[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, so the naturalist, as Lewis says, thinks that nature is a whole show. So everything in nature has to be explained in terms of nature and ultimately in terms of matter, energy, physical laws, quantum mechanics. Everything has to be explained in terms of that. And in particular, the naturalist believes that nature is essentially blind.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: If our minds are the product of a blind and aimless process, what reason do we have to believe what we think?
But if we can be rational because a rational intelligence designed life and the universe, how does that change how we should think about thinking?
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I conclude my conversation with Rebecca Valerius about an essay she recently wrote, Unpacking the Argument from Reason and its implications for Darwinism, materialism, atheism, and for that matter, I.D. and even AI. Rebecca has a BS in biochemistry and a master's in apologetics. She teaches advanced chemistry, biology, and apologetics at a classical Christian school in the Dallas area. Rebecca is also an editor and contributing writer with Shadowlands Dispatch, an online journal dedicated to Christian apologetics.
Welcome back, Rebecca.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: In the first half of our conversation, you helped us unpack the argument from reason as CS Lewis formulates it in his book Miracles. Your essay lays it out all very clearly, and I think it's a great resource to help us wrap our heads around this really important topic. Before we can begin considering the evidence of design in nature, we first need to make sure we can trust our minds and. And our ability to reason.
Remind us what the argument from reason is.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Yeah, so the argument from reason basically asks the question, can we replace the rational grounds for our beliefs with non rational causes? So it asks the question, are our beliefs totally reducible to non rational material causes? Physics, chemistry.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Okay, so in contrast, what does the naturalist believe about the origin of cognition?
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Well, so the naturalist, as Lewis says, thinks that nature is a whole show. So everything in nature has to be explained in terms of nature and ultimately in terms of matter, energy, physical laws, quantum mechanics. Everything has to be explained in terms of that. And in particular, the naturalist believes that nature is essentially blind and purposeless, and so everything has to be reducible to that, including our cognition.
So when I think that I am, we used in the last podcast, when I think that I am looking at evidence and that evidence is compelling me or causing me to come to a conclusion, we have to have at rock bottom a material cause for that. And what we said, matter doesn't. Can't know anything. Matter doesn't know how to. You know, if you take the syllogism, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates must be mortal. Matter doesn't understand the structure of a syllogism. Matter doesn't understand math. Matter doesn't understand anything.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Right. And yet we're saying all of this came from matter. Or at least the naturalist is.
So if you have a thought, you know, that's just matter. Right. Blind, you know, purposeless matter and motion.
And then if you apply meaning to that thought or meaning to this thought over another and choose one over the other, the naturalist says that's just all matter as well. And blind, purposeless, you know, matter and motion. And so how do you know what's true and what isn't? How do you know that you can even reach truth, I guess, is the central problem there. Now, in part one, we talked about philosopher and atheist Daniel Dennett as an example of how naturalists sort of get hemmed in by naturalism when it comes to explaining cognition. Dennett called naturalism a universal acid that eats through all our concepts of mind and meaning.
Remind us how Dennett explained rationality.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Well, he kind of explained it away. He uses rationality to explain away rationality.
So he says rationality is ultimately illusion.
All of our traditional concepts of mind and meaning are eroded by evolutionary naturalism.
And. But he still thinks that evolution can give rise to some kind of. I guess he would call it sub rationality.
But the problem is he calls ultimately our. The process of rational inference. So when the naturalist is looking at the scientific evidence and thinks it's the evidence that's compelling him to believe in naturalism, it's really physical causes that's doing that. The problem is Dennett himself has to use rational inference to make that argument.
So it's like it's the proverbial sawing off the limb that he's sitting on in the tree.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And he borrows from the language of mind in order to argue that the mind doesn't exist, doesn't he?
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Oh, scientists do this all the time. I mean, we can't even talk about nature without talking about purpose in purposeful ways. You know, we talk about evolution doing something and evolution aiming.
We can't escape this sort of teleological language.
And I think it was JBS Aldane that said teleological language, language is like a mistress that you don't want to be seen with in public. The bio for the biologist. Yeah, they came up with this other term, tele, tele, tele. I Can't even say it, right? Oh yeah, but basically it's just a hand waving. It's just a saying that, well, we're going to borrow it because it's useful but it doesn't really mean anything.
So yeah, so he, he uses the language of mind to explain mind away. And so it's, you know, it's incoherent ultimately.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And ultimately his, his universal acid.
You know, there are certain things that he even will protect from that acid, right, that don't burn away because he needs them to make arguments, you know, and express doubts about the existence of God or, or the verifiability of the science.
Well, another person that got caught up in the conundrum of whether to trust rational thought if it's merely the product of non rational matter and blind aimless processes was Mr. Charles Darwin himself. In a letter to William Graham in 1881, Darwin wrote with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the conviction of man's mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals are of any value or are at all trustworthy. So he really wrestled with it. Did that stop him though from believing his theory of evolution?
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Yeah, no. And so in, in particular, if you go look in my paper, I link, I put a link to an online source of all Darwin's letters. Someone's collected it. It came at the end of his life and, and the conviction in particular that he was talking about doubting was the conviction that the universe was designed.
So he said, yes, I can't seem to escape the conviction of design in nature, but how can I trust that my convictions if they come from the mind of the lower animals?
So he was isolating that little conviction. Right. So he didn't sort of follow through that, that very good intuition. He had that very good intuition about a sort of a paradox going on here and follow it through to the end and see that even entire, I mean he used rational inference to come up with his theory.
And if he had followed that sort of question of can I trust the thoughts of, of the minds developed from the minds of the lower animals, why didn't he, he reserved his thoughts about naturalism and dart and evolution and a little sacred space away from that, just like Dennett does. So he doesn't, he, he's not consistent. He doesn't follow it through to its end, which is, which is sad.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds like he got a hemmed or hemmed himself in by his own theory of natural selection. And you know we've published or some of Our scholars and scientists have published books sort of giving a more human look at Darwin and, you know, his background and family and its thought processes. And as you take all that in, you look and you, you start to feel sorry for the guy because, you know, you bring in the aspect of his relationship with his father and the fact that his father would say, look, you don't want to be a disgrace to your family. What are you doing messing around with your studies? You know, get serious. And this is when he was studying in Edinburgh in my hometown for a while and indeed he did get serious and he came up with this theory and he stuck to it, you know, even though he was fighting these doubts about it. And so it's a, it's kind of a sad story really, to see how much he clung to something that really, he struggled with the logical consistency of it. Now, speaking of Darwin, in his theory, you mentioned American philosopher and theologian Alvin Plantinga also in your essay. In his evolutionary argument against naturalism, Plantinga formulates the argument from reason to demonstrate the unreliability of reasoning. If the brain is a product of blind evolution, can you briefly describe Plantinga's approach and how it's different from Lewis's?
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Yeah, so actually I think what Plantinga really does is he further develops something that Lewis does talk about in Miracles, and he takes it into the realm of analytical philosophy and probabilistic theory and so he really fine tunes it. So Lewis does mention this as well. So an escape hatch for naturalists that Dennett tries to use and many use is this idea that they think that evolution can, they recognize that there's this problem with non rational matter giving rise to rational thought and non rational processes. And by definition evolution has to be blind. Right. It's the blind watchmaker. Right.
As Dawkins says, it's not really aiming for anything. So they want to try to figure out how we can get from that to reliable cognitive faculties. Right. Because this is what it's calling into question. How can we trust our cognitive faculties if it's the product of blind, aimless processes? And so they think, you know, and a lot of them, again we talked about in naturalism of the gaps, they think, well, science will eventually show how you can go from non rational matter to, to cognitive faculties we can trust. Well, so Plantica takes that and, and Lewis mentions this and then Planet Plantica takes it further and makes it very technical philosophically by saying that the fact that we know evolution is not tracking truth, it's tracking survivability first and Foremost, right. It's the, it's the environmental conditions that are selecting for those rotate mutations that give you survivability, but that doesn't necessarily mean truth.
So at its heart, evolution is tracking survivability.
So the probability that our cognitive faculties are fine tuned for truth are not as high as perhaps they are for survivability.
And it does have a problem. Thomas Nagel we mentioned in the last episode even brings up like, you know, it's hard to see what the truth value of some of our complex mathematics have for survivability. I mean, string theory, I mean, how does string theory help us stay alive? I know it gives a lot of people the headache when they have to study it. I think of physical chemistry. I had to take physical chemistry, some aspects of that. You know what, that actually reduced my survivability.
Anyway, there's just certain truths that it's hard to track. So he put, put it into a probabilistic framework and said the probability is very low that this is actually giving us true tracking, true belief. So our cognitive confidence is, is very, very low.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: Okay, all right, so that's, that's how they compare. But you, you do focus on Lewis's formulation of this in your work. And as Lewis wrestled with this structural flaw in naturalism, you write that he sought consistency. You know, he wanted to really understand this. If he wanted to maintain that abstract thought, when obedient to logic, gave indisputable truth, then thought could not be an event that was solely dependent upon the action of matter. Now you word it differently in your essay. You say, if our reasoning is entirely reducible to something that by its very nature does not reason, the former is nothing but sound and fury. Can you unpack that just a little more?
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Yeah. So matter does not know the difference between, you know, doesn't know the difference between a premise and a conclusion. Right. So we talked about the mechanics of how our brains work. A neurotransmitter, you know, the, the. I mean, I, I've. Those trans. Yeah. I used to study pros proteins. So those transmembrane proteins are beautiful in what they do. I mean, I, they're, they're so fun and so cool to watch in action.
When you look at how they change their confirmation and, and they allow sodium potassium ions get in, it is an incredibly beautiful and I would argue irreducibly complex system. Okay, but I'm sorry, those proteins and those ions and those neurotransmitters know nothing about a syllogism, a logic, the Rules of logic.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: So the question is, is it the rules of logic causing my beliefs and rational inference causing my beliefs, or is it these physical components of, you know, the, the brain and ultimately matter in chemistry?
And so Lewis said, if I want to say when I, when, you know, abstract thought, when obedient to logic, can truly get me true beliefs, that is the cause of my beliefs. It can't. The cause, the primary cause cannot be matter.
So this is also kind of asking the question is, it's kind of a chicken and egg question, what comes first, rationality or matter?
If matter comes first and it's fundamentally non rational, it's hard to see rationality flowing from that. Rationality somehow has to be prior.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, and that really is a great way to see this whole topic. You know, did mind come first or matter produce mind? And if matter produce mind, there's really no meaning. And if mind produce matter, then there is and we can tap into it. You know, that's a great way to sort of understand it. Now you go on to write in the essay that our reasoning is not some arbitrary net fashioned by millions of years of blind biological processes that we cast over the world to make sense of it. It's not merely a cognitive adaptation that given a different set of evolutionary circumstances, would have been woven into a very different and equally arbitrary pattern. Such mindless contingency kills our cognitive confidence. That's you writing in your essay, and I like that, that phrase cognitive confidence. So that's going to get killed if we just think that this is a product of, you know, blind material forces. And let's not forget what they say about evolution. If it was rewound and done again, it would be entirely different.
So, you know, that's just not something that could come up with something that will give us confidence about our cognition. Now you also mentioned GK Chesterton and what he calls this. He, he describes this as the suicide of thought. Can you tell us what he meant by that?
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So GK Chesterton, the quote that I share in it really mirrors Darwin, which makes me think that he might have read them. So writing in 1908 in his masterpiece Orthodoxy, G.K. chesterton is definitely an intellectual hero of mine, as is C.S. lewis.
But he says he notes he was seeing the same consequences. Right. He probably read Balfour. Balfour wrote his book in 1895, that Balfour was a, a prominent British philosopher that directly attacked this idea of naturalistic evolution giving rise to, to reliable human cognitive faculties. So, and Lewis is going to take that too.
So there were a Lot of people that saw the inconsistency here. So Chesterton says, you know, in that quote that I share, he said, reason itself is a matter of faith. It's a matter of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. Right. If our thoughts are just matter and matter, neither sees or knows well, so how do we know what reality is?
He said, you know, they're all just minds in the. They're all just movements in the minds of a bewildered ape.
And then he said, there is a thought that stops all thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. And I think he would put that one of those thoughts would be naturalism.
So, yeah, and I will say one of the consequences of people seeing this incoherence in naturalism, but embracing it is the postmodern movement we see today.
Because they sort of. They bought that. And Chesterton saw this coming. If you read orthodoxy, you can see him seeing it coming down the road. Which postmodernists now realize that, you know, they talk about being in post truth society. Right. And that we can't really know the truth. So everything is reduced to this sort of Darwinian power play.
So there were definitely postmodernists at the time that tried to embrace it as well. But ultimately, yeah, his idea of it being the suicide of thought is that if we can't trust our reasoning, then we can't reason at all.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: And also, what does Lewis conclude about reason? You know, you talked about him realizing that this wasn't just explaining our mind, but it also explained the cosmos in our previous episode. Can you just touch on that? Again, this is not just about in here, but it's actually out there, isn't it?
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So I shared the quote earlier that we're not reading rationality onto a sort of an essentially dead universe. We're responding to a rationality which, with the universe has already been saturated. So our participation in logic and rationality is actually participation in something except external, because he's seeing that it has to be external to matter.
Right. And there has to be some kind of reason built into nature which, you know, scientists themselves assume this. They assume there's some sort of rationality and reason in nature. We see the regularity of nature and we assume it's real. We're not being fooled. Right. And so this all fit within, you know, you know, the basic assumptions of scientists for. For many, many, for, you know, hundreds of years, I will say that this naturalism is nothing new under the sun, because even Plato and Aristotle had to deal with the atomists of their day in the 3rd and 5th century or 4th and 5th century Democritus.
And they were basically the proto naturalists in a lot of ways. And Plato, and then his student behind him, Aristotle, saw that, no, there is this immaterial aspect to mind. And that's what Lewis is going to conclude.
In miracles, our minds and our reasoning capacity don't fit into nature as in being caused by nature.
We kind of stand over it in a sense. And there's a supernatural element to that. And once you. And for Lewis himself in his own journey, it was this realization that sort of freed him from, you know, the binds of his own atheism to be open to the idea of something outside of nature. Now it'll. It would take him 10 years to eventually become a Christian, but it opened the door, it closed the door on materialistic naturalism for him and led him into being open to having this sort of external rationality or intelligence in nature.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now this argument that, you know, mind is over matter and comes before it, that clearly is, is something that connects to intelligent design. How do you see the argument from reason informing and supporting the argument for intelligent design?
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Well, asks the question, you know, are intelligence itself has to be intelligently designed. If it is the result of blind, purposeless, non rational matter, then it's an illusion. But we all know that it's not an illusion. Right. People can say it, but they don't act that way. You know, they act as if they have a lot of faith in their cognitive faculties. And in fact, like I mentioned before, the naturalist himself, when he wants to invalidate an argument, will tell somebody that their argument is, is a result of non rational causes, upbringing, you know, prior religious beliefs. Right. We fundamentally understand that it needs to be purely rational in some way. Now it's not that it's totally separate from the physical. We know that our physical brain can have effects on our rationality, but it still has to be some component. So it introduces intelligence. And like I mentioned before, you know, we talk about the signature in the cell and Michael Behe's irreducible complexity. We can look at these things and see design, but it's our very ability to see the design. We also need to question, right, what is the intelligent source of our minds.
And so, yeah, I think it connects beautifully with intelligent design.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Now, before we wrap up, I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about how the argument from reason is relevant to the moment we're living in right now, particularly around artificial intelligence. Given Enough training data. Large language models can answer our queries using language. And that simulation of conversation is powerful, leads some people to think there might be a mind there behind the machine. In what ways does artificial intelligence connect to Lewis's formulation of this argument from reason?
[00:23:48] Speaker A: Well, first of all, the large language models aren't using language, they're using syntax. Right. And it takes a computer programmer to tell them to do the translation for them.
So we have to remember that. But I, I love Lewis's formulation and, and how he breaks down the architecture of reasoning and rational inference for us because, I mean, that's not the only aspect of consciousness that's unexpected, explainable by naturalism. You have, you know, like you said, intentionality. We have free will, we have qualia, we have, you know, we can, our just our ability to understand language.
So all of those things are, are also part of this problem. But for Lewis, just breaking down rational inference, like he's doing, he's showing that there's some immaterial causal effect effect going on when we can weigh evidence and then it causes a belief. Right. And so, and you're not going to get that out of, of matter.
And if anything, what AI shows us is it needs an intelligent external intelligence to sort of put intelligence into the system, make sense of the system, such that it can sort of mirror human rationality. But I would say it's not really mirroring the way human rationality really works.
It's, it's mirroring the rationality of the programmers.
Yeah, but because that it can use language. And of course there's this aspect that so much of our own lives are online now and people are lonely and you know, they, it can talk to us and make us think that it's real. We're sort of projecting our own humanity onto the computer.
That's kind of a big problem for it. But if we can follow Lewis's argument and really understand the architecture of human reasoning, it can help us to see that what a computer programming programmer, what a artificial intelligence is doing is actually reflecting the intelligence of the programmer himself.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, reason. And it's important we understand what that is when we do it, so that we can see that our machines and our artificial intelligence isn't doing it. It's not just processing information or having thoughts or making associations.
It's involving the capacity to apprehend logical relationships, to recognize valid inferences and perceive why a conclusion might follow from a certain premise.
So there's definitely ways that large language models might simulate those things. Yes, but it's not the things themselves.
Very important that we understand what we can do versus AI.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And AI's understanding is different from ours. And I heard the example. So AI will, a language model will say something like a red apple, because statistically speaking, using statistics and probabilities, it has looked at a vast amount of information and has decided that red apple usually comes with the word red. Right. But they don't know, they don't understand an actual red, what red is. And this is actually qualia that goes down to quality and human consciousness. How what is red? You know, but we have this concept of red. Well, a machine is not doing it. The machine has been programmed by a person that does understand red and, and, and is using human data through, you know, it's, you know, vast processing all this information that it's given to, you know, mathematically say, okay, well, red usually goes with apple. So, you know, I'll put those two together.
And so that's a whole different way of reasoning than what we do.
[00:27:43] Speaker B: Would you say the introduction of AI is strengthening the argument from reason then?
[00:27:48] Speaker A: I think it is. I think, I think it would be really neat to see the argument from reason developed more. In particular, you know, one of the arguments that's often raised against the argument from design, I mean, argument from reason is the existence of computers.
And so is this indifference between algorithmic and so computers, algorithmic thinking as is AI vs non algorithmic human consciousness. So I think there's, there's room for further application and development.
I think the philosopher Victor Reppert, he was a CS Lewis scholar as well. He's worked a lot on this argument. I think he said there's seven ways you can develop the argument from reason.
And I think AI may be opening up a new door. And it may be a wonderful door to open up because it can help educate people at the same time on what AI is doing and so that they're not fooled by it.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, given how much AI is impacting our lives and will continue to.
What do you think is the future of the argument from reason and how it might inform our, our thinking?
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Hopefully it's, it's just developed more and more. I think one of the things that again I mentioned at the beginning, it's a very basic and simple argument in a lot of ways, but it's a hard argument because the naturalists are always raising up objections to it. So you have to continually contend with their objections. Right.
But also our reasoning process and our thinking process is so close that it's hard to really evaluate.
And so it's, it's fascinating that we can evaluate. You know, we can think about our own thinking, which is really fascinating. And you can think about thinking about your own thinking. It's just meta, meta, meta levels of things. But I think, you know, especially in the future, where we seem to have these conscious agents that we're dealing with that are totally matter that we've created, the argument from reason is a great way it could be developed and really developed specifically to target that kind of what's going on with AI to help protect us from it.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We've got to understand what it means to be fully human in this age. And I think that understanding the argument from reason can really help us with that.
Well, Rebecca, thank you for your time unpacking this over a couple of episodes and for writing this fine essay.
It's been a delight to have you on the show.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Thank you. It's been fun. Thank you.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: And also in the show notes, we're going to include a link to your essay, which was published in the Worldview Bulletin on Substack. I encourage readers, viewers, to read it in full and see if you can get to the point where you can formulate it in your own words, this argument from reason, because really, everything else is downstream from that. And Rebecca, just to mention this one more time, when we were talking before this interview, and indeed we mentioned it in part one, you said that before we can recognize a signature in the cell, we must, you know, get to the point where we can see the signature in our own reasoning process.
That's a great way to put it.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Well, listeners, viewers, if you haven't enjoyed part one of this conversation, go back and do so now.
And we look forward to having more great conversations in the near future. For Idea the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
