This is the apollos.ws argument from reason page

People sometimes either blog or write me about where the best AFR information is. This is still the one.

This site gives a bit more detail on the Lewis encyclopedia

My entries are:
The Ecumenical Apologist: Understanding C. S. Lewis’s Defense of Christianity

Victor Reppert
Miracles: C. S. Lewis’s Critique of Naturalism

Except for an essay in the Arizona C. S. Lewis society bulletin, this is the first time that my anti-Carrier material has appeared in print. It's also going to appear in the IVP volume that David Baggett is editing.

Two arguments from evil by Spencer Lo

Spencer Lo writes:

1. The Christian God strongly desires a loving relationship with almost every human being, and desires it to last for all eternity. [Christian assumption]
2. A loving relationship with God is possible only if one (a) believes that he exists and (b) chooses to be in a loving relationship with God.
3. Therefore, if the Christian God exists, since he wants humanity to have a loving relationship with him, he would make his existence well-known to almost everyone, thereby ensuring condition (a). (from 1, 2)
4. There are multitudes of conflicting religions and religious beliefs (Christianity, Islam, Hindus, Buddhism, secularism, etc), and more people who don't believe that the Christian God exists than those who do. [empirical assumption]
5. Therefore, not almost every human being believes that the Christian God exists. (from 4)
6. Therefore, the Christian God's existence is not well-known to almost everyone. (from 5)
7. Therefore, the Christian God doesn't exist. ( from 6, 3)


The reason I formulated (2) the way I did was to block the free will defense.The thought is: even if there is libertarian free will, belief in God is not a choice. I can no more choose to believe that God doesn't exist than I can choose to believe that an invisible genie isn't in my room. If I did believe that an invisible genie is in my room, I can then choose to talk to him. Similarly, I can choose to be in a relationship with God, but only after I believe he actually exists. Many Christians who cherish free will claim that if God's existence was so obvious, everyone would be forced to accept Jesus as their lord and savior, and thus salvation would not be a free choice. This just seems false to me. Belief is a necessary but not sufficient condition for acceptance. I can believe that there's life-saving medicine at the nearest store, but that in itself doesn't force me to go there and buy it.

Argument 2

1. If God exists, then pointless suffering wouldn't exist.
2. It is untenable to claim that pointless suffering doesn't exist.
3. Therefore, it is untenable to claim that God exists.

Defense of (2)

1. God is all-powerful and all-knowing. [Christian assumption]
2. Hence, God can thwart or prevent any negative consequences which may arise from a particular action. (from 1)
3. If God intervened to thwart or prevent suffering, he could thwart or prevent any negative consequences which may arise from such intervention. (from 2)
4. Therefore, God can't have a consequentialist justification for not thwarting or preventing suffering. (from 3)
5. The only other possible justification for not thwarting or preventing suffering is deontological: God is morally forbidden to intervene because of the nature of the intervention itself.
6. However, since God is the moral legislator, (5) is untenable.
7. Apart from a consequentialist or deontological justification, there is no other type of justification that God can appeal to to not thwart or prevent suffering.
8. Therefore, it is untenable to claim that pointless suffering doesn't exist. (from 7)

The intuition that God can thwart or prevent negative consequences without having to prevent the action is quite strong. Suppose I see a small child about to walk into a building rigged to explode as soon as he enters it. I can easily prevent him from walking into the building, but I choose not to. Why? Because I know that if I prevent him from walking into the building, 5 millions people will suddenly die horrible deaths as a result of my action. Hence, I justify my inaction to prevent an instance of suffering by appealing to the negative consequences which would have inevitably resulted from my action. Me acting to save the child will bring about far worse consequences than me not acting to save the child. Hence, I have a morally sufficient reason for my inaction.

However, since God is omnipotent, he can have his cake and eat it too. He can prevent the child from walking into the building and the deaths of millions who would have died as a result of God's action. There are no negative consequences that God cannot prevent which would result from him thwarting or preventing suffering.

Only if there is a logically necessary connection between a particular action and its negative consequences would God then not be able to thwart or prevent those consequences without preventing the action. However, at best, it seems that in most cases the kind of necessary connection involved is only causal. Since God can perform miracles, he can surely suspend "natural regularity," and there doesn't seem to be any limitation on the amount of miracles he's allowed to perform. I think the burden would be on the theist who wants to posit a logical necessity between an action and its consequences.

The harder problem of consciousness

Is it getting easier with the advance of science, or harder?

Loftus and Stewart on God of the Gaps

John W. Loftus writes:
Christian philosopher W. Christopher Stewart objects to the “god of the gaps” epistemology because, as he says, “natural laws are not independent of God. For the Christian theist, God upholds nature in existence, sustaining it in a providential way.” From his perspective this is true. But his rationale is a bit strange. He says, “To do so is to make religious belief an easy target as the gaps in scientific understanding narrow with each scientific discovery,” in “Religion and Science,” Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael Murray (Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub., Co., 1999), p. 321-322. Now why should he be concerned with this unless science truly is leaving less and less room for the supernatural? He’s admitting the evidence does not favor his faith. He’s trying to explain away the evidence. If he still lived in a pre-scientific era before science could explain so much he’d be arguing this is evidence that God exists!

Do gaps in scientific understanding narrow with every discovery? Or do scientific discoveries sometimes render gaps larger and at least apparently less bridgeable? My two favorite examples are the way in which science undermined confidence in determinism through quantum mechanics and undermined confidence in a beginningless universe through Big Bang cosmology. These developments, it seems to me, opened gaps rather than closed them. Naturalism has found ways of living without determinism and a beginningless universe, but before these scientific developments took place naturalists thought that they were essential to their naturalistic world-view.

There may well be something right about the anti-God-of-the-gaps rhetoric. But it's a mistake to give in to it every time it is brought up. Often these arguments are given a free pass, even by Christians.

Of course Stewart may think that there are reasons for accepting theism that do not involve gaps. The Thomistic cosmological and ontological arguments don't appeal to gaps at all, so far as I can tell.

A New Lewis Encyclopedia

This is a really nice volume, and it has two essays by me in it.

Hasker, sensible naturalism, and causal closure

What would the naturalist have to accept, in order to accommodate the demands of reason at this point? At minimum, the naturalist must accept the existence of emergent laws—laws which manifest themselves in complex organic situations, and which result in behavior of the fundamental particles of nature different from the behavior predicted on the basis of the physical laws alone. To admit this is to reject the “causal closure of the physical domain” that is so dear to the hearts of many, perhaps most, contemporary naturalists. The naturalist will have to acknowledge that new causal powers emerge in suitably complex configurations of organic chemicals.—powers that are not evident in simpler situations, and are not deducible from any laws that operate in simpler situations. It will have to be true that, given a particular sort of brain-state, there supervenes, say, a desire to hear a performance of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and that, in virtue of this desire, certain actions, and certain bodily movements occur that could not be predicted merely on the basis of the physical laws that apply to the elementary particles making up the nervous system. A view that countenances the emergence of such causal powers might provide the basis for understanding mental states that could be effective in virtue of their propositional content. Many naturalists, however, will be extremely reluctant to abandon causal closure; if they do so, their status as naturalists in good standing could plummet alarmingly.

Richard Dawkins and the Argument from Reason

Geoff Robinson wrote:

I had the opportunity to pose comments to Dawkins while he was in Philadelphiaon his book tour. I am a relatively well-read layman, but color me unimpressed. I pointed out several inconsistencies. Among which he chose to respond to the Argument from Reason. And, frankly, his response was pretty much "I'm not sure why this is a problem."

That's funny. Darwin could see a problem. How come Dawkins can't?

My question for Paul Draper

My question for Paul Draper on the Internet Infidels God or Blind Nature debate

In your reply to Plantinga, you maintain that a “sensible naturalism” can provide an adequate response to Plantinga’s EAAN. I would like to take a closer look at that “sensible naturalism.”

Surely you must know who invented the term “sensible naturalism.” It comes from William Hasker’s generally friendly response to my presentation of the Argument from Reason, entitled “What About a Sensible Naturalism: A Response to Victor Reppert," Philosophia Christi 5 (2003), at 53-62.

In your essay you define a set of beliefs that Hasker would accept as part of what a sensible naturalist must accept:

S: Beliefs exist, they affect behavior by virtue of their contents, and a belief's having a particular content is not the same as its displaying a certain set of third-person properties.

I quite agree. But I wonder if you are willing to accept the next step in Hasker’s argument, the claim that a sensible naturalist ought to deny the causal closure of the physical. Do you accept that, or not?

The problem here is that orthodox physics does not import first-person properties to its descriptions. It must be admitted that before living things ever came to exist, there was nothing that had a first-person perspective. Yet, if naturalism is true, all the causes were in place within the physical world to produce everything that has been produced since. So how does third-person physical stuff give rise to first-person entities?

If the physical is closed, the every particle’s being where it is can be fully accounted for in terms of physics. If you were physically omniscient, then nothing from the world of the mental could possibly give you any information about where a particle was going to be. You are familiar, surely with the difficulties Jaegwon Kim has raised for mental causation in a physicalistic world, or the argument from mental causation found in Hasker’s The Emergent Self (Ithaca: NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 3, or in my book, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (Inter-Varsity Press, 2003).

If you say that the universe started out as a physicalistic system with no mental causes in place, how did it create a distinct, irreducible mental realm that interacts with it?

Hasker, of course, argues that sensible naturalist should set the causal closure of the physical aside, even though many of you fellow naturalists will wonder whether you’re still a naturalist. But it seems to me that one must do more than that, one must admit that there are basic, irreducible causes in the universe that are mental in nature. Now you can do that without accepting theism per se: pantheism and absolute idealism are OK also. Admitted this is not supernaturalism, in the sense these world-views do not posit a separate, supernatural realm. But it does so at the cost of maintaining that the physical world is quite different from what orthodox physics says that it is.

Is reason central to science? I think so.

Science is wedded, at least in principle, to the evidence. Creationism is unabashedly wedded to doctrine, as evidenced by the statements of belief required by various creationist organizations and the professions of faith made by individual creationists. Because creationism is first and foremost a matter of Biblical faith, evidence from the natural world can only be of secondary importance. Authoritarian systems like creationism tend to instill in their adherents a peculiar view of truth.

This is from the Talk-Origins archive. Notice something about this argument: that ir presupposes a difference between proper and improper ways of getting the truth. Some methods are superior to others. "Works for me" isn't good enough in this arena of inquiry; genuine standards of right and wrong reasoning have to be applied.

Two dozen or so arguments for God

How many arguments are there for theism? Alvin Plantinga thinks there are a couple of dozen.

Here's the other side of the moths story

Here's the other side of the Wells moth story. It doesn't look, from the context of this statement, as if Majerus was inferring atheism from evolution.

It is not my place to tell people what to believe. But I know that we are making a horrendous mess of this planet, and I do not have faith in some supernatural intervention putting it right: No second coming; No helping hand from on high; No last minute redemption.

I caught my first butterfly when I was four, and started recording peppered moth forms when I was 10. I am getting old, and have spent my life in scientific enquiry and discovery. And it has been a great life!

Until now, for instead of the vision of a world made better by the appliance of science, I see a future of ever-increasing global problems. I probably won't see the worst of what's coming - but I fear for my children, who will face escalating problems of climate change, over-population, pollution, starvation, disease and conflict. And for their children and grandchildren, I have little optimism.

We need to address global problems now, and to do so with any chance of success, we have to base our decisions on scientific facts: and that includes the fact of Darwinian evolution.

Though, when I read this sort of thing, I have to wonder what is packed into the term "Darwinian evolution."

Deep and passionate commitment on an issue makes it hard to tell what is simply serious misunderstanding and what is out and out deceit.

If Majerus is looking for a "proof of evolution" in the peppered moth case, this is probably asking too much.

As for the "icons" strategy Wells uses, I am kind of skeptical, because education below the highest level requires a certain amount of "cartooning" if theories which are presented in better detail at a higher level.

Reply to Dmitry Chernikov's Inquiry on subjective probabilities

The idea is rejecting classical foundationalism and accepting the idea that people come into a topic from various perspectives. We are called upon to adjust the beliefs we have rather than start from scratch. So to begin, any prior is OK, but in the light of evidence, if the case is really strong, everyone can move from where they are to a consensus.

As I understand it, everyone's prior probabilities (even people who believe weird things) are "properly basic" and we revise from there.

Christopher Mitchell's essay on Lewis the apologist

Which covers the Anscombe debate.

Peppered moths: Alive or dead?

What bothers me here is how the biologist proclaims not just that peppered moths prove evolution, but they also disprove God. That's quite an accomplishment for a bunch of dead moths.

See what those CADRE guys mean?

I googled "idiot xtians" and came up with lots of stuff. This is one of the links I got.

Some comments from CADRE on atheist rhetoric

A Mormon for President?

Stunney's Important Point

Stunney: In other words, regardless of whether materialism is true or not, some things must have their nature or essential properties, and must engage in the activity that is specified by that nature or essential properties, NOT in virtue of some underlying parts and processes that 'enable' or ’cause' that nature or activity, but immediately, directly, and hence non-mechanically.

VR: Quite correct. At some point we have to stop reducing, and say that something is the way it is because it is its nature to be the way it is. Why can't we say something (maybe God, maybe something else) is rational because it has the essential property of being rational. Why say that such a stopping point has to be with mindless particles.

Misunderstanding the argument from reason

W wrote: In your argument from reason, for example, you demand a step by step, no gaps, defense of reason in a physicalist universe.

VR: No, I don't require such a thing. I maintain that there is a conceptual disparity between the mental and the physical. In fact the physical is typically defined in terms of the absence of the mental. I see attempts to accommodate the mental to the physical that either explain the mental away or "sneak in" the mental to into a presumably physical explanation, and then try to tell me that it's a good physical explanation because it's being attributed to the "brain."