Can reason survive naturalism?

Last updated on: November 4, 2018 at 3:19 pm by Dan Peterson

Can reason survive naturalism? 2018-11-04T15:19:25-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The first court at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where C. S. Lewis finished his teaching career
(Wikimedia Commons)

Yawn. More notes from another incomplete manuscript. I wrote this up several years ago. Eventually, in sha’a Allah, it will be incorporated (probably in substantially modified form) into a more finished text and submitted for publication:

It is not obvious that reason as reason can survive on a naturalistic view of the universe. Let us suppose, for example, that the universe did indeed commence with the Big Bang—as, to this point, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it did—and that various kinds of material substance were produced by that inconceivable explosion. These material substances fly away from each other according to the laws of physics, but for no purpose. Just as rocks fall down a mountainside in an avalanche according to the law of gravity—neither stopping because of a desire to avoid hitting and killing people in their path nor speeding up to swerving to hit them—so do the material products of the Big Bang hurtle on their way, blindly and unconsciously. Somehow, though, in the naturalistic world view, these material particles can organize themselves into complicated systems that we call “living,” systems or organisms that can work together to further their own individual survival and that of their class or “species.”

The human eye, for example, has, through vast eons of random evolutionary change, come together in such a way that it permits individual human organisms to see. But the particles of which the eye is composed are, in the naturalistic or mechanistic view, just as mechanistically determined as are the particles of a rock hurtling down a mountainside during an avalanche. Therefore, if what we call “drawing an inference” is, fundamentally, a matter merely of material particles in action, it, too, is mechanistic, and akin to the particles of that tumbling rock.

Perhaps our brains are structured in such a way that the activity that we call “rational inference” will be performed, and that this capacity contributes to our survival individually and collectively. But the description of this activity as a rational inference is not the description of this activity on the most basic level of analysis. The most basic level of analysis is that of physics, which makes no reference to purposes or logic whatsoever. At that point we’ve broken things down as far as possible, and we have reached the “basic stuff” of the universe.[1]

The brain is a material object in essentially the same way the heart is. One might say that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood throughout the body. But, of course, the heart itself doesn’t really have a “purpose” in the same way we say of a mountain climber who is systematically working his way up the face of a cliff that his purpose is to reach the summit of the mountain. The purpose or function of the heart is simply a byproduct of evolution. So, too, for the brain. Just as “pumping” doesn’t have a purpose in the sense that the heart knows what it is doing, “meaning” and “reasoning” seem to be (on a naturalistic view) physical processes that are, in a very important and fundamental way, simply evolutionary byproducts. In the final analysis, a naturalistic explanation for “meaning” and “reasoning” cannot be essentially different from the naturalistic explanation given for the pumping of the heart. It must be mechanical, and its apparent purposes must, in the end, be explained in terms of non-purposive processes.

Philosopher Victor Reppert makes the point clearly:

Any genuinely naturalistic position requires that all instances of explanation in terms of reasons be further explained in terms of a nonpurposive substratum. For if some purposive or intentional explanation can be given and no further analysis can be given in non-purposive and nonrational terms, then reason must be viewed as a fundamental cause in the universe, and this strikes me as a huge concession to positions such as theism, idealism and pantheism, which maintain that reasons are fundamental to the universe.[2]

[1] Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 48.

[2] Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, 51.

It’s been long enough since I typed the words above that I can’t recall how closely, or whether, they’re paraphrased from whatever I was reading at the time. Fortunately, I have some dedicated critics out there who plainly have lots of disposable time and who have given themselves over to me as unpaid research assistants, and they’ll be delighted should they find the paraphrase (if it is a paraphrase) too close. They’ll make an indignant fuss on their message board, and that will alert me to the need to rewrite what I’ve shared above before it goes into the final pre-publication manuscript. I thank them in advance! If they’re willing — and they certainly seem to be — I’ll probably use them for this purpose in the future, as well.

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