The argument from reason and four categories of statements

The argument from reason, which I have defended, essentially maintains that if you maintain a consistently naturalistic view of human thought, you end up not describing our thought processes in a way that renders our belief in naturalism, or even the thought processes of natural scientists, justified. For any proposition, there are four possibilities.

                A) It is true, and we can have a justified belief that it is true. We believe, for example, that the world is round, and we have good reason to think so.

                B) It is true, but we cannot have a justified belief that it is true. Consider the proposition “No one believes anything for a reason.” If could be true, but if it were, you couldn’t possibly provide an argument that it is true, because if you did so, there would be no one could possibly be persuaded by your argument. If you did persuade someone, it would falsify your position. The self-refuting character of this position, is, therefore a good reason to believe that it is false.

                C) It is false, but we can have a justified belief that it is true. We had a justified belief that all swans were white, before they found a black one in Western Australia.

                D) It is false, and we cannot have a justified belief that it is true. The claim the universe is nothing but a turnip with whipped cream on top is not only observationally false, but if it were true, neither the turnip nor the whipped cream could infer that the universe contains nothing but a turnip and whipped cream.

Naturalists obviously want to claim that their belief that naturalism is true falls into category A. Naturalism is true, they say, because the natural sciences provide us with a great way of knowing things, (though theory formation, observation, experimentation, and mathematical calculation). But this involves inferring one thing from another. The reason is that the base level, which is typically called the physical, is mechanistic, meaning that it proceeds without reference to the mental. On a deterministic form of naturalism, at the basic level, given the condition of the basic particles at a time when no minds even existed, and given the laws governing those basic particles, every event that follows, including all the discoveries of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, as well as the arguments of J. L. Mackie and John Rawls, are all inevitable results of a process that is, at the fundamental level, nonrational or even, at least in the dictionary sense of the term irrational. The indeterminism of quantum mechanics doesn’t really add anything rational, by itself if merely adds a factor of random chance. Causation on the naturalistic view is a mechanistic process that takes place at the physical level. Thus we have an apparent incompatibility between the claim that, say, Charles Darwin inferred natural selection from observations about finches in the Galapagos islands, and that Charles Darwin’s went from one brain state to another brain state, not because of the evidence, but because of the laws of nature and previous facts concerning Darwin’s brain and his environment. In defending the argument from reason, I have been arguing that this conflict isn’t just apparent, it’s real. If there is justified belief, then naturalism has to be false. Naturalism might fall into category B, that is, it could be true but no one knows that it is.  But any proposition that is a bad candidate for category A is best rejected as false.