean anything without the contrast of real perception. Similarly, an irrational belief does not mean anything without the contrast of a rational one.

Naturalistic explanations
Anscombe then asks what exactly in the naturalistic worldview would prevent any of the reasons for a belief from applying. If we are asked for an explanation of a particular belief, “what in the naturalistic hypothesis prevents that explanation from being given and from meaning what it does?”{10} The naturalist scenario, at least as naturalists understand it, does not preclude someone believing something and giving an explanation for this belief when challenged.

In fact, this leads to a great irony in Lewis’s argument. He condemns attempts to refute beliefs based on their allegedly irrational credentials, such as Freudians claiming that traditional beliefs are the result of psychological processes in the subconscious. This, however, is presumptuous and inappropriate. We should judge a belief on whether or not it is true; any other factors are simply irrelevant.{11}

Yet after condemning this fallacy, he turns around and commits it himself. Any belief with irrational causes is thereby invalidated; so if all beliefs have irrational causes, all beliefs are invalid. Recall his claim that, if naturalism were true, “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.”{12} But to dismiss a belief because it has irrational causes is precisely the Bulverism fallacy. To argue that a belief is made invalid by such irrational causes “does not follow at all. Whether his conclusions are rational or irrational is settled by considering the chain of reasoning that he gives and whether his conclusions follow from it.”{13} Regardless of whether someone reached a belief for irrational or nonrational reasons, we cannot, on those grounds, reject it. The validity of a particular belief is not determined by whether the person who drew it did so in accord with the correct logical procedures, but whether we can do so upon further investigation.

Reasons and causes
This leads to the heart of Anscombe’s critique, that one type of explanation does not rule out another type. Lewis had assumed that giving a naturalistic explanation of a particular belief was incompatible with giving a rational one, in fact that any given phenomenon has only one complete explanation. Anscombe argues to the contrary that the rational and naturalistic explanations are just two different ways of describing the same phenomenon; both can be correct simultaneously.

As a Wittgensteinian, Anscombe was content to view different types of explanations as different “language games.” A “full” explanation would be one which fully answers the questions of an inquirer. As Victor Reppert writes,

… there can be many explanations for the same event. For example, if we ask, “Why is the soda can sitting on the bookshelf?” I can answer correctly, “Because I put it there yesterday,” or “because I wanted it to be recycled,” or “because no one has knocked it over,” or “because the shelf holds it up,” or “because of the law of gravity,” or even “because it is cylindrical,” which explains why it stays put on the bookshelf and doesn’t roll around. We must admit, with Anscombe, the question-relativity of explanations and also that different explanations can be given for the same event.{14}

Such explanations “are not mutually exclusive. They are not even in competition.”{15}

Lewis, essentially, has confused the causes of a belief with its grounds. His failure to distinguish between irrational and nonrational causes leads him to use other terms in an ambiguous manner as well, specifically the terms “reason,” “why,” “cause,” “because,” and “explanation.” When we ask why someone believes something, we can answer in terms of what caused the belief, or we can answer in terms of what grounds the belief. The former would yield a nonrational answer, while the latter would yield either a rational or an irrational one. Both answers would begin with “because,” but would be a different type of explanation.

Anscombe’s point is that these two types of explanation do not contradict each other. They are merely describing the same thing from different perspectives. Anscombe even adds on to the naturalistic and rational explanations of a belief two more: one can give a psychological explanation why one has a belief, and one can give a personal history explanation of why one has a belief.{16} None of these explanations are in competition with each other, and all can be true of the same belief simultaneously.

Anscombe goes into some detail about the difference between a causal-type of explanation and a grounds-type of explanation. Lewis seems to be arguing that if a belief has an irrational or nonrational cause, the person believing it did not reach that belief by reasoning. If the belief turns out to be true “we regard it as accidental.”{17}

But this is not the role that reasons play in our beliefs. Causes are mechanical, physical regularities based on observation. Reasons “are what is elicited from someone whom we ask to explain himself.”{18} So, in contrast to Lewis’s claim that reasons are “a special kind of cause.”{19} Anscombe seems to think that reasons are not causes at all. Thus, reasons and causes are completely different spheres, different language games, that have nothing to do with each other. “It appears to me that if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they are genuinely his reasons, for thinking something -- then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements we make about him.”{20}

In the notes of the discussion following Anscombe’s presentation, and a supplemental comment by Lewis,{21} he acknowledges the difference between causes and grounds, but argues that a belief could only be considered rational when its cause is the recognition of its grounds. If one only arrives at a belief because of causes that have nothing to do with the grounds, then it seems that the grounds for that belief play no role in one’s holding of it. The final assessment of those in attendance was that Lewis “would have to turn his argument into a rigorous analytic one.”

Summary
Anscombe’s critique can be reduced to the following points, not necessarily of equal importance, and some of which bleed into each other:

1. Lewis conflates different types of nonrational processes: just because some nonrational processes lead to false beliefs, it does not follow that all do so.

2. Lewis conflates nonrational processes with irrational processes. If his argument is that having irrational causes for a belief invalidate it, it does not follow that nonrational causes do likewise.

3. The paradigm case argument. Suggesting that a position would invalidate all reasoning is nonsensical, since we would not be able to understand what these terms mean without examples of both. It would erase the distinction between valid and invalid reasoning. However, this distinction may be the only way we can understand what valid or invalid reasoning is.

4. There is nothing in the naturalistic worldview which would prevent a person from giving a rational explanation for a belief and meaning it.

5. Bulverism. Lewis, ironically, commits his own fallacy. A belief is not justified by how it was formed, but by whether or not it is true.

6. Lewis fails to distinguish between a belief’s grounds and its causes. Both may use the same terms (“reason,” “why,” “cause,” “because,” and “explanation”), but they are two distinct types of explanation that do not preclude each other.

In the next post in this series I will analyze these points in more detail.

Notes

{1} See, for example, Robert Eisler, Review of Miracles: A Preliminary Study, by C.S. Lewis, Hibbert Journal 45 (1946-47): 373-77.
{2} C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 1st ed. (London: Bles, 1947), 27.
{3} 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), 231.
{4} Ibid., 224.
{5} Ibid., 225.
{6} Ibid., 226.
{7} It should be pointed out that Anscombe leaves this point open: she writes, “Whether you would adopt this method or some other (though I do not know of any other) …” (ibid., 226)
{8} Victor Reppert, “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19 (1989): 37.
{9} Antony Flew, “The Third Maxim,” The Rationalist Annual 72 (1955): 64-65.
{10} Anscombe, “Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis,” 226.
{11} 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), 271-77; idem, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock, 215.
{12} Lewis, Miracles, 1st ed., 28.
{13} Anscombe, “Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis,” 227.
{14} Victor Reppert, C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 66.
{15} John Beversluis, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 74.
{16} Anscombe, “Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis,” 230-31.
{17} Ibid., 228.
{18} Ibid., 229.
{19} Lewis, “Bulverism,” 275.
{20} Anscombe, “Reply to Mr C.S. Lewis,” 229.
{21} Ibid., 231-32; C.S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” in God in the Dock, 144-46.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Counting the days

I've argued before that I don't think the days of creation in Genesis 1 should be understood as calendar days (or solar days, human days, "normal" days, or whatever). The Hebrew word for day, yom, can be defined -- in fact can be literally defined -- as an extended period of indeterminate length, and if you think it should be understood metaphorically that opens up even more possible definitions.

One common objection to this is that when yom is modified by a number (e.g. first day, second day, etc.) in the Bible, its meaning is restricted to a calendar day. There are a few problems with this, but the biggest one is that it's false: yom plus a numerical modifier is used in the Old Testament to refer to a period of indefinite length. The best example of this is Zechariah 14:7-8 which uses the phrase yom echad (day one) to refer to a long period of time. Many translations do not translate that phrase as "one day" or "day one" but that is the Hebrew phrase. Here's the passage:

It will be a unique day [yom echad], without daytime [yom] or nighttime [layelah] -- a day known to the LORD. When evening ['ereb] comes, there will be light [or]. On that day [beyom] living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, in summer and in winter. 

This verse tells us that there is a day known only to God in which there will be no daylight and no night, and which will encompass the annual seasons. As such, the day in question is an extended time period. The significance of this passage is threefold. First, obviously, it gives us an example of yom being used with a numerical modifier to refer to a long period of time. Second, the word yom is used twice in close proximity, but has two different definitions: daylight and an indefinite period of time. This is precisely what I'm claiming is the case in the account of the first day of creation in Genesis 1:5, which reads

God called the light [or] "day" [yom], and the darkness he called "night" [layelah]. And there was evening ['ereb], and there was morning -- the first day [yom echad].

If Zechariah 14:7-8 uses yom to refer to daylight, and yom echad to refer to an undefined period of time, there's nothing unusual in claiming that Genesis 1:5 has these same two definitions as well. In fact, these passages are the only two instances of "yom echad" in the entire Old Testament. This strongly suggests that the first day of creation was not a calendar day.

This leads to my third point: Zechariah 14:7-8 also contains several of the other terms in Genesis 1:5, such as or (light), layelah (night), and 'ereb (evening). That makes it the closest semantic parallel to Genesis 1:5 in the Bible. In order to defend the calendar-day interpretation, one would have to say that all of these parallels -- the same words, as well as yom echad referring to a long time period in close proximity to yom without modification referring to daylight -- are irrelevant. I'm afraid I don't find that position to be credible.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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British Authorities have Decided that Selectively Aborting Girls is not a Crime

In China in 2011, there are 118 male births for every 100 female births. That’s pretty typical for the last few years and is the highest ratio of baby boys to baby girls in the world. As far as we can tell, the natural rate is a preponderance of 105 boys born for every 100 girls. It is very hard to escape the conclusion that there is a surfeit of males in the most populous country in the world. As Steven Pinker noted in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the civilising effect of women on young men is one of the most important ways that male aggression can be curtailed. In other words, too many guys are good for nobody. No one seriously doubts that the mismatch between the sexes is caused by selective abortion, and that this is exacerbated by the one-child policy of China.

On the controversial question of abortion, I’ve always felt Bill Clinton put it best when he said that it should be “safe, legal and rare”. But there should be no controversy about the equality of men and women. Both the sexes have exactly the same right to life. To abort a foetus just because it is female is a fundamental offence against human rights. In the UK, it is also illegal. All this makes the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (“CPS”) not to prosecute two doctors who agreed to perform sex-specific abortions bewildering.

The CPS and the police have spent fourteen months investigating allegations made in the Daily Telegraph. In two cases, the evidence is strong enough for a prosecution, but the CPS have said that this would not be in the public interest. Jenny Hopkins, the CPS lawyer in charge of the case, appears to believe that aborting a female foetus is not a criminal offence, merely a breach of professional ethics. For this reason, she wants to the General Medical Council (“GMC”) to deal with the case. However, the GMC have already said that they cannot take the place of the CPS.

In the oddest part of her statement, she states that the level of harm to the victim was relevant. In fact, she implies that there was no harm to anyone as the journalist who approached the doctors was never going through with the abortion. This shows a disturbing level of naivety on the part of Ms Hopkins. Does she imagine that these doctors were picked by the Daily Telegraph at random? Clearly, the likelihood that illegal selective abortions have taken place in the past cannot form part of the case against the doctors. However, Ms Hopkins admits that there is already sufficient evidence for a prosecution. Presumably she also sees nothing wrong with speeding as long as there is no intention to crash.

The case must be reviewed by an independent and accountable third party. That review must include in its terms of reference how the CPS could reach such an irrational decision in the first place. As for the CPS itself, it is clearly not fit for purpose. Many people were shocked when it refused to prosecute Simon Harwood for the killing of Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in April 2009. Even when they were forced to change that decision, the CPS failed to achieve a conviction. As recently as June this year it was revealed that a murderer had to be retried because the CPS prosecutor was “incompetent”.

It is high time for the CPS to be disbanded. Its role should be given back to local prosecutors who will be ultimately responsible to elected Crime Commissioners. Unlike the bureaucrats of the CPS, Crime Commissioners are accountable to their electorates. If one of them were crazy enough to decide it wasn’t worth prosecuting doctors for agreeing to abort a foetus just because it was female, it is unlikely the public would keep him or her in post.

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Tom Holland's account of the origins of Islam: "In the Shadow of the Sword"

Last year, I reviewed Islam: the Untold Story, a television show on the origins of Islam hosted by the author Tom Holland. I thought that Holland’s revisionist thesis didn’t quite convince, although the show was well worth watching. I’ve now gotten around to reading Holland’s book upon which he based the show: In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World.

To recap, the traditional story of Mohammad’s life and early Islam, as recounted in many books (not all of which are by Karen Armstrong), is usually presented as strictly factual. Even if we discount the angel Gabriel dictating the Koran, we supposedly know lots about Mohammad’s activities, trade, family and sayings. We know he was born in Mecca, fled to Medina and later returned to Mecca in triumph. Many people imagine that all this information is set out in the Koran itself. But, of course, it isn’t. The Koran is nothing like the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. It contains almost no history or biography. Almost all the facts about Mohammad’s life come from biographies written a couple of hundred years later. Given that Mark’s Gospel was written only 40 years after Jesus’ death and historians have not been able to agree on how much of it is factual, it is odd that there isn’t more scepticism about the activities of Mohammad. When we actually subject the sources to criticism, we find we know almost nothing about him or what he said.

Holland sets out all this background in an exhilarating first chapter. In fact, like a Bond film with a fantastic pre-credits sequence, the rest of In the Shadow of the Sword never quite hits these heights again. That’s not to say the rest of the book isn’t a good read. The last couple of chapters are also excellent. It’s just there does seem to be a lot of padding in between.

The need for padding isn’t Holland’s fault. His aim is to explain the rise of Islam in the context of the clash of the Roman and Persian empires during Late Antiquity. He doesn’t use the later Islamic sources on Mohammad’s life at all: this is history based on contemporary and third-party sources, just like it ought to be. But since Holland is writing for laypeople, he has to present a vast amount of background material in order for his story to make sense. It’s a sad reflection on British education (and the decline of western civilisation in general) that Holland cannot assume his readers will have already read Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in its entirety. He can’t even assume that they’ve read John Julius Norwich’s History of Byzantium. Hence the padding.

Still, there is lots of interesting stuff here. Holland has constructed his narrative with great skill to ensure that we absorb the points that he will bring up again later when he covers the rise of Islam. Thus, we learn about the rabbinical schools of Sura and Pumpedita; the origin of the Zoroastrian scriptures; and the Arab mercenaries of the Caesars and Sassanids. Only then does Holland serve up the main course on how Islam came to be.

The strange thing is that the television show seemed a lot more radical than the book does. Holland’s account of Islam’s rise is revisionist only in the sense that it reads like ordinary history. There’s nothing flaky here. Mohammad existed and he wrote the Koran pretty much as we have it today. He based himself at Medina and won lots of Arabs over to his cause. Then they poured out of Arabia, conquered the Persian Empire and almost destroyed the Byzantines as well. That’s not to say Holland’s account of the formation of Islamic orthodoxy in the ninth century isn’t fascinating stuff. The tensions between the Caliphs and the conquered Zoroastrians, both of whom tried to construct a model of Islam to suit themselves, are beautifully explicated. And if all this sounds like the battles over Trinitarianism in the fourth century, that’s a parallel that Holland is keen to bring out.

Holland’s most striking scepticism is about the location of Mecca. He presents a good deal of circumstantial evidence that Mecca was chosen as the central shrine of Islam by the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik in the 690s. This location, we’re told, was well to the south of the House of God identified in the Koran. In other words, Mohammad didn’t come from Mecca and had probably never even heard of the place. The trouble with this thesis is that Holland makes it quite clear that everyone knew perfectly well where the House of God originally was. He doesn’t provide a particularly compelling reason why Abd al-Malik moved it south or any slam-dunk evidence that it was moved at all.

Overall, In the Shadow of the Sword is a book that anyone interested in the origins of Islam must read. It’s enjoyable and well written (although Holland’s rather arch style of prose can be a little tiresome at times). That it is also an outsider’s perspective on a complex subject is one of its strengths as well as a disadvantage. It is a shame there is very little else, outside the specialist academic literature and Islamic apologetics, that we can turn to for an alternative perspective.

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Richard Dawkins was Wrong About the History of Islamic Science Too

The reaction to Richard Dawkins’s recent tweet about Islam and science has been unswervingly negative. There’s a good reason for that. Lumping Muslims into an amorphous mob of scientific illiterates may not strictly be “racist”, but it is deeply insensitive. On his blog, Dawkins suggests that even Abdus Salam should not be considered a Muslim Nobel laureate. Salam shared the Prize in 1979 with Steven Weinberg for his work on the weak nuclear force. However, he was a member of the Ammadiyya sect in his native Pakistan, which the Sunni majority consider non-orthodox. To say that this made Salam any less of a Muslim is just doing the fundamentalists’ work for them. Certainly, he was a most devout man who worked hard to improve scientific education in the developing world.

The case of Salam makes a mockery of Dawkins’s efforts to group all Muslims together. And if they happen to have won the Nobel Prize for physics, he doesn’t seem to count them as Muslims at all. But the second half of his infamous tweet is also based on ignorance: “They did great things in the Middle Ages, though” says Dawkins. This seems to be a reference to the popular narrative of a scientific flowering under early Islam that was later subsumed under a wave of obscurantism.

Dawkins’s vision of a lost Islamic Golden Age sounds similar to the widely-believed trope that Christianity extinguished ancient Greek science by closing the schools in Athens and burning down the Great Library of Alexandria. In fact, when they closed in 529AD, the neo-Platonic mysticism taught in the Athenian schools in no way resembled science. As for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, it never happened. Even the attempt by Edward Gibbon to pin the loss of the subsidiary Serapeum library on Christians was based on a misreading of the sources.

Likewise, Islamic science wasn’t snuffed out by the fundamentalist teaching of Al-Ghazali (d. 1111). The astronomical work of Nasir al-Tusi (d. 1274) and Idn al-Shatir (d. 1375) alone refutes that theory. The mathematical models of both these scholars were used, unacknowledged, by Nicolas Copernicus (d. 1543) in his Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. Rather, history turns out to be a lot more complicated than some great battle between science and religion.

As George Saliba notes in his Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, the question of why modern science didn’t arise in the Muslim world is the wrong one to ask. It didn’t arise in all sorts of advanced civilisations including China or Japan; ancient Greece and Rome; or Sassanid Persia and its great antagonist Byzantium. Instead, we should be wondering why a recognisably modern science had arisen in the West by the end of the nineteenth century. That this didn’t happen elsewhere isn’t because of the deficiencies of other societies. It’s just that there was a unique conjunction of historical contingencies in one place and time. Exactly what those contingencies were remains a matter of much debate.

As for the Abbasid Caliphate, whatever the nature of the science being practiced therein, it wasn’t modern. Islamic apologists don’t help themselves by anachronistically searching for the roots of experimental science in ninth-century Baghdad. They won’t find them. What a careful study of this period reveals is the sheer variety of theological and philosophical belief among Christians, Jews and even pagans, as well as Muslims.

All this diversity could be politically unwelcome. When, in 833AD, the Caliph al-Mamun launched the Mihna, a persecution of Muslims who believed the Koran to be eternal and uncreated, he wasn’t acting in the name of reason. His campaign is sometimes called the Rational Inquisition: a double-anachronism. Inquisition is a particular legal system developed by jurists in thirteenth- century Italy and still forms the core of the criminal law in continental Europe today. And the Caliphs were no rationalists. They took their status as the guardians of the Prophet’s legacy very seriously indeed. Al-Mamun, like the Roman Emperor Constantine at Nicea, simply wanted to impose some sort of uniformity on the state religion. Herding Christians into agreement was hard enough, but early Islam had no detailed body of doctrine and certainly no central magisterium to tell people what to believe. Al-Mamun’s campaign was an inevitable failure and Muslims have resisted centralised doctrinal authority ever since.

The fascinating mathematics and natural philosophy of this period probably owes much to the heterodox nature of the society in which it arose. It might also have been the reason that no doctrine ever reached critical mass so that it could dominate the others. Either way, Richard Dawkins’s vision of an undifferentiated mass of medieval Muslims achieving great things is fantasy. The contribution made by Muslim scholars to the body of knowledge that makes up science today is of a fairly typical volume for a major civilisation. In any case, the image of a golden age followed by a fall from grace is not helpful or accurate. The history of Islam deserves better.

Originally published at Huffington Post

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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