SteveD

Like boneyard bill I am not a trained in philosophy so you won't find me using terms like "ontology". However, I believe the correct technical term for C.S. Lewis' argument is "a big pile of smelly doo doo".

Lewis spends the first part of the argument explaining why we don't trust the results of an irrational thought process. From which he states his rule. "no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes".

I think that the only rule he can derive from the examples he gave would be ""no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational"thought processes.

He then makes a complete non-sequitur and applies his bogus rule to the physical process of natural selection.

Now the only reasons I can see that he would do this are 1)he is purposely trying to mislead the reader, or 2)he doesn't recognize the faulty logic. Now I will give him credit for being an intelligent person so that leaves me with #2 (there's that doo doo again). He is purposely being dishonest to push his agenda. This makes me mad.

As far as being able to rely on our reason; I think that we all trust it based on the same thing. I have 45 years of using it all day long. Over that time I have developed quite a database of informatin that indicates it is generally pretty reliable. It doesn't matter whether it came from naturalistic causes or God or Spiderman. I know that it works because I have a ton of evidence.

I am also surprised at how blase you Metaphysical Naturalists are towards the apologists using the word "irrational" to describe natural processes. Among your fellow philosophers you may have a mutual understandig of the term to mean "not-rational" or "not the result of intelligence" or "non-purposeful". But, for ordinary guys like me who are just trying to figure it all out, it means illogical and non-sensical. The apologists are aiming their writings at guys like me. So, if you let them get away with this then they have won right out of the gate. By letting them use the term "irrational" you are admitting that MN DOESN'T MAKE SENSE

Well, thats enough ranting for now.

Steve

99Percent

SteveD Good grief! What is so hard to understand from the following two equations?

Irrationality=death
rationality=life

That is where your confucion and anger arises. Its not so complicated after all.

Stil in doubt? Look at how each cell of your being is struggling with its own genetic code.

boneyard bill

Turtonm writes:

A creature possessing reliable reason could not arise in a world that could not be reliably reasoned about. Therefore, either the world possesses rational characteristics, or our reason is not reliable. But the naturalist claims (according to Lewis) that the world is fundamentally non-rational. But the theist is not making that claim. Therefore the theist is not faced with an inconsistency whereas the naturalist is. The way out of this would be for the naturalist to accept that rational processes are operative in the universe. This might involve interpreting something like a feedback loop as a rational process or accepting John Wheeler's suggestion of a kind of information ontology or David Bohm's implicate order. I'm really not familiar enough with these ideas to comment with any kind of authority. And I don't know if they would qualify as naturalism. They wouldn't qualify as the kind of naturalism Lewis is critiqueing. However bd from kg defined naturalism as the belief that the universe was knowable without reference to an entity such as God. In that case some of these theories might qualify, although as far as I can tell, Bohm's theory comes awfully close to theism.

boneyard bill

SteveD writes:

I think you are misunderstanding Lewis position. I think his "rule" is short-hand way of asking how reason can arise from non-rational processes and suggesting that this is a problem the naturalist faces. He is writing to a popular audience, not a philosophical one so he is perhaps oversimplifying somewhat.

However, he does NOT apply this rule to the physical process of natural selection. He admits that such a process would provide a way out for the naturalist. But then, the naturalist faces another problem because, in order to prove that reliably rational processes derived from irrational ones, he must assume that his reason is reliable in the first place, and an argument that assumes what it sets out to prove is no argument at all.

bd-from-kg

boneyard bill:

1. On Lewis’s argument

Let’s review the structure of Lewis’s argument again. His first (and main) argument begins by pointing out that it seems self-evident that “no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes”. (What he seems to mean by saying that a thought is not “valid” is that not only is there no reason to expect it to be true; but that is is rational to expect that it will hve no correlation with reality at all. Thus a nontrivial invalid thought could be true only by an incredible coincidence.) Thus if all thought can be fully explained in this way, no thought is valid. Against the naturalist’s argument that science has discovered how valid thoughts can arise from irrational processes, he points out that according to the naturalist the theory in question can itself be fully explained as the result of irrational causes, and therefore is not valid. So the naturalist’s theory is out of court.

It should be clear from this that Lewis did not consider that this argument was “defeated”, and I would have to agree that it is not defeated by the argument that he considers. If one accepts the “Rule” as being presumptively valid, the argument that the theory of evolution shows how valid thoughts can arise from irrational processes is indeed defeated by pointing out that this theory (like all theories) is the result of irrational processes, and so (according to the Rule) is invalid.

Thus your statements “Thus you can say that you disagree with Lewis' first argument but agree with his second. But Lewis says the same thing!” and “He starts with the rule but admits that there is a valid response” are incorrect. In fact, it would be very odd for Lewis to offer this argument in the first place if he thought that it could be defeated by such an obvious counter. In that case he would have simply started with the second (subsidiary) argument and omitted the first entirely.

Now let’s look at my counter to this argument. Rather than assuming that the theory of evolution is true and using this supposed fact to challenge the Rule, I challenge the Rule directly with no prior assumptions. In the face of such a challenge, anyone who proposes to invoke it must provide a positive justification for claiming that the rule is applicable. By focusing on the reasons why the Rule seems so plausible in “ordinary” cases and showing that they do not apply to the kinds of processes exemplified by evolution, my argument destroys any reason for supposing that the Rule applies to evolution. This really does defeat Lewis’s main argument.

Lewis’s second (subsidiary) argument, in a nutshell, is “You have to assume that inference is valid before you can even begin your arguments for its validity. And a proof which sets out by assuming the thing you have to prove, is rubbish.” His main reason for bringing in this argument is to support the main one, by pointing out that the argument that evolution shows that irrational processes can produce valid thoughts is fundamentally circular. In conjunction with the Rule, this does indeed imply that naturalism has a problem in that it implies that it is highly unlikely that any given nontrivial thought will have any connection with reality. But without the Rule, all that the argument shows is that it cannot be proved that human reason is valid (or reliable, as you would put it.)

2. Naturalism and “reliable reason”

In my last post I asked “What does it mean to say that reliable reason is (or isn’t) integral to nature?” Instead of answering, you just kept talking about reliable reason being “in nature” , “making room” for reliable reason, etc. This failure to define terms clearly is not conducive to a productive discussion.

You say:

This is all extremely vague and confusing. How can a “fundamental axiom” not be a “presupposition”? What exactly is it that a theist is claiming when he says that “reliable reason is in nature” that a naturalist would deny? In what sense does the naturalistic description of the world “make no room” for reliable reason? What exactly is the naturalist claim for which there is “no basis ... other than bald necessity”? Why is this claim (whatever it is) a “presupposition” when the theist’s fundamental axioms are not presuppositions?

The next paragraph is less obscure:

Here it would appear that what you mean by “the universe must have rational characteristics to begin with” is that it must be such that it can be “reliably reasoned about”. Presumably this means that it must have some degree of order of such a nature that it can be discerned, at least to some degree, by human reason. So far, so good. But no sane naturalist denies any of this; in fact, as the EB says, all this is presupposed by naturalism. In fact, the assumption that the universe has patterns and regularities that can be discerned by the human intellect is implicit in adopting the Principle of Induction and Occam’s Razor as metaphysical axioms. Thus it is difficult to make sense of your contention that the naturalist has “omitted such characteristics from her initial description”.

Perhaps the following analogy will be helpful here. A deck of cards in which the cards are arranged by suit, with the cards in each suit in ascending order, would surely be said to be “ordered”. Clearly the universe is “ordered” in this sense (though not nearly as well ordered as our deck of cards). And of course, just as our card deck can be “reliably reasoned about” (for example, after examining a substantial part of the deck, I can be reasonably confident that the two of clubs will be followed by the three of clubs), so can our universe be reliably reasoned about because of the order that it displays. It also seems plausible that beings capable of reliable reason could not arise in a universe that exhibited no order at all.

But no naturalist would deny any of this; on the contrary, the existence of some order in the universe is presupposed by all naturalists, and indeed by anyone who is sane. So what is it that you claim the naturalist description of the world “leaves no room for”? What is it that you claim the naturalist has “omitted ... from her initial description”?

Perhaps you are trying to say that the fact that the universe is ordered (to some extent) implies something further about its nature, or its origin, or something. I’m perfectly willing to grant that this might be so, but it’s not at all clear what, if anything, it implies.

In particular, it’s not at all clear (at least to me) that it implies that “rational processes are operative in the universe”. In fact, I don’t even understand what this might mean in this context. For example, what would it mean to say that “rational processes” were “operative” 10 to the minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang? Would it mean that the laws of physics were being systematically violated or tweaked for the purpose of creating “order” in the newly forming universe? What about today? What are these “rational processes” up to right now? Can their existence be observed or verified, at least in principle?

Anyway, until and unless someone can come up with a cogent argument showing that the existence of order in the universe implies something specific, I am content to regard such questions as impenetrable mysteries and leave it at that. Perhaps this is the real difference between the theist and the naturalist. The former is not content to leave it at that. He cannot accept that there are unanswerable questions, impenetrable mysteries. He has to have answers, even if they are based on nothing but wild speculation.

boneyard bill

jbd-from-kg writes:

I have deleted this post in the light of my further investigation into to the question. My revised response is posted below.

Boneyard Bill

[ January 26, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]</p>

Bill Snedden

Well, I don't know what was to blame, but I see the difference, now. Given that, I suppose that my argument is really pretty much the same as the Maximal Warrant argument Plantinga attempts (without much success, I agree) to rebut.

Thanks!

Bill Snedden

[ January 25, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

boneyard bill

bd-from-kg writes:

Mea culpa. What I have overlooked until now is that Lewis' argument is intended as "a defeater" of metaphysical naturalism. That point was not stated in the original Lewis post, but it can be inferred from the context of the other posts on this thread which, unfortunately, I had not read diligently. I have deleted my previous response because it was based on that misunderstanding. On that basis I must concede:

1. That Lewis bears a greater burden of proof than I have been assuming.

2. You are correct in claiming that Lewis' rule cannot be supported by intuition.

3. You are correct in claiming that Lewis' rule cannot be supported by experience.

However, you are incorrect in claiming that Lewis' rule must be either the result of intuition or experience. I believed Lewis' rule can be sustained by a logical argument.

It is basically the same argument I have already made. The naturalist claims that valid human reason arose from irrational processes. The naturalist cannot prove that human reason is valid but presupposes this. But again, valid human reason cannot arise from processes that can't be validly reasoned about. These processes, therefore, must have rational characteristics to begin with.

But Lewis' rule states that "no thought is valid if it can be fully explained by irrational causes." However, for reasons explained above, the naturalist cannot both "fully" explain human reason by irrational causes and presuppose its validity. The presupposition itself implies that the causes possess rational characteristics.

Sorry, I have a tendency to be careless in my use of terminology and rely too heavily on the reader to figure it out from context, and this can lead to confusion. I'm trying to hone my philosophical skills, but I tend to lapse. Of course, we have to make assumptions. But then we also have to fully account for what those assumptions imply. I have been using the term presupposition for a situation in which the full implications of the assumption have not been accounted for. This is, perhaps, not quite the correct meaning of the term and, in any case, I have not used it consistently in that sense either.

The theist claims that reason is part of God's nature and is reflected in his creation. There is no question of reason arising from irrational processes. In the theistic description of the world, it is there from the beginning. I think the naturalist would deny this. Don't you?

As far as I can tell, rationalist terminology is pretty forbidden in a naturalistic description of the world. Only irrational, mechanistic language is acceptable.

and
Are you claiming that "order" is a rational principle? If you claimed that the existence of order was evidence of reason in the universe, how would your fellow naturalists respond? Lewis says that naturalists claim that humans arose from the "total system" and the total system is "irrational." But a system must have order. If order is a rational principle, why didn't you object to Lewis' characterization of the system as irrational? Or conversely, what if Lewis had said that a system must have order and that order is a rational principle; therefore, an "irrational system" is a contradiction? What would your response have been? I think you'd have said he was rehashing a very old argument.

Of course, I have no objection to your claiming that order is a rational principle, but that does not seem to me to be consistent with naturalism.
-------------------------------------------------
"Perhaps you are trying to say that the fact that the universe is ordered (to some extent) implies something further about its nature, or its origin, or something. I’m perfectly willing to grant that this might be so, but it’s not at all clear what, if anything, it implies."

-------------------------------------------------
Yes and no. It's a question of language. On an earlier post Turtonm raised the issue of a feedback loop. I said it sounded like a rational process to me. After all, I use a feedback loop when I play chess, and I like to think that I play chess rationally. But in the scientific community, it is treated as a mechanical process.

So where is the reliably reasonable character of the universe reflected in the language of the naturalist? You're saying the naturalist has taken it into account. If so, the language should show that. But as far as I can tell, anyone who tries to use such language is quickly branded as a creationist, or presuppositionalist, or whatever.

Only mechanistic language is permitted. This means the naturalist must defend the claim that human reasoning processes somehow spring, miraculously, from irrational processes. The naturalist is as dependent on a deus ex machina as the theist is. At least the theist admits it.
---------------------------------------------
"In particular, it’s not at all clear (at least to me) that it implies that “rational processes are operative in the universe”. In fact, I don’t even understand what this might mean in this context. For example, what would it mean to say that “rational processes” were “operative” 10 to the minus 43 seconds after the Big Bang? Would it mean that the laws of physics were being systematically violated or tweaked for the purpose of creating “order” in the newly forming universe? What about today? What are these “rational processes” up to right now? Can their existence be observed or verified, at least in principle?"
-------------------------------------------------


Rational processes are, or are not, operable depending upon the label you want to put on them. I fail to see how you will ever be able to show that rational processes flow seamlessly from irrational processes (what I would think would be a truly naturalist position rather than a faux materialism) if no intermediate stages are permitted. We have a mechanistic universe and voila sentient creatures appear whose behavior we are now, at least sometimes, allowed to describe in rational terms.

Or, at another level, we have rational human beings who observe a universe which is completely irrational, and there is no compatible relationship between the rational observer and the observed mechanism. The rationality exists only in the observer and not in the observed.

The only way out of this difficulty is to claim that the rational observer isn't really a rational observer at all but only a mechanism itself, and it is this kind of absurdity that leads us to Lewis' rule and all the attendent difficulties that that creates for the naturalist. Because even if you reject the claim that Lewis' rule defeats naturalism, it exposes the great difficulty the naturalist has in making any positive defense of his position.

Then why are you asking me to come up with an explanation for the first few nanoseconds after the Big Bang? What have I said that suggests there are any pat answers? As for theists, at least Christian ones, I think mystery and epistemological limitations are important concepts of Christian thought. Admittedly, I'm no theologian.

[ January 26, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]

[ January 26, 2002: Message edited by: boneyard bill ]</p>

bd-from-kg

boneyard bill:

1. On language, meaning, and the importance of defining terms

The most important insight attained by twentieth-century philosophy is that many of the questions that troubled philosophers in the past were purely semantic in nature. Thus the realization dawned that it was supremely important to be very careful about defining the terms they were using and to make their meaning as clear as possible. As this practice became widespread it began to become clear that many classic philosophical “arguments” were merely pseudo-arguments. They seemed at first sight to make sense, but on close analysis they dissolved into a cloud of meaningless verbiage.

It seems to me that your main argument is of just this type. This suspicion is strengthened by your continued failure to offer anything approaching a clear definition or explanation of many of the critical phrases that you use. I want to focus on this problem and see whether you can offer a coherent account of some of these phrases. If not, I will have to conclude that you don’t really mean anything by them, and that your argument is just sound and fury signifying nothing.

Example 1:

Two posts ago I asked “What does it mean to say that reliable reason is (or isn’t) integral to nature?” After noting that you failed to answer this question, I repeated it in my last post. I now note that you have once again failed to answer it, and ask you once again to explain what you mean.

Example 2:

Similarly, in my last post I asked:

You replied:

Not only does this not explain what you mean by “reliable reason is in nature”, but it raises a number of other questions.

Possibly by “reason is part of God’s nature” you mean that God is capable of reasoning validly. But in that case it’s unclear what you mean when you say that this is “reflected in His creation”. Of course, one might say that it is “reflected in His creation” in the sense that his creation contains beings – for example, human being - capable of reasoning validly. But this cannot be what you mean, since you say that this whatever-it-is “[was] there from the beginning” – meaning, presumably, that it was already present a second after the Big Bang, when there were surely no beings in the universe who were capable of reasoning. So what do you mean?

Example 3:

In yet another attempt to get you to clarify your meaning, I asked

Your reply was:

What do you mean by “rationalist terminology “? Could you give an example of the sort of terminology that you believe to be forbidden in a naturalistic description of the world? Please do not use more of your pet phrases involving the word “rational” in your example unless you are prepared to give a clear definition of it. Otherwise I will conclude that naturalists do not favor the use of such language for the simple reason that it is so vague as to be meaningless.

Example 4:

You asked:

What do you mean by a “rational principle”? What would it mean to say that “order is a rational principle”? After all, “order” does not seem to be a “principle” of any kind. (For example, consider a piece of canvas which is colored “blue”, but in such a way that the shade of blue gets gradually darker from left to right. This canvas exhibits “order” in the sense of exhibiting a pattern or regularity discernible to human intelligence, but would you say that it exhibits a “rational principle”? Or any kind of principle, for that matter?) And to answer your question, I suspect that if I were to say “the existence of order is evidence of reason in the universe”, most naturalists would respond by saying “Huh? What do you mean by that?”

Example 5:

You asked:

What do you mean by saying that the universe has a “reliably reasonable character”? How would you distinguish between a universe with a reliably reasonable character from one that does not?

Example 6:

You said:

But what do you mean by saying that a process has “rational characteristics”? The first quotation above seems to imply that it means only that it “can be validly reasoned about”. But in that case the final sentence would be saying only that, in presupposing the validity of human reason, the naturalist is presupposing that the causes of human reason are things that can be validly reasoned about. This is of course true, but processes that can be validly reasoned about can obviously be “irrational” in the sense of being completely mechanical, spontaneous, neither guided not created by a rational intelligence, or whatever else you might want to subsume under the term “irrational”. So there would seem to be no problem for the naturalist in presupposing that the causes of human reason have “rational characteristics” if this means only that they can be validly reasoned about. There is no obvious reason why the naturalist cannot fully explain human reason by causes that are completely mechanical and unguided by a rational intelligence yet can be validly reasoned about. In fact, this is exactly what the theory of evolution does.

But perhaps you mean more than this. Perhaps by saying that a process has “rational characteristics” you mean that it has some property other than being capable of being “validly reasoned about”, but which is a prerequisite or necessary condition of its being capable of being validly reasoned about. But I am unable to form any notion of what sort of property this might be.

2. Your position and Lewis’s Rule

You claim that, although Lewis’s rule cannot be supported by intuition or experience, it can be supported by logical argument. Now it’s obviously impossible in principle to support it by a strictly logical argument, since the statement "no thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes" is clearly not a tautology. So any such argument must rest on some non-tautological premises. And if the argument to have any force these premises must be more “self-evident” than the Rule itself. It seems highly unlikely that any such argument exists, the more so because if one did, Lewis (who was a very bright fellow) would very likely have discovered it. But let’s take a look at your argument and see whether, against all odds, it actually supports the Rule.

You say:

From the context I take it that by a “process that can't be validly reasoned about” you mean an “irrational process”, since otherwise the argument doesn’t even make sense. But in that case the final sentence means the same thing as “valid human reason cannot arise from irrational processes”, which is just a restatement of Lewis’s Rule. It’s not too surprising that you can prove Lewis’s Rule (or anything else) if you start from it as a premise.

This is crucial, since (as we shall see) your thinking about this whole subject is permeated with the assumption that Lewis’s rule is valid. So if you cannot rebut my argument that there is no reason to suppose that it is applicable to evolution in a non-circular fashion, your entire argument is left in shambles.

To see how heavily your thinking is based on Lewis’s Rule, let’s look at some of your comments.

So far as I can see, the only “reason” that you give for the final statement here is Lewis’s rule. In fact, this once again appears to be just a restatement of the Rule. You’re going in circles so fast that it’s making my head spin.

To claim that it would take a “miracle” for human reasoning result from irrational processes is yet another restatement of the Rule.

As I’ve commented several times, the naturalist doesn’t claim to be able to show that this did in fact happen; he claims only to be able so show that it is possible to construct a consistent, plausible ontology (namely the theory of evolution) which fits all observations to date and has proven to have remarkable predictive power, and in which rational processes flow seamlessly from irrational processes. But I think that you’re saying that any such ontology must meet an extraordinarily high burden of proof because it entails that rational processes can have irrational causes. And why do you think that it has to meet this high burden of proof? Why, the Rule, of course.

The point being, presumably, that you find such a thing highly implausible a priori. And what is your supposed justification for thinking this? Why, the Rule.

And why does this seem to you to be a problem in the naturalist position? The Rule, yet again.

The claim that it is absurd to suppose that something can be at the same time a rational observer and a “mechanism” does not “lead” us to Lewis’s rule, it is Lewis’s Rule.

By this time it is clear that a great deal of your “argument” consists of asserting the validity of the Rule repeatedly, varying the language a bit each time. It really appears that this Rule is such an integral part of the fabric of your thought that you don’t even recognize that you are invoking it again and again.

3. C. S. Lewis and Naturalism

I don’t know where you got your ideas about Lewis’s “characterization” of naturalism, or why you think it’s so important, but since you keep referring to it, let’s see how Lewis does characterize naturalism. He says (in Chapter 2 of Miracles):

Now I don’t agree entirely with Lewis’ characterization of naturalism. (For one thing, it seems to imply determinism, which is incompatible with the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, and is in any case not a necessary part of naturalism). But the main point is that he defines it essentially as the opposite of “Supernaturalism”: a belief in God or the gods. Thus if you are claiming that naturalism as Lewis defines it is inconsistent, the only logical alternative is supernaturalism.

boneyard bill

be-from-kg writes:

I addressed it indirectly in my example of a feedback loop. I will deal with in more fully below.

I will deal with my own view on this more fully when I'm finished with the specific questions. But you raise a good point. I assume that theists mean pretty much the same thing I do, but I don't really know theistic position. I'm not defending theism, I'm defending Lewis' critique of metaphysical naturalism. If theists mean the same thing I do, then their position is not subject to the criticism that they are in the same boat as the naturalist. But if they mean something else, maybe they are.

I mean the same term should apply to the same process whether it occurs in nature or in human problem-solving. I will elaborate below.

You said that we could apply reason to the world because it was ordered. It sounded as if you were saying that this was evidence that the naturalist does say that the world possesses rational characteristics, and that seemed to contradict Lewis' description of the naturalist position.

Again, my point was that if you were saying that the naturalist has accounted for the reliably reasonable character of the universe, it should be reflected in the language the naturalist uses.

I'm surprised I wasn't challenged on this earlier. The leap from "being reasoned about" to "possessing rational characteristics" is not self-evident. I mean by that that a process is either rational or not, regardless of where is occurs.

Oops. I used the wrong verb. It is meant to be a parallel with the argument about reasoning creatures. But creatures arise, whereas reasoning must be applied. So it should be "valid human reason cannot be applied to processes that can't be validly reasoned about." I think that is more self-evident than Lewis' rule. So if it can be shown that the processes have rational characteristcs, naturalism fails.

I re-iterated the point about Lewis' "characterization" of metaphysical naturalism because it's the only thing I have to go on. I'm not coming at this from any significant knowledge of Plantinga or presuppositionalism or even theism. As I pointed out, until I re-read some of the posts I had missed the point that Lewis' argument was supposed to be a defeater of naturalism rather than just a critique. And that's why I questioned you about your use of the term "order." I wanted to be sure that you weren't implying that Lewis had mis-characterized naturalism.

But I'm not interested in claiming that naturalism as Lewis defines it anywhere and everywhere is inconsistent. I'm only interested in claiming that naturalism as he defined it in the citation you originally posted is inconsistent. In other words, I'm not defending theism. I'm only defending a critique of naturalism that happens to have been made by a theist.

So now I will try to respond to your objections with greater specificity. I'm not dealing with any scripted argument here so it's difficult for me to get the point across simply by responding to questions. So I'm just going to try to lay out the whole remainder of my argument.

So far in this discussion it is agreed (and I don't see how it can be denied) that creatures capable of reliable reason can not arise in a universe that cannot be reliably reasoned about. In other words, it must be agreed that the presuppostion that human reason is reliable also implies (at a minimum) that the universe is acessible to reliable reason.

But if the universe is accessible to reason (assumed from here on to be reliable), does that necessarily mean that the universe possesses rational characteristics? This, I think, is the crux of the issue. Because a logical defense of Lewis' rule depends on this distinction. This distinction is also essential to the theists' claim that the criticism does not apply to their own doctrine.

I think a chess analogy is appropriate here again. I use a feedback loop when I play chess, and when I do so I am said to play chess rationally. In fact, when I don't use a feedback loop, when I assume I have a crushing position and can ignore my opponent's counter moves; I usually end up with a losing position and am told that I played the game "mechanically."

So why is it that a feedback loop encountered in a human individual's thought processes is termed rational, but the same process encountered in nature is termed mechanical? I contend that the distinction is arbitrary.

Likewise, the principle of induction is held to be rational, but the structure that is analyzed is said to be irrational. If I engage in synthesis, however, and construct a logical system; that is called rational. And if my task was an engineering project that resulted in an artificial structure, it woud still be regarded as rational. But a similar structure occurring in nature is quite literally described by naturalists as the product of irrational processes. So again, the distinction between a rational process and an irrational process seems to be, from a logical perspective, arbitrary.

But it is only arbitrary in a logical sense. It is not at all arbitrary in a historical sense. For what the naturalist has done throughtout this process is to presuppose the ego cogito. Now I'm well aware that naturalists would deny that they are Cartesians. But the fact remains that, like Descartes, naturalists continue to treat the mind as a separate substance. True, they have abondoned his "separate but equal" doctrine to claim instead that the mind is a derivative substance. But it remains separate, isolated, and autonomous - a freak of nature, not a part of it.

The origin of this error lies in the effort to reslove Cartesian dualism into a monism - the monism of material substance. Obviously, the only way to do that was to posit that the mind derived from material substance. But in formulating his dualistic philosophy, Descartes had broken with Greek philosophy which had regarded reason (logos) as a property of nature and properly attributable to humans for that reason and not due to some fortuitous accident.

But materialists took over Descartes' materialist views more or less unaltered so that the material world became the source of reliable "objective" truth, and the mental realm was "merely" subjective and less reliable. So one could not attribute subjective qualities, like reason, to the more reliable qualities of the objective world. The result, of course, has been to throw the reliability of reason itself into question. And this raises the issue of whether anything at all can be known.

Of course, many naturalists have abandoned strict materialism, but they retain the materialist view of a non-rational, mechanistic world. But when we see that the definitions of rational and irrational derive from historical, rather than logical, antecedents; we no long need to persist in this error.

On a logical basis, a process that is properly labelled rational should be regarded as rational whether it occurs in the human mind or in the physical world. And on that basis we can also say tht the presupposition that human reason is reliable also implies that the physical world has rational characteristics. And if the physical world has rational characteristics, metaphysical naturalism is defeated.