The Argument Clinic

[lee_merrill]

@John_Harshman

Nor, even if you somehow control your thoughts through some kind of magic, immaterial process, that’s not a reason to trust them.

Unless my reason has a source in a supernatural Reason, then there is cause to trust it.

@John_Harshman

@lee_merrill

Yes, the validity of reason is a postulate, but we can see that reason coming from non-reason is invalid, just as a paragraph typed by monkeys would be a curiosity, but not to be taken seriously.

I’m afraid we can’t see that. You merely assume what you want to prove, that reason can’t arise from physical processes, and the typing monkey analogy does not help.

So you would take seriously what monkeys produce? If so, why?

@John_Harshman

@lee_merrill

I’m not saying our reasoning is perfect, but it does need to come from a perfect Reason in order to be fundamentally trustworthy.

Why?

Because a faulty source would seem to produce only a faulty outcome.

@John_Harshman

@lee_merrill

Because unreasoning processes have no interest in giving us a clear perception of reality.

How do you know God has such an interest? And can we not establish that our perception of reality isn’t all that clear? Consider the analogy of your visual system, which uses all sorts of heuristics and shortcuts that render it vulnerable to optical illusions. That’s just the sort of thing we might expect in an evolved system, and we see analogous failures in human reasoning.

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31). And I think you just proved my point, that unreasoning processes have no interest in giving us a clear perception of reality.