The False Anscombe Legend

This is familiar material to those of you who read my book or my essay for the Chronicles of Narnia volume, but I am working on an entry for a C. S. Lewis encyclopedia, so I have put a couple of things I wrote in different places together here.

The False Anscombe Legend
It is sometimes argued that not only are Lewis’s apologetics woefully inadequate, but that Lewis himself recognized this and abandoned apologetics at the height of his apologetic career, as a reaction to a devastating encounter with a real philosopher. This encounter was not with an atheist, it was with the Roman Catholic Elizabeth Anscombe.
The legendary debate with Anscombe took place at the Oxford Socratic Club on February 2, 1948. In his book Miracles, published the year before, Lewis argued that naturalism—the view that only physical reality exists—is self-contradictory. Anscombe sharply criticized the argument, claiming that it was confused and based on the ambiguous use of key terms. According to the “Anscombe legend,” Lewis not only admitted that Anscombe got the better of the exchange, but recognized that his argument was wrong. Further, as a result of the exchange, Lewis gave up on Christian apologetics. According to Humphrey Carpenter, one of the purveyors of the Anscombe legend, “Though [Lewis] continued to believe in the importance of Reason in relation to his Christian faith, he had perhaps realized the truth of Charles Williams’s maxim, ‘No-one can possibly do more than decide what to believe.’’ In short, Lewis went from a belief in the rationality of his faith to a fideistic position, according to which belief is based on faith and should not be defended rationally.
Now it is true that, immediately following the debate, Lewis expressed disappointment to friends as to how the debate went. Further, Lewis did think that Anscombe’s objections were serious enough to require him to rewrite the relevant chapter of Miracles. And it is also true that he wrote no more explicitly apologetic books after Miracles. But we have no reason to believe that he had any apologetic books in mind that went unwritten because of the exchange with Anscombe. What we do know is that he did continue to write essays on apologetical subjects. In “Is Theism Important” (1952), Lewis affirms the importance of theistic arguments, and says “Nearly everyone I know who has embraced Christianity in adult life has been influenced by what seemed to him to be at least probable arguments for Theism.”4 In “On Obstinacy of Belief” (1955), Lewis defends Christianity against the charge that while scientists apportion their beliefs to the evidence, religious people do not, and are therefore irrational. In “Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger” (1958), Lewis defends his Christian apologetics against criticisms from a prominent theologian, hardly what you would expect him to do if he thought his career as an apologist had been misguided The essay “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959) is a stinging assault on modern Biblical scholarship of a skeptical variety, the sort of scholarship that is currently represented by members of the Jesus Seminar.7 If that essay is not a piece of Christian apologetics, then I simply do not know what the term means.
I should note that Lewis not only revised his chapter on Miracles, he expanded the chapter. Now if you really thought that someone had proved you wrong, why in the world would you expand the very chapter that had been disproved? What is more, this revision was not just something he thought of years later; an examination of the original issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe’s article appears we find a short response by Lewis in which he lays the foundation for the subsequent revision, which appeared in 1960.8
One devastating blow to the Anscombe legend has come from a surprising source. In his 1985 book C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion John Beversluis criticized C. S. Lewis’s apologetics as a failure, and in so doing made reference to the psychological impact of the Anscombe incident. He also analyzed the arguments, and found that “the arguments that Anscombe presented can be pressed further, and Lewis’s revised argument does nothing to meet them.” However, in a subsequent review of A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis, which implied Lewis wrote Narnia because he was running away from the thumping he got from Anscombe, Beversluis, much to his credit, abandoned the Anscombe Legend entirely. He wrote:
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.

Anscombe's commentary on her exchange with Lewis

In 1948, Elizabeth Anscombe, then a student of Wittgenstein and a research fellow at Oxford, publicly challenged C. S. Lewis’s central argument against naturalism. In response to her criticisms, Lewis rewrote the relevant chapter of his book Miracles. Anscombe briefly acknowledged the revision in print as an improvement, but never wrote more extensively about it. In 1985, however, she gave a talk about Lewis’s revised version to the C. S. Lewis Society, discussing its strengths and remaining weaknesses. This chapter is a transcript of that talk.

Here.  I wish this transcript had been available back when I was writing my dissertation chapter on the Lewis-Anscombe Controversy. Now if I can just get my hands on it!

This is Gregory Bassham's summary of Anscombe's discussion. from Church History. 

One reading that will be of special interest to Lewis scholars is Elizabeth Anscombe’s talk on “C. s. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of MiraclesAs is well-known, Lewis and Anscombe engaged in a famous debate in 1948 over Lewis’s claim that naturalism is self-refeting (his so-called "argument from reason”). Confroversy has swirled over who won the debate and whether Lewis largely abandoned rational apologetics as a result of his perceived defeat. What we know for sure is that Lewis substantially revised and expanded his original argument in the second edition of Miracles (London: Collins-Fontana, 1960), and that Anscombe stated in the early 1980s that Lewis’s revised argument was a substantial improvement over the original formulation, iat we have not known until now is whether Anscombe believed that Lewis’s revised argument was substantially correct. We can now see that she did not. Anscombe examines Lewis’s argument in detail, and finds it to be rife with confiisions, ambiguities, and false assertions (16-22). Lewis argues that naturalism undermines itself, because naturalism can only be justifiably believed if it can be rationally inferred from good evidence, and naturalism excludes the possibility of rational inference by claiming that all human mental processes are wholly determined by nonrational causes. In other words, naturalism can be rationally believed only if reasoning is possible. But if naturalism is true, then reasoning is impossible. So if naturalism is true, it cannot be rationally believed (and neither can much else). Anscombe suggests that this argument rests on a confiision. The fact that a beliefor statement is felly determined by non-rational causes has no bearing on whether it is true or rationally justified. Consider, she says, the analogy of a printed book. Every word in such a book is wholly determined by the machinery that printed the book. Yet no one would suppose that this casts any doubt on whether the things said in the book are true or rationally defensible (16). As Anscombe sees it, the whole issue of causal determination is a red herring؛ even strict, reductionistic naturalists can consistently recognize the existence of reasoning and the possibility of rational beliefs. But Anscombe does find something of real value in Lewis’s discussion. Lewis raises the important and deeply puzzling question of how logical grounds can cause a conclusion to be drawn (18). As Anscombe sees it, Lewis’s “damnably obscure” claim that an inferred conclusion can be "determined only by the truth it knows” (22) does not do much to solve this problem, but Lewis was right in pointing to the deeply puzzling nature of mental causation.

As I noted in the first essay I wrote on Lewis-Anscombe, Anscombe is committed to a divorce between rational justification and the causation of belief that strikes me as implausibly strong, and one that would not have be embraced by most naturalists today, who would follow Donald Davidson in rejecting a strict divorce between reasons and causes (see his essay "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" in which he criticizes the standard Wittgensteinian position on this). Anscombe also has to deal with the ontological restrictiveness of naturalism. Whether an explanation is causal or not, it still has an ontology, and most philosophical materialists and naturalists will not accept reasons into their ontology without some kind of intertheoretic reduction or supervenience relation, and this is not part of Anscombe's critique at all. 

The Anscombe Debate and the Anscombe Legend

I think some notes need to be made with respect to the relationship between the Anscombe debate and the Anscombe legend. It seems to me that one can maintain that the exchange between Anscombe and Lewis must, in the last analysis, be adjudicated in Anscombe's favor, without subscribing to what I have been calling the Anscombe legend. The legend says that, as a result of his debate with Anscombe, Lewis realized that he had been completely wrong and gave up on Christian apologetics. Further, this caused Lewis to abandon the "adult" world of rational discussion of religion in favor of the emotional, childlike world of Narnia. It was the legend that Philip Pullman was alluding to in the interview I quoted.

John Beversluis, in the first edition of his book on Lewis, wrote that "the arguments that Anscombe presented can be pressed further, and Lewis's revised argument does nothing to meet them." In a later paper reviewing A. N. Wilson's book, he took Wilson to task for overestimating the psychological impact of the Anscombe incident but his comments did not indicate a change in his views on the success of Lewis's actual argument or the philosophical effectiveness of the Anscombe critique. So he withdrew his previous acceptance of the Anscombe legend, but not the Anscombe critique.

In the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe essay appeared, Lewis presented an argument against naturalism which he thought could meet Anscombe's objections.
I think the Anscombe critique is decisive only if certain Wittgensteinian doctrines that she presupposed are true, doctrines that I consider to be highly counterintuitive, to say the least, and which would be rejected by most people on the naturalist side. But even if pursuing Anscombe's points further completely refutes Lewis's arguments, the Anscombe Legend would still be completely bogus.

Distinguishing two theses in Anscombe's reply to C. S. Lewis

 From an essay I am writing on the Anscombe legend. 

Now most of Anscombe’s argumentation is aimed at establishing what I will call thesis A:

A) The argument Lewis presents in the third chapter of the first edition of Miracles overlooks some crucial distinctions, and therefore fails to show that naturalism is incompatible with the validity of reasoning.

However, at the end of her piece Anscombe goes on to say the following:

I do not think that there is sufficiently good reason for maintaining the “naturalist” hypothesis about human behaviour and thought. But someone who does maintain it cannot be refuted as you try to refute him, by saying that it is inconsistent to maintain it and to believe that human reasoning is valid and that human reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.

In other words she asserts what I will call thesis B:

B) You cannot refute the naturalist position by saying his position is inconsistent to say that naturalism is true, that human reasoning is valid, and that humans reasoning sometimes produces human opinion.

This goes beyond saying that Lewis didn’t refute naturalism because he overlooked the distinctions Anscombe insisted upon, this is to say that you can’t refute the naturalist on the basis of the validity of reasoning, because of these distinctions. 

            Did Lewis concur with A? Almost certainly he did. I have known some philosophers who have thought that Lewis really didn’t need to revise his chapter at all, including the late philosopher Richard Purtill, but Lewis did not concur. (Neither would I).  Even in his initial brief response to Anscombe’s critique, which was published in the same issue of the Socratic Digest in which her essay appeared, he acknowledged the difficulty surrounding the use of the term “valid” and employed one of Anscombe’s central distinctions, between the cause and effect because, and what  he called the ground and consequent because. He indicated in his reply to Norman Pittenger that the third chapter of Miracles contained a “serious hitch” and that it “needs to be rewritten.” Establishing A is a good day’s work for a philosopher, particularly in that she persuaded the very person to whom she was responding that one of his central arguments, as stated, had serious problems and needed to be reworked.

            Now, if this is what winning the debate amounts to, Anscombe won, and Lewis agreed that she did. But she did go on to assert B, and if winning the debate requires establishing B, Lewis dissented. He wrote in his short response in the Socratic Digest:

It would seem, therefore, that we never think the conclusion because GC it is the consequent of its grounds but only because CE certain previous events have happened. If so, it does not seem that the GC sequence makes us more likely to think the true conclusion than not. And this is very much what I meant by the difficulty in Naturalism.

Lewis would go on to make this claim the centerpiece of his argument when he revised the chapter. He wrote:

But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

            I am inclined to be resistant to talking about winning and losing in philosophical debates. They are not football games.  The Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig often does public debates on apologetical issues, and usually comes out looking better than his opponents. But skeptics have complained, with some justification, that doing well in a public debate format is not the same as proving one’s central thesis to be true from a philosophical standpoint. Now, if we are going to assess a winner in the exchange, there are, as Bassham notes a few different ways this can be assessed. Do we look just at the exchange on that day in at the Oxford Socratic Club, or do we look at the overall exchange between the two parties over time? Do we go by what the audience thought had happened? In a couple of important senses, Anscombe was the clear winner, especially if you look only at what happened on Feb. 2, 1948. There is no reason to doubt Carpenter’s report that many in the audience thought that a conclusive blow had been struck against one of Lewis’s fundamental arguments. On the narrow question of whether Lewis’s formulation of the argument is philosophically adequate, Anscombe contended that it wasn’t, and Lewis agreed. However, the most interesting philosophical question of whether or not you can refute naturalism based on the validity of reasoning cannot be settled the outcome of a particular exchange at a debating club. When Walter Hooper asked Lewis if he said he lost the debate with Anscombe, and Lewis said he didn’t, Lewis was probably thinking in terms of the question of whether Anscombe had shown that B is true. He was convinced that she had not. And looking at Anscombe’s responses to Lewis’s revised work, both in the introduction to her collected papers, and in her longer response given to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society in 1985, she does not reassert B. So far as I can tell from her responses, she does not think that Lewis had established that B is false, but she no longer confidently asserted that B is true. I would summarize this by saying that I think Anscombe won a significant, but only partial, victory, and in this I believe Lewis would concur.

Why did the exchange with Anscombe upset C. S. Lewis?

This is a follow-up on the post I did a couple of weeks back on the impact of the Anscombe exchange on Lewis. On the one hand we do have Lewis in various communications expressing discouragement about his debating experience with Anscombe, and also a certain amount of avoiding of apologetic controversy after that. And we even have some comments to the effect that he had been proven wrong at least reported by people like Sayer.

At the same time there is clear and overwhelming evidence that Lewis, at least from fairly early on after the exchange with Anscombe, did not consider his argument refuted. Of course there is the 1960 revision of the relevant chapter, in which he expanded the relevant chapter. It makes no sense to expand the very chapter of one's book which is thought to have been disproved.

But more importantly, Lewis's own response printed in the Socratic Digest later that year showed that he didn't think the argument itself refuted. He wrote:

I admit that valid was a bad for what I meant; veridical (or verific or veriferous) would have been better. I also admit that the cause and effect relation between events and the ground and consequent relation between propositions are distinct. Since English uses the word because for both, let us use Because CE for the cause and effect relation ('This doll always falls on its feet because CE its feet are weighted') and Because GC for the ground and consequent relation ('A equals C because GC they both equal B'). But the sharper this distinction becomes the more my difficulty increases. If an argument is to be verific it must be related to the premises as consequent to ground, i.e. the conclusion is there because GC certain other propositions are true. On the other, our thinking the conclusion is an event that must be related to previous events as effect to cause, i. e. this act of thinking must occur because CE previous events have occurred. It would seem, therefore, that we never think the conclusion because GC it is the consequent of its grounds, but only because CE previous events have happened. If so, it does not seem that the GC sequence makes us more likely to think the true conclusion than not. And this is very much what I mean by the difficulty in Naturalism.

The red-lettered passage suggests that Lewis actually thought that when you draw the Anscombe-type distinctions more sharply, you actually get more trouble for naturalism, not less. Although it would have seemed to the outside observers of the debate that Anscombe helped the naturalist defend naturalism against Lewis's attacks, what Lewis is saying that she did was actually provide ammunition for the case against naturalism.

Lewis also seems to concede some points to Anscombe that I am not sure he really should. For example, valid is a term that has more than one sense. In logic a valid argument is one that is structured in such a way that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true, but it also can be used to refer to reliability or legitimacy. Anscombe objects to the use of the term irrational causes to refer to non-rational causes, but actually in The Abolition of Man Lewis distinguishes between two senses of irrational; he writes: "It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational." In a previous post I looked up a dictionary and found that Lewis could not be faulted by the way he used "irrational" in the first edition.

The philosophical upshot of the exchange with Anscombe, as Lewis saw it, was that the argument surely needed some cleaning up, but after that cleaning up the argument was, if anything, in better shape than it was before Anscombe criticized it. Given all this, it is amazing to me that Lewis would have given so many signals to other people suggesting that this exchange was some kind of huge defeat for him. I have a distinct impression that there are parts of this story that are below the surface, maybe that we will never fully understand.

I have created a link to a search of my blog for "Anscombe," so that you can see my reflections on that controversy that I have put up here. See also the discussion by Ed Cook on the exchange.

Reply to Anonymous on Lewis and Anscombe

Anscombe's final comments are the beginning point of my discussions of the argument. Anscombe thought that there were flaws in the revised formulation of the argument, she also thought that Lewis asked a question "Even if grounds do exist, what have they got to do with the actual occurrence of belief as a psychological event," to which she said "we haven't got an answer." These are not the words of someone who thinks they have slam-dunked their opponent.

I've often wished that the Anscombe original critique, and the Anscombe final comments. I wrote a brief review of the volume for Amazon. Getting the appropriate permission, in this case, might be difficult. I tried to get a volume together of Lewis-related philosophical essay along with another Lewis scholar, but was not able to pull together such a complex project. One of my plans was to include all the original texts from the Anscombe exchange (though there is a new volume of Lewis essays coming out edited by Walls, Habermas, and Baggett--unfortunately no Anscombe appendix).

As an attempt to show difficulties with Lewis's original argument, the critique works nicely, as Lewis surely admitted. That's a good day's work for a philosopher. If that's all you mean by winning, the Anscombe won. If winning means getting the better of the session at the Socratic, then that's probably right, though reports are mixed. But invariably, "winning" is thought to be a good deal more than that; it is thought to be showing the argument to be fundamentally mistaken and misguided. But in order to hold that Anscombe achieved this, you would have to agree with her that reason-explanations not only can be distinguished between causal explanations, they can be divorced completely, and therefore a "S believes P for reason R" can be answered in a way that leaves completely out of account how the belief is produced and sustained in S. That was popular amongst Wittgensteinians, and I sometimes hear it being defended, but even naturalistic philosophers from Davidson to Dretske to Jaegwon Kim don't want to go that way, and I think (for reasons I give in some detail in my book), they have good reason for so doing.

But yes, I would love to include an appendix to my book with the original documents in it, or make it available online. But it isn't the sort of thing you can include in a monograph without a lot of hassle. I understand that even the Lewis estate can be difficult to deal with for permissions.

Does anyone think that I failed to give an adequate summary of the relevant arguments?

I am linking to the Amazon page on Anscombe's book, which may be out of print but it's still available.

Here we go again with Anscombe nonsense

Nuff said. No, let me repeat what I posted back on June 28:

My researches into the Anscombe exchange show pretty clearly 1) Anscombe provided some legitimate objections to the formulation of the argument against naturalism as found in the first edition of Miracles. 2) Lewis seems to have felt discouraged in the immediate aftermath of the exchange, as shown by comments he made to literary friends. 3) Lewis did not think that Anscombe’s considerations put the naturalist in the clear; in fact, Lewis employs Anscombe’s distinctions in the response that appears in the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe’s paper appeared. 4) Anscombe considered the revised argument much more serious than the first edition, although she did not endorse it. 5) Lewis's revisions, along with other philosophical considerations, show that Lewis's argument, properly reformulated, can survive Anscombe's objections. 6) Although Lewis published no more books about apologetics after the Anscombe exchange, he did write many articles devoted to apologetics, revising and expanding the controversial chapter of Miracles for the Fontana edition. You don't expand a chapter you think has been proven wrong. 7) Attempts by A. N. Wilson and others to identify the Green Witch in Narnia (who attempt to persuade the children that the Overworld does not exist) with Anscombe are complete and utter nonsense.

Hugh Chandler on the Lewis-Anscombe exchange

I mentioned after returning from Cambridge the fact that at the Oxford half of the meeting (which I did not personally attend), they had an actors' re-enactment of the Lewis-Anscombe exchange, incorporating material from Lewis's original argument, Anscombe's criticisms, Lewis's revision(s), and Anscombe's final comments in the book of her papers. I also pointed out that Anscombe's husband, Peter Geach, was concerned about how his wife would be portrayed. Now in one respect I really do think the dramatization did realize what Geach feared. The presentation ended with a spotlight on Anscombe taking a cigar out of her mouth and saying "I won." I remember expressing some concerns about this to the people who wrote the re-enactment (who for the most part did an outstanding job) because I think philosophy is not mainly about winning and losing. I told my dissertation advisor Hugh Chandler, with whom I spent a long time talking about Lewis v. Anscombe while I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, and he shared my concerns about it.

I don't think that "I won" ending is fair to Anscombe, or to the discussion.
It is true that she thought that her criticisms of that first version had been just. Presumably Lewis himself took at least some of her objections to heart. His re-working of the first edition argument shows awareness of "the depth and difficulty of the questions being discussed" (Anscombe's generous words).

Both of them, presumably, showed 'honesty and seriousness' in the exchange and afterwards. It wasn't a game. Winning or losing wasn't the point.


The cigar incident was reported by Walter Hooper, and I think is one of the things that has led to a deep misunderstanding of the exchange between the two. It does not reflect Anscombe's mature, reflective understanding of what really happened. I suppose, however, that it did make good drama, but I for one wish it had been omitted.

Some conclusions about the Lewis-Anscombe controversy

My researches into the Anscombe exchange show pretty clearly 1) Anscombe provided some legitimate objections to the formulation of the argument against naturalism as found in the first edition of Miracles. 2) Lewis seems to have felt discouraged in the immediate aftermath of the exchange, as shown by comments he made to literary friends. 3) Lewis did not think that Anscombe’s considerations put the naturalist in the clear; in fact, Lewis employs Anscombe’s distinctions in the response that appears in the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe’s paper appeared. 4) Anscombe considered the revised argument much more serious than the first edition, although she did not endorse it. 5) Lewis's revisions, along with other philosophical considerations, show that Lewis's argument, properly reformulated, can survive Anscombe's objections. 6) Although Lewis published no more books about apologetics after the Anscombe exchange, he did write many articles devoted to apologetics, revising and expanding the controversial chapter of Miracles for the Fontana edition. You don't expand a chapter you think has been proven wrong. 7) Attempts by A. N. Wilson and others to identify the Green Witch in Narnia (who attempt to persuade the children that the Overworld does not exist) with Anscombe are complete and utter nonsense.

Lewis was right after all

This passage comes from A. N. Wilson's "Why I Believe Again." 

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist "explanations" for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: "It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names."

This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah's Ark. More so, really.

Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

What Wilson has seen the force of, here, is the argument from reason, which was the argument that, in Wilson's own biography of Lewis, Anscombe is credited with demolishing so thoroughly that he was driven into to write children's fantasies instead of Christian apologetics. His was the most virulent version of what I have called the Anscombe Legend, the legend that Lewis critic John Beversluis (who had employed it in the first edition of his book on Lewis) dispatched with the following critique. 

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.

Language is a product of our ability to reason, and it if is to be explained naturalistically, it has to be as much a product of evolution as a finch's beak. If this is deeply problematic for evolution, then he is essentially embracing the conclusion that Peter Geach, Anscombe's husband, came to when he wrote: 

When we hear of some new attempt to explain reasoning or language or choice naturalistically, we ought to react as if we were told that someone had squared the circle or proved the square root of 2 to be rational: only the mildest curiosity is in order-how well has the fallacy been concealed?] P. T. Geach (The Virtues). 

But to do that is to accept the conclusion of Lewis's AFR.  

The False Anscombe Legend Again

kbrowne: While I would agree that, as a result of his exchange with Anscombe, Lewis came to believe that his formulation of his argument was flawed, the claim that he believed the argument to be fully refuted is an urban legend, which I have dubbed the Anscombe legend. Anscombe herself attributed reports of Lewis's dejection over the exchange to the psychological phenomenon of "projection." Lewis in fact produced a short response to Anscombe's argument that appeared in the very issue of the Socratic Digest in which Anscombe's own essay had appeared. In 1960, the Fontana edition of Miracles appeared, in which Lewis produced a revised and expanded version of the third chapter of Miracles, which he wrote in response to Anscombe, and which expanded on the ideas in his short response that appeared in the Socratic Digest. Anscombe thought that this effort was considerably improved, but pointed out a couple of areas where the argument needed further development if it were to succeed.

My own efforts, starting with my 1989 doctoral dissertation, through my book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and the Blackwell Companion article, has been to defend Lewis's overall argument. I think as an attempt to refute Lewis's overall argument, (as opposed to showing that it had been inadequately formulated) relies on some assumptions, popular amongst Wittgensteinians (that explaining the reasons for someone's belief can be done in a way that is completely separate and independent from the question of how that belief is produced and sustained), that most people, naturalists or otherwise, would not endorse, and which have unacceptable consequences.

It is of some interest to note John Beversluis, who is the leading critic of Lewis's apologetics, concludes that Lewis did not consider his argument refuted and did not give up apologetics after the exchange, as biographers such as Humphrey Carpenter and A. N. Wilson have claimed. He differs from me with respect to the merits of Lewis's argument, and does think it can be refuted on broadly Anscombian lines, but he has completely abandoned the Anscombe Legend with respect to the psychological impact of the exchange.

A summary of Lewis-Anscombe (at least in part)

 

            Lewis had originally argued that if naturalism/materialism is true, then all thoughts are produced by irrational causes, that is, the motions of atoms in the brain. Since atoms in the brain move the way they do because of the laws of physical and their original positions, if naturalism is true, then our beliefs would end up being no more likely to be true than false.

            We ordinarily distinguish between people who, to use Lewis's example, form the belief that the neighbor's black dog is dangerous by inferring it from evidence (they have seen it muzzled, messengers avoid the house), and people who form the belief that the dog is dangerous because they were bit by a black dog in childhood and have been terrified of black dogs since. One of these people is being rational, the other isn't. But, he argued, the real causes for everyone's beliefs, if naturalism is true, have to be blind physical causes, and therefore the distinction between people who form their beliefs rationally and those who don't breaks down. If naturalism is true no one ever believes anything for a reason, and if we are forced to assume that some people believe some things for a reason (which is certainly what scientists imply when they claim we should believe something because scientific evidence supports it), then we have to reject naturalism.

I think a lot of materialists would respond to this either by appealing to computers or appealing to evolution (though Lewis anticipated the argument from evolution). Anscombe does neither. She starts by distinguishing irrational causes from merely nonrational causes--she says that irrational causes are, basically, causal mechanisms that typically produce errors, while non-rational ones need not be shown to show that proclivity. However, to get an anti-naturalist result through this kind of argument is to confuse reasons-explanations with causal explanations. If someone gives an argument to the effect that the dog is dangerous based on evidence you can't rebut that argument by saying that the real reason the person believes the dog dangerous is because he was bitten in childhood. That's the fallacy that Lewis himself criticized as Bulverism, and is known in the logic books as the ad hominem circumstantial fallacy.

            However, Anscombe then considers the response that what Lewis is claiming is that if naturalism is true, then, as a matter of actual fact, logic and evidence are never relevant to the actual production of any belief, because a full explanation of every belief can be produced in terms of physical, not rational causes. However, full explanations for every event are simply explanations that answer completely what we want to know about the event. And if I ask for why you believe something I am asking for grounds, not causes, what I want is what I get if I ask you why you believe something. Casual laws are based on observed regularities, but reasons are elicited from people when you ask why they believe something or did something. Wittgensteinians typically held that reasons weren't causes at all, and that Wittgensteinian position seems to be built into Anscombe's response to Lewis.  Naturalism, Anscombe says, just says we can have causal explanations for all our thoughts in terms of causal laws, but that doesn't mean, as Lewis implies, that there are no reasons. One way of looking at this would be to say that talk of reasons and talk of causes occur in different language games, so there is no real conflict.

I maintain that although Anscombe has provided an attack on an anti-naturalist argument, but a modern naturalist might not, or should not, be inclined to stand up and cheer. Naturalism, I maintain, is an attempt to provide a comprehensive ontology, it is committed to the idea that other non-scientific explanations have to be either absorbed into the universe of naturalistic explanation or eliminated. While anti-causalist theories of reasons were popular in the 50s and early 60s, most naturalists today, I think, would follow Donald Davidson in saying that reasons are causes. I once gave a paper on the Anscombe exchange at a faculty colloquium at a secular philosophy department. The consensus  was I had a good critique of Anscombe, but that Anscombe's criticisms of Lewis's argument weren't interesting.

 

        First of all, explanations, causal or not, have an ontology, and naturalism isn't just a claim about causal explanations, it makes ontological restrictions. If I explain the presence of presents under the Christmas tree in terms of the munificence of Santa Claus, I imply that Santa is real. If I explain my belief in terms of reasons, then I imply that reasons exist, whether that explanations is a causal explanation or not.

            They do maintain that a total causal story, from big bang to big crunch, can be given for every event, and that causal story is part of a closed and nonteleological system. Lewis asked,

But even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event? If it is an event it must be caused. It must in fact be simply one link in a causal chain which stretches back to the beginning and forward to the end of time. How could such a trifle as lack of logical grounds prevent the belief’s occurrence or how could the existence of grounds promote it?

And Anscombe said “We haven’t got an answer” to the question Lewis asked here.

 

 

On Beversluis's New Edition

I have redated this post by a few days because I wanted people to notice that I put a correction on the comment line to one claim that I had made about the conclusion of Beversluis's argument.

23 years ago, John Beversluis’s book, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion was published. I was then in my first year as a philosophy student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The previous semester I had taken Hugh Chandler’s metaphysics class and we had already begun discussions of what later came to be known as Lewis’s argument from reason. At that time Beversluis’s book was published by a Christian publisher, Eerdmans, and two of the endorsements on the dust jacket were from leading Christian philosophers. On that basis, a reader might have come to expect Beversluis’s book to be a relatively friendly critique of Lewis’s apologetics, perhaps along the lines of Thomas V. Morris’s critical study of Francis Schaeffer’s apologetics. Morris showed that Schaeffer’s arguments were underdeveloped, admonished against excessive idolization of popular apologists, and made some recommendations as to how the Schaeffer’s arguments could be made stronger, though he also recommended that they be put to the service of more modest claims.

In the beginning of the book, it might seem as if that was what Beversluis was up to. But further reading dashed those expectations. The criticisms of each argument: the argument from desire, the moral argument, the “trilemma,” and the argument from reason, yielded a verdict of abject failure, with no suggestion that the arguments could be revised and strengthened. The tone at points was quite harsh, attributing blatant fallacies to Lewis, especially the fallacy of the straw man and the false dilemma. At some points expressions like “irresponsible writing” and “considerably worse than fuzzy” thinking were used. Though at other points Beversluis seemed to show at least some sympathy toward Lewis the man.

In the latter part of the book Beversluis made the case that Lewis had no adequate answer for the problem of evil, and that his own agonized response to his wife’s death in A Grief Observed constituted a repudiation of his previous apologetics and an abandonment not only of his previous views on pain and suffering, but also of rational religion itself. The conclusion of the book was not simply that Lewis had failed to successfully defend Christianity, but that his apologetic career showed that Christianity could not be rationally defended.

It should not be too surprising that persons well-disposed toward Lewis and his apologetics might be angered by a critique of this kind. Now, sharply worded criticism is part and parcel with the activity of philosophy and is to be expected. But some responses to Beversluis went considerably beyond criticism to actually impugning the Beversluis’s intellectual integrity. One response, by Richard Purtill, defended this claim:

My purpose in this paper is to convince the reader, by evidence and argument, that the general impression given by the television play, the books, and the article are not only false, but perniciously and culpably false. It is in fact part of the counter-attack against Lewis’s outstandingly successful defence of the rationality and probability of Christianity, and it is a particularly unfair and underhanded counter-attack, because it distorts Lewis’s work and exploits his personal tragedy. (Purtill, “Did C. S. Lewis Lose his Faith” in A Christian for all Christians, Hodder and Stoughton, 1990).

Further on in his essay, he explains Beversluis’s motivation in terms of envy at Lewis’s success as an apologist.

Now, there may be times when it is reasonable and sensible to make charges of this sort. However, if unless one is prepared and able to meet a very high standard of proof in defense of such claims, it is best to avoid making them. It doesn’t help Purtill’s cause at all that he entitled his essay “Did C. S. Lewis Lose his Faith,” a question that Beversluis answered quite firmly in the negative. Beversluis never said Lewis lost his faith, he said that in the course of his grief experience he decisively compromised his apologetic position; that after calling God a bunch of names for putting him through that the ordeal of grief he abandoned the objections, but also moved from what Beversluis calls a Platonist view of God to an Ockhamist view of God. That is a very different charge, one that can be criticized, (and I have criticized it myself), but one that Purtill never actually addresses.

It is valuable to remember that Lewis himself, after making a charge of misinterpretation against Dr. Pittenger, wrote:

"How many times does a man have to say something before he is safe from the accusation of having said exactly the opposite? (I am not for a moment imputing dishonesty to Dr. Pittenger; we all know too well how difficult it is to grasp or retain the substance of a book one finds antipathetic.)”

Lewis is more than sensible in refusing to charge his opponent with dishonesty even when he found himself to be egregiously misinterpreted, and in the absence of very strong evidence we should do likewise.

Any doubts I might have had about the honesty and seriousness of Beversluis’s work on Lewis was decisively smashed when I read his review of A. N. Wilson’s biography of Lewis. He protests against Wilson’s psychoanalyzing, claiming that many of his assertions are based on very poor evidence. But one paragraph stood out to me. In his book and in a related article published at the same time Beversluis quoted some people who claimed that Lewis essentially abandoned apologetics after the exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe, but in the review of Wilson, he takes that all back.

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.

(Beversluis, “Surprised by Freud” Christianity and Literature (1991).

I remember reading this passage when James Sire, the former editor of IVP, sent Beversluis’s paper to me. Ideologues and dishonest thinkers don’t take their claims back if they find them to be unsupported by evidence. They just don’t. Besides, what I have called the Anscombe Legend is a key dimension in the anti-C. S. Lewis playbook. It gets repeated over and over again until people actually think it’s true. Most recently, I found it in Philip Pullman’s anti-Lewis diatribes. No anti-Lewis ideologue could possibly abandon the Anscombe legend, but Beversluis did.

Now that Prometheus Books has published a second edition of Beversluis’s book, I can say that the spirit that engendered this change in the treatment of the Anscombe controversy can be found throughout his revised edition. He has called by own book “scrupulously fair,” a compliment that I am more than proud to receive. In his treatment of the argument from desire, he acknowledges a critic’s charge that Lewis’s argument could be developed as an inductive argument as well as a deductive argument, and considers the argument as an inductive argument. In his treatment of morality in the previous edition he considers it irresponsible that Lewis characterized ethical subjectivists as people for whom moral judgments are on a level with “a liking for pancakes or a dislike for spam” but in the revised edition he admits that Russell said almost the same thing in describing his own view. His treatment of the “Lord or Lunatic” argument takes critics into consideration. He once again criticizes the Anscombe Legend, though he defends Anscombe’s arguments against Lewis. In his treatment of the problem of pain he withdraws the charge, made in the prior edition, that Lewis started with a Platonist view and then retreated to a position that “differs only semantically from Ockhamism.” The new edition is a fresh, serious effort that deserves fair attention by Lewis’s admirers. It’s must reading for anyone interested in Lewis’s apologetics.

Now I am not going to say, with John Loftus, that Beversluis has provided an overwhelming blow against Lewis’s apologetics. Beversluis thinks that the apparent strength of Lewis’s apologetics is mostly in the rhetoric, and I do not. He thinks a case against the rationality of the Christian faith can be developed on the basis of Lewis's life and writings, and I do not. Unlike him, I think that we can follow what I have called Lewis’s “outstanding philosophical instincts” and find and develop good arguments, although I would not vouch for the technical adequacy of those arguments as Lewis presents them. We “sensible supporters” of C. S. Lewis have work to do, too. But I think that I have shown with my book, and Beversluis with his, that the merits and demerits of Lewis’s apologetics can be discussed with courtesy and without recourse to ad hominems.

Lewis and Anscombe on distinguishing "irrational" from "nonrational"

In my book and in my 1989 essay, "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues," I discussed Anscombe's insistence that Lewis distinguish between irrational causes and non-rational causes. Irrational causes would be things like being bitten by a black dog as a child gives you a complex and causes you to believe that all black dogs are dangerous. Nonrational causes are physical events or physical causes. Now interestingly enough, when I wrote a paper on Lewis on ethical subjectivism back in grad school I noticed this passage from Part I of The Abolition of Man:

Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, cannot be either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of error.

Now, in this passage doesn't Lewis draw the exact distinction on which Anscombe insisted? The only difference here is that Lewis distinguishes two senses of the term "irrational" instead of distinguishing between irrational and nonrational. But was Lewis's usage of the term "irrational" wrong? Going to a dictionary definition of "irrational" (see link below) I think not. Nevetheless, Lewis changed from "irrational" to "nonrational" to accomodate Anscombe's criticism.

This is the dictionary entry:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1) - Cite This Source
ir‧ra‧tion‧al  /ɪˈræʃənl/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[i-rash-uh-nl] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

–adjective 1. without the faculty of reason; deprived of reason.
2. without or deprived of normal mental clarity or sound judgment.
3. not in accordance with reason; utterly illogical: irrational arguments.
4. not endowed with the faculty of reason: irrational animals.
5. Mathematics. a. (of a number) not capable of being expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers.
b. (of a function) not capable of being expressed exactly as a ratio of two polynomials.

6. Algebra. (of an equation) having an unknown under a radical sign or, alternately, with a fractional exponent.
7. Greek and Latin Prosody. a. of or pertaining to a substitution in the normal metrical pattern, esp. a long syllable for a short one.
b. noting a foot or meter containing such a substitution.

–noun 8. Mathematics. irrational number.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Origin: 1425–75; late ME < L irratiōnālis. See ir-2, rational]

—Related forms
ir‧ra‧tion‧al‧ly, adverb
ir‧ra‧tion‧al‧ness, noun


—Synonyms 3. unreasonable, ridiculous; insensate.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006


In writing about this in my 1989 paper "The Lewis-Anscombe Controversy: A Discussion of the Issues," I conceded Anscombe's point but argued that since scientific knowledge depends crucially on our having knowledge that is inferred from other things we know, the distinction hardly sinks Lewis's argument. But I should have gone futher. The dictionary definition clearly shows that the word "irrational" can be used in both senses. Therefore any claim that Anscombe exposed a blunder on Lewis's part is clearly incorrect.

I am grateful to Jim Slagle for pointing this out.

Beversluis on C. S. Lewis

One issue that arose in relation to the discussion of John Ku's story is the critique of C. S. Lewis which impressed him. The book came out at the time when I began my doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and was the subject of numerous discussion amongst myself, fellow graduate student Tim Erdel, and Dr. Hugh Chandler, the eventual chair of my dissertation committee. The following is material for an essay I intend to publish in a volume I am co-editing with Steve Lovell on Lewis and philosophy, so comments are more than welcome.

My early reaction to the book was a very critical one, and I would still have to say (no surprise here) that I differ with the substance of the book at nearly every point. However, the book really does contribute to our understanding of C. S. Lewis and does advance the discussion. This is, to be honest, a good deal more than I can say for a number of more friendly books.

What the book succeeds in doing is providing the reader with a perspective on C. S. Lewis from the point of view of the unpersuaded reader. When I look at a great deal of the literature on Lewis, it isn;t so much that I think the literature too adulatory, but that I find that perspective of the critic is not given consideration. What that means is that people writing about Lewis very often do not succeed in making Lewis plausible to anyone who is not persauded already.

Criticism of a thinker you oppose can come in a couple of different forms. You may criticize someone because you think them an intellectual fraud whose has received an undeserved reputation in some quarters. You are attacking your target not because you think them a respectable opponent, but because you think them unworthy of respect. Or you can criticize a thinker because you think that, while their efforts are worthwhile, then nevertheless get it wrong in the final analysis, and you want to show why. The tone of the first type of critique is bound to differ profoundly from the tone of the second. In short, you can criticize someone as a Respected Intellectual Opponent or as an Intellectual Fraud.

In Beversluis we find a considerable ambivalence as to how to treat Lewis's works. In some passages he shows admiration for Lewis's intellectual gifts and achievements., suggesting that he intends his critique to be of the second variety. In other passages we find what seems to be Lewis-bashing. Richard Purtill, in an early review of the work, wrote:

"There is a notable lack of the principle of charity in the logician's sense, as well as of charity in the theological sense, despite much rather patronizing praise of Lewis." On this interpretation, anything Beversluis says about Lewis is patronizing, concealing his profound contempt for him. A recent book, S.T. Joshi's God's Defenders: What they Believe and Why They Are Wrong. 1clearly takes the contemptuous approach in his critique of Lewis while quite consciously building on Beversluis's work. And certainly the text of the book gives considerable ammuntion for this kind of a reading. As Thomas Morris writes:

It is Beversluis's aim to put his readers into a position where they can see Lewis's failures. In representative passages, he characterizes Lewis's 'irresponsible writing' as exhibiting a presistent tendency toward carelessness, inaccuracy, and oversimplfication wheneveer he discusses opposing views," and blasts Lewis's own positive positions as "confused," wrongheaded," shipwrecked," "disgraced," "considerably worse than fuzzy," "tendentious" and "desperate". Colorful passages in Lewis are labelled as "bellicose outbursts," and we find that Lewis doesn't just state his positions, he "gives vent to them. " The overall tone should be evident.

Reading Beversluis in this way, I was inclined to be a hostile critic of Beversluis. I believed that Beversluis was operating by the W. C. Fields-ish motto "never give a popular apologist an even break." I thought, and stiill think, that Lewis's arguments can by and large be defended against Beversluis's criticism. However, I also think that Beversluis's own views on Lewis are somewhat more complex, and probably less consistent, than I had been reading from his book. One would have thought that A. N. Wilson's hostile Freudian biography on Lewis would be right up Beversluis's alley, but in a review article for Christianity and Literature in 1992 entitled "Surprised by Freud", Beversluis takes Wilson to task for his attempt to psychoanalyze Lewis away. In the review essay he criticized Wilson for failing to treat the enormously influential apologist to who Beversluis actually ascribes the word "greatness" with adequate seriousness, and failing to consider how Lewis would respond to this kind of Freudian attack. In the review of Wilson he completely abandons any appeal to what I have referreed to in my book as the Anscombe Legend, the idea that Lewis gave up apologetics after being "defeated" by Anscombe at the Oxford Socratic Club. As he writes:

JB: First, the Anscombe debate was by no means Lewis's first exposure to aprofessional philosopher: he lived among them all his adult life, read theGreats, and even taught philosophy. Second, it is simply untrue that the post-Anscombe Lewis abandonedChristian apologetics. In 1960 he published a second edition of Miraclesin which he revised the argument of his third chapter and thereby repliedto Anscombe. Third, most printed discussions of the debate, mine included (65-73), failto mention that Anscombe herself complimented Lewis's revised version onthe grounds that it is deeper and far more serious than the originalversion (see Anscombe ix-x). Finally the myth that Lewis abandoned Christian apologetics overlooksseveral important 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 their relevance to the religious life -- and "On Obstinacy of Belief" (1955) in which he defendsthe rationality of believing in God in the face of apparently contraryevidence (the issue in philosophical theology during the late 1950s andearly 1960s). It is rhetorically effective to announce that thepost-Anscombe Lewis wrote no further books on Christian apologetics, but itis pure fiction. Even if it were true, what would this Argument fromAbandoned Subjects prove? He wrote no further books on Paradise Lost orcourtly love either.

In short, I think Beversluis intended for his book to be a critique of a Respected Intellectual Opponent, not an attack on what he took to be an Intellectual Fraud. And a critique of Lewis from the point of view of someone who takes him as a Respected Intellectual Opponent would be well worth reading. But I don't think the book succeeds as this type of critique, because if his criticisms of Lewis are correct, then not only was Lewis in error, he erred in ways that are not intellectually respectable.

Let's put it this way. Suppose I am playing a chess game with someone who is ranked above me, like Monokroussos or Rowley. And I see a quick and easy way to win the exchange (Rook for bishop or knight, almost always an advantage). Now maybe Dennis or Bob is just dropping the exchange. But, if I have more than a minute or so on my clock, I had better take a close look. It might be a trap. I might not have such hesitation if I were playing a beginner. Having studied Lewis for as long as I have, I can safely assert that when Lewis is wrong, he is rarely simply wrong. There is a good deal to be considered on his side before the view he espouses can be dismissed. In my susbsequent discussion of Beversluis's book, I wish to show how even if you think Lewis wrong, you have to take the measure of what he says before you can say that it is wrong. As a critic attempting to respond to a Respected Intellectual Opponent, Beversluis's book does not succeed because if Lewis is really guity as charged by Beversluis, he cannot be merely a Resepcted Intellectual Opponent who got it wrong, but an Intellectual Fraud who, in spite of a good reputation in some quarters, really can't think his way out of a paper bag.




Now he does not at any point in the review

An attack on Lewis from Austin Cline

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.

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

The Argument from Reason and Lewis's Post-Anscombe Revision

IV. The Argument of the First Edition
In the first edition of Miracles, Lewis presents the version of the argument from reason that Anscombe criticized. We can formalize it as follows:
1. No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes.
2. If naturalism is then all beliefs can be explained in terms of irrational causes.
3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, then no thought is valid.
4. If no thought is valid, then the thought, “materialism is true,” is not valid.
5. Therefore, if materialism is true, then the belief “materialism is true” is not valid.
6. A thesis whose truth entails the invalidity of the belief that it is true ought to be rejected, and its denial ought to be accepted.
7. Therefore, naturalism ought to be rejected, and its denial accepted.
This is the argument that drew the criticisms of Roman Catholic philosopher and
Wittgenstein student Elizabeth Anscombe. This critique is significant because of way in which it forced Lewis to develop and refine his arguments. Entirely too much attention has been paid to the putative psychological effects of this controversy, and conclusions concerning Lewis’s success as a Christian apologist have been drawn on the basis of his supposed emotional reaction to Anscombe’s challenge. Very often this is done without regard to the content of this exchange, and often this is done by people who show by their discussion to have no real understanding of the relevant philosophical issues. Such a procedure, as Bertrand Russell once said of a thesis in the philosophy of mathematics, has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.
V. Anscombe’s First Objection: Irrational vs. nonrational.
Is it correct for Lewis to talk about physically caused events as having irrational causes? Irrational beliefs, one would think, are beliefs that are formed in ways that conflict with reason: wishful thinking, for example, or through the use of fallacious arguments. On the other hand, when we speak of a thought having a non-rational cause, we need not be thinking that there is any conflict with reason.
While this is claim seems correct, it hardly puts an end to the argument from reason. The problem arises when we consider what a naturalist typically believes. Let’s take the theory of evolution as an example. Naturalists are always big on evolution, since invariably they must assign to the evolution process the task of producing the incredibly complex features, say, the human eye. Traditionally, the existence of the human eye was thought to be so efficient and complex that it had to be the handiwork of God. After all, the artificial replacement of vision by modern medicine is still the stuff of science fiction. Nevertheless, the naturalist is undaunted; she is persuaded that it is all the result of natural selection. However, a naturalist does not merely need to believe that we are the product of evolution through random variation and natural selection, she also has to believe that there was a process of scientific inference that led Charles Darwin to reach his conclusions about natural selection and how it works. Naturalism really does require the existence of rational inferences in order to be legitimate. Now a rational inference is a rational process. A valid or sound argument is an argument on paper in which the premises are true and the conclusion follows logically and inevitably from the premises and therefore must also be true. A rational inference, however, is not just a paper argument, it is an act of knowing on the part of a person that recognizes the content of the premises, accepts the premises as true, perceives the logical relationship between the premises, and concluded that the conclusion must be true as well. In short, the naturalist must believe not merely that their own beliefs were not produced by irrational causes, they must maintain that the conclusion that evolution is true was produced, in the mind of Charles Darwin and in their own mind, as the result of a rational process. Otherwise there would be no reason to prefer the deliverances of the natural sciences to a blind acceptance of the Book of Genesis as a way of forming one’s beliefs concerning the origin of species.
For that reason, it is possible to restate Lewis’s argument in such a way that it does not make reference to irrational causes, and indeed in Lewis’s revised chapter the phrase “irrational causes” does not appear.
1. No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
2. If naturalism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes.
3. Therefore, if naturalism is true, the no belief is rationally inferred.
4. If any thesis entails the conclusion that no belief is rationally inferred, then it should be accepted and its denial accepted.
5. Therefore, naturalism should be rejected and its denial accepted.
VI. Anscombe’s Second Objection: Skeptical Threats
Anscombe also objected to the idea that Lewis had argued that, if naturalism were true, then reasoning would not be valid. She asks, “What can you mean by valid beyond what would be indicated by the explanation you give for distinguishing between valid and invalid reasoning, and what in the naturalistic hypothesis prevents the explanation form being given or meaning what it does.” This is a paradigm case argument, and the point is this: We can ask whether this particular argument is a good one, but does it really make sense to argue that reasoning might itself be invalid? Anscombe maintains that since the argument that some particular piece of reasoning is invalid involves contrasting it with some other kinds of reasoning that are valid, the question “Could reasoning really be valid?” is really a nonsense question.
One way of using the argument from reason would be to use it as a skeptical threat argument. The idea is that if naturalism is true we will be unable to refute skeptical arguments against reasoning in general. The problem here is that it is far from clear that anyone, naturalist or not, can refute skepticism about reasoning, nor is it considered any great merit for any metaphysical theory that it would be possible to refute this kind of thoroughgoing skepticism. And, if we need to refute skepticism in order to accept some world-view, then it is not at all clear that theism will do that either. If we use our theistic beliefs to defend the basic principles of reasoning, then we would have to formulate that into an argument and then presuppose our ordinary canons of logical evaluation in the presentation of that very argument, thereby begging the question.
Rather, one can, it seems to me, present the argument from reason as a best explanation argument. One should assume, at least to begin with, that human beings do reach true conclusions by reasoning, and then try to show, given the fact that people do reach true conclusions by reasoning, that this is best explained in terms of a theistic metaphysics as opposed to a naturalistic metaphysics. Now if we present the argument in this way, and then an opponent comes along and says “I see that your argument presupposes that we have beliefs. I don’t think we do, so your argument fails, then we can reply to him by saying that if there are no beliefs then you don’t believe what you’re saying. Consequently the status of your own remarks as assertions is called into question by your own thesis that there are no beliefs, and that this is going to end up having a devastating effect on the very sciences on which you base your arguments. Presenting the argument in this way, it seems to me, gets around the problems based on the Paradigm Case argument.
VII. Anscombe’s Third Objection: The ambiguity of “Why,” “Because,” and “Explanation
The third and main Anscombe objection to Lewis’s argument is that he fails to distinguish between different senses of the terms “why,” “because” and “explanation.” There are, she suggests, four explanation-types which have to be distinguished.
1. Naturalistic causal explanations, typically subsuming the event in question under some physical law.
2. Logical explanation, showing the logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion.
3. Psychological explanations, explaining why a person believes as he/she does.
4. Personal history explanations, explaining how, as a matter of someone’s personal history, they came to hold a belief.
She suggests that arguments of different types can be compatible with one another. Thus a naturalistic causal explanation might be a complete answer to one type of question with respect to how someone’s belief came to be what it was, but that explanation might be compatible with an explanation of a different type.
Now what is interesting is that Lewis, in reformulating his own argument, not only draws the distinctions on which Anscombe had insisted; he actually makes these distinctions the centerpiece of his revised argument. He makes a distinction between Cause and Effect relations on the one hand, and Ground-and-Consequent relations on the other. Cause and effect relations say how a thought was produced, but ground-and-consequent relations indicate how thoughts are related to one another logically. However, in order to allow for rational inference, there must be a combination of ground-consequent and cause-effect relationships which, Lewis says, can’t exist if the world is as the naturalist says that it is.
Claiming that a thought has been rationally inferred is a claim about how that thought was caused. Any face-saving account of how we come to hold beliefs by rational inference must maintain that “One thought can cause another thought not by being, but by being, a ground for it.”
However, there are a number of features of thoughts as they occur in rational inference that set them apart from other beliefs.
Acts of thinking are no doubt events, but they are special sorts of events. They are “about” other things and can be true or false. Events in general are not “about” anything and cannot be true or false….Hence acts of inference can, and must be considered in two different lights. On the one hand they are subjective events in somebody’s psychological history. On the other hand, they are insights into, or knowings of, something other than themselves. So here we already have three features of acts of thinking as they occur in rational inference. First, these thoughts have to be about something else, and second, they can be true or false. Second, their propositional contents must cause other thoughts to take place. But there is more:
What from the first point of view is a psychological transition from thought A to thought B, at some particular moment in some particular mind is, from the thinker’s point of view a perception of an implication (if A, then B). When we are adopting the psychological point of view we may use the past tense, “B followed A in my thoughts.” But when we assert the implication we always use the present—“B follows from A.” If it ever “follows from” in the logical sense it does so always. And we cannot reject the second point of view as a subjective illusion without discrediting human knowledge. So now, in addition to the three features of thoughts as they occur in rational inference, we can add a fourth, that is, that the act of inference must be subsumed under a logical law. And the logical law according to which one thought follows another thought is true always. It is not local to any particular place or time; indeed laws of logical obtain in all possible worlds.
Lewis then argues that an act of knowing “is determined, in a sense, by what is known; we must know it to be thus because it is thus.” P’s being true somehow brings it about that we hold the belief that P is true. Ringing in my ears is a basis for knowing if it is caused by a ringing object; it is not knowledge if it is caused by a tinnitus. As Lewis puts it:
Anything that professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what it knows, is really a theory that there is no reasoning. But this, as it seems, is what Naturalism is bound to do. It offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behaviour, but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.