How can a statement that doesn’t mention Jesus directly be explicit?
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Frequently. Also whether a deity would leave deliberate gaps in senses and thought processes.
On the rare occasion I’m answered, its usually just some variation on ‘why wouldn’t they’ or ‘they just would’.
I recall Lewis in that book distinguishing between naturalism and supernaturalism (so not sure that “non-physical” is strictly the best description, as Lewis never ruled out physical processes such as evolution being the means by which God created humanity)… the latter he essentially identifies with monotheism. If we were the intentional design of God, our very bodies and brains purposed and intended by a rational agent to function so as to facilitate rational thought, then one can see how this may well provide a more solid basis for trusting our thoughts to actually be rational than the alternative - that non-rational causes happened upon a process to create rational thought… and even if it did, can we trust it?
that said, here would be my own critique, or at least qualification of Lewis at this point… humans can undoubtedly indeed act irrationally and hold irrational beliefs, so does this automatically mean that any supernatual creator failed when attempting to create rational beings? Not a fatal challenge, as Lewis like me would appeal to the fall of man to explain said brokenness. But to me, at least, this means that the two categories are not as categorically different or distinct as would be needed to try to make this a particularly decisive point. However a creator may have created us, the end result doesn’t seem categorically different than would hypothetically be possible under the naturalistic scenario – that is, in both cases you end up with beings with faulty or fallible rationality, who ought not always trust what their rational minds tell them.
All that said, the way Lewis actually presents his argument philosophically, especially under the concept of causes, is probably stronger than I just presented it. his core point, if I recall correctly, is that if our thoughts are explained completely by naturalistic forces, then one should not trust them, and he has a point… If we could determine somehow that something someone is telling us is literally caused 100% by a certain medicine, hallucinogen, or side effect or medical condition, for instance, then we would not trust it to be true except by some random chance. and thus his basic point is that naturalism, by definition, entails that every last one of our thoughts is 100% caused by a long string of non-rational causes, which would not be the case were our minds the end result of supernatural, rational agency.
He addressed the topic in passing in an article, What are we to Make of Jesus Christ, compiled in God in the Dock… I feel like he said more elsewhere but Id have to search for that.
One attempt consists in saying that the Man did not really say these things, but that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, they belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God - that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.
In my own experience there are plenty such people. when i ask the proverbial man on the street i often get such replies, from people who have a vague respect for Jesus as a religious guru who taught people to love each other, not unlike Buddha or Confucius, but who just don’t see (or aeen’t even awareof) the incongruity between their basic respect for his ethical teachings and the striking nature of his truly extraordinary claims. I mean, this is essentially the entire underlying premise of Jesus Christ, Superstar. And sure, lunatic is a rhetorical term, though as i discussed above it seems fitting, as this is the kind of thing that sane people don’t make reasonable mistakes about. I’d be curious of any reasonable alternative… what kind of sane person goes around saying that he is the only son of the blessed God, who will be seated on a heavenly throne and will return from the clouds of heaven with glory at the end of time to judge the eternal destiny of all people?
To get back to the main topic, what exactly impresses you about this argument?
I find the Argument from Reason faulty on two grounds.
Firstly it is framed as an epistemological argument - and it simply doesn’t work as one.
For epistemology we want to make as few and as modest assumptions as we can. Assuming that our reason - properly employed - is about as effective as it seems to be is a pragmatic necessity. Going on to assume more is simply unjustified. It may be reassuring to assume that a loving God created you and gave you the ability to reason reliably but rationally it assumes too much to be a good epistemological foundation.
This answer is simply wrong. Evolution is not used to “vouch for reasoning” - indeed any attempt to do so will fail on the same grounds.
The question is not whether evolution can justify our - cautious - trust in reason, the question is whether it is compatible with it. This puts a heavier burden on proponents of the argument - but trying to evade that burden with faulty arguments is not a rational answer.
The second serious error is that it seems to beg the question.
One common physicalist view of the mind is that there are two levels of description of mental events. One is at the level of the mind, the second at the level of the physical brain. Now obviously we want the processes at the level of the mind to be rational. Assuming that this cannot be the case if the mind is based on the operation of brain function, then, assumes that this view must be false.
Who argues that the conclusions from our thinking
are absolutely reliable? My brain sure isn’t.
But it has got me out of some difficulties.
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“The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” is the old title, the new one is “The Cardinal Difficulty of the Naturalist”. I tracked it down, and have attempted to skim it – but found the writing style to be very verbose and circuitous. This is where I think his argument goes badly off the rails.
It is agreed on all hands that reason, and even sentience, and life itself are late comers in Nature. If there is nothing but Nature, therefore, reason must have come into existence by a historical process. And of course, for the Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behaviour that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood. The type of mental behaviour we now call rational thinking or inference must therefore have been ‘evolved’ by natural selection, by the gradual weeding out of types less fitted to survive.
Once, then, our thoughts were not rational. That is, all our thoughts once were, as many of our thoughts still are, merely subjective events, not apprehensions of objective truth. Those which had a cause external to ourselves at all were (like our pains) responses to stimuli. Now natural selection could operate only by eliminating responses that were biologically hurtful and multiplying those which tended to survival. But it is not conceivable that any improvement of responses could ever turn them into acts of insight, or even remotely tend to do so. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and the truth known.
Here Lewis seems to be conflating rational thought with abstract thought. The former includes the search for novel solutions and, although not pervasive in nature, is not too uncommon nor that recent. Corvids, in particular, are known for their ability to solve problems, and examples of tool-use are widespread.
Abstract thought on the other hand is a much more recent innovation, and likely required the prior development of a relatively sophisticated system of language. The search for abstract “objective truth” is a more recent innovation still.
And even unaided human abstract thought is itself imperfect – a muddle of biases, imperfect rules-of-thumb, etc, etc. This is why humans needed to invent things like Formal Logic and the Scientific Method, as crutches to correct for these imperfections.
So what we have (and had, even in Lewis’ own time) is a series of bootstraps, leading to a reasonably good, if still imperfect, ability to discern abstract truths.
But this would appear unsatisfactory to Lewis, who seems to expect “Reason” (capitalised, in his exposition) to leap forth fully formed, like Athena from the brow of Zeus.
This essentialist view of cognition would appear archaic and muddled, even for Lewis’ own time.
I am unsurprised that this argument finds favor with Plantinga and Nagel, but am unable to give it a favorable assessment, myself.
I don’t see how that conclusion follows from its premises, which is proof that my reasoning is purely physical.
If we were the intentional design of God, our very bodies and brains purposed and intended by a rational agent to function so as to be blind to any flaws in that rational agent or in arguments against it’s behaviour, that would provide a far less solid basis for trusting our thoughts to be rational than the alternative that they arose from non-rational causes.
How do we know that God would intend us to function so as to facilitate rational thought?
Why can’t non-rational causes result in rationality? Do you distrust the result of a pocket calculator? And again, how do you know that a supernatural agency is both rational and intended to create rational beings? Adding the Fall into it just makes it worse, too.
It seems quite empty rhetoric. Isn’t Jesus supposed to be the same God that the Jews believe in? Is Lewis claiming that Christianity is polytheistic? Why is the invention horrible? He doesn’t say. Where does this impression he refers to come from? And were the New Testament writers all really Jews? How would we know, since we don’t actually know who any of the Gospel authors were?
I certainly don’t see any incongruity.
I’ll admit I haven’t read the bible in a while, but where does Jesus make all these claims?
The more rational alternative is to provisionally assume that our reason is about as reliable as it seems to be - and keep our eyes out for contrary evidence. That does not solve the problem but we can’t do any better so we’re stuck with it.
Assuming a scenario that justifies the assumption gets us nothing - at least in terms of epistemology - so it’s not rational to do so. Even if the scenario guarantees that our reason is as reliable as we think it is, the scenario cannot be more likely to be true than the bare assumption that our reason is that reliable. In fact it’s probably less likely to be true.