Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The argument from Reason, and I mentioned this in the article, formed an anchor for me during that time. Because it's such a fundamental argument.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: It gets to the heart of even being able to doubt, even to be able to trust your doubts, you have to assume that you can.
And what the argument showed me was, given naturalism or atheistic naturalism, I have no grounds for that trust in my reasoning ability.
So it was very important to me.
ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Before we can ask whether the universe is designed, we have to start by seeing if we can really trust the minds we're using to investigate it. And that includes our own mind. Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I'm welcoming to the show Rebecca Valerius, to discuss an essay she recently wrote, unpacking the Argument from Reason and its implications for Darwinism, Materialism, and atheism. This is Rebecca's first conversation on ID the Future. She 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 a contributing writer with Shadowlands Dispatch, an online journal dedicated to Christian apologetics. Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Thank you for having me on.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great to have you. Now, let's start with your interest and experience in science. I know you spent some time in the lab and you also studied science in school. Tell us how science kind of got your attention and what you studied and what you did in the lab.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah, so my bachelor's degree is in biochemistry, and it's actually through that that I first got introduced to the Discovery Institute. I think someone gave me a copy of Philip Johnson's Darwin on Trial, and I was hooked with his logical arguments there.
And then as a young biochemist, biochemistry student, Michael Behe's work was very influential for me. In fact, he came and spoke at our university when I was an undergrad and. And our biochemistry. The head of our biochemistry department, Dr. Billian, this British guy, very much an atheist, he loved to take time to attack the creationists, who he all loved kind of into one group. He. He was, of course, at the talk, and.
And I was just so impressed by how gracious be he was with my professor when he attacked him afterwards.
It just. So the Discovery Institute has been a huge influence on me.
So as an undergraduate, I got the honor of getting to do a fellowship with UT Southwestern Medical center in Dallas and do some research in a lab. And so I Got to work in a lab doing a protein structure lab. So basically we were doing X ray crystallography, which is the technique that was used to. To determine the structure of DNA, but with proteins.
And so when I graduated, I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, but I didn't know exactly what area I wanted to do. And so my, the PI in the lab, the principal investigator kindly let me come in and work with her and start my graduate project without being in grad school.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: And so I was studying a class of proteins that are involved in cancer. They basically cellular division.
And so that was a wonderful experience.
I, like, I've often said I felt closest to God in the lab because I was just continually confronted with design.
But in the end, I eventually got married and started having children. And I also realized that I really preferred the philosophical aspects of science and philosophy of science and then the actual lab work. I mean, some days this science is very, very slow. And sometimes all you feel like you're doing is making buffers every day.
And that really wasn't my favorite thing. I, I just have, I have so much respect for scientists that are so patient that do that.
But my interest was really in philosophy.
And so eventually I would eventually go back to school. But as you mentioned, I, I eventually got a master's degree in apologetics.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Okay, and you took that path. But you have this science background, which is really helpful, I'm sure, when, when you're looking at the scientific arguments and, you know, weighing all the, the different approaches to science and faith, I'm sure it comes in handy. And you mentioned Michael Behe. We're actually celebrating 30 years of his landmark book, Darwin's Black Box.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Wow. 30 years this year.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I'll be talking to him later this month about that.
But such a gracious man, such a diligent worker, and has come up with just some devastating, you know, ideas.
Devastating, of course, to the Darwinian framework because of what he's found out about design at the molecular level. It's fascinating.
Well, in your essay, you call the argument from reason one of your favorite arguments to return to. So what's your personal connection with it and how did it become a favorite?
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Yes, so when I left the lab and started having children as a young mom, I really went through a very difficult period of spiritual doubt and often say I needed to go back to the lab to be confronted by design all the time, to see.
But I started really struggling. And so I was first introduced to The Argument from Reason through Christian apologetics.
It was around the time of the early to mid 2000s, when the Four Horsemen of the atheist apocalypse were doing business.
Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.
And they were making a lot of, a lot of noise and I was getting exposed to a lot of that. But thankfully, this whole industry of Christian apologetics that had already been around really became much more prominent, and I was so thankful for that.
So I was first introduced to the argument from Reason through Alvin Plantica's evolutionary argument against naturalism, which was very important for me as a scientist. It was, it just made perfect sense that there's this aspect of evolutionary naturalism that is self defeating when it comes to being able to trust the reasoning, our reasoning capacity.
And so that for me, in my time of doubt, I had a lot of questions beyond just basic, you know, philosophy, theological questions. But the argument from reason, and I mentioned this in the article, formed an anchor for me during that time because it's such a fundamental argument.
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: It gets to the heart of even being able to doubt, even to be able to trust your doubts, you have to assume that you can.
And what the argument showed me was given naturalism or atheistic naturalism, I have no grounds for that trust in my reasoning ability.
So it was, it was very important to me.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And it really is across the board important, you know, no matter what side you come down on the science on religion, you know, if you have doubts and if you have beliefs, you've got to be able to trust those and work through them towards truth. And this really is a crucial tool for doing that now. So you, you first found it with Alvin planting his work, and then you read C.S. lewis, and I think it's his book Miracles that he explores this. Now he begins by noting that everything we know about the world beyond our own immediate sensations, and certainly everything we know about science is inferred. So can you explain how our inferences follow what's called a ground consequent pattern? Maybe give us an example of that?
[00:08:36] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely.
I love this. So this is Lewis's formulation, and I think it is so powerful, this ground consequent pattern that he discusses here, because really what he's doing is he's giving us an architecture of human reasoning, and we do this all the time, and it's so close to us that we never really think about what's going on.
And so he really breaks it down for us. And I think this is so powerful and so important, especially as we'll talk about later when we look at something like an artificial intelligence. And what is artificial intelligence doing? Is it doing what we do when we reason?
And we will learn that it's not. It's something very different.
So by ground consequent pattern.
So yes, he says, so we infer evolution from fossils. We infer the existence of brains because we find brains in the skulls of creatures like us in the dissecting room. So we infer that we have a brain. I like to use the example because it kind of gets right to naturalism itself.
So a naturalist will say, because of the preponderance of scientific evidence ground, I am compelled to believe, to believe that naturalism is true.
So look what he's saying there. What is causing his belief in naturalism? It's the scientific evidence.
So that's what Lewis is going to call the rational cause of a belief. And that's what we always understand as rational inference. And when you think about it, if you were to go throughout your day and think of all the times you make rational inference, we do it all the time. We can't escape it. It's just so much a part and parcel of our thinking process.
It's definitely fundamental to science. We take what we, our sense information through the sciences and we infer truths from that.
So that's what he means by the ground consequent pattern of reasoning.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And just to dwell on the fact that you're, you're saying we do this all the time. I mean, I'm going to get in the car later and you know, I don't know how that car is going to handle me when I'm driving it today, but I can infer based on all the uses beforehand that it's going to get me from point A to point B. And of course I'll have something to say about how safe it is. But, but, you know, I mean, we're making that inference with, you know, vehicles we get into goes all the way right to our, our mother's love, you know, or, or the love of a, a parent or a child. We infer that, you know, based on all the evidence we're, we're observing. We don't, we can't say we know 100%, but we have a lot of confidence in that inference. And you're saying the argument from reason works that way?
[00:11:39] Speaker A: Yes. So what Lewis is going to do is he's going to begin by saying, and I like to call it a tale of two causes.
So you can have this, the scientific evidence, in case of the naturalism causing the belief of that naturalism is true. So that's one cause, but he's going to contrast that with something he calls the physical cause, and that is something totally different.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: And in your essay you ask, after you kind of unpack the ground, consequent understanding of it, you then ask, can we make such an assumption if strict naturalism is true?
So let's talk about what we mean when we say naturalism. How do you explain it? And how does Lewis explain it?
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Lewis defines naturalism as the whole show.
So that means a naturalist believes that we live in a causally closed system and that ultimately everything in the universe can be described by matter, physics, chemistry, physical laws, maybe quantum mechanics, but everything has to be described, described in terms of that. And then our system is causally closed. So at rock bottom, all causation in the universe comes from these fundamental elements. And these fundamental elements that are for the naturalist, they are inherently blind, purposeless and non rational for the naturalist.
Okay, so a naturalist views. So if there's one thing Lewis notes in the universe that doesn't fit that causal explanation that seems to come outside of it, naturalism is invalidated. And he's going to make the argument that human reasoning is. And what's really fascinating, Lewis is doing this in his book Miracles. And so it's kind of a strange thing, like it's a book on miracles. Why didn't he give us a whole list of all these miracles and evidence for them? Well, he begins the book by saying he had had a colleague that saw a ghost, had an experience of seeing a ghost. She was a materialist before she saw the ghost, and she was a materialist after she saw the ghost, or materialist, materialistic naturalist. And so he realized that it was her naturalism that was sort of constraining her explanation of the ghost. She had no tools within naturalism to explain it other than it must have been an illusion. Right. She has to reduce it to some kind of material cause. And so he realized that you can make all the arguments you want for miracles, but as long as someone's a naturalist because of this causal, causal closure, they can't, they cannot believe in it. They have to have a physical explanation for it. And what Lewis is going to say, aha, but there is one thing that doesn't fit within your causally closed system, and you can try to fit it within your causally closed system, but you destroy it. And that is human reasoning.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Yeah, he's very good at going back to the beginning of things and Starting where he needs to start in order to make his points.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Now you write that nature's creativity is aimless in your essay. Let's zoom into that for just a minute. A proponent of intelligent design is going to see that creativity in nature is a result of pre programmed adaptability engineered into designed living systems by an intelligence. An evolutionary biologist, on the other hand, looking at nature's creativity, is going to consider it driven by a Darwinian evolutionary process through natural selection, acting on random mutations.
They argue that the results of evolution are non random and that they follow a predictable path of survivability. But this output is just a happy accident, a fortuitous convergence of random mutation and the right environmental conditions to get that advantage. But the process remains largely blind and ultimately aimless.
So how does the naturalist explain cognition then? You know this thinking faculty that we have to reason.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: Yes. So yeah. So for the naturalist, nature's creativity is fundamentally aimless in the sense that it doesn't have foresight. Right. It doesn't have some kind of end goal purpose. There's no, teleology is kind of the technical philosophical word that is very important for the naturalist.
Now they say that if there is an aim, it's survivability. Right. So but ultimately it's the happy accident of the right random mutations meeting the right natural conditions. Right. That ensure the survivability of a species that's going to carry on those genes, including those mutations that gave it survivability. Right. And so the, the key for the naturalist is it's blind. The is, it is blind. So if we go back to Lewis's tale of two causes. So we have the, so we have the first proposition because of the preponderance of evidence, the evidence itself, when I think about it using my reasoning, I'm compelled to believe the naturalism is true. That causes my belief. But for the naturalist they are reduced to this second cause, and it's called, Lewis says, it's the physical cause and effect.
So say I'm a neuroscientist and I put the person, the naturalist brain in under a scan and I watch their brain while they're, you know, pondering all the scientific evidence and concluding that naturalism is true. As a scientist I can give a beautiful physical account of what's going on. And since I, I'm a teacher, I'm a biology teacher, I love to teach this part to our K.
So it's one of my favorite sections to teach because I can bring in the argument from reason. But you have These neurotransmitters, binding receptors, you have these beautiful transmembrane proteins inside the neurons that open and close and let in potassium and sodium ions. Right? And it propagates its signal to the end of a neuron where the whole process starts again. Okay. We can give a complete, detailed, full physical description down to the atomic level of this whole process.
For the naturalism, for the naturalist that is at rock bottom, what is causing his belief that naturalism is true?
Okay. And so the problem is potassium and sodium ions don't know the difference between a premise and a conclusion.
Right?
I say in my paper and I, I cut a riff off of Richard Dawkins, matter neither sees nor knows matter just is. He said that about DNA, but this is true. And so for the naturalist, they have to describe how from that purely blind system that's obeying chemistry and physics. Chemistry and physics, he says, gave him the belief that naturalism is true. And we intuitively know that this is a problem, right? Because when we want to invalidate someone's argument, what do we do?
So suppose an ID proponent comes along and looks at the same evidence that the natural naturalist was looking at and says, well, I look at the evidence and I see that the best explanation is intelligent design. Well, a naturalist will often say, and we do this all the time with people too.
Well, you only believe that because you're motivated by religion. Well, look what he did there.
He gave a non rational account for that belief as a means to invalidate it.
Well, isn't that exactly what naturalism is doing when it says that all of our thoughts are reducible to chemistry, that non rational matter, chemistry and physics, they're giving a non rational account of, for all of human thought, including the thought that naturalism is true.
So they really can't explain cognition without explaining it away.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: So if cognition is just neurons firing based on blind physical events, what does that mean for intentionality or knowledge or truth? Are those things possible?
[00:20:38] Speaker A: And free will? Right. We're, you know, it's, is it the chemistry that's causing my choice? Because, you know, we still can make a choice not to believe that naturalism is true, right? We have this sense that we have a choice in the matter. Well, that must be an illusion.
So under naturalism, all these components, intentionality, knowledge, truth, qualia, all these things that are part of consciousness that philosopher philosophers of mind study, ultimately are illusory.
And at rock bottom it's just matter and blind matter and non rational causes.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Now in your essay you mentioned that some people use Quantum, the quantum realm to try to justify or make room for rational inference. Is there a loophole there for naturalism?
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Well, you know, not really. So I, I love this aspect and this does get a little bit above my pay grade, but I know Sir Roger Penrose, 2020 Nobel Prize winner for his work on black holes with Stephen Hawking.
I love him. He is such an out of the box thinker.
He is what you call a mathematical Platonist, from what I understand. So he believes that numbers are real. The naturalist, by the way, has to believe that our perceptions of math and logic and numbers are also illusory. They're somehow construct, they have to be products of evolution somehow. Right? Well, he believes that there are these true mathematical entities that truly exist.
And so for him, one of the things we can thank him on is he connects something called G's incompleteness theorem and which basically says that human consciousness is fundamentally non algorithmic. And I think this he Penrose's work on this will be very helpful for us in dealing with AI in the future.
And but it's from that that he wants to try to still locate consciousness within the universe. He still wants some kind of material cause or a mathematical cause. And so from him, from what I can understand, it's math that's causing consciousness.
The problem is he has to prove that math can have causal potency. Because one of the things we do know about our thoughts that I also didn't bring up is yes, there is causal potency to the neurons firing and everything that does have a physical effect on us. Right? Our brains can affect us, but there is this potency, causal potency coming from rational inference too. Right? Because so the naturalist who looks at the evidence and concludes naturalism is true, he can do lots of things.
He can change it by having that worldview. He can organize his life around that worldview. Right. He can turn around and have an effect on matter.
Lewis points out that we use rational inference to build bridges, to take matter and build bridges. I would say we use rational inference to build AI, so it has a causal effect too.
And so Penrose, I just don't think he can find that in quantum indeterminacy. I know that Bruce Gordon has done work on this, so he might be, if someone's interested in pursuing that further to look into work.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Now some who hold to naturalism won't seem too bothered that their actions and their life that they're living don't really match the reality that's conjured by their naturalism and that belief. And who could blame them, of course. But you know that there are some naturalists who try to embrace the void, who try to sort of live up to naturalism. In the fool in your essay, you mention American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, a vocal atheist, you know, one of the, the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.
And he is, you know, describing naturalism as a universal acid that eats through all our concepts of mind and meaning.
How did he get hemmed in, as you call it, by his naturalism?
[00:25:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So I have to appreciate his honesty there. It, it is a universal acid. It does eat through our concepts of mind and meaning and they become illusions.
He does what I think what many naturalists do, they have kind of a, I almost want to call it to not be too provocative, but a naturalism of the gaps in the sense that they think that eventually science will give them the answers to how you can go from non rational matter to matter.
But I think it's still going to mean that our cognitive faculties are illusions. Right.
You know, it is something shaped by non rational forces, so it's ultimately non rational. So this illusion of rationality is not real. And, and Dennett, yes, tries to embrace it, but do you see what he did? He uses rational inference to infer that rationality is an, is an illusion.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: So you know how it's self defeating and this is why. Yes, there's just sense.
It was, I think, I believe it's Psalm 139 that talks about being hemmed in by God, behind and before.
Well, we're hemmed in by this argument because we can't, we can't take on a philosophical position that defeats it the moment we defeat our confidence in our cognitive ability.
What, what else is there?
Now I will say there is a naturalist that I really respect. In recent years, probably it's been over 10 years now, philosopher Thomas Nagel, he wrote a book, Mind and Cosmos.
Why the, the materialistic neo Darwinian conception of reality is most certainly false.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Which like he laid down the gauntlet with that subtitle.
But he concedes all of Lewis's arguments, which is wonderful. In fact, he goes, he goes the same direction. Lewis in Miracles is also going to say not only can our rational inference not be accounted for under naturalism, neither can our moral reasoning. So morality is subjective. Well, Nagel sees this as well, what Nagel wants to do though, he still wants to stay within naturalism. So he wants to introduce some kind of purpose and teleology into matter itself. Because he thinks, well, if we, I can make matter sort of rational, then maybe that can give rise to mind. But that he just begs the question, where do you get that rationality from? We only have minds that do that.
So, yeah, so you have to, you know, be thankful for these guys, but they still end up kind of hitting a wall.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: And as Lewis was studying this, he. He found that this was not just the argument from reason, was not just an argument about how the mind works, but he also extrapolated it to understand the universe. Can you tell us what he sort of concluded about cognition and how it relates to the cosmos?
[00:28:25] Speaker A: Yes, yes. So I have, I just have to read the quote here because, you know, Lewis says it best. He was such a wonderful writer and this is what I share in my article. So he wrote, where thought is strictly rational, it must be in some odd sense not ours, but cosmic or super cosmic. It must be something not shut up inside our heads, but already out there in the universe or behind the universe, either as objective as material nature or more objective still, unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion. We must hold that in thinking. We are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has already always been saturated.
And he's going to go on to say that this rationality is a little telltale rift in nature that tells us that there's something beyond her. And this is how he, he lays the groundwork for the possibility of miracles.
And of course, he's going to end by saying it makes much more sense that our logic is a participation in, in some kind of cosmic logic. Logic or cosmic logos.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: Okay, so not just something that occupies our own mind, but something we rather are participating in that is larger and that is cosmic, irrational. Yeah, that's mind blowing.
Okay, well, last question here before we, before we end this segment. The scientific enterprise, of course, depends on the assumption that human beings can discover truth about the world. So what do you think are the implications, you know, of the argument from reason for science and scientists who are studying the natural world?
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's a question they need to always be asking themselves.
We can't help but look at science and draw sort of, what would you say, philosophical or theological conclusions. Right. So I think of my biochemistry professor that I talked about that, Dr. Bellion, that.
One of my favorite professors ever, but he was not a fan of Michael Behe and his work in intelligent design.
But we need to be, you know, scientists, we love to be logically consistent as possible.
Well, if your ultimate worldview undermines your own ability to even do science, you need to revisit it and think, well, maybe, maybe naturalism is wrong and, and maybe we don't live in a totally causally closed universe.
Maybe our, the fact that I can do science is an indication that there's some sort of greater rationality going on here. And of course, for intelligent design proponents, the rationality is in nature itself. We can see the goal, directedness, the teleology, the purpose, the. What the naturals has to do is explain that all the way. Right. They say, oh, you know, as Dawkins says, it gives the appearance of purpose and the appearance of design.
And so for them, that's all an illusion. But ultimately that means that their own reasoning process is illusion. So I like to say, you know, just as there is a signature in the cell that speaks to, you know, the, the, the specified complexity of the information in DNA, right. Speaks to some sort of greater rationality, some greater intelligence.
I think our, our ability is to either accept or reject the argument from the signature in the cell is also an even more fundamental sort of pointer to the fact that there is some greater rationality. And you know, again, because our reasoning is so close to us, we forget about this. It's so built into us.
So it, I think it has a huge implication for scientists. Of course, they can continue doing their scientists, their science even if they think it's an illusion.
You can just try to encourage them to connect the dots.
[00:32:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, pursue that. Consistency, as you say.
Well, this is a fascinating topic and, you know, I just, I thought it was important enough to spend, you know, a couple of segments just unpacking it. So we're going to continue the discussion in another episode. In part two, we're going to look at how Lewis's formulation of the argument compares to another philosopher who you mentioned earlier, Alvin Plantinga. We'll also consider how Charles Darwin himself wrestled with the origin of human reasoning. And we'll consider how all of this relates to the debate over evolution, the argument for intelligent design, artificial intelligence, and also just the future of reason itself, which I think is a very timely and important topic. Rebecca, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Well, in the show notes for this episode, we'll post a link to Rebecca's essay on the argument from reason. You're going to want to read the whole thing and don't miss the second half. As I said of this conversation in a separate episode coming very shortly after this one, if you enjoyed today's conversation, consider sharing it with a friend that always helps us to find new listeners and viewers for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
