Jason Pratt on Lewis

This is by frequent commenter Jason Pratt, on what I am missing in Lewis's argument from reason.

....... C. S. Lewis' (most?) Dangerous Idea.......

When Professor Victor Reppert wrote his detailed analysis of variants of
the Argument from Reason (especially in connection to the work of C. S.
Lewis), a few years ago, I opined more-or-less steadily through various
drafts and into the finished copy (and beyond in occasional comments since
then), that despite his book's title (_C. S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea_, wryly
riffing on the title of Daniel Dennett's _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_) Victor
was downplaying the most "dangerous" application of Lewis' argument: the
application Lewis himself culminates his chapter with.

I recently mentioned this again in a private critique of some potential
encyclopedia entries; and while collating discussion on the theistic
Argument from Reason, Victor has publicly opened the debate here on his
second DangIdea site. (To which initial comments Victor will probably link
this letter for prior reference, below.)


The discussion between us, is on the value of the portion of Lewis' 3rd
chapter from the 2nd edition of _Miracles: A Preliminary Study_, which (for
quick reference sake) begins "'But,' it will be said, 'it is incontestable
that we do in fact reach truths by inferences.'", and which (for our
purposes) ends at roughly the place where Lewis writes, "On these terms the
Theist's position must be a chimera nearly as outrageous as the
Naturalist's." Victor has posted a bit more than half of this in his
initial remarks (opening the public debate). Of course, none of us should
be reading and analyzing this apart from the progression and development of
Lewis' argument up to the beginning of that climactic section; so for
reference sake I encourage readers unfamiliar with the work to please refer
(if a copy isn't handy) to the page Victor linked several days earlier,
containing a text of MaPS Chp 3 (2nd edition). This page can be found at

http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/Intro/csl3.html (That's CSL 3, not
CS thirteen, for readers with some kinds of fonting...)

As usual, I will caution that there is a prevalent tendency to conflate
between the category of atheism/theism and the category of
naturalism/supernaturalism. While I find Lewis was actually better about
avoiding category error switches on this topic than the average (especially
in MaPS 2nd ed), his presentation is still worded with this conflation in
view, and there are times when (in acceding to the popular use of the term
Naturalism) he verges hard on category error. Between this, and the fact
that most subsequent commentators are in the habit of conflating the
categories (not infrequently in convenience to whatever argument they're
trying to make), figuring out what Lewis was primarily attempting in this
chapter can become (even?) more difficult.


In opening his recent public comments on the topic, Victor contended, or
seemed to contend, that Lewis was disagreeing with Darwinians that
evolutionary development could lead to effective mental behaviors in
relation to true facts. Lewis does have something to say about the
difficulty of evolutionarily developed expectations being proposed as
leading to a power to recognize truths; and this can be found beginning at
the very top of page 30 (paginated according to the hyperlinked text
referenced above) down to roughly the first sentence completion at the top
of page 31 (with some commentary and explication afterward leading into the
portion I have identified as the climactic summary; this can be found
beginning at the bottom of page 32.)

However: if we go back to the beginning of the first full paragraph on page
28, down to the bottom of page 29, we will find Lewis nevertheless
_agreeing_ with the notion that evolutionary processes could plausibly
result in the development of effective mental reactions (the phrase
"responses to stimuli" is how Lewis puts it) which, in the consequent
accuracy of connecting behaviors to true facts of reality, Lewis admits,
"might serve us as well as reason or in some circumstances better."

I contend that in making this concession, Lewis is actually agreeing with
the sort of notion represented by Victor's quotation of Antony Flew; not
disagreeing with it. (Not so far as that quote itself goes anyway, aside
from whatever Flew does with the notion elsewhere.)

Victor finds the portion of Chp 3 which I call the climactic summary, to be
dissatisfactory as a way of ending-and-illustrating Lewis' disagreement
with (specifically) Darwinian claims of effective process development. I
agree that this portion would in fact be dissatisfactory as such an
ending-and-illustration; _if_ Lewis intended for it to be used that way.

I believe he did not intend for the climactic summary to be used that way.
He is not primarily aiming at critiquing this or that particular Darwinian
explanation for the rise of effective epistemic behavior. He isn't aiming
at various fish; but for Leviathan itself.

(In passing, let me add that I may have misread Victor originally to be
trying to say that one part of this climactic portion was Lewis presenting
"the Darwinian objection to his argument from reason", instead of pointing
to a different subsequent portion where this objection would be better
located instead, which Victor did go on to give after some interspersed
commentary. In retrospect, I expect that when Victor wrote "Here Lewis
presents the Darwinian objection..." he was thinking in terms of what he
would quote from Lewis _next_, after a commentary digression, instead of
what he _had just quoted_. If so, I readily retract an incidental criticism
I made in a preliminary comment, with apologies.)


My contention is that in MaPS chapter 3, Lewis is carefully building up to
a tactical deduction of atheism out of the pool of philosophical options.
Whether or not he succeeds or fails at this, _this_ is his "dangerous
idea". He is going for the heart; not against various fingers and toes or
even arms and legs. He intends this argument to be a deadly (if polite)
threat to atheism across the board, at the very root of any person's ground
for choosing to believe atheism or not.


In order to trace and demonstrate this most fully, I would (of course) be
required to analyze the progression of Lewis' argument point for point;
something that would require far more length from me than chapter 3 itself!
As a quick-n-dirty illustration, though, I can combine (a) Lewis' treatment
of the word "Naturalism" in chp 3, in topical connection with (b) his
treatment of the words 'rational' and 'non/not/sub-rational' (which
not-incidentally begin on page 28), in conjunction with (c) his original
title for the chapter ("The Self-Refutation of the Naturalist", or
"Self-Contradiction", my sources differ--either of which in itself ought to
be sufficient evidence for his original intention at least!); along with
(d) Lewis' removal of the term 'irrational' from his original 1st edition
of the chapter, substituting for it in the 2nd edition the _stronger_
negative terms mentioned at (b). (Terms insisted upon by Anscombe and,
ironically, Flew.)

Lewis did not gear down chapter 3, after his loss to Anscombe, his more
cautious title notwithstanding. He took Anscombe's critiques, incorporated
them, revised his argument, and _ramped up_ at least the apparent (I would
say actual) strength of his argument thereby.


Leaving aside even a fast summary of _how_ Lewis is getting there, his
final aim may (I believe) be accurately described thus: Lewis intends to
demonstrate that the claim of atheism sooner or later _requires_ the
atheist to have to do one or the other of two logically illegitimate
moves--justify that our justification abilities can be possibly accurate,
or justify that our mental behaviors can be possibly accurate even if we
don't (in fact) have justification abilities. Ultimately there is no other
option (once the topic turns to epistemology) under rigorous atheism. We
can see that non-rational causation frequently produces non-rational
effects, and atheism requires that our own apparently rational behaviors
must be ultimately produced and maintained by non-rational behaviors.

In order to fully appreciate the problem, rational behavior must be
discussed in context of intentional actions while avoiding various pitfalls
(e.g. the externalistic fallacy), in comparison to and distinction from
non-intentive purely automatic reactive behaviors.

At which point, two basic paths emerge: either true action capability (and
not merely the illusion thereof) is produced somehow by-and-only-by
reactions and counterreactions; or else only non-intentive reactions and
counterreactions exist. The latter directly calls into question any claims
we ourselves may make to personal cogency, but in either case it is readily
apparent from experience that usually non-rational causation only causes
non-rational effects. _Why then_ should we insist that our own real
reasoning is _not_ only knee-jerk reaction to stimulus? Or, alternately, if
our own ostensible reasoning is in fact only knee-jerk reaction to stimulus
_why then_ should we insist on being taken seriously?

The potential answers for 'why then' in either case, however, are
irrelevant, for in _any_ case they will require necessarily presuming what
they are hoping to defend.

Lewis doesn't present his argument in quite these terms and fashions, but I
find that this is the dichotomy he is trying to set up. If the proposition
of atheism necessarily requires that we end up having to justify that our
real-or-apparent justification abilities can in fact possibly be effective,
then dichomatic fallacies necessarily follow from proposing atheism.
Consequently, atheism should be removed from the list and not-atheism
(naturalistic or otherwise) should be believed instead. Formality aside,
not-atheism, of course, effectively equals theism.

Among other things, the argument recognizes that our effective reasoning
capability be a (if not _the_) necessary presumption for _any_ argument.
This means we cannot prove thereby that our reason exists; we can only
demonstrate and follow out what happens when we presume otherwise in a
self-reflexive fashion, observing along the way, not-incidentally, that
even to try to presume otherwise and operate on that presumption, we
essentially still must presume _not_-otherwise!

This is why Lewis writes (near the top of page 33), "If the value of our
reasoning is in doubt, you cannot try to establish it by reasoning. [...]
Reason is our starting point. There can be no question either of attacking
or defending it." Lewis' aim is to demonstrate that atheism necessarily
leads sooner or later to having to explain _why_ our justificational
ability (more specifically our own, _my own_--not some hypostatized
"humanity's") should be accepted as being possibly accurate. One way or
another, the atheist cannot get around this without begging the question.

(In passing, I will here note that the argument cannot be considered
finished at this point, for theism would have to be tested too for a
similar failure!--something Lewis, so far as I have ever been able to tell,
completely misses. Nor does Victor discuss it, so far as I recall.)


It will (and should) be noted that this is a soft deduction, even if it is
successful. In effect, by using Lewis' most dangerous argument (or a
refined variant of it), I am discovering that so long as I insist on taking
my own intellectual claims seriously, I ought to believe God exists, and I
ought not to believe that God doesn't exist. What I find I must necessarily
believe to be true about myself, for purposes of making _any_ argument, I
find I must doubt without any way to legitimately escape the doubt, so long
as I also propose atheism to be true.

The extent to which this may be considered to be a hard proof of God's
existence could be easily critiqued (and I expect rebutted). That it leads
deductively to a conclusion that I _should believe_ God exists, with the
action of that choice (to believe or not to believe) still to follow, is I
think less debatable--if the argument actually holds, of course.

Let me also say that this is only a barest rendering of the argument, and
that I do not even remotely expect it to be fleshed out sufficiently for
acceptance by an opponent yet. I can think of many topical considerations
still needing discussion in regard to the argument, myself. My main purpose
here is not to argue exhaustively for the position, but to contend that
this is ultimately what Lewis is trying to accomplish in his argument: the
deductive removal of a position by demonstrating that a necessarily fatal
dilemma necessarily follows from treating the position as being true. This
is also reflected, though more crudely, in practically every reference by
Lewis to what we now would call the theistic AfR (keeping in mind Lewis
never referred to it by this title), outside of MaPS, either edition. It is
also reflected in Lewis' move to become an absolute idealist upon
acceptance of the argument's conclusion: he precisely rejected _atheism_
and accepted _not-atheism_ instead, making the minimal move necessarily
implied by the conclusion.


Steve Lovell seems to think that Lewis only sees a _possibility_ of the
atheist making such a question-begging response--which is surprising given
Steve's own thorough analysis of the argument. I contend that Lewis
(rightly or wrongly) sees the eventual _necessity_ of the atheist making a
question-begging response; and _not_ to an argument by Lewis from reason to
not-atheism (an argument which, it should be observed, _Lewis hasn't
already given_ at the point Steve is commenting on!--though Lewis is in the
process of giving the concluding elements there), but to the challenge
posed by atheism's own first implications in regard to human epistemology:
_from_ nothing, comes _nothing_. From no-reason comes... reason? Or just
more no-reason? Either claim requires a subsequent follow-up that can only
beg the question in regard to the epistemic claims we ourselves are making
right that moment _in order to_ follow-up on either claim. This is
completely reflected in the quotes, from outside MaPS, with which Steve
begins his own analysis of the argument's history and implications, btw. It
will also be noticed that this is completely reflected in the title (and
contents?) of John Lucas' new debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, held several
years after Lewis' death, with Lucas taking the role of defending Lewis'
argument: "Is Mechanism Self-Refuting?"

(It would be a mistake to infer from this title that Lewis ended up only
aiming at a particular kind of determinism, by the way; as most of his 2nd
edition chp 3 is explicitly presented in discussion of a 'naturalism' that
need not even be purely materialistic! This explicit announcement occurs
right after the quote from Haldane, on page 20, which tends to lead some
critics, who couldn't be bothered to read a sentence or two further, to
think Lewis only has mechanistic determinism in view.)


Steve also claims (in relation to the quote from Flew presented by Victor
in his opening statement) that Flew "is not trying to remove doubts about
our cognitive faculties, he is attempting to stop those doubts from arising
in the first place."

It looks to me, from the quote given, like the doubt has already been
established, and Flew is trying to defend against it. (i.e. Ernest Gellner
writes, "If [naturalism] is true, then it is always _a mere coincidence_
that what we believe is also true." [my emphasis] To which Flew is, by
Steve's report, responding.)

But supposing Steve is correct instead, this still raises a portentous
question: why should Flew have to attempt to stop those doubts from arising
in the first place? Is he _having to_ attempt to stop those doubts from
arising? If so, and if he is appealing to the effectiveness of a process in
order to prevent those doubts, then he is still falling afoul of what Lewis
is actually attempting. For Lewis' ultimate point is that Flew, from the
presumption of atheism, _will have to_ make a defense (whether that
involves stopping doubts from arising in the first place, or whatever.)
Flew's doubt prevention strategy cannot possibly be successful at avoiding
begging what Lewis says is being questioned--which is why Lewis (in his 2nd
edition) answers Flew (in effect) the way that he does.

Put another way, Flew wants to succeed at keeping the possible reliability
of his cognitive faculties from being called into question, and proposes to
do so by using his presumably possibly reliable cognitive faculties to
explain why ancestors of his who had possibly reliable cognitive faculties
were more likely to survive to pass any improvements (accidental ones per
atheism, of course) in those possibly reliable cognitive faculties along,
etc. It doesn't matter what his defense attempt is, though. He has already
shot himself in the foot. (Which, I expect, is why Lewis can seem ambiguous
about whether he accepts or rejects portions of Flew's defense. It's a
secondary matter, and he isn't primarily concerned about it.)


BDK, in commenting on perhaps the key statement of the climactic summary
(where Lewis writes, "If the value of our reasoning is in doubt, you cannot
try to establish it by reasoning."), notes that if we accept this, we kill
epistemology. To the extent that epistemology currently involves justifying
our justification capabilities, that would indeed be true!--but that
doesn't make the statement less correct. It would just mean epistemology
has gone badly off the tracks somewhere (or numerous somewheres.)

In any case, Lewis can be said to proceed by assuming BDK's (1) ("That
human reasoning is epistemically valuable"); but Lewis is _not_ actually
proceeding by going on to BDK's (2) ("Argue that this skill couldn't have
evolved via natural processes.") That would be a variant of the argument
from reason, certainly, and a popular variant, too--Victor, for example,
frequently appeals to it in various ways (as do I on occasion. So does
Steve in the article Victor links to.) But it is not what Lewis is doing.

Also, for Lewis to make the claim quoted above ("If the value of our
reasoning is in doubt..."), manifestly does _NOT_ undercut the first of the
steps listed by BDK. To observe that we cannot reasonably reestablish the
value of our reasoning once that value is doubted, is not the same as
actually _doubting_ the value of our reasoning. (BDK's further comments are
not inappropriate, but Victor is handling those elsewhere.)


I have an expectation that Victor's denigration of Lewis' efforts in what I
am calling the climactic summary portion of MaPS chp 3, hinges on Victor's
preference for Best Explanation variants of the AfR instead of Sceptical
Threat variants; and be he right or wrong, Lewis in _that_ portion is
certainly making a type of Sceptical Threat AfR. But I don't believe Lewis
is making quite the same kind of ST-AfR that Victor nominally rejects.

What Victor objects to (as Steve in his own analysis rightly summarizes
from Victor's work), is the kind of argument that proceeds by raising
sceptical doubts about the validity of reasoning and then goes on to argue
that such doubts can be resolved only if 'naturalism' (more specifically
atheism) is denied. Victor correctly observes that no absolute security
against such doubts is available from any quarter. Of course not!--if we
appeal to theism (or not-atheism) in order to reestablish our security on
this, then we are only doing what Lewis is excoriating the atheists for
doing. But that is not the point of the Lewisian AfR; or anyway that is not
the point of its 'gist', so to speak, for as Lewis presents it the argument
does need better phrasing in order to clarify its proper implications. (I
am especially but not exclusively thinking here of the chp 3 material
subsequent to the climactic summary, which if read out of context can
easily seem to be appealing to theism in order to justifiably restore our
confidence in the possible reliability of our justification ability. I
don't believe Lewis is actually doing this even here, any more than he does
on a similar application later in chapter 13 "On Probability", but it could
be misunderstood that way.)

Properly presented, though, the most dangerous version of the Lewisian AfR
needs no such re-establishment. It proceeds by beginning from Reason, just
as Lewis says, and by looking to see whether one of a dichomatic group
itself necessarily raises questions about reasoning which necessarily need
answering but can only be answered by begging the question. At a more basic
level, the Lewisian AfR isn't even really about deducting away a threat to
the _validity of reasoning_ per se; a phrase that is probably a non
sequitur anyway (though used by Lewis in his presentation.) Lewis is not
assuming validity (or whatever may be considered most important about our
reasoning for purposes of presenting our own arguments) is a fact and then
asking whether in an atheistic reality one can account for the assumed
fact. He is demonstrating that under the proposition of atheism, we have to
try to account for something otherwise necessarily presumed to be factual.
This is subtly but crucially different as a tactic.

We may, if we wish, reduce Lewis' point down to this: _from_ the necessary
presumption of our reasoning ability, for sake of argument, we can consider
atheism or not-atheism. Does either of these require us to try to
subsequently account for the existence of something we are already
necessarily presuming to be factual? Since, under atheism, our reasoning
behaviors must depend upon non-rational behaviors, this necessarily
requires us to try to subsequently account for the existence of a type of
behavior which we are already presuming to factually exist, even in order
to try making that account. The distinction between theism and atheism is
precisely a distinction about the existence of that type of behavior.
Atheism denies that behavior's existence at a fundamental level; requiring
it to be produced or substituted in derivation. Theism at least doesn't
involve the denial of that behavior's existence, and so doesn't introduce
an immediate disparity in regard to our own derivative reasoning claims.


Does atheism involve introducing conflicts with the character and quality
we ourselves claim for our own reasoning when making any argument? Lewis
demonstrates (or at least aims at demonstrating) the answer is yes; and
then effectively assumes without further evaluation that the answer would
necessarily be no for not-atheism (i.e. for theism.)

If Lewis' demonstration is properly accurate, though; _and_ if an
evaluation of theism's implications does not reveal necessary introduction
of conflicts with the character and quality we ourselves claim for our own
reasoning when making any argument; then we will have deduced, not strictly
that atheism is false, but that so long as we take our own reasoning
seriously we ought to reject atheism as false--and accept not-atheism as
true.

Which, in a cruder but equivalent fashion, is how and why Lewis the atheist
eventually decided to believe theism to be true instead. (While, at first,
_keeping_ his philosophical _naturalism_.)


Jason Pratt


Addendum: it may be asked if this means no Best Explanation AfR can be
derived from Lewis' work. I believe Victor and others have amply
demonstrated that various kinds of BE-AfR may be derived from, or
illustrated by, Lewis' work as well. I also believe, however, that Lewis
was not primarily aiming at this, which explains why in his own climactic
summary he is clearly not making that kind of argument. Efforts to try to
demonstrate that the primary importance of Lewis' AfR is in providing a
BE-AfR instead, are always going to be unable to account for that climactic
portion, and must at best simply wave it aside as being a peculiar
mis-step.

The Unity of Consciousness

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What does this mean?

The Unity of Consciousness
I have maintained that a key feature of rational inference is that it is inference that must be performed by an agent who possesses a unified consciousness. The idea is that if the self-same entity does not think the premises and think the conclusion, then we have no rational inference. If Dennis has the thought “All men are mortal,” and Bill has the thought “Socrates is a man, and I have the thought “Socrates is mortal,” then none of us have preformed a rational inference.

Now, I have quoted some naturalistic thinkers, such as Blackmore and Pinker (and Dennett seems also to be in this category) who deny the unity of consciousness. The unity is the result of some sort of a user illusion. But if the unity is an illusion, isn’t the inference as well? Or so I would have thought.

Perhaps I can begin discussing the argument by seeing how it appears in Immanuel Kant. Kant seemed to perceive this as a successful argument against materialism but not as an argument in favor of a simple soul, and this is because his own solution to these philosophical problems was to rely on a distinction between the self as it appears to us and the self as it is in itself. But Kant develops the argument as follows:

Every composite substance is an aggregate of several substances, and the action of a composite, or whatever inheres in it as thus composite, is an aggregate of several actions or accidents, distributed among the plurality of substances. Now an effect which arises from the concurrence of many acting substances is indeed possible, namely, when this effect is external only (as, for instance, the motion of a body is the combined motion of all its parts). But with thoughts, as internal accidents belonging to a thinking being, it is different. For suppose it be the composite For suppose it be the composite that thinks: then every part of it would be part of the thought, and only all of them taken together would be the whole thought. But this cannot consistently be maintained. For representations (for instance, the single words of a verse), distributed among different beings, never make up a whole thought (a verse), and it is therefore impossible that a thought should inhere in what is essentially composite. It is therefore possible only in a single substance, which, not being an aggregate of many, is absolutely simple.

William Hasker, the argument’s chief contemporary architect, has a version of the argument that has been formalized as follows:

1. I am aware of my present visual field as a unity; in other words, the various components of the field are experienced by a single subject simultaneously.
2. Only something that functions as a whole rather than as a system of parts could experience a visual field as a unity.
3. Therefore, the subject functions as a whole rather than as a system of parts.
4. The brain and nervous system, and the entire body, is nothing more than a collection of physical parts organized in a certain way. (In other words, holism is false.)
5. Therefore, the brain and nervous system cannot function as a whole; it must function as a system of parts.

6. Therefore the subject is not the brain and nervous system (or the body, etc.).
7. If the subject is not the brain and nervous system then it is (or contains as a proper part) a non-physical mind or “soul”; that is, a mind that is not ontologically reducible to the sorts of entities studied in the physical sciences. Such a mind, even if it is extended in space, could function as a whole rather than as a system of parts and so could be aware of my present visual field as a unity.
8. Therefore, the subject is a soul, or contains a soul as a part of itself.

Now people on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board have been trying to persuade me that my brain can experience my visual field, or the diachronic experience of rational inference, as a unity. The brain, they say, is closely interconnected functionally, and has billions (and billions) of neurons. But I guess I just have to ask them whether they think holism is true, or not. Are physical systems the sum of their parts. If so, then the properties of the “whole” have to be summative properties of the parts. Tell me where all the red bricks are, and even without using the word wall, I can know that there is a wall over there. The properties of the wall are entailed by the properties of the bricks. Wallness is a summative property of bricks. Intentionality and the unity of consciousness do not seem to be entailed after you add up all the properties of the proper parts of the brain. This will be controversial, but I’m prepared to argue that if you add up all the physical states of a person, you could still end up with a zombie.

Mystery and Materialism

3. Mystery and Materialism
In his book God and the Reach of Reason, Erik Wielenberg attempts to respond to
Lewis’s argument from reason, using a parallel with some Christian responses to the argument from evil. In response to the argument from evil, Christian philosophers have sometimes attempted to produce theodicies which explain God’s reason for permitting various of the world’s evils. Other Christians, however, have argued that our inability to explain this, that, or the other instance of evil in suffering is not the end of the world for theists. We are, after all, human beings with limited understanding, and it would be surprising if God were to exist and we could understand God’s ways well enough to know why some particular instance of suffering was permitted. In the same way, the fact that no analysis of intentional states in physical terms need not be fatal for materialism, because it could be that our brains are simply not well-suited to understand the connections between the mental and the physical. If we can’t figure out how the mental could possibly be, in the last analysis physical, that need not be because the mental is really non-physical, it could be simply that we have trouble solving philosophical problems. The response he gives to the argument from reason is very much akin to the “mysterian” view in the philosophy of consciousness put forward by Colin McGinn.
However, several responses can be given here. In responding to the argument from evil in the terms delineated above, it does seem to me that the theist in engaging in a damage control project rather than a project that actually refutes the argument from evil. If an atheistic world-view can come up with an explanation for the suffering in the world that makes more sense than theism can possibly offer, then it seems to me that the argument from evil still counts in favor of atheism. Some theists are prepared to admit that the existence of suffering counts against theism, but just think that there is better reason to be a theist nonetheless. Of course, it would be another matter if the atheists’ explanation for suffering could be shown to be fundamentally inadequate. If that were the case, the the force of the atheistic argument could be blunted completely. On my view we have to consider the fact that on a broadly materialist world-view, the existence of qualia such as pain, as well as the existence of a moral standard by which to judge something to be evil, are both problematic, so I am not fully convinced that the argument from evil really points to an explanatory advantage for atheism. However, it may be that it does, in which case the explanatory disadvantage for theism need not be fatal.
Every time I have presented the argument from reason, I have put it forward as a factor that should count in favor of theism, but not necessarily decisively. In evaluating particular arguments, it is important not to get “tunnel vision” and think that the argument now being considered is the only consideration for or against theism. So I can easily imagine someone saying “Yes, reason is tough for atheists to explain, but theists have worse problems, so I am not going to go there.” In fact, I introduced the comparison between the argument from reason and the argument from evil in my book’s penultimate paragraph. I wrote:
However, I do contend that the arguments from reason do provide some substantial reasons for preferring theism to naturalism. The “problem of reason” is a huge problem for natuarlism, as serious or, I would say, more serious, than the problem of evil is for theists. But while theists have expended considerable effort in confronting the problem of evil, the problem of reason has not as yet been acknowledged as a serious problem for naturalism.
Now, once again, the force of the argument from reason could be blunted if it could be shown that whatever the weaknesses of the various materialistic accounts of reason, a non-naturalistic account of reason would have to be by its very nature inadequate. However, theism does offer a way whereby we can say that we need not be saddled with the problem of how reason might arise in a universe that lacked it to begin with, or how rational states can supervene on lower-level states that lack rationality entirely. If we ask “Why does reason exist at all?” the theist can answer “It is on the ground floor of reality. Its existence is more fundamental to the ultimate causes of the universe than the existence of matter itself.
Others have argued that whatever theistic explanations are always inadequate explanations, and that we are better off saying “I don’t know” than attributing anything to God. That is the force of what I call the Inadequacy Objection, and it is an argument that I will take up later in this essay.

Lycan's four objections to substance dualism

Josh Hickok, on Pretentious Apologetics, responds to four objections to substance dualism by William Lycan. Interestingly enough, Lycan himself seems to have moved away from a strong commitments to the objections to substance dualism, now claiming that they are overrated. However, Keith Parsons gave those arguments against dualism in our Philosophia Christi exchange in 2003, and I responded to those objections as follows: "Some Supernatural Reasons Why My Critics are Wrong", Philosophia Christi vol. 5. no. 1 (2003).

Lycan argues that Cartesian minds do not fit with out otherwise physical and scientific picture of the world and that they are not needed to explain any known phenomenon. But this argument seems to assume that my argument to the contrary is incorrect; if my argument is successful then we need something inherently rational to explain the existence of reason in the world. So simply to assert that we do not need souls to explain any known phenomenon is to beg the question against my argument, since my argument maintains that something nonmechanistic must explain our capacity to reason. And it is not the case that we know nothing about such a soul. We know, as a consequence of the argument, both that it is governed by reason and that reason reason can be a basic explanation for what it does.

Second, Lycan says that since human beings evolved over aeons by purely physical processes of random mutation and natural selection, it is anomalous to suppose that Mother Nature created Cartesian minds in addition to cells and physical organs. Again, this assumes a strong version of evolutionary imperialism that is certainly open to dispute. If my argument is successful, then the human mind could not have arisen through a purely physical process of mutation and natural selection, for, if it had, we would not have been able to discover that we arose through a purely physical process of mutation and natural selection. On the other hand, if theism is true, then it is hardly beyond the powers of Omnipotence to create souls or to give matter the capacity to generate souls.

Third, Lycan says that if minds are nonspatial, how can they interact with physical objects in space? First, I never said that souls were not in space, so I do not see why I have to take this objection seriously (unlike Descartes, who explicitly denied the spatiality of souls). Second, I have never heard anyone argue that since God is not in space, God could not create the world (a causal interaction if there ever was one). So if this is a good argument against dualism, the atheists have been missing out on a good argument for atheism. But it certainly seems logically possible for something that is not in space to interact with something that is in space; the claim that it is impossible is all too often made as a bald assertion, without argumentative support.

The violation of conservation laws does not strike me as a serious problem either, because the laws of nature tell you what happens when nothing outside the system interferes with it. If we are thinking of the soul as outside the physical order, and conservation laws tell us what will happen within the physical order, then it does not violate those laws if something from the outside that order causes something to occur that would not have happened otherwise. The argument works only if physicalism is true, and thus begs the question.

Menuge debates P Z Myers

“Does Neuroscience Leave Room for God?”

My debate with Dr. PZ Myers at

University of Minnesota at Morris,

8pm-10:30pm, Saturday, April 19^th, 2008

by

Dr. Angus J. L. Menuge

1. Format of the debate. The debate was moderated as follows: each of us had a maximum of 40 minutes to present our case. Then there was a maximum of 30 minutes in which Dr. Myers and I could probe each other’s position with questions. Finally, we opened to the floor and members of the audience could ask questions of either speaker.

2. My presentation. I presented first and made three main points.

(1) First, I argued that materialism is presumed true before looking at the evidence. Richard Lewontin has admitted that he holds to materialism in science as an a priori assumption. My main points were that inflexible adherence to materialism could prevent us from finding the truth, and weakens the claim to have found the best explanation by eliminating competitors to materialism without considering them. But what about those who claim that materialism has such an amazing track record, we should have a presumption in its favor?

(2) My second main point was that materialism does not have such an impressive track record. I noted that Christian theology, not materialism, played a substantive role in the rise of modern science, by justifying belief in laws of nature and in minds reliable enough to discover them. I noted the “Argument from Reason” against Evolutionary Naturalism, which points out that Evolutionary Naturalism predicts minds equipped with useful gadgets, but not ones attuned to discovering truth, especially in theoretical matters having nothing to do with basic survival. By contrast, rational theism predicts that our minds are attuned to the laws of nature, since both reflect the same divine logos.

Moving closer to the central issue of the debate, I argued that there is considerable evidence against the materialist contention that the mind reduces to the brain. There is the “hard problem” of consciousness, that subjective awareness is not explained or predicted by impersonally described states of the brain. Then there is the evidence from neuroscientists such as Jeff Schwartz and Mario Beauregard that, in addition to the bottom-up influence of the brain on the mind, the mind has a top-down influence on the brain (cognitive therapies that exploit neuroplasticity) and on health (psychoneuroimmunology). I focused on how these approaches gave hope to patients by showing that their own conscious choices could play a role in their recovery and health. I also mentioned the remarkable studies of Near Death Experiences by Pim van Lommel. I held up and recommended Jeff Schwartz and Sharon Begley’s The Mind and the Brain, and Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’ Leary’s The Spiritual Brain, and said that if someone is a true skeptic, they should be skeptical of materialism as well as of non-materialistic claims.

(3) My third point was to critique the slew of contemporary materialist attempts to explain away religious belief and experience. I noted that a culture of 1-way skepticism encourages both a presumption that supernatural religions are false without investigating the evidence for their truth claims, and also credulous acceptance of unsubstantiated materialist speculations, such as the “God gene” and “God spot” theories, all of which can be decisively refuted. I then investigate the claim that religion is a “virus of the mind,” and argue that the underlying theory of memes would either discredit everyone’s beliefs or, if it does not, require us to check out the actual evidence for or against them.

3. Dr. P Z Myers’ presentation.

Dr. Myers focused mainly on defining the terms “science” and “God.” He argued that science can only work with what is measurable, and that “God” cannot be defined in a way that is measurable, and so God/theology are irrelevant to science. He claimed that scientists must accept the rule methodological materialism, according to which scientists can believe in any religion they want, but, within science, must restrict themselves to considering only material causes. He likened the scientist to the plumber who must work at the level of what physically works. Indeed, Dr. Myers asserted that science is not about truth, but about what works, and that God is irrelevant to science because “God” is not a tractable concept.

Dr. Myers held up a large standard volume on neuroscience, and asserted that it was better than Schwartz’s and Beauregard’s books, apparently because it was bigger! He then showed some interesting slides detailing the standard “homunculus” model of the brain, mapping various sensations and bodily functions to parts of the brain. He acknowledged the reality of neuroplasticity, but claimed that this could all be understood in terms of chemical processes in the brain, without appeal to consciousness. Yet, interestingly, he admitted that no-one could explain consciousness. Dr. Myers also mentioned a recent scientific experiment showing that in advance of conscious awareness of decision, there is already a 60% probability of action. (He did not, however, claim that this showed there was no free will, and since the result was so recent and under-analyzed, I chose not to take the bait.)

The remainder of Myers’ presentation was focused on the case for the brain’s bottom-up influence on the brain, including the impact of neural deficits and degeneration through illness and age. At one point he made the quite absurd suggestion that some people seem to think that neurons have nothing to do with it! Since I had argued for neuroplascticity and psychoneuroimmunology, this was a bit hard to take. I suppose it was an exaggeration or a joke, designed to make dualists look silly. Dr. Myers’ presentation was frankly depressing, because it left the impression that we are passive products of physical causes, with no ability to take control of our health. Myers did try to claim that he could account for some of the studies I had mentioned, but in terms of one part of the brain taking charge of another. The talk included relatively few slides, some of them showing the plight of family members.

4. Our discussion/debate.

Myers was surprisingly passive in debate and did not really seem eager to spar. I got the sense that he had previously dismissed me as another creationist “ID-iot,” and that he was not really prepared for me to make a serious case. Here are some of the main points of our discussion.

(1) While I agreed with Myers about the evidence of bottom-up causation, I argued that this did not negate the evidence of top-down causation. To refute the idea that consciousness must simply be generated by the brain, I used the analogy of a telephone. If someone calls and we drop the phone and break it, we no longer hear the voice, but the voice is not generated by the phone: the phone transmits it. Likewise the fact that certain thoughts are impossible with neural deficits does not show that the brain generates our thoughts or that our mind is simply a passive shadow of the brain.

(2) I noted that at the end of his review of The God Delusion, Michael Ruse had argued that if the likes of Richard Dawkins continue to claim that Darwinian evolution inevitably supports atheism, then teaching Darwinian evolution in schools would violate the first amendment. Was not the approach to science advocated by Myers likewise against the constitution? In response, Myers said that science only uses methodological materialism, so it does not technically exclude religion, saying that he knew scientists who were Christian who subscribed to Methodological Materialism. (What he did not address was the distinction between those theists who believe in the natural knowledge of God and those who do not. Methodological Materialism favors secular humanists and those theists unconcerned about the natural knowledge of God and discriminates against those who believe God worked detectably in nature by preventing them from exploring scientific evidence for their point of view.)

(3)Wishing to expose the way Methodological Materialism can be held indefinitely, no matter what the evidence, I challenged Myers to define what could convince him that materialism was false, pointing out that if all materialist explanations were working or very promising, I could be persuaded that theism was false. He dodged the question saying it was too hypothetical. I did not get the impression that he has seriously considered the question of what it would be like to learn materialism is false. How, then, can he claim that the materialism of science is purely methodological, which implies it could be dropped if it fails to work in some areas?

(4) I also argued that Myers’ attempt to reduce science to the physically measurable was inadequate, because science postulates theoretical entities that may or may not turn out to be observable. Mendel postulated genes, and these were later shown to be observable. In physics, however, there are plenty of entities (particles, forces, strings etc.) that are at the least unobserved, and also measurement itself presupposes such abstractions as logic and numbers that are inherently unobservable. I agreed with Myers that science should try to get the tractable and observable if it can, but argued that science should not give up if the best evidence points away from the observable. In my view, Myers is maintaining a positivistic view of science which limits science to what is verifiable by observation, but this does not square with Quantum Physics for example, particularly as it recognizes the role of the conscious observer in influencing what is measured.

(5) I asked Myers why, if science was neutral, there were so few studies of the psychology and neurology of atheists and secular humanists, given all the attempts to explain away theistic belief and experience. He surprised me by noting that Schwartz and Beauregard are Christians, suggesting that only theists were interested in the question. This did not jive with all the studies by secularists of the psychology and neurology of atheists cited by Beauregard. I also noted the 3 million dollar European project, “Explaining Religion,” cited in The Economist, March 19^th, 2008 (“Where angels no longer fear to tread”).

(6) I also asked why, if science was a free inquiry, Guillermo Gonzalez had been so shabbily treated at Iowa State University. Myers claimed that this was because he had not brought in enough grant money. I pointed out that Gonzalez had 68 peer reviewed science articles, was author of a Cambridge text on astronomy, and that the emails acquired through Iowa’s open record laws showed that Gonzalez’s tenure was denied because of his pro-design views.

(7) Myers and I sparred on the fine-tuning argument. He asserted that there was nothing surprising: we wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t happened. I mentioned John Leslie’s analogy: suppose you are scheduled to be executed by 200 sharpshooters. It would not be a convincing explanation of them all missing, that unless they had, you wouldn’t be here. We would want to know if there was an order from above, a conspiracy, a flaw in the manufacture of the guns, etc.

I had two very big surprises. First, Dr. Myers denied being a Darwinist, which produced the kind of stunned silence one would expect if the Pope announced his non-Catholicity. Myers’ stated grounds were that Darwin has been dead for over a hundred years. I wished I had pointed out that I am on many issues a Platonist, even though Plato has been dead for 2400 years. Second, as I mentioned, Myers denied that science is really about truth. I had to wonder why it was so important for him to exclude design from science if all that matters is what works. After all, I had noted earlier on in my presentation that the Darwinist philosopher Michael Ruse agrees that methodological design does work in biology by helping scientists decode the machinery of life.

At the end, I made Myers the offer of trying to set up a special issue of a journal where he could bring in his “cronies” and I could bring in mine to discuss the issue. He found the idea amusing and, so far as I could tell, not without appeal. I do not know if this will happen, but I am going to look into it.

An attack on Lewis from Austin Cline--redated from DI 2005

These comments are from Austin Cline, on his atheism website. He seems a little out of touch with the most recent scholarship on the Argument from Reason. Cline's comments are in bold, my responses are not.

AC: C.S. Lewis wanted to explain nature on the basis of his supernatural god; as a consequence, naturalistic explanations for nature represented a major threat — just as it does for contemporary apologists. Lewis argued against naturalism in a variety of contexts. It plays an important role not just in his discussions about morality, but also in his arguments about the nature of reason.

VR: No, Lewis did not think naturalistic explanations for nature constituted a threat. It is only when these explanations are claimed to excluded a theistic explanation that they become at threat. There is no problem with Christians believing in, say, the law of gravity.

AC: In his book Miracles, Lewis argues against naturalism by saying “If Naturalism is true, every finite thing or event must be (in principle) explicable in terms of the Total System.” This isn’t necessarily true. Lewis was aware of advances in physics which revealed that events on the quantum level were probabilistic rather than deterministic, but he regarded this as a reason to think that there exists something more than “Nature” rather than as a reason to think that maybe nature isn’t quite what he (like others) assumed it to be. He rejected the findings of science because they conflicted with his assumptions.

VR: The difference between Quantum and Classical mechanics are irrelevant to the Argument from Reason, since on most interpretations quantum activity is pure blind chance and nothing more. If QM opens the door for ground-level teleology (which seems to be what Wiest was suggesting on this blog a few months back), then we have something that is not naturalism in the sense that Lewis was trying to criticize.

AC: Lewis appears not to have understood that some events and systems are, even in principle, not explainable despite being entirely natural. No one disputes that the weather is completely natural, but while weather events can be predicted to varying degrees of accuracy, it’s not possible even in principle to explain every facet of them because they are too complex, chaotic, and probabilistic.

VR: Meaning not explainable in principle, or beyond out powers of explanation? Cline seems not to understand the difference between inexplicability due to temporary human limitations, and inexplicability due to the absence of determining causes. In any event I see no reason to believe that Lewis was guilty of this lack of understanding, and if he did it is irrelevant to the argument.

AC: Part of the problem is that Lewis adopts a very limited, narrow understanding of naturalism. For Lewis, naturalism is the same as determinism. Thus, what we encounter is a tactic which Lewis uses continually: the construction of a false dilemma fallacy in which he presents the “wrong” option in an unfavorable and incorrectly defined way against the “right” option which, he hopes, will seem more reasonable against his straw man. The idea of a third option, like rejecting both extreme determinism and supernaturalism, is never entertained.

VR: Again the question is not determinism, it is the question of whether, at the most basic level of analysis, nature in non-purposive. Since believing something for a reason needs to be explained purposively in order for it to be regarded as reasoning, this is the basis for a prima facie incompatibility. Replacing blind determination with blind chaos does not help account for reason.

AC: From this inauspicious beginning, things only go down hill. Lewis argues that nature cannot explain the existence of Reason:

“A strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true...and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ (Possible Worlds, p. 209)”
In other words, because atoms are not themselves rational, then they alone cannot be responsible for rationality because such an irrational foundation cannot be a reliable basis for rational thinking. This absurd reasoning would preclude atoms being responsible for anything at all — atoms aren’t visible to the naked eye, so how could they produce anything visible? It’s known as the fallacy of composition and is just one more example of Lewis constructing fallacious arguments in the apparent hope that no one would notice.

VR: Lewis makes a distinction between "strict materialism," which can be refuted in one sentence, and naturalism, which requires a much longer treatment. Lewis was praised by his most famous opponent, Anscombe, for "honesty and seriousness" in his revised chapter. Shouldn't this tip anyone off that a "quick and dirty" refutation of Lewis is not in the cards? The real question is how logical relationships between proposition can play any role in some event in the physical world being caused. I'm really not sure what Lewis meant by "strict materialism;" however I would not give that simple of an argument against more contemporary kinds of materialism. But I think a some versions of Lewis's arguments against naturalism are telling arguments against contemporary materialism.

AC: On February 2, 1948, G.E.M. Anscombe read a paper to the Oxford Socratic Club criticizing this section of C.S Lewis’ book, identifying several serious weaknesses. According to George Sayer, a friend of Lewis, he recognized that his position was soundly refuted:

“He told me that he had been proved wrong, and that his argument for the existence of God had been demolished. ...The debate had been a humiliating experience, but perhaps it was ultimately good for him. In the past, he had been too proud of his logical ability. Now he was humbled ....’I can never write another book of that sort’ he said to me of Miracles. And he never did. He also never wrote another theological book. Reflections on the Psalms is really devotional and literary; Letters to Malcolm is also a devotional book, a series of reflections on prayer, without contentious arguments.”VR: Here we go again with the Anscombe Legend. Sayer was basically a high school English teacher, and he fails to draw the all-important distinction between thinking oneself really proved wrong, and thinking the someone has shown one's argument to be inadequately formulated. Lewis probably thought he had performed poorly in the exchange; he probably thought that there were problems with the formulation of his argument, but there is no reason to suppose that he thought his argument shown to be a bad one.

John Beversluis, on whom Cline seems to be relying for his critique of Lewis, had this to say in a subsequent paper:

First, the Anscombe debate was by no means Lewis's first exposure to a professional philosopher: he lived among them all his adult life, read the Greats, and even taught philosophy. Second, it is simply untrue that the post-Anscombe Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics. In 1960 he published a second edition of Miracles in which he revised the third chapter and thereby replied to Anscombe. Third, most printed discussions of the debate, mine included, fail to mention that Anscombe herself complimented Lewis's revised argument on the grounds that it is deeper and far more serious than the original version. Finally, the myth that Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics overlooks several post-Anscombe articles, among them "Is Theism Important?" (1952)—a discussion of Christianity and theism which touches on philosophical proofs for God's existence—and "On Obstinacy of Belief"—in which Lewis defends the rationality of belief in God in the face of apparently contrary evidence (the issue in philosophical theology during the late 1950s and early 60s). It is rhetorically effective to announce that the post-Anscombe Lewis wrote no further books on Christian apologetics, but it is pure fiction. Even if it were true, what would this Argument from Abandoned Subjects prove? He wrote no further books on Paradise Lost or courtly love either.1

AC: Lewis never publicly acknowledged his defeat, but he did respond. The relevant chapter was renamed from “Naturalism is Self-Refuting” to “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” Some statements were revised and he removed the egregious claim that “We may state it as a rule that no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.”

These revisions are not enough to salvage his argument because its flaws are fundamental. Lewis relied, for example, on a bizarre epistemology, according to which knowledge can only be attained indirectly by inferring from sensory perception to the objects supposedly lying behind them. Because of this, he felt that reliable knowledge depends upon logical reasoning — that we cannot come to have true, justified beliefs about the world without it. This is a peculiar and extreme form of rationalism, but it’s not an epistemology which is compatible with modern science and thinking. It doesn’t enjoy wide currency today, even among Christians who ostensibly accept Lewis’ apologetics. If they do not accept the epistemological assumptions he uses, though, they cannot also accept his theological conclusions which they find so appealing.

VR: This is a criticism that Cline is borrowing from John Beversluis, whose book C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, is taken by many in freethought circles to be the definitive refutation of Lewis, in spite of the fact that numerous articles effectively criticizing it have been published. Lewis did say that all possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. But depends in what way? Is he actually saying that what we are immediately aware of are "sense data" and that we recognize physical objects only by performing inferences? This is a philosophical theory that still exists, and it is probably more defensible than most people think it is, but it is true that today the mainstream position is a some kind of direct realism, according to which we perceive physical objects directly.

But would a good case for direct realism refute Lewis's argument? No. First, did Lewis really say we infer physical objects? What he said was:

"It is clear that everything we know, beyond out own sensations, in inferred from those sensations. I do not mean that we begin as children, by regarding out sensations as "evidence" and thence arguing consciously to the existence of space, matter and other people. I mean that if, after we are old enough to understand the question, our confidence in the existence of anything else (say, the solar system or the Spanish Armada) is questioned, our argument in defence of it will have to take the form of arguments from our immediate sensations."

So it is not that we perform inferences in order to know physical objects; it is that we use inferences to defend out beliefs in those objects that makes perceptual knowledge depend on inference. This I consider to be perfectly compatible with the claim that we perceive physical objects directly and noninferentially.

Note: Since I wrote this Dr. Beversluis has written a revised version of his book in which he defends the claim that Lewis did think that we are not directly aware of physical objects. The evidence isn't crystal-clear from the Lewis texts, however I think Beversluis is probably right about this. However, the more important point, which unfortunately Beversluis does not attempt to rebut, is the claim I make below, the claim that on any view we are dependent upon reasoning for knowledge, such that that, if no one ever engaged in rational inference, we simply could not make the knowledge claims that all naturalists accept, such as e=MC squared, or even that the Pythagorean theorem is true.

In any event, if Lewis exaggerated the role of inference in knowledge, so what? His argument is that if naturalism is true, then there are no inferences. Maybe my knowledge that the wall in front of me is purple can remain as knowledge under these circumstances, but if there are no inferences, then no one ever proved the Pythagorean theorem, Darwin didn't really provide arguments for evolution by natural selection, and no one ever inferred that e=mc squared, and no one ever inferred atheism from the existence of evil in the world.

In other words, whether or not Lewis used the "epistemological assumptions" in his argument, the argument does not need them, and will can do just fine without them. Whether one can explain the existence of rational inference naturalistically--well, I could write a book about that subject. In any event, if there is something wrong with Lewis's argument, Cline has failed to take the argument seriously enough to find out what it is.






1 John Beversluis, "Surprised by Freud: A Critical Appraisal of A. N. Wilson's Biography of C. S. Lewis," Christianity and Literature, Vol. 41, No. 2 (1992), pp. 179-95

Is the case for materialism as strong as it looks?

Feser on the Case for Materialism

The most formidable argument against dualism has always been what I would call the argument from the onward march of science. Science, we are told, always pushed in a materialist direction, and it invariably resolves problems for materialist understandings of things that may have seemed insurmountable to a previous generation. So prior to the 19^th century, many otherwise naturalistic thinkers were reluctant to accept full-blown atheism, because they of what they took to be the undeniable evidence of design in nature, yet Darwin came along and showed us all how to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Arguments of any kind against materialism can do no better than point out some explanatory gap in the present materialist understanding of the world, but just as past gaps have been close by subsequent science, so difficulties that naturalistic science faces in coming to terms with things like consciousness, intentionality, and reason, are simply bumps in the road to be got over in good materialist fashion by the future course of science.

Edward Feser thinks this argument is not as strong is it might appear to be at first. He writes:

First, the advance of science, far from settling the mind-body problem in favor of materialism seems to have made it more acute. Modern science has, as noted in chapter 2, revealed that physical objects are composed of intrinsically colorless, tasteless, and odorless particles. Colors, tastes and odors thus, in some sense, exist only in the mind of the observer. But then it is mysterious how they are related to the brain, which, like other material objects, is composed on nothing more than colorless, tasteless, and odorless particles. Science also tells us that the appearance of purpose in nature is an illusion: strictly speaking, fins, for example, don’t have the purpose of propelling fish through the water, for they have in fact no purpose at all, being the products of the same meaningless and impersonal causal processes that are supposed to have brought about all complex phenomena, including organic phenomena. Rather, fins merely operate as if they had such a purpose, because the creatures that first developed them, as a result of random genetic mutation, just happened thereby to have a competitive advantage over those that did not. The result mimicked the products of purposeful design in reality, it is said, there was not design at all. But if purposes were “mind-dependent”—not truly present in the physical world but only projected on to it by us—then this makes that act of projection, and the intentionality of which it is an instance (as are human purposes, for that matter,) at least difficult to explain in terms of processes occurring in the brain, which seem intrinsically as brutely meaningless as and purposeless as are all other purely physical processes. In short, science has “explained” the sensible qualities and meaning that seem to common sense to exist in reality only by sweeping them under the rug of the mind, that is, it hasn’t really explained them at all, but merely put off any explanation by relocating them out of the physical realm and into the mental realm. There they remain, however, forming a considerable bump under the rug, one that seemingly cannot be removed by further scientific sweeping.

Link

Updated Reply to Carrier

I am opening this blog, which I am calling Dangerous Idea 2, which will be dedicated to Argument from Reason related issues. I will be reposting all of my AFR related material here in some sort of a systematic sequence, working through each of the main arguments one by one. Maybe what I will do is when I post something here just link back to it on the main blog. Anyway, one of the firsts posts I did was a version of a paper I did in response to Carrier. It doesn't focus on the six main arguments that way the paper I did in England did, rather it deals with a lot of the other issues Carrier posed.

Updated reply to Carrier
This is an updated version of a reply to Richard Carrier that initially appeared on Bill Vallicella's blog. Richard sent me some responses to what I have written, and I plan to work though his replies in a step-by-step manner in subsequent posts.

Reply to Carrier

Richard Carrier has written a very extensive critique of my book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason1. So extensive, in fact, that when I printed it out it was 127 pages, compared to 128 pages of my book. Considering the fact that two of my chapters are not defenses of the primary argument of the book, this is rather remarkable. I am glad that he has put such an effort into responding to what I have written, although he obviously differs sharply with me on the merits of the arguments.
A quick note to begin with. A more careful reading of my book would demonstrate that I do not employ an argument from motive against naturalists, but only against those naturalists who insist, at all costs, that we cannot let a Divine Foot in the door. I realize that the quotation from Lewontin is sometimes generalized to be a statement about what all evolutionists or philosophical naturalists conduct themselves intellectually, but I have not made that kind of generalization. What I said was that when anyone, a naturalist or a non-naturalist, padlocks their belief system against even possibly considering an opposing view, then I suspect ulterior motives are work.2 How Carrier translates that into an Argument from Motive against naturalists is beyond me.
I should say that desires, either that God should exist or that God should not exist, unavoidably operate extensively in the minds of even those people who do their best to be rational about the matter. We should be conscious of the presence of ulterior motives on our own parts as well as those of our opponents, and should not presume that all ulterior motives are on one side of the question. But I would not accuse someone else of believing for ulterior motives unless I were convinced that their minds were padlocked against the possibility of accepting a contrary position.
I. The Scope and Limits of My Book
I must first raise some objections to what I consider to be a lack of regard for the scope and limits of my book. The book is relatively short, and written so as to be accessible to an audience of non-specialists. As such, it is not designed to be the final word on the arguments it presents. A lot more needs to be said than what I have said in the book. Those familiar with my original article on the Secular Web know that I originally wrote about one Argument from Reason. I could have simply developed one of the arguments from reason and left it at that, and if I thought my book would be the end of the discussion I probably would have done just that. But I see my own work as one link in a chain, going from Kant to Balfour3 to Lewis to Hasker4 to me and on forward to others. I have heard from a number of philosophy graduate students interested in pursuing these arguments. So the question one needs to ask in response to my book is not “Does Reppert conclusively refute naturalism?” Rather, one should ask “Has Reppert shown some promising ideas for criticizing naturalism that give reasonable people a good reason to reject it?” (Carrier seems to have made no mention of the discussion of Critical Rationalism in the chapter 2). But even by those standards, I am quite sure Carrier will say that, in light of the scientific and philosophical arguments he presents, the versions of the AFR that I defend are not very promising. I of course don’t agree, and that’s why I am writing this response.
Carrier’s disregard for the scope and limits of my book is further illustrated by his discussion of Pyrrhonian skepticism. I said, “If any thesis entails the conclusion that no belief is rationally inferred, then it should be rejected and its denial accepted.”5 Now it seems perfectly reasonable to me to rule out any world-view that renders rational inference (and therefore science) impossible, even if we have no idea of what world-view to put in its place. Carrier seems to be saying that if on all other counts my argument is persuasive, it might still be rational to reject some kind of anti-naturalist worldview by becoming a Pyrrhonian skeptic and adopting no worldview at all. I suppose, while I was at it, I should have refuted the Cartesian evil demon, or refuted the brain-in-a-vat scenario. Or maybe I should have thrown in a refutation of Parmenides and Zeno. If the only worldviews that permit rational inference are anti-naturalist ones, then either the discussion has to come to a screeching halt or anti-naturalism must be accepted. If Carrier were to tell me that he was going to stop arguing about atheism and instead seek enlightenment in a Zen monastery, I would probably not want to use the Argument from Reason to talk him out of it. This in no way undermines the task I have assigned to the Arguments from Reason, and that is to provide good reasons for preferring non-naturalistic worldviews to naturalistic ones.
But it gets even worse. Consider the claim
P) If any thesis entails the conclusion that no belief is rationally inferred, then it should be rejected and its denial accepted.
From this Carrier somehow thinks that this entails
P1) We should deny any premise that is not rationally inferred.
And he then argues that I must have a rational inference to support P, otherwise P is self-defeating. But this is preposterous. I never said you had to be able to rationally infer everything you believe; I said that we couldn’t accept a worldview that entailed that no one makes rational inferences. P1 in no way follows from P, nor does Carrier provide any argument to suggest that it does.6
This is symptomatic of a problem with Carrier’s review throughout, he puts such a heavy burden on someone advancing a case against naturalism that it can be no surprise that the case fails. But with more realistically calibrated requirements for success, perhaps my arguments will turn out a little more successful.
II. Carrier’s Three Underlying Problems
The first and most serious problem with my arguments is that I commit what he calls the Possibility Fallacy, that is, I assume that having no explanation is equivalent to not being able to have one. I mention this objection on p. 118, in the context of discussing Nicholas Tattersall’s critique of Lewis’s Miracles and Darek Barefoot’s response. I quote Barefoot’s reply in my book as follows:
Tattersall here confuses logical absurdity with phenomena incompletely known. To learn why grass is green simply involves gathering more information. To learn how non-rational processes give rise to rational thought is like learning how a three-dimensional object can be created by arranging lines on a two-dimensional surface. We need not draw lines all day long in every geometric pattern imaginable to realize that the task is impossible. It is true that by means of perspective drawing we can usefully represent a three-dimensional shape, such as a cube, in two dimensions, just as human reason can be represented and communicated usefully by computer programs and even by humbler devices such as multiplication charts and slide rules. Nevertheless we can identify a set of lines in two dimensions as representing a cube only because we occupy three-dimensional space, and similarly we can appreciate that the blind functions of a computer have been so arranged as to accomplish a rational purpose only because, unlike the computer, we possess genuine rationality. 7
Carrier gives me two options for developing my argument. Either I prove
conclusively that a naturalistic account of reasoning is impossible, or I conduct an exhaustive study of the finding of brain science and find that reasoning probably cannot be accounted for in terms of brain function. It seems to me that there is a third option available. I can show we are dealing with a conceptual chasm that cannot simply be overcome by straightforward problem-solving. An example would be the attempt to get an “ought” from an “is”. Moore argued that for any set of “is” statements concerning a situation, the question of whether this or that action ought to have been done is left open. To generate any confidence that you can get an “ought” from an “is”, it simply won’t do to come up with one theory after another to show how you can get an ought from an is. We need to be given some idea that these theories can surmount the conceptual problem Moore and others have posed.
Another way of putting my point is to say that reason presents a problem analogous to what David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness.8 When we consider seriously what reasoning is, when we reject all attempts at “bait and switch”9 in which reasoning is re-described in a way that makes it scientifically tractable but also unrecognizable in the final analysis as reasoning, we find something that looks for all the world to be radically resistant to physicalistic analysis.
So I maintain that there is a logico-conceptual chasm between the various elements of reason, and the material world as understood mechanistically. Bridging the chasm isn’t going to simply be a matter of exploring the territory on one side of the chasm. Now someone might perceive the chasm and either think that some kind of paradigm shift in our thinking will bridge the chasm, or that it while it’s a mystery to us how all this is possible, that somehow there is a bridge over the chasm, even if we can’t see one that’s consistent with materialism. In pointing out the chasm, I do not necessarily claim that no possible considerations could persuade us to think that the chasm has been bridged. However, we have no reason to believe that the problem can be dissolved a way by doing just a little more science. Without necessarily demonstrating that the problem is insoluble, I can try to show that the problem is deep and intractable, and that an alternative to naturalism would resolve the problem. And I should point out that lots and lots of naturalists, like Colin McGinn,10 think that there is a deep and intractable problem. The arguments from reason, in many cases, suggest that the descriptive discourse of physics cannot capture the normative discourse of reason. This presents a logico-conceptual gap, which is a very different kind of problem than pointing out something for which we don’t currently have a naturalistic explanation, and saying it must be supernatural because science can’t explain it now.
The second fallacy Carrier says I commit is the Causation Fallacy. He thinks that I, along with C. S. Lewis, endorse the argument that “the presence of a cause and effect account of belief is often used to show the absence or irrelevance of a ground and consequent relationship,” and that therefore all cause and effect accounts prove the absence of irrelevance of ground and consequent relationships. However, he claims in arguing thus I commit the fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, Hasty Generalization and Red Herring. (Quite a lot of fallacies to commit in one argument!) But while this type of argument was used in Lewis’s original chapter, in the revised edition this is not the primary reason for thinking that reason cannot be accounted for naturalistically. And I don’t argue that way either. The argument against the relevance of ground and consequent relationships has to do with the causal closure of the physical. If a physical account of the process is causally complete, and physics is mechanistic, how do reasons come into play? Remember, at the most basic level of analysis physics, in order to play the role of physics in the kind of physicalism that is under attack in my book, must be mechanistic. This being the case, if we apply the Principle of Explanatory Exclusion and the Principle of Causal Exclusion defended by Kim10 and others, a case can be made that a comprehensive physicalistic causal explanation excludes a mentalistic account of rational inference.
The third fallacy he thinks I commit is the Armchair Science fallacy. That, he says, is my failure to interact with the extensive philosophical literature and the findings of cognitive science. Here I would first like to reiterate that no book, especially a book that is supposed to be readable by non-specialists, can interact with every opposing thinker. Well, perhaps I should at least interact with the really important stuff. But what is that? I see no interaction in Carrier with John Searle,11 in spite of the fact that he is advocating positions that Searle has quite famously criticized. Nor do I see any discussion of Thomas Nagel, who maintains that an evolutionary account of our capacity to reason has always seemed to him to be laughably inadequate.12 Nor do I see any interaction with Lynne Rudder Baker’s13 and William Hasker’s14 critiques of eliminativism, which I explicitly reference in the book. Nor do I see any references to Jaegwon Kim’s work on mental causation and the Principle of Explanatory Exclusion.15 The literature is enormous on this subject, and a comprehensive treatment of the relevant issues would require a 12,800 page book with a 128 page bibliography. Carrier and I are bound to differ as to what is “really important.” Of course the argument needs to respond to what Hasker calls the “sensible naturalist.”16 But naturalists and anti-naturalists might very well disagree on exactly who the sensible naturalists are.
I do, in my book, say that naturalistic analyses of mind “invariably fail,” largely because they “sneak in” the very concepts they are trying to explain through the back door. They also tend to re-describe what they are trying to explain in terms that will make such things as consciousness and reasoning more tractable to naturalistic analysis, but this produces what I call a “subtle changing of the subject.” Instead of explaining their subject matter, they explain it away. Since I did say these things, it simply won’t do for Carrier to merely assert that there’s all this philosophical and scientific literature out there. He needs to show evidence that these analyses of mind don’t commit the two errors listed above. Carrier’s own treatment of intentionality is repeatedly guilty of the first defect, as we shall see.
Further, scientific work on cognition can be illuminating without actually solving the fundamental problems of the philosophy of mind that my book is concerned with. I never denied that the mind is not in many important ways dependent on the brain, it is just that the brain story cannot be comprehensive, if I am right. So I have no problem with the idea that scientists like Cattell can help us understand how different mental functions are linked with different areas of the brain.17 As I put it on pp. 114-115;
But again I would reiterate the claim that the arguments from reason require only that the account of mental functioning in terms of blind physical processes, operating in accordance with the laws of physics, rather than in accordance with thee laws of logic, cannot be comprehensive. It seems to me to be perfectly compatible with an extensive dependence of the mind on the physical brain; it only says that if mechanistic accounts of rational inference are the only accounts you can get out of brain science, then a neurophysiological account cannot be complete.18
Now I should make perfectly clear that the more defenders of AFR interact with naturalistic philosophical and scientific literature, the better. Here I would strongly recommend Angus Menuge’s recent analyses of the Churchlands and Dennett,19 along with the critiques of the Churchlands by Hasker, Baker, and myself20 that I endorse in my book. But if we have what David Chalmers would call a “hard” problem of intentionality, then simply knowing about correlations between intentional states and physical states will not solve the problem. What science would have to provide is a successful intertheoretic reduction, and this is something over and above what straightforward neuroscience provides. What we need are answers to questions that are fundamentally philosophical rather than scientific, questions that are perhaps better addressed in armchairs rather than in laboratories.
Here again I would just reiterate what I said earlier, that the problem with naturalistic analyses of reasoning has to do with a logico-conceptual gap between our ordinary conception of what goes on when we reason, as opposed to what has to be given in a properly mechanistic analysis of that same process. If you give an analysis of how the brain produces some output or other, that may not do the job if when we get does the thing that has been analyzed physicalistically cannot plausibly be described as reasoning.
Further, many people in the philosophy of mind, even some who would be described as card-carrying physicalists, often maintain that we have no real understanding of how the mental and physical are related to one another. Physics describes things from a third-person, non-normative, mechanistic point of view, while we describe our own thought processes from a first-person, normative perspective. Hence, they maintain, mental events are irreducible to physical events, nevertheless they are either token-identical to physical events or supervene upon physical events. However, they also often say that they perceive the relation between the mental and the physical as being deeply mysterious.
III. Non-Reductivism and Beyond
One strategy in responding to the versions of the argument from reason that I have presented is to admit that these realities are profoundly mysterious in a naturalistic universe, but that that providing a supernatural explanation for them is unacceptable. Keith Parsons sums it up when he says.
Physicalists may have to admit that some mental phenomena are mysteries and likely to remain so. Consider consciousness. How consciousness can exist in the physical world remains the “world-knot,” as Schopenhauer called it, and the expressions of despair quoted by Reppert are apt. But the honest thing to do when we confront an insoluble mystery is to admit that we do not know. It is obscurantist to “explain” the mystery in ways that only deepen our ignorance.21
In other words, yes, we can’t reduce reason to the non-rational activities of physical particles, but to accept a theistic account of these is obscurantist. His quarrel is going to be with chapter 6 of my book, entitled “The Inadequacy Objection.”
Now Carrier, to be sure, is not a non-reductive materialist. He thinks that mental-physical reductions are indeed possible. But I think his discussion of the relevant literature underestimates the sizable group of people in the philosophy of mind who are philosophical naturalists but who eschew reductionism. The “sensible naturalist” of Hasker’s reply to me is clearly a non-reductive materialist, who tries to stay within the naturalist fold while not holding out any promise for, for example, a causal analysis of mental states.
Then there are other people who think the mind’s being what it is requires a change in metaphysics, such the mind is fundamental to the universe and is not an evolutionary by-product. However, these thinkers are reluctant to accept theism as the solution to the problems they pose. Such people include Daniel Hutto,22 who has proposed Bradleyan absolute idealism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, and of course Thomas Nagel. In fact Nagel’s The Last Word is pretty much a defense of the Argument from Reason, the difference being that he does not offer God as his solution of choice. Reason for Nagel, is fundamental to the universe, but not the reason of God. The general thrust of Nagel’s book is to show the importance of rejecting accounts of reason that make reason relative, but, once you do that, you end up having to accept a metaphysics that, as he puts it “makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.”23 However, Nagel has traveled outside the realm of what people like Carrier would consider naturalistically acceptable and adopted what I call explanatory dualism, the idea that in addition to mechanistic explanations at the most basic level, we must have rational explanations as well.
Now Carrier’s strategy is very different. He spends little energy trying to show that even if naturalistic explanations of reason are unsuccessful, offering a theistic account of the phenomenon of reason does nothing to alleviate our ignorance. He instead maintains, not that I have overestimated the power of theistic explanations, but that I have underestimated that power of naturalistic explanations. (Of course one can argue both that naturalistic explanations are adequate and that theistic explanations are inadequate, but neither Carrier nor Parsons actually do both.) He thinks I have failed to pay sufficient attention to analyses of mind that are on offer.
IV. Intentionality
Consider his treatment of intentionality. Carrier’s task is to show that you can build and intentional brick wall out of non-intentional bricks. Just as a brick wall can be six feet tall even though none of the bricks are, a state can be intentional even though the fundamental, underlying states are non-intentional, as is required by the understanding of naturalism that both of us accept.
But what does Carrier say about intentionality? He says that A material state A is about material state B just in case “this system contains a pattern corresponding to a pattern in that system, in such a way that computations performed on this system are believed to match and predict behavior in that system.”
Unfortunately, this analysis of intentionality is simply loaded with intentional concepts, so if we didn’t know what intentionality was before we heard from Carrier, we wouldn’t know now. Moreover, on its face, it doesn’t even come close to being a physicalistically acceptable concept of intentionality that analyzes intentionality in non-intentional, physical, terms. Consider the term “corresponds.” What does “corresponds” mean in this context? If I’m eating a pancake, and the piece of pancake on my plate resembles slightly the shape of the state of Missouri on the map, can we say that it corresponds to the state of Missouri; that it is a map of Missouri? I’m looking at about for bottle trees right now. Is each of the bottle trees about the other bottle trees because there is a “correspondence” of leaves, branches, bark and roots, one to the other? In order for “correspondences” to be of significance, doesn’t it have to be a “correspondence” recognized by somebody’s conscious mind as being “about” the thing in question? And if that’s the case, then are we anywhere in the vicinity of a naturalistic account of intentionality?
And then there’s more to the definition than that. The intentional state has to be believed to correspond. But how could we define belief if we didn’t have any idea what it was for a mental state to be about something? If I have to believe that brain state X is about object Y only if I believe it to correspond to Y, then how do we analyze my belief that there is a correspondence without throwing us into an infinite regress?
Presumably this is explained by a “choice,’ though this doesn’t have to be a conscious choice. Decisions, presumably can be done by computers, even without intentionality. But do decisions generate beliefs? “The core engine of intentionality derives from the attentional centers of the brain. That’s why cats can keep track of their prey, for example—by the same means, we can track the image or thought of, say, out uncle, by attending to it cognitively, a process well understood in neurophysiological terms.” But surely one can “track” something without thinking “about” it. A heat-seeking missile tracks its object, but surely we don’t want to say that it’s activities are in any way intentional. Does a thermostat make decisions about what number to show? In dealing with questions of mind you have to be awfully careful to make sure that the words people are using really do mean what you think they mean, or whether they have been subtly re-defined to make them tractable to a physicalistic account.
Another highly ambiguous term, though quite popular in the philosophy of mind, which Carrier uses in his account of intentionality, is the term “computation.” But what does that mean? Chris Eliasmith suggests that there are serious problems with all definitions of computation currently on offer.24 He writes:
There are numerous competing definitions of computation. Along with the initial definition provided here, the following three definitions are often encountered:
Rule governed state transitions
Discrete rule governed state transitions
Rule governed state transitions between interpretable states
The difficulties with these definitions can be summarized as follows:
Admits all physical systems into the class of computational systems, making the
definition somewhat vacuous
Excludes all forms of analog computation, perhaps including the sorts of
processing taking place in the brain.
Necessitates accepting all computational systems as representational systems. In
other words, there is no computation without representation on this definition.
So how does Carrier want to define computation in his account of intentionality?
Without further definition, his use of the term is simply not clear. Yet it plays a very important role in his arguments against me.

In short, I just don’t see it. C. S. Lewis wrote an essay in which he delineated the difference between “looking at” and “looking along.”25 When you look at something, you view it from a third-person, outside perspective. When you look along something, you view it from within. An attempt to come up with a physicalistic view of the mind invariably ends up looking “at” mental events, and always fails to capture what is going on when you look “along” those same events, as the thinking subject. But these are not merely the musings of a popular Christian apologist of the last century. Philosophers of the stature of Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson,26 and John Searle have, in essence, said the same thing. But perhaps we all are just suffering from a lack of imagination. If so, then Carrier’s reflections on the matter have done nothing to expand my imagination. The suggestion that intentional states could arise in a purely physicalistic universe strikes me as incoherent.
But, as Carrier points out, there are other physicalistic accounts of intentionality on the market. Maybe those analyses will not suffer from the kinds of problems I am seeing in Carrier’s account. But I doubt it. If Angus Menuge’s critique of Daniel Dennett is right, then these sorts of problems afflict Dennett’s account of intentionality as well.
http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-24-t-000003.html 27

1 Richard Carrier, “Critical Review of Victor Reppert's Defense of the Argument from

Reason (2004), http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/reppert.shtml.

2 Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: A Defense of the Argument from Reason

(Inter-Varsity Press: Downer’s Grove, IL, 2003) p. 127.

3 Arthur James Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, Being Notes Introductory to the Study

of Theology (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1895).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587420058/104-4215955-4597522?v=glance


4 William Hasker, The Emergent Self (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 58-80.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801487609/qid=1099360281/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/104-4215955-4597522?v=glance&s=books

5 Reppert, p. 58

6 I am grateful to Tim McGrew for pointing out the difficulties in this passage.

7 Darek Barefoot, “A Response to Nicholas Tattersall’s “A Critique of Miracles by C. S.

Lewis” http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=89

8 This is developed in David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of A

Fundamental Theory, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

9 In using this term I am certainly not suggesting that materialists are engaged in deliberate deception.
10 Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999). http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465014232/qid=1099360365/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-4215955-4597522?v=glance&s=books For an interesting critique see Charles Taliaferro, “Mysterious Flames in the Philosophy of Mind” in Kevin Corcoran ed., Soul, Body, and Survival, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 59-72.
11 See especially John Searle, The Re-Discovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), reviewed by Thomas Nagel here: http://members.aol.com/Mszlazak/MindWins.html. Also, Carrier’s views are certainly opposed by the admittedly controversial Chinese Room argument. http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm

12 Nagel, The Last Word, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 75. See also The View from Nowhere, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 78-81.
13 Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) ch. 6.
14 William Hasker, “What Can’t be Eliminated,” in The Emergent Self (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 1-26.
15 Jaegwon Kim, see especially “Mechanism Purpose and Explanatory Exclusion” in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
16 William Hasker “What About a Sensible Naturalism?” in Philosophia Christi, vol 5 no. 1, (2003) pp. 53-62
17 Raymond Cattell, Intelligence: Its structure, growth, and action. (New York: Elsevier, 1987).
18 Reppert, pp. 115-116
19 Angus Menuge, Agents Under Fire (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) pp. 27-94. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0742534049/ref=wl_it_dp/002-9824154-3259266?%5Fencoding=UTF8&coliid=I3CE7V8TLWW3IT&v=glance&colid=13MFGQ287LAGS
20 Reppert, “Ramsey on Eliminativism and Self-Refutation,” Inquiry 34 (1991), 499-508, Reppert, “Eliminative Materialism, Cognitive Suicide and Begging the Question,” Metaphilosophy 23 (1992): 378-92.
21 Parsons, “Need Reasons be Causes: A Further Reply to Victor Reppert’s Argument from Reason,” Philosophia Christi, vol 5 no. 1, (2003), 74-75.
22 Daniel Hutto, “An Ideal Solution to the Problem of Consciousness,” http://www.herts.ac.uk/humanities/philosophy/JCS.html
23 Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 130
24 Chris Eliasmith, “Computation” in “Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind,” http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/computation.html
25 C. S. Lewis, “Meditation on a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1970), pp. 212-215.
26 Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” Philosophical Quarterly, 1982. http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Mary.html
27 Angus Menuge, PCID Volume 2.3 Philosophy of Mind Issue, “Dennett Denied, a Critique of Dennett’s Evolutionary Account of Intentionality”.