This week, having found some time to get away, I have been listening to and reading some very interesting and engaging material. I want to note, before I continue about the material I've been taking in, one interesting thing. I can honestly say that reading heady philosophical literature, listening to debates, and thinking about arguments regarding the world, God and reason feel to me much like eating an ice cream cone or soaking in a warm bath. I find few things as invigorating and life giving. Those who know me can probably attest to this, either to their delight or chagrin. My wife would identify with the latter. But I can't help it.
Two thinkers have been filling my time this week, one who is current, and one from the last century. William Lane Craig is the first. He is perhaps the most well spoken Christian thinker when it comes to arguments from reason for the existence of God, the resurrection, and many other things. Whether writing or speaking, he carefully and tactfully builds arguments from the ground of logic upwards, so that each point naturally follows each argument and evidence. I quite enjoy it. Check out his debate with Bart Ehrman on Youtube, where he lays out a mathmatical formula for the probability of any explanation for any given event or phenomenon - thereby forcefully arguing for the vaidity of Christ's resurrection. Check out reasonablefaith.org for more from him.
The second is C.S. Lewis. He was introduced to me when I was in perhaps grade 11, and I read Mere Christianity. The force of his reasoning, as well as his use of metaphors and language, was not only a new discovery at the time, but very transforming for me spiritually. I have come back to his work, both fictional and philosophical, periodically since that time. I have read perhaps half of his well known work, my favorite being perhaps The Great Divorce and Miracles, which I am reading now.
What inspired me to write at this moment was precisely the aforementioned Miracles, a treatise on the possibility for miracles in our world, and also the foundations of reason. I want to share some thoughts from the third chapter in particular, which I think our culture's thinkers need to seriously revisit in light of some frightening developments in modern science and philosophy. The chapter is called "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist". Although written in 1946, it is very apropos.
"All possible knowledge depends on the validity of reasoning... Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true... A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished."
Why does this matter? Naturalism is the reigning worldview of modern science and culture. Yet the foundations for reason and science depend on this logical conclusion - that we can in fact coherently reach certain conclusions about nature, based on human reason. But naturalism holds that our brains, and our bodies, are simply part of the total whole.
"The mind, like every other particular thing and event, is supposed to be simply the product of the Total System. It is supposed to be that and nothing more, to have no power whatever of 'going on of its own accord.' And the Total System is not supposed to be rational. All thoughts whatever are therefore the results of irrational causes and nothing more than that." Lewis goes on, "You cannot show that our processes of thought yield truth unless you are allowed to argue 'Because a thought is useful, therefore it must be (at least partly) true.' But this is itself an inference. If you trust it, you are once more assuming that very validity which you set out to prove."
He goes on to then tackle those who would say they really aren't interested in truth, just the well being and flourishing of human life. The paragraph here is good enough that I want to include all of it: "The real answer is that unless Naturalists put forward Naturalism as a true theory, we have of course no dispute with them. You can argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome': but you neither can nor need argue with a man who says, 'Rice is unwholesome, but I'm not saying this is true.' I feel also that this surrender of the claim to truth has all the air of an expedient adopted at the last moment. If the Naturalists do not claim to know any truths, ought they not to have warned us rather earlier of the fact? For really from all the books they have written, in which the behavior of the remotest nebula, the shyest photon and the most prehistoric man are described, one would have got the idea that they were claiming to give a true account of real things. The fact surely is that they nearly always are claiming to do so. The claim is surrendered only when the question discussed in this chapter is pressed; and when the crisis is over the claim is tacitly resumed."
I am going to now go back to reading instead of writing. Hopefully you enjoyed these thoughts from myself and mostly C.S. Lewis.
