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C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason
Who ought to hold claim to the more dangerous idea--Charles Darwin or C. S. Lewis? Daniel Dennett argued for Darwin in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Touchstone Books, 1996). In this book Victor Reppert champions C. S. Lewis. Darwinists attempt to use science to show that our world and its inhabitants can be fully explained as the product of a mindless, purposeless system of physics and chemistry. But Lewis claimed in his argument from reason that if such materialism or naturalism were true then scientific reasoning itself could not be trusted. Victor Reppert believes that Lewis's arguments have been too often dismissed. In C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea Reppert offers careful, able development of Lewis's thought and demonstrates that the basic thrust of Lewis's argument from reason can bear up under the weight of the most serious philosophical attacks. Charging dismissive critics, Christian and not, with ad hominem arguments, Reppert also revisits the debate and subsequent interaction between Lewis and the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. And addressing those who might be afflicted with philosophical snobbery, Reppert demonstrates that Lewis's powerful philosophical instincts perhaps ought to place him among those other thinkers who, by contemporary standards, were also amateurs: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke and Hume. But even more than this, Reppert's work exemplifies the truth that the greatness of Lewis's mind is best measured, not by his ability to do our thinking for us, but by his capacity to provide sound direction for taking our own thought further up and further in.
132 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 6, 2023
This is a good defense of C.S. Lewis’s argument from reason! That said, I wish Reppert spent more time addressing objections to the syllogisms he presents later in the book. If he would’ve spent more time addressing objections I would’ve given this book four stars. Still enjoyed the book!
February 26, 2018
This book is a very fine defense of C.S. Lewis's "argument from reason." The argument was central to Lewis's entire frame of mind, and Reppert provides a meticulous treatment of it. Also worthwhile is his treatment of the Anscombe/Lewis encounter, revolving around this particular argument. I give this book high praise despite his view, as expressed in a footnote, that in a debate with Theodore Drange I personally did not cover myself with glory.
August 12, 2016
The author of this book, Victor Reppert, is a Christian philosopher, and an expert on C. S. Lewis. That doesn't sound too promising for readers interested in secular philosophy, but this book is superb. First of all, it's brief (!) and beautifully written -- in a measured and conciliatory tone often lacking in today's atheist vs. theist (and theist vs. atheist) polemics. Most important, this book focuses on a core philosophical issue that haunts the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. The problem isn't confined to Christian philosophy, and has been noted, in various forms, by many prominent philosophers including Kant, Wittgenstein, Haldane, Searle, Haugeland and Jaegwon Kim.
So what is the "Argument from Reason" (AfR)? In short, it's a way to crash together two compelling yet conflicting world-views. The first is naturalism -- the view that the universe is a deterministic, physical process in which the movements of mindless atoms are dictated by the laws of nature. The second is reason, a process in which thinking humans derive propositions from other propositions based on the laws of logic.
Suppose, for example, that a mathematician is thinking rationally, and developing the logical consequences of a set of axioms. From a naturalistic perspective, nothing is happening here except a bunch of totally automatic chemical reactions in the man's head. Those chemical reactions (as chemical reactions) can't perceive propositions or the laws of logic. They follow their own necessity. This raises a doubt about whether the man's conclusions are being determined by their content (i.e., the ideal mathematical objects he is thinking about) or by the chemical processes in his brain. If we take naturalism seriously, it seems the chemical processes must be in the driver's seat. But that casts reason itself into doubt -- a major problem for a reason/science-based doctrine like naturalism. That's the AfR in a nutshell, and Reppert presents a number of variations on this basic theme.
But wait, you say: What about computers? Surely they show that naturalism and logic are compatible. After all, if a computer (a mindless physical process), can implement the laws of logic, then doesn't that prove that physical things can be sensitive to logical laws?
That's an excellent point, and it occurs to almost everybody who encounters the AfR. Indeed computers are at the very heart of the problem posed by the AfR. But simply pointing to the computer as a refutation to the AfR (as tempting as that is!) doesn't really work and that's another charm of this book: the deceptive depth of the AfR.
To illustrate, consider a couple of critics of Reppert. Steven Carr, a computer programmer, writes: "The point is that a purely material thing can manipulate very abstract non-material things (software classes, pointers, variables etc)." What an astounding statement! It harks back to Descartes' substance dualism, and the intractable problem that stumps everybody: how can material bodies and immaterial souls interact? In critiquing the AfR, Carr has essentially yielded to it, allowing that there is a quasi-Cartesian dualism between the material (hardware) and non-material (software). A view like that is actually very congenial to a Christian -- or, more generally, an anti-materialist -- worldview, and is exactly where C. S. Lewis and Reppert want to take you with the AfR.
Another critic, Richard Carrier, has written a lengthy refutation of Reppert, and the asymmetry with Reppert's book is itself quite telling. Reppert's book is slim and elegant, almost like philosophical haiku in places. Carrier's refutation is (aesthetically speaking) a bloated mass of spaghetti -- a hundred half-baked theories cobbled together as a "solution" to the riddle of man. It's intriguing that such a simple, clear argument requires so much complicated artillery to refute.
As part of his refutation, Carrier states that the laws of logic derive from the laws of physics; in fact "because the laws of physics are as they are, the laws of logical operations are as they are." However, thinking about it, it's clear that the laws of physics are themselves deeply dependent on mathematics. Without mathematics, physical laws couldn't even be expressed. And mathematics, in turn, is a structure whose foundation is the laws of logic. Therefore, if Carrier were to formally write a sort of "Principia Logica" (on the model of Principia Mathematica, Vol 1) reducing logic to physics, he would have to derive logical laws from physical laws, which are written in mathematics, which in turn is built up on a foundation of logical laws. The explanation is circular. The abstract, Platonic laws of logic are being smuggled in from the beginning. The plain fact is: logic and mathematics explain physics, not the other way around.
The deeper problem is that the laws of logic are normative. They set a standard that tells us the right way to reason, and it's possible to do reasoning wrong (as in a logical fallacy). Physical processes and the laws of nature, on the other hand, can never make a mistake or do something "wrong." That fact alone shows the difficulty of reconciling physics and logic.
Suppose we take a computer running a reasoning program (like PROLOG or a theorem prover), and enshrine it in the Bureau of Standards. We will declare the physical processes in the computer to literally be the laws of logic. Everything works great until the computer develops a glitch and begins to malfunction. Since we've declared the processes of the computer to actually be the laws of logic, everyone now has to start reasoning incorrectly because the standard is malfunctioning. But that's absurd. No physical process can be the laws of logic because at the level of physical process, nothing can be a "mistake" or a "malfunction."
Anyway, no need to get into these issues here. The point I want to emphasize is this: don't judge too quickly! First impressions can be deceiving. The AfR is very slippery, and not as easily refuted as it seems. Personally, I don't see much value in hasty attempts to refute the AfR. I think Lewis and Reppert have their finger on something very important here. I liken the AfR to a loose yarn; if we pull it with great delicacy and care, we may begin to unravel the "sweater" in which in the mind and body are woven together.
So what is the "Argument from Reason" (AfR)? In short, it's a way to crash together two compelling yet conflicting world-views. The first is naturalism -- the view that the universe is a deterministic, physical process in which the movements of mindless atoms are dictated by the laws of nature. The second is reason, a process in which thinking humans derive propositions from other propositions based on the laws of logic.
Suppose, for example, that a mathematician is thinking rationally, and developing the logical consequences of a set of axioms. From a naturalistic perspective, nothing is happening here except a bunch of totally automatic chemical reactions in the man's head. Those chemical reactions (as chemical reactions) can't perceive propositions or the laws of logic. They follow their own necessity. This raises a doubt about whether the man's conclusions are being determined by their content (i.e., the ideal mathematical objects he is thinking about) or by the chemical processes in his brain. If we take naturalism seriously, it seems the chemical processes must be in the driver's seat. But that casts reason itself into doubt -- a major problem for a reason/science-based doctrine like naturalism. That's the AfR in a nutshell, and Reppert presents a number of variations on this basic theme.
But wait, you say: What about computers? Surely they show that naturalism and logic are compatible. After all, if a computer (a mindless physical process), can implement the laws of logic, then doesn't that prove that physical things can be sensitive to logical laws?
That's an excellent point, and it occurs to almost everybody who encounters the AfR. Indeed computers are at the very heart of the problem posed by the AfR. But simply pointing to the computer as a refutation to the AfR (as tempting as that is!) doesn't really work and that's another charm of this book: the deceptive depth of the AfR.
To illustrate, consider a couple of critics of Reppert. Steven Carr, a computer programmer, writes: "The point is that a purely material thing can manipulate very abstract non-material things (software classes, pointers, variables etc)." What an astounding statement! It harks back to Descartes' substance dualism, and the intractable problem that stumps everybody: how can material bodies and immaterial souls interact? In critiquing the AfR, Carr has essentially yielded to it, allowing that there is a quasi-Cartesian dualism between the material (hardware) and non-material (software). A view like that is actually very congenial to a Christian -- or, more generally, an anti-materialist -- worldview, and is exactly where C. S. Lewis and Reppert want to take you with the AfR.
Another critic, Richard Carrier, has written a lengthy refutation of Reppert, and the asymmetry with Reppert's book is itself quite telling. Reppert's book is slim and elegant, almost like philosophical haiku in places. Carrier's refutation is (aesthetically speaking) a bloated mass of spaghetti -- a hundred half-baked theories cobbled together as a "solution" to the riddle of man. It's intriguing that such a simple, clear argument requires so much complicated artillery to refute.
As part of his refutation, Carrier states that the laws of logic derive from the laws of physics; in fact "because the laws of physics are as they are, the laws of logical operations are as they are." However, thinking about it, it's clear that the laws of physics are themselves deeply dependent on mathematics. Without mathematics, physical laws couldn't even be expressed. And mathematics, in turn, is a structure whose foundation is the laws of logic. Therefore, if Carrier were to formally write a sort of "Principia Logica" (on the model of Principia Mathematica, Vol 1) reducing logic to physics, he would have to derive logical laws from physical laws, which are written in mathematics, which in turn is built up on a foundation of logical laws. The explanation is circular. The abstract, Platonic laws of logic are being smuggled in from the beginning. The plain fact is: logic and mathematics explain physics, not the other way around.
The deeper problem is that the laws of logic are normative. They set a standard that tells us the right way to reason, and it's possible to do reasoning wrong (as in a logical fallacy). Physical processes and the laws of nature, on the other hand, can never make a mistake or do something "wrong." That fact alone shows the difficulty of reconciling physics and logic.
Suppose we take a computer running a reasoning program (like PROLOG or a theorem prover), and enshrine it in the Bureau of Standards. We will declare the physical processes in the computer to literally be the laws of logic. Everything works great until the computer develops a glitch and begins to malfunction. Since we've declared the processes of the computer to actually be the laws of logic, everyone now has to start reasoning incorrectly because the standard is malfunctioning. But that's absurd. No physical process can be the laws of logic because at the level of physical process, nothing can be a "mistake" or a "malfunction."
Anyway, no need to get into these issues here. The point I want to emphasize is this: don't judge too quickly! First impressions can be deceiving. The AfR is very slippery, and not as easily refuted as it seems. Personally, I don't see much value in hasty attempts to refute the AfR. I think Lewis and Reppert have their finger on something very important here. I liken the AfR to a loose yarn; if we pull it with great delicacy and care, we may begin to unravel the "sweater" in which in the mind and body are woven together.
December 9, 2008
C. S. Lewis’s famous debate with Elizabeth Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic club over the validity of his argument in Miracles for the self-defeating status of naturalism may or may not have produced much clarification of the issues, but it definitely produced a tendentious interpretation of Lewis’s career: that he was so mortified at being defeated that he gave up rational apologetics from then on. Never mind that many of the people who were present either thought Lewis had won or that the debate was a draw; never mind the fact that he revised the relevant chapter in a later edition of Miracles to meet Anscombe’s objections and published several subsequent essays on apologetics. Why let mere facts stand in the way of a good myth?
Victor Reppert first destroyed the “Anscombe Myth” in “The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19:2 (1989). It is good to see that discussion brought forward for a new generation of readers. If Reppert had done nothing else, he would have performed a valuable service here. It is to be hoped that more people will read his complete review of the evidence in the new book and that this particular bit of arrant nonsense will finally be put to rest. But Reppert’s goal is much broader: to bring Lewis’s argument for theism up to date and see how it fares after all these years. He concludes that the argument from reason is still a good one.
Reppert begins with his review of the Lewis-Anscombe debate and then moves on to a discussion of a healthy approach to apologetics, rejecting fideism (just believe) and “strong rationalism” (Christian truth is so evident that any rational person should accept it) in favor of “critical rationalism” (Christian apologists can show that Christianity is a reasonable option). I find myself wishing there were a middle position between his "strong rationalism" and "critical rationalism." He points out well the problems with strong rationalism of the Josh McDowell type. But . . . if Christianity is really true, the universe ought in the final analysis to reflect that truth. One doesn't want to be able to offer nothing more than one reasonable alternative among many.
I feel this problem at the end of the book, where I believe Reppert has earned the right to be at least a bit less tentative than he is. Naturalists really can't defend naturalism without cutting off the limb they are wanting to sit on . . . but Reppert is not willing to say that this is irrational? How self defeating must a position be before we are willing to say so?
Also, it doesn't seem to me possible to give a complete account of the issues surrounding apologetic method without dealing with 1 Cor. 2:14. It would seem that one would have to get past that verse somehow in order to see the amount of irrationality as being as evenly distributed between believers and non-believers as Reppert seems to imply. Or, to put it more accurately, I should say that irrationality may well be tragically fairly evenly distributed in fact, (I unfortunately think he is right about that), but there should be a difference in theory. Christians don't have to be as irrational as they are; non-Christians do. They have no choice but to be irrational at some point, because they have set themselves against the rational universe that God actually made. I think this is a pretty important distinction that I wish had come out more clearly.
When Reppert turns to the argument from reason itself, he does a good job of guiding us through the issues. The argument on p. 68 is especially fine. “If a materialist says that she believes in materialism because she perceives the reasons for believing it, then I take it she is committed to the existence of reasons,” and therefore has to explain how they can exist in a materialist universe. It is really the same argument that Socrates used at his defense: How can you believe in flute playing and not believe in flutes? How can you believe in divine effects and not believe in the gods? Reppert has updated it and applied it to the existence of reasons in a useful and persuasive manner. His refutation on pp. 100-101 of the notion that reason could have been produced by natural selection is also good. The “inadequacy objection,” which argues that non-scientific explanations do not explain, is one of the biggest hurdles the argument from reason has to face. Reppert’s question on p. 111 is an excellent response to it: “Is it more dangerous to the scientific enterprise to suggest that a comprehensive “scientific” account of cognition cannot be correct, or to suggest that truth should not be the goal of our rational deliberations?” That is a question that we need ask more insistently.
When I tried to update Lewis's argument in"Some Propositions for a Theistic Argument," Bulletin of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, 14:1 (1991): 70-81, I focused on the fact that a naturalist universe is by definition a deterministic universe. The laws of physics determine everything because the universe, being uncaused, exists a se and therefore by definition cannot be other than it is. It seems to me that this fact needs to be stressed, for it provides a simpler way of defeating Anscombe's objections. It really doesn't matter whether chains of reasoning caused by non-rational causes can happen to have been valid or not, unless we are free to choose between them on a non-deterministic basis. If nobody can help believing what he believes, whether it be rational or irrational, then nobody is in a position to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted truth claims or to urge his own truth claims with any moral force. Valid chains of reasoning might occur, but nobody--including the naturalist making truth claims for naturalism--would be in a position to benefit from them. Reppert implies all of this when he talks about the problem of knowing that one is rational, but it seems to me that his case would be strengthened by bringing it out more clearly.
Over all this is a very fine book, one of the few books on Lewis that actually contributes something useful to our knowledge of him and our understanding of the things he talked about. I hope it will have the success it deserves.
Donald T. Williams
Toccoa Falls College
April 7, 2013
An excellent read! Reppert simultaneously gives a critique of naturalism and a defense of dualism as well as theism. His critique of naturalism, to my mind, is devastating. His defense of dualism was equally genius and well thought out. The only thing he needs to improve on is why dualism requires theism. It seems his basic argument is that naturalism cannot give ontological grounding for reason and rationality. This implies that 1) the mind is independent from the brain, and 2) God, or something like God must be the foundation of reason. If reason cannot come from material then it seems obvious that dualism is true, because we obviously use reason. But its not quite clear to me that God would be necessary to be the ontological foundation of reason. I think Reppert has got a good line of reasoning here, he just needs to develop it further.
October 12, 2017
Victor Reppert wrote this book in 2003. My impression is that the title is primarily a marketing decision. It is intended to call to the prospective reader's mind the title of Daniel Dennett’s criticism of theism in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Dennett thought Darwinism was “dangerous” to theism because it suggests the possibility that material things can have purely natural, or material, origins.
Reppert also also invokes C.S. Lewis, to balance the philosophical firepower but also to suggest that the so-called “argument from reason” is dangerous to anti-theism (or “materialism,” or “naturalism”) in the same way. Reppert is suggesting that the very process of deliberating on the truth of naturalism and super-naturalism undermines the materialist position. Reppert draws out C.S. Lewis’s take on the subject from his (Lewis’s) book Miracles, in particular its revised form following Lewis’s famous debate on the subject with Elizabeth Anscombe.
It is often argued that the very fact of order in the universe implies the existence of an order-Giver. All of science presupposes the existence of this order. In fact, science would be impossible without it. Science assumes that there are constant and measurable forces acting upon physical things in predictable ways. The undeniable order of the universe has huge implications for the question whether or not God is. As C.S. Lewis wrote:
"Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator."
It has often been argued that Christianity provided the intellectual foundation for all of science, including its breakout in the early Enlightenment with Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and so on. Christianity provided this foundation because Christians envisioned a God of order, who created material reality in a state of order.
If there is no God, however, then all of reality consists of matter in motion. A person who believes there is no God is a materialist; a naturalist; an anti-theist or atheist; one who rejects metaphysics. This is the dominant view of reality in our culture, and the point of view people necessarily adopt when they shrug the shoulders and ask “who knows” when considering the proposition that God is.
If all of reality is natural reality, how does that vision of reality explain the obvious order of the universe? The short answer, for theists, is that it doesn’t. Materialism depends on the existence of that order, but cannot explain it.
Now with that background, we can go a step forward with these ideas, and consider the “argument from reason,” as it is stated in its usual philosophical formulation, or, as Reppert (and I) prefer, “the argument from rational inference.”
The basic idea is this. We develop our ideas about the truth of materialism, or theism, or anything else, for that matter, by making logical inferences. One observation leads us to another logically. We say it’s “logical” because we say one inference causes the next. That causation is at the heart of the order of the universe. Our reasons for our beliefs – and our reasons for everything – are based on a sometimes complex series of inferences, from observations to ideas to ideas. That progression is not random.
The argument from rational inferences serves not just to support theism but to negate materialism. Materialism is self-defeating because it requires refutation of the very argument it attempts to advance.
It goes like this. First, a belief is not rationally inferred if it can be fully explained by non-rational causes. A non-rational cause includes any cause that is not the product of thought. So B can follow A naturally and in accordance with the natural order of the universe, but not be “rational” because it is not the product of rational thought.
If materialism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained by nonrational causes. It rests on the determinist principle that one’s thoughts are the products of a seemingly infinite (but actually finite) number of movements of matter according to natural forces, from the largest galaxy to the smallest nearly imperceptible spark in the brain. One’s thought at any moment is the result of physical causes and effects, only.
If materialism is true, then no belief is arrived at from causes other than physical ones. They are determined mechanistically; not rationally inferred. A person’s beliefs are not formed by a series of rational inferences, but instead by the particular combination of material particles in motion to the moment the belief is formed. That person’s belief is formed purely by mechanistic processes, not by rational inferences.
On one level this just sounds like a reiteration of the notion that the appearance of logic and order within natural reality implies an ordering Entity. But it also applies to our individual consciousness. The existence of rational inferences experienced subjectively would appear to be among the most basic of our beliefs about reality. To deny them runs counter to our very sense of subjective directedness – the “aboutness” of our consciousness, its intentionality. How can we exist as meat machines and organic calculators, when we have this deep intuition that inside our minds we make rational inferences from observation to idea, or idea to idea? We employ rational inferences even to discern the truth or falsity of the proposition that rational inferences explain reality.
The materialist explanation of reality rejects that proposition, and therefore must itself be rejected. The proposition (that people explain reality through a series of rational inferences) is supported not only by subjective conscious experience, but by the logical connections extant in the physical world around us. Those logical connections are the same kind of logical connections we make internally; rationally. The conclusion is that there is a rational, thought-connection between events in the physical world. We live inside the mind of God.
“Fideism” is the idea that our belief is based on faith alone; that science, philosophy, and rational thought in general are irrelevant to faith. People rightly scoff at the fideist’s justification for belief. Faith should be based on natural revelation, including but not limited to supernatural revelation. These are matters which present to our reason.
And yet, the usual method of persuasion to materialism is that we’re to accept on faith that materialism explains or will explain everything, and so if there’s anything not yet explained materialistically, we’re to nonetheless remain faithful to materialism. This is “promissory materialism;” a priori commitment to the anti-metaphysical proposition. This might be called scientific fideism. It must be rejected for the same reason as Christian fideism.
So what’s so dangerous about the argument from rational inferences? It jeopardizes the coherence of the naturalist worldview. Whether you’re a committed materialist, or just a materialist by default, the very reasoning by which we arrive at truth calls that naturalistic or materialistic worldview into question. According to C.S. Lewis and Reppert:
"If we explain reason naturalistically we shall end up explaining it away, that is, explaining it in such a way that it cannot serve as a foundation for the natural sciences that are themselves the foundation for naturalism."
Reppert also also invokes C.S. Lewis, to balance the philosophical firepower but also to suggest that the so-called “argument from reason” is dangerous to anti-theism (or “materialism,” or “naturalism”) in the same way. Reppert is suggesting that the very process of deliberating on the truth of naturalism and super-naturalism undermines the materialist position. Reppert draws out C.S. Lewis’s take on the subject from his (Lewis’s) book Miracles, in particular its revised form following Lewis’s famous debate on the subject with Elizabeth Anscombe.
It is often argued that the very fact of order in the universe implies the existence of an order-Giver. All of science presupposes the existence of this order. In fact, science would be impossible without it. Science assumes that there are constant and measurable forces acting upon physical things in predictable ways. The undeniable order of the universe has huge implications for the question whether or not God is. As C.S. Lewis wrote:
"Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator."
It has often been argued that Christianity provided the intellectual foundation for all of science, including its breakout in the early Enlightenment with Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and so on. Christianity provided this foundation because Christians envisioned a God of order, who created material reality in a state of order.
If there is no God, however, then all of reality consists of matter in motion. A person who believes there is no God is a materialist; a naturalist; an anti-theist or atheist; one who rejects metaphysics. This is the dominant view of reality in our culture, and the point of view people necessarily adopt when they shrug the shoulders and ask “who knows” when considering the proposition that God is.
If all of reality is natural reality, how does that vision of reality explain the obvious order of the universe? The short answer, for theists, is that it doesn’t. Materialism depends on the existence of that order, but cannot explain it.
Now with that background, we can go a step forward with these ideas, and consider the “argument from reason,” as it is stated in its usual philosophical formulation, or, as Reppert (and I) prefer, “the argument from rational inference.”
The basic idea is this. We develop our ideas about the truth of materialism, or theism, or anything else, for that matter, by making logical inferences. One observation leads us to another logically. We say it’s “logical” because we say one inference causes the next. That causation is at the heart of the order of the universe. Our reasons for our beliefs – and our reasons for everything – are based on a sometimes complex series of inferences, from observations to ideas to ideas. That progression is not random.
The argument from rational inferences serves not just to support theism but to negate materialism. Materialism is self-defeating because it requires refutation of the very argument it attempts to advance.
It goes like this. First, a belief is not rationally inferred if it can be fully explained by non-rational causes. A non-rational cause includes any cause that is not the product of thought. So B can follow A naturally and in accordance with the natural order of the universe, but not be “rational” because it is not the product of rational thought.
If materialism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained by nonrational causes. It rests on the determinist principle that one’s thoughts are the products of a seemingly infinite (but actually finite) number of movements of matter according to natural forces, from the largest galaxy to the smallest nearly imperceptible spark in the brain. One’s thought at any moment is the result of physical causes and effects, only.
If materialism is true, then no belief is arrived at from causes other than physical ones. They are determined mechanistically; not rationally inferred. A person’s beliefs are not formed by a series of rational inferences, but instead by the particular combination of material particles in motion to the moment the belief is formed. That person’s belief is formed purely by mechanistic processes, not by rational inferences.
On one level this just sounds like a reiteration of the notion that the appearance of logic and order within natural reality implies an ordering Entity. But it also applies to our individual consciousness. The existence of rational inferences experienced subjectively would appear to be among the most basic of our beliefs about reality. To deny them runs counter to our very sense of subjective directedness – the “aboutness” of our consciousness, its intentionality. How can we exist as meat machines and organic calculators, when we have this deep intuition that inside our minds we make rational inferences from observation to idea, or idea to idea? We employ rational inferences even to discern the truth or falsity of the proposition that rational inferences explain reality.
The materialist explanation of reality rejects that proposition, and therefore must itself be rejected. The proposition (that people explain reality through a series of rational inferences) is supported not only by subjective conscious experience, but by the logical connections extant in the physical world around us. Those logical connections are the same kind of logical connections we make internally; rationally. The conclusion is that there is a rational, thought-connection between events in the physical world. We live inside the mind of God.
“Fideism” is the idea that our belief is based on faith alone; that science, philosophy, and rational thought in general are irrelevant to faith. People rightly scoff at the fideist’s justification for belief. Faith should be based on natural revelation, including but not limited to supernatural revelation. These are matters which present to our reason.
And yet, the usual method of persuasion to materialism is that we’re to accept on faith that materialism explains or will explain everything, and so if there’s anything not yet explained materialistically, we’re to nonetheless remain faithful to materialism. This is “promissory materialism;” a priori commitment to the anti-metaphysical proposition. This might be called scientific fideism. It must be rejected for the same reason as Christian fideism.
So what’s so dangerous about the argument from rational inferences? It jeopardizes the coherence of the naturalist worldview. Whether you’re a committed materialist, or just a materialist by default, the very reasoning by which we arrive at truth calls that naturalistic or materialistic worldview into question. According to C.S. Lewis and Reppert:
"If we explain reason naturalistically we shall end up explaining it away, that is, explaining it in such a way that it cannot serve as a foundation for the natural sciences that are themselves the foundation for naturalism."
Read
August 27, 2012The author Victor Reppert has spend a significant amount of time defending the argument from reasoning for the existence of God in various setting before this book was written (2003) and after this book was published as well. As the title reveal, the author is a fan of C.S. Lewis' particular formulation of the argument from reason, though the author wishes also to improve it and develop nuances. Although my theological and apologetics biases is Calvinistic and Presuppositional, I would have to say that the discerning and Scripturally grounded reader can profit from this work, though of course there will be disagreements (For the record, the author is neither Reformed or Presuppositional). There is something to be gained here especially with some of the parallels with the Presuppositionalist's Transcendental Argument in general and in particular as that form of argument is applied to the issue of Logic/reasoning. The first chapter of the book discusses about how some biographies of Lewis has been inaccurate about certain facts concerning Lewis' life and apologetics. This chapter alone was worth the time and money of reading this book! Very fascinating. The author also discuss about Lewis' argument from reason in the context of Lewis' challenger, Elizabeth Anscombe. The author notes Lewis' improvement of his argument as a result of this interaction and then the author goes on to provide some further improvements to the argument from reason against Naturalism and responses to some rebuttals. The following were quotes that I thought were beneficial, whether insights or illustration that would be useful for future conversation:
Four kinds of explanation: (1) naturalistic causal explanations [physical laws], (2) logical explanation [relationship between premises and conclusions], (3) Psychological explanation and (4) personal history explanations [how someone came to a conclusion over time].
“But if wind blown leaves were to spell out the premises and conclusion of an argument of the form modus ponens, would we continue to regard it as even an argument at all if we truly came to believe that the leaves got to be in that formation because they have randomly blown that way?” (61)
“Instead he [C.S. Lewis] argues that there are two types of connection, connection by cause and effect and connection by ground and consequent. Both types of connection use the word because, but these represent two different types of relationship. If we say, ‘Grandfather is ill because he ate lobster yesterday,’ we are giving a cause of Grandfather’s illness. If we are told, ‘Grandfather is ill because he hasn’t gotten up yet,’ we are not talking about the cause of his illness (which antedates his failure to rise early); what we are talking about is the evidence that Grandfather is ill. The former is an example of cause and effect, the latter an example of the ground and consequent relationship. While every event in nature must be related to one another by cause and effect, the premises in a rational inference must be related to the conclusion by the ground and consequent relationship” (63).
“If you were to meet a person, call him Steve, who could argue with great cogency for every position he held, you might on that account be inclined to consider him a very rational person. But suppose it turned out that on all disputed question Steve rolled dice to fix his position permanently and then used his reasoning abilities only to generate the best available arguments for those beliefs selected in the above-mentioned random method. I think that such a discovery would prompt you to withdraw from him the honorific title of ‘rational.’ Clearly the question of whether a person is rational cannot be answered in a manner that leaves entirely out of account the question of how his or her beliefs are produced and sustained” (64-65).
“Any adequate account of the relation between reason 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 exaplanations, considering the former to be noncausal explanations. And insofar as she is divorcing these types of explanations, here critiques of Lewis is faulty” (65).
“Rational inference involves the employment of the laws of logic. These laws are not physical laws. Indeed they pertain across possible worlds, including worlds with no physical objects whasoever. So while the laws of physics denote the powers and liabilities of things in the physical world, the laws of logic tell us what must be true in any universe whatsoever. Even in possible worlds with no law of gravity, the law of noncontradiction still holds. If one accepts the laws of logic, as one must if one claims to have rationally inferred one belief from another belief, then one must accept some nonphysical, nonspatial and nontemporal reality—at least something along the lines of the Platonic forms” (81).
“It is often supposed that the laws of logic are true by convention. But this is clearly not a coherent idea. Before conventions can be established, logic must already be supposed. If logical laws are human conventions, then presumably it is at least possible for us to have different conventions. But the laws of logic are conditions of intelligibility; without them we could not say anything. Part of what it means to say anything is to imply that the contradictory is false. Otherwise, language simply does not function in a declarative way. So the reality of logical laws cannot be denied without self-refutation, nor can their psychological relevance be denied without self-refutation” (82).
“If the chief enemy of a creature is a foot-long snake, perhaps some inner programming to attack everything a foot long would be more effective from the point of view of surval than the complicated ability to distinguish reptiles from mammals or amphibians” (101).
Four kinds of explanation: (1) naturalistic causal explanations [physical laws], (2) logical explanation [relationship between premises and conclusions], (3) Psychological explanation and (4) personal history explanations [how someone came to a conclusion over time].
“But if wind blown leaves were to spell out the premises and conclusion of an argument of the form modus ponens, would we continue to regard it as even an argument at all if we truly came to believe that the leaves got to be in that formation because they have randomly blown that way?” (61)
“Instead he [C.S. Lewis] argues that there are two types of connection, connection by cause and effect and connection by ground and consequent. Both types of connection use the word because, but these represent two different types of relationship. If we say, ‘Grandfather is ill because he ate lobster yesterday,’ we are giving a cause of Grandfather’s illness. If we are told, ‘Grandfather is ill because he hasn’t gotten up yet,’ we are not talking about the cause of his illness (which antedates his failure to rise early); what we are talking about is the evidence that Grandfather is ill. The former is an example of cause and effect, the latter an example of the ground and consequent relationship. While every event in nature must be related to one another by cause and effect, the premises in a rational inference must be related to the conclusion by the ground and consequent relationship” (63).
“If you were to meet a person, call him Steve, who could argue with great cogency for every position he held, you might on that account be inclined to consider him a very rational person. But suppose it turned out that on all disputed question Steve rolled dice to fix his position permanently and then used his reasoning abilities only to generate the best available arguments for those beliefs selected in the above-mentioned random method. I think that such a discovery would prompt you to withdraw from him the honorific title of ‘rational.’ Clearly the question of whether a person is rational cannot be answered in a manner that leaves entirely out of account the question of how his or her beliefs are produced and sustained” (64-65).
“Any adequate account of the relation between reason 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 exaplanations, considering the former to be noncausal explanations. And insofar as she is divorcing these types of explanations, here critiques of Lewis is faulty” (65).
“Rational inference involves the employment of the laws of logic. These laws are not physical laws. Indeed they pertain across possible worlds, including worlds with no physical objects whasoever. So while the laws of physics denote the powers and liabilities of things in the physical world, the laws of logic tell us what must be true in any universe whatsoever. Even in possible worlds with no law of gravity, the law of noncontradiction still holds. If one accepts the laws of logic, as one must if one claims to have rationally inferred one belief from another belief, then one must accept some nonphysical, nonspatial and nontemporal reality—at least something along the lines of the Platonic forms” (81).
“It is often supposed that the laws of logic are true by convention. But this is clearly not a coherent idea. Before conventions can be established, logic must already be supposed. If logical laws are human conventions, then presumably it is at least possible for us to have different conventions. But the laws of logic are conditions of intelligibility; without them we could not say anything. Part of what it means to say anything is to imply that the contradictory is false. Otherwise, language simply does not function in a declarative way. So the reality of logical laws cannot be denied without self-refutation, nor can their psychological relevance be denied without self-refutation” (82).
“If the chief enemy of a creature is a foot-long snake, perhaps some inner programming to attack everything a foot long would be more effective from the point of view of surval than the complicated ability to distinguish reptiles from mammals or amphibians” (101).
June 18, 2024
Prior to reading this book, I thought the argument from reason didn't work. Now I think decent odds that it does work. Theism better accounts for certain things that seem needed for competent reasoning including intentionality, our knowledge of logical laws, broad probabilistic understanding, and mental causation.
Want to read
November 12, 2021
February 12, 2019
I decided to return this week to one of my favorite authors, C. S. Lewis. But this time, I would be reading a book about Lewis rather than one straight from the horse's mouth. I appreciate a good explication, such as such-and-such's ingenious
Planet Narnia
, but this time I settled on Victor Repport's C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea. Sounds a little edgy, right?
And edgy it most certainly is! Repport takes on the very foundation of modern scientific materialism, the basis on which most everything you are taught from your first chemistry class in junior high to advanced physics and beyond in college. Repport outlines three "levels" of materialism, each making more specific assumptions:
Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all there is and that there are no supernatural beings. Whatever takes place in the universe takes place through natural processes and not as the result of supernatural causation.
Materialism maintains that the basic substances of the physical world are pieces of matter.
Physicalism maintains that those pieces of matter are properly understood by the discipline of physics.
Repport revives a seemingly discarded yet provocative idea proposed by Lewis in his book Miracles. I read Miracles about seven years ago shortly after returning from my LDS mission. It was a little more difficult to take in when compared with, say, Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce, because it gets into some pretty heady philosophical ground. But I got the gist of what he was saying, and I had never heard an argument like it. It goes like this, as summarized by Repport:
C. S. Lewis's dangerous idea...[is that] the world thus analyzed has to have scientists in it. And scientists draw their conclusions from evidence, and in so doing they engage in rational inference. But can rational inference itself [be so] accounted for..? Lewis's contention was that it could not, that if you tried to account for the activity of reasoning as a byproduct of a fundamentally nonpurposive system, you end up describing something that cannot be genuinely called reasoning.
Chew on that one for a minute. If everything is just made up of random collisions of atoms without any real purpose, how can something as purposeful as rational thought ever arise? Repport further breaks up the dangerous idea into a syllogism to help see every point of the argument:
1. No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
2. If materialism is true, then all thoughts can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
3. Therefore, if materialism is true, then no thought is valid.
4. If no thought is valid, the thought "materialism is true" is not valid.
5. Therefore, if materialism is true, then the thought "materialism is true" is not valid.
6. A thesis whose truth entails the invalidity of the thought that it is true ought to be rejected, and it denial ought to be accepted.
7. Therefore, materialism ought to be rejected, and its denial ought to be accepted.
Now, I hadn't thought about this line of argument before. Perhaps others might try to discard it by citing Darwin, how something as complex as an eye or a human could emerge from the primordial slime. But the argument is on a different level: not necessarily the material, but the logical. Rational thought can't be broken down into constitutive parts, so how would it be built from the ground up?
Rapport talks about the difficulties of making theistic arguments in a philosophical setting, as most philosophical discussions today are made on atheistic assumptions. He includes a few criticisms in this regard that, as a theist myself, I definitely agree with. The first is the condescending attitude that is often employed when encountering theistic arguments:
Another obstacle to teh serious consideration of Lewis's arguments is just plain snobbery. I once presented a paper on the ex-change between Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe at a secular philosophy department where I was a visiting instructor. In that paper per I argued (as I shall argue later in this book) that Lewis's argument against naturalism could surmount the challenges that Anscombe posed for it. Most of the faculty there told me that I had not persuaded them that Lewis's argument was a good one, but I had shown that Lewis had adequate responses available to him to meet Anscombe's challenge. One older professor of known positivist tendencies told me that I had written a good paper on reasons and causes, but the main problem with it was that I had chosen a "patsy" (Lewis) to devote my energies to. Never mind that I had (apparently) successfully defended Lewis against Anscombe, he was still a patsy and not worthy of serious discussion. It is sometimes presupposed by those who are familiar with the technical side of a discipline like philosophy that no one who is not similarly a "professional" has anything serious to say. But of course "professionalism" ism" in philosophy is a rather recent development: the majority of those who have made significant contributions to philosophy over the past twenty-five centuries would not qualify as "professional" philosophers in the contemporary sense.
On a related note, there seems to be such a confidence in the underlying assumptions to science that it becomes its own kind of cult, what Rapport refers to as scientific fideism. He quotes Richard Lewontin:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material causes, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot not allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who believes in God can believe in anything. thing. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, the Miracles may happen.
Rapport is humble in his conclusions, acknowledging that this one seemingly nit-picky thing isn't going to be enough to topple materialism, nor is he trying to do that here. But it does give food for thought, and I would hope invite a similar stance of humility for materialists out there.
While I did appreciate some Lewis nostalgia, I didn't quite feel like I got my dose of Lewis. Rapport's book was good, but it just wasn't the same reading a secondary source. Granted, Rapport had some specific work he wanted to do fleshing out some of Lewis's ideas. But still. I may need to go back and re-read some classic Lewis sometime now.
And edgy it most certainly is! Repport takes on the very foundation of modern scientific materialism, the basis on which most everything you are taught from your first chemistry class in junior high to advanced physics and beyond in college. Repport outlines three "levels" of materialism, each making more specific assumptions:
Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all there is and that there are no supernatural beings. Whatever takes place in the universe takes place through natural processes and not as the result of supernatural causation.
Materialism maintains that the basic substances of the physical world are pieces of matter.
Physicalism maintains that those pieces of matter are properly understood by the discipline of physics.
Repport revives a seemingly discarded yet provocative idea proposed by Lewis in his book Miracles. I read Miracles about seven years ago shortly after returning from my LDS mission. It was a little more difficult to take in when compared with, say, Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce, because it gets into some pretty heady philosophical ground. But I got the gist of what he was saying, and I had never heard an argument like it. It goes like this, as summarized by Repport:
C. S. Lewis's dangerous idea...[is that] the world thus analyzed has to have scientists in it. And scientists draw their conclusions from evidence, and in so doing they engage in rational inference. But can rational inference itself [be so] accounted for..? Lewis's contention was that it could not, that if you tried to account for the activity of reasoning as a byproduct of a fundamentally nonpurposive system, you end up describing something that cannot be genuinely called reasoning.
Chew on that one for a minute. If everything is just made up of random collisions of atoms without any real purpose, how can something as purposeful as rational thought ever arise? Repport further breaks up the dangerous idea into a syllogism to help see every point of the argument:
1. No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
2. If materialism is true, then all thoughts can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
3. Therefore, if materialism is true, then no thought is valid.
4. If no thought is valid, the thought "materialism is true" is not valid.
5. Therefore, if materialism is true, then the thought "materialism is true" is not valid.
6. A thesis whose truth entails the invalidity of the thought that it is true ought to be rejected, and it denial ought to be accepted.
7. Therefore, materialism ought to be rejected, and its denial ought to be accepted.
Now, I hadn't thought about this line of argument before. Perhaps others might try to discard it by citing Darwin, how something as complex as an eye or a human could emerge from the primordial slime. But the argument is on a different level: not necessarily the material, but the logical. Rational thought can't be broken down into constitutive parts, so how would it be built from the ground up?
Rapport talks about the difficulties of making theistic arguments in a philosophical setting, as most philosophical discussions today are made on atheistic assumptions. He includes a few criticisms in this regard that, as a theist myself, I definitely agree with. The first is the condescending attitude that is often employed when encountering theistic arguments:
Another obstacle to teh serious consideration of Lewis's arguments is just plain snobbery. I once presented a paper on the ex-change between Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe at a secular philosophy department where I was a visiting instructor. In that paper per I argued (as I shall argue later in this book) that Lewis's argument against naturalism could surmount the challenges that Anscombe posed for it. Most of the faculty there told me that I had not persuaded them that Lewis's argument was a good one, but I had shown that Lewis had adequate responses available to him to meet Anscombe's challenge. One older professor of known positivist tendencies told me that I had written a good paper on reasons and causes, but the main problem with it was that I had chosen a "patsy" (Lewis) to devote my energies to. Never mind that I had (apparently) successfully defended Lewis against Anscombe, he was still a patsy and not worthy of serious discussion. It is sometimes presupposed by those who are familiar with the technical side of a discipline like philosophy that no one who is not similarly a "professional" has anything serious to say. But of course "professionalism" ism" in philosophy is a rather recent development: the majority of those who have made significant contributions to philosophy over the past twenty-five centuries would not qualify as "professional" philosophers in the contemporary sense.
On a related note, there seems to be such a confidence in the underlying assumptions to science that it becomes its own kind of cult, what Rapport refers to as scientific fideism. He quotes Richard Lewontin:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material causes, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot not allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who believes in God can believe in anything. thing. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, the Miracles may happen.
Rapport is humble in his conclusions, acknowledging that this one seemingly nit-picky thing isn't going to be enough to topple materialism, nor is he trying to do that here. But it does give food for thought, and I would hope invite a similar stance of humility for materialists out there.
While I did appreciate some Lewis nostalgia, I didn't quite feel like I got my dose of Lewis. Rapport's book was good, but it just wasn't the same reading a secondary source. Granted, Rapport had some specific work he wanted to do fleshing out some of Lewis's ideas. But still. I may need to go back and re-read some classic Lewis sometime now.
October 24, 2016
I took this book to explore my knowledge on the Argument from Reason. In fact, this book would be the best book to read about it. I have to say, it was difficult to understand a lot of the concepts but it intrigued my interest to read Wittgenstein and Anscombe.
One thing which struck was the different types of explanations given by Anscombe
1) Naturalistic causal explanation
2) Logical explanation
3) Psychological explanation
4) Personal history of explanation, where a person describes how he came to such and such beliefs
Anscombe explains that if a person has reasons, if they are good reasons and they are genuine, then his thought is rational.
A man might die from a heart attack, a naturalistic explanation would be because of less exercise, blockage in his heart value, meanwhile a person might also explain it as a cause of voodoo curse. This
piqued my interest in Wittgenstein.
Overall, I do think he defends the Argument from Reason, you might bump into Philosophy of Mind & Science.
One thing which struck was the different types of explanations given by Anscombe
1) Naturalistic causal explanation
2) Logical explanation
3) Psychological explanation
4) Personal history of explanation, where a person describes how he came to such and such beliefs
Anscombe explains that if a person has reasons, if they are good reasons and they are genuine, then his thought is rational.
A man might die from a heart attack, a naturalistic explanation would be because of less exercise, blockage in his heart value, meanwhile a person might also explain it as a cause of voodoo curse. This
piqued my interest in Wittgenstein.
Overall, I do think he defends the Argument from Reason, you might bump into Philosophy of Mind & Science.
June 17, 2008
Reppert takes Lewis's argument against naturalism and injects it with serious amounts of anabolic steroids. He walks you through the initial explication of the argument (with the added bonus of an analysis of the Lewis-Anscombe controversy), and then strengthens it, and then applies it to various aspects of our cognitive lives, and then argues for a dualism of the mind, and then takes on some objections. The argument, in a nutshell, is simply this: if we try to explain reason naturalistically, we shall end up explaining it away, viz., explaining it in such a way that it actually undercuts the positive epistemic status of beliefs, including, and most importantly for present purposes, the belief in naturalism itself. Much has happened since the publication of this monograph, and the argument can be strengthened, but this is a good initial kick in the pants to naturalism.
May 23, 2018
C.S. Lewis' argument from reason is unassailable. Reppert does an excellent job pushing it into the corners.I didn't know that Kant and Arthur Balfour advanced it earlier, but it will be known as Lewis' because of his masterful job presenting it in his book Miracles, one of his best.
May 8, 2022
Good Companion to Lewis's "Miracles"
This book does a good job dissecting Lewis's argument from reason, engaging with the famous "debate" Lewis had with Elizabeth Anscombe. This book will provide Christians who have also read "Miracles" with much to think about and discuss with skeptics. I would highly recommend that all Christians give this book to their skeptic friends and then discuss and talk through the points of the argument.
This book does a good job dissecting Lewis's argument from reason, engaging with the famous "debate" Lewis had with Elizabeth Anscombe. This book will provide Christians who have also read "Miracles" with much to think about and discuss with skeptics. I would highly recommend that all Christians give this book to their skeptic friends and then discuss and talk through the points of the argument.
May 4, 2019
Great little book that succinctly argues the value of the Lewis’ argument from reason. Also, a nice introduction to some material on philosophy of mind.
February 6, 2016
Victor Reppert does an admirable job of elaborating upon, elucidating, and defending Lewis' argument from reason (basically, the idea that naturalism is self-refuting because it is inconsistent with the validity of reasoning), which appeared in his book Miracles (one of my favorites of Lewis' work). The main force of the argument stems from the fact that materialists are committed to there being only non-purposive and non-rational forces at work in the universe, which work mechanistically and physicalistically; while reason is itself a rational, purposive, and teleological phenomena. As materialism leaves no room for reason, and gives no satisfactory explanation of how the rational could ever rise from the non-rational, it therefore undermines the very reason (flawed, apparently) which gave rise to it as an idea. The argument is actually several further argument as well; and it is more accurate to speak of the arguments from reason. But I will leave further exploration of this to Reppert's book.
Reppert explores the modern arena of theistic-materialistic debate, explores the types of beliefs one can have on the subject (or any controversial subject), the nature of the debate, and the history of the formulation of Lewis' argument. The philosophical work here seems exceedingly complete, despite the book's small length; space is given to almost every objection, as well as a reasonable answer. Most of the time the subject matter is not above the average reader, though the book does, as is only to be expected, sometimes get lost in philosophical technicalities. But this of course I did not mind: such things are mentally bracing. Reppert's final statement makes it clear that he is not arguing exclusively toward theism, only against materialism and naturalism: though he does say more than once that the argument from reason gives a strong occasion to accept theism. The ideas in this book are ones which every philosopher and every thinker should come to terms with, regardless of their views on science and religion.
Reppert explores the modern arena of theistic-materialistic debate, explores the types of beliefs one can have on the subject (or any controversial subject), the nature of the debate, and the history of the formulation of Lewis' argument. The philosophical work here seems exceedingly complete, despite the book's small length; space is given to almost every objection, as well as a reasonable answer. Most of the time the subject matter is not above the average reader, though the book does, as is only to be expected, sometimes get lost in philosophical technicalities. But this of course I did not mind: such things are mentally bracing. Reppert's final statement makes it clear that he is not arguing exclusively toward theism, only against materialism and naturalism: though he does say more than once that the argument from reason gives a strong occasion to accept theism. The ideas in this book are ones which every philosopher and every thinker should come to terms with, regardless of their views on science and religion.
April 25, 2009
I really like Elizabeth Anscombe's work, and this was a helpful bridge in understanding her as a counterpoint to Lewis
February 8, 2010
I read only chapter 2 "Assessing Apologetic Arguments".
January 3, 2011
Reading this book was as exhilarating as watching a Telmarine army being routed by Aslan's roar.
March 14, 2013
Um livro que, apesar de defeitos teológicos e apologéticos, mostra como o naturalismo e o ateísmo tornam o raciocínio injustificável.
January 15, 2014
I enjoyed the presentation of the arguments against CS Lewis's argument from reason and then the response. It was very helpful.
January 28, 2015
An expanded argument from reason based off C.S. Lewis' argument in "Miracles." Very enjoyable read.
June 4, 2015
Good stuff; a little tough at times, but very good nonetheless.
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