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To: Mr. Silverback; Alamo-Girl; betty boop; unspun
Naturalism claims that everything that exists, including our own mental states, results from nonrational causes. As Lewis explained in the third chapter of Miracles, “If there is nothing but Nature . . . reason must have come into existence by an historical process. And of course, for a Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behavior that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood.” Human beings could have learned to respond to their environment, but this does not necessarily mean the same thing as learning to think rationally.

That means that we have no way of evaluating whether our reasoning process—which comes from chance—is itself valid. But if we can’t trust that our reasoning processes are truly rational, then we can’t trust the reasoning we used to arrive at that conclusion, or any conclusion. Therefore, naturalism must be false. It is a self-refuting proposition.

Nothing wrong with this argument, as a matter of fact, the naturalists have no answer for it. They have more supreme trust in reason then most theists have in God himself, but they have no explanation for why they trust it so, except to label it a "logical necessity," which is, of course, a circular argument: "We believe in rational thought because without it we couldn't think rationally..."

The ultimate failure of naturalism is that there's no real explanitory power in it. It's wonderful for making observations and testing theories about our natural world, but it fails miserably to explain the more significant questions of man: "Why am I here?" "Why am I a rational creature?" "What am I suppose to do?" "Why is there such tremendous biological diversity?"

Naturalism, at best, can explain some of the "hows" of life, but none of the "whys."

Excellent post...

4 posted on 04/12/2004 9:56:51 AM PDT by Ronzo (GOD alone is enough.)
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To: Ronzo
Kinda like saying "Everything is relative, there are no absolutes" which cannot be taken seriously since it is an absolute statement.
8 posted on 04/12/2004 10:34:41 AM PDT by Tennessean4Bush (An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds, a pessimist fears this is true.)
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To: Ronzo
If there is nothing but Nature . . . reason must have come into existence by an historical process. And of course, for a Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behavior that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood.

I'm not a naturalist, and a great admirer of C S Lewis, but alas I find this argument a crock.

Let's take a simple truth: fire burns.

Even for a naturalist, that was true long before there were thinkers. Unreasoning animals have been fleeing forest fires since the first animals inhabited the first forests. And today, reasoning men try to avoid starting forest fires.

No designer is needed to explain this. The animals that ran, survived; the animals that stayed, ended up crispy critters. Good old Darwinian selection explains that quite well enough.

And it can also explain reason. We have evolved ways to find out truths about the natural world because knowing those truths gives us a better chance of survival. And hence reason tells us not to drop lighted matches in forests, because lighted matches start fires, and fire burns. A "reason" that could not find such truths could not evolve, because it would confer no survival value. Therefore, no designer is needed to explain why reason works, any more than one is needed to explain why birds' wings work. Impersonal Nature simply says, try it: if it works, you live; if it doesn't work, you die.

What naturalism cannot explain, of course, is how we can reason our way to truths that have no survival value, such as the truth that there is no largest prime number. Over to you, Plato.

12 posted on 04/13/2004 12:40:21 AM PDT by John Locke
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