What do you think about the argument from reason for the existence of God, which is presented by C.S Lewis in one of his works. I’m an atheist and do not find this argument convincing, as for me it just points out to a gap in scientific knowledge, and I think in the future science may be able to develop an explanation for material rationality, but from a philosophical point of view, it does seem quite tricky. What do you think about it?
One absolutely central inconsistency ruins [the popular scientific philosophy]. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears… unless Reason is an absolute[,] all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.
Posted: February 1st 2011
Mike the Infidel www
It’s not an argument for the existence of God at all – it’s just an attempt to undermine reason. What Lewis fell for is the trap that is all too common in apologists: confusing our tentative acceptance of the things we’ve reasoned out for absolute certainty that our conclusions are correct. We know we can be wrong.
Basically, he’s arguing that a lack of absolute certainty means we can’t know anything. This ignores the reality of varying degrees of certainty. We can be reasonably sure that certain conclusions are accurate to an acceptable degree of certainty without saying “we know this is true for sure.”
I do so love when people attempt to use reason to undermine reason…
Posted: February 12th 2011
Paula Kirby www
Take a look at this news story. Now stop and think about all the things human reason had to have got absolutely spot-on for this story to have been possible.
Here are a few for starters. We had to have worked out – using our reason – exactly where, in all the vastness of our solar system, the comet was going to be at a very precise moment in time. To do that we had to have worked out the physical and gravitational forces at work on it, and thereby to have calculated its precise orbit. Then, we had to reason how to get our space probe to precisely the right spot at precisely the right time to be able to collect those dust samples. And then, we had to use our reason to guide the probe back to Earth in its new position relative to the sun (since some considerable time would have elapsed since the probe launched), which meant we had to use our reason to tell us where exactly that would be. And that’s just for starters. I haven’t even begun to list all the reasoning that went into the engineering that made such a probe possible in the first place.
If human reason were not reliable, the chances of this mission being successfully accomplished would have been, well, nil. The mission only worked because human reason working on observed facts really does give us an accurate and reliable picture of reality. So we can discount the claim that it does not.
Now, how could such a phenomenal – and demonstrably reliable – ability have come about? The same way as everything else about us, of course. Evolution by natural selection means that modifications which enhance our ability to survive get passed on down the generations more often than those which do not, until they become moreorless universal in the gene pool of a species. How could an ability to reason and draw reliable conclusions from that reasoning not enhance our ability to survive? More importantly, how could faulty, unreliable reason possibly enhance our ability to survive and therefore survive long enough to become a standard characteristic of our species? If our reasoning powers were fundamentally misleading, if they consistently gave us false readings and led us to false conclusions about the world around us, they would be actively harmful to our chances of our survival – because they would consistently lead us to take bad, often dangerous, decisions – and we would have died out as a species as a result.
So this is how we know a) that human reason is dependable, b) that it couldn’t have evolved if it had been anything less, and c) that therefore, as ever, there isn’t the slightest need to invoke a deity to account for it.
Posted: February 10th 2011
George Locke
Lewis relies on the premise that if reason is the “unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter” then it is unreliable. If this were true, the materialist’s position would be incoherent. Mind you that this would not prove the existence of God, only that reason doesn’t work without God or some other transcendent justification. You might want to prove God with this argument by assuming that reason does work, but that would be begging the question.
Regardless, there is no support for this hidden premise. It is unclear why a brain produced by mundane, natural processes could never think reasonably. This issue is taken up more fully in a related question.
Posted: February 10th 2011
SmartLX www
All is in ruins if Reason isn’t an absolute…only if you want an absolute answer. If you just want one that works, you’re fine. Carroll didn’t consider that his untrustworthy conclusion can also be based on the testimony of direct experience and precedent.
Inferences yield predictions, and those predictions can be tested. When predictions are well-reasoned, they are borne out by the results. When predictions are poorly reasoned and contradicted by the results, you can find out why and make better predictions next time. This process works, or thinking would be useless and there would be no civilisation.
We don’t know whether reason is absolutely reliable, and may never know. We can however declare it reliable enough to behave as if it is absolutely reliable, at least until it gives us all a nasty surprise. We have no good reason to rely on any god in the same way.
Posted: February 10th 2011