bd-from-kg

Biff the unclean:

Ah, the cogency of this argument is overpowering: “X’s argument for P is ridiculous because X also believes Q, which I think is false.”

Lewis was well aware of the science of the preceding 100 years. The statement is a logical deduction from the Rule that he stated earlier.

Missing the point completely. Lewis is arguing that inference is itself a product of nonrational natural processes (or as he puts it, of irrational causes). Since we routinely dismiss as untrustworthy beliefs that can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes (as he illustrates in his examples), why should we trust beliefs based on inference if our belief in the reliability of inference is itself a result of irrational causes?

Lewis’s argument is that metaphysical naturalists also display an inordinate amount of credulity. They trust the products of their own cognitive processes when those very processes have led them to conclusions that should cause them to completely distrust them.

For someone who is criticizing someone else’s arguments, you really need to brush up on Logic 101. Ad hominem is one of the most elementary fallacies.

Anyway, anyone familiar with Lewis’s writings would know that he gave a detailed account of his conversion from atheism in Surprised by Joy. Are you seriously claiming that this entire book is a big fat lie?

If you don’t want to grapple with this argument, so be it. But it’s a complete waste of time to devote an entire thread to ridiculing an argument that’s taken seriously by competent philosophers. As I’ve already said, I don’t buy it. But before rejecting an argument it’s a good idea to get some idea of what the argument is and what it is about it that makes a number of very intelligent people take it seriously.

Steven Carr:

Huh? How did you get that from what he wrote?

Lewis is using “irrational” to mean “nonrational”. And the “Total System” is supposed to be nonrational in the obvious sense that it is completely controlled by nonrational natural laws. In other words, there’s no intelligence “behind” it, either in the sense of creating it in the first place or “running the show”.

It is a fact that there are beings who suppose themselves to be rational. How do they (that is to say, we) know that they’re right?

In any case, Lewis isn’t saying that there can’t possibly be any rational beings in the “Total System, only that even if there are, they have no justification for believing that they’re rational.

No, Lewis is saying that we ourselves believe that beliefs that have nonrational causes are not to be trusted (or even taken seriously).

Baloo:

He means “nonrational”.

The man who believes that all black dogs are dangerous is not guilty of a fallacy; his thinking is simply colored by a traumatic childhood experience. He isn’t reasoning incorrectly; he isn’t reasoning at all. The man with delirium tremens is not guilty of a fallacy; his cognitive processes are not functioning correctly because of the presence of alcohol in his neural pathways. Similarly, the man whose pessimism can be traced to a liver attack, the paranoid who thinks that everyone is conspiring against him, etc., aren’t committing logical fallacies; their cognitive faculties are being affected by various “mindless” physical processes.

Gunnaheave

Lewis is wrong about the nature of credibility. A statemnt is not discredited because the reasons for it turn ut to be irrational. It is merely unsupported. It is thus incorrect to say that; "We may in fact state it as a rule that no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes." One doesn't evaluate beliefs by investigating the "causes" of the beliefs at all.This is simply psychologism (not to mention the confusion of validity with truth value). The argument fails. Whether or not we should snicker at it is another question, but the bottom line is it fails. End of story.

Llyricist

This whole paragraph is nonsense. Human reason as a whole is the basis from which individual thoughts occur, it is NOT all thoughts taken collectively. The extension of the rule does NOT apply.

Toss the rest.

bd-from-kg

Gunnaheave :

Lewis didn’t even use the term “credibility”. In fact, no one on this thread has used it either. But of course a statement is discredited if it is learned that the person who made it had no rational justification whatever for believing it. It might, of course, happen to be true anyway. For example, if my grandson says that his neighbor won that lottery and it turns out that his reason for saying so is that he dreamed it, his statement is discredited. But his neighbor might have won the lottery after all.

If by “valid” Lewis had meant “true”, you’d be right. But obviously what he meant by “valid” was something like “rational” or “rationally justified” (depending on whether one is talking about the process leading to the belief or the belief itself).

Nonsense. We all do this all the time. Of course, if the matter is important enough and we can check the matter directly, that’s what we’ll do. But if it isn’t all that important, or if we’re not in a position to check the matter directly, we sure as heck will be interested in how much weight we should give to the opinion of the person who made the statement. And this in turn depends in part on how rationally justified we think this opinion is likely to be. If we know that it has nonrational causes, we know immediately that it is not rationally justified, so there is no reason to give it any weight at all.

Steven Carr

And Lewis is wrong.

There is intelligence controlling what goes into this email.

Lewis is simply lying when he says atheists believe there is no intelligence controllng at least part of the Universe.

Lewis knocks over a strawman. Little wonder that he gathers no respect on this forum.

However, you appear to have overlooked my destruction of Lewis's arguments.

Would you agree that the 'Total System' is completely controlled by non-green natural laws? How then is grass green?

Or is Lewis's analogy just a ludicrous category mistake - as ludicrous as his comparing the state of scientific reasoning with the thoughts of just one person, almost as though Lewis is ignorant of the fact that scientific reasoning is the product of more than one mind?

Volker

Yes, bd-from-kg is right with his argument. This isn't easy to refute. How can something which clearly cannot think (= nature) bring something forth that can (= us - ok - some of us ).

How can someone who thinks irrationally have rational thoughts?

The argument: By chance. Even someone who is completely irrational will by chance have a rational thought "by accident" sometimes. If you eliminate everything irrational and - given enough time - you will have lots of rational thoughts.

Its the fundamental principle of try and error. You can't find out what is right, but you can find out what is wrong and dismiss it. Life itself is founded on this principle. Life is a knowledge-gaining process. In Science, we replicate this process, though we do it consciously.

In fact, we have not much more than try and error. What makes religion so disagreeable that they try to avoid the part with the error. The know-it-all attitude has never worked, not in nature, not in society. If you have no process to sort the errors out, you won't gain knowledge.

Hope you understand this, in spite of my language ...

bd-from-kg

Llyricist:

Sorry, I don't follow. Please clarify.

ReasonableDoubt

A few weeks ago on this site I brought up a similar argument to Lewis' that someone tried to assert to me showing how atheism must be false because of this "irrational causes" thing.

I still don't get it - I must be dense - so what if we are all experiencing a huge delusion? As long as we can all agree within that delusion what works - what is pragmatic - that is all that is necessary for our existence. If our thoughts can't be trusted as "true" because they are the products of naturalism, how has this been problematic?

And if we grant that this is a problem, how does God solve the problem? It seems there is an assumption that in order to have "true" thoughts we must have been created by God. Just as well could be another type of intelligent design out there - or perhaps a "demon" intelligent god who created us but we still cant' "trust" our thoughts.
What am I missing here?

Steven Carr

Lewis wrote 'But it won't do. In the first place, the argument works only if there are such things as heredity, the struggle for existence, and elimination. But we know about these things certainly about their existence in the past only by inference.'

Is Lewis claiming that there is no such thing as heredity? Or that we know about only by inference? What is he on about? Is he claiming that black parents don't have black children? Surely heredity can be observed.

As for the struggle for existence and elimination, as there are millions of tadpoles which never turn into frogs, I think that can be observed as well.

Was Lewis really as silly as his writings suggest? Was he trying to con people?

Or did he look at his own thought processes - realise that they were irrational, and come to a tempting, but sadly mistaken conclusion, that everybody else was as irrational as he was?

Steven Carr

Why not try the easier problem?

How can something which clearly cannot bark (= nature) bring something forth that can (= dogs)?

If you regard that as a non-problem, why do you regard Lewis's problem as a problem?

Why do you say nature clearly cannot think, when there are natural objects which can think? I don't see what is so clear about saying nature cannot think.