Trent is joined by Pints with Jack host David Bates to dive into C.S. Lewis’s most philosophically challenging argument against atheism.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. We have another special in-studio episode today, recording here at Catholic Answers Studios here at 2020 Gillespie down in San Diego. Always fun to be able to stop by, and fun to have guests who do other podcasts who live here in the San Diego area be able to join us.
Trent Horn:
Today joining me is Mr. David Bates. He is the host of Pints With Jack. You might’ve heard of Pints With Aquinas that podcast out there, but if you haven’t heard of it, you need to check out Pints With Jack.
Trent Horn:
It’s a wonderful podcast dedicated to C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis is someone… I remember when I was in my conversion experience, David, I think for a lot of people, one of the first authors they read in their conversion to Christianity is C.S. Lewis. His words still have forceful resonance, even now it’s been about 80 years since he wrote some of his works like Mere Christianity. I thought today, it’d be fun to have you come in. And I wanted to talk about one of Lewis’ works that people aren’t as familiar with. So most people know C.S. Lewis probably from the Chronicles of Narnia. I think that’s probably his most famous work.
David Bates:
That was how I was first introduced to him, and that’s how most people are.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So they know the Chronicles of Narnia, and my kids have thoroughly enjoyed listening to those on audiobook. The audiobook versions have really great narrators. My son was listening to the Last Battle, which is the final entry in the Narnia series, at least chronologically according to the story, and I believe it’s narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart.
David Bates:
They have some really great voice actors doing that.
Trent Horn:
Oh, it’s stupendous to hear him do Aslan, and it’s wonderful. And then also of course, Mere Christianity, he had many other books. Other people in the Catholic sphere are probably familiar with Surprised by Joy, Problem of Pain.
David Bates:
Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters.
Trent Horn:
Screwtape Letters. But one I think a lot of people are not as familiar with, because frankly it’s a denser book and really shows off Lewis the philosopher, and that would be his book, Miracles. That’s what I want to talk about today on the show.
David Bates:
I was a little nervous when you first suggested it for lots of those reasons. It’s a book with which I’m not as familiar. I’ve probably read Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, Screwtape Letters, I’ve probably read each of them at least 15 times each. I’ve only read Miracles once and, as you say, Lewis goes into deeper waters. It’s slightly heavier material.
Trent Horn:
He does.
David Bates:
I’m not trained in philosophy. So I think this is going to be great because you are, and you can correct all of my misunderstandings.
Trent Horn:
Oh no. When I looked over the notes you sent me saying… At first we had a bit of a miscommunication before coming on here. I thought we would record a Pints With Jack episode, and so you wrote out all this stuff. I thought “Oh man, I don’t have to do anything for this interview.” But it’ll be fun to talk about it. I think it’s important because Lewis’ other works tackle a lot of… What’s the word I would be searching here for? The common man’s objections to theology. Mere Christianity were radio addresses. But here in Miracles, he goes to the root, which is also the root of many people’s objections to Christianity in general. I’ve noticed this in my engagement with skeptics. This happened a lot in my debate with Matt Dillahunty.
Trent Horn:
I believe it was Mere Christianity. I can’t remember the citation right off my head, but Lewis says that the modern man’s objection to Christianity is not necessarily that it’s supernatural, but that it’s ancient. It takes place in a shrouded misty world of knights, and when you go back in time it’s an unreal realm sort of, and people just can’t wrap their heads, not just around that it’s one, that it happened a long time ago. But then two, that it’s a miraculous thing that happened a long time ago. For a lot of people, it’s a one-two punch that miracles are hard enough and they’re a long time ago. So in Miracles, he’s really trying to set out to show to the modern man, not just that miracles are something that we should believe in, but that our existence itself is an inexplicable miracle that requires explanation.
David Bates:
Yes. He goes to the roots of the presuppositions of those problems. So one of them being chronological snobbery. If it’s old, it’s out of date. And also we can’t speak about miracles because miracles don’t happen. That starts as your presupposition from which you then depart.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, let’s jump into the book. Before we do, you brought me a special gift I’m grateful for. We should cheers and do a toast-
David Bates:
Cheers.
Trent Horn:
To. Cheers. You brought me my special drink. I like chocolate milk in a glass. I tried to buy it the other day and they were out. Other people are in on the secret.
David Bates:
Well, you see, I just want you to associate other things with California other than just potholes and high taxes. So I want you to think, whenever you come back to the San Diego, you get chocolate milk. So you might do it more often.
Trent Horn:
Well, I’ll give it some thought. One of these days, I’m going to do my free-for-all Friday on my chocolate milk connoisseur. I’ve ranked all the brands. So we’ll see that for or even another best bonus episode. Let’s talk about Miracles. So Miracles is a book Lewis wrote in 1947 and then he released a revised edition in 1960. Full title is Miracles: A Preliminary Study. So what’s the overarching thesis and some of the arguments that Lewis puts forth in this book?
David Bates:
So as I said earlier, he goes to your presuppositions, and he says that really before you can start looking at miracle claims, you have to decide as best you can, can miracles actually even happen in principle. Because if you decide they can’t, that’s going to influence everything else that comes afterwards. You see this a lot in scripture studies where you have non-believing biblical scholars, will date books because they contain prophecies of things that happened. So if you start with a point of view that prophecy can’t happen because supernatural events don’t happen, you then have to date the book after the event that it’s claiming to prophesize.
Trent Horn:
That is to me one of the most boneheaded things that New Testament scholars do in particular, when they say, “Well, the synoptic gospels, at least Matthew and Luke, had to have been written after 70 AD because they described Jesus predicting the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which happened in 70, to which I’d say, “Well, once again, if prophecy is real, if miracles are real, he could do that.” But also number two, even if they weren’t, it’s not that grand of a conclusion to say that, “Oh, maybe the Romans were always out to get us. And there’s always a war or conflict every few decades, they’re going to come in and wreck the place.” I mean, that’s something everybody was worried about.
David Bates:
It’s rather like predicting that there’ll be a conflict in the Middle East.
Trent Horn:
Give it enough time, it’s going to happen.
David Bates:
Give it enough time, it will happen.
Trent Horn:
Right? Exactly. So, so in miracles, Louis… He’s saying, well, miracles happen, but in order to defend the claim that miracles can happen and we can believe in them, he has to juxtapose two camps; the naturalists and the supernaturalists. Because if you are a naturalist, like you said about presuppositions, miracles are already off the table. To investigate a miracle, if you’re committed to naturalism, is the same as a mathematician trying to find a square circle. You don’t even have to bother, I know it’s not there.
David Bates:
It’s based around the idea that nature is a closed system.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
Interlocking. It’s all just cause and effect. That’s all there is. Whereas a supernaturalist believes that there can be interference by a supernatural entity, Christianity, we call it God. And that goes beyond our natural laws, how they would normally operate.
Trent Horn:
Right. So I think some people have mistakenly defined miracles to say, oh, well, a miracle is of violation of the laws of nature. And so miracles can’t happen because you can’t break the laws of nature. I think this is mistaken because the laws of nature are not things. It’s not like gravity goes around and you’re wearing a hat and a badge. And it’s like, “Hey, you’ve got to stop floating! Stop floating up there! You got to get down!” The laws of nature just describe how things naturally tend to act.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
And so what’s amazing is we notice all this uniformity. And yet, if you are a naturalist, you just have to say, well, the uniformity is there for some reason.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And it just always is there. And it’s uniform and universal, so these miracles don’t happen. But if there is an entity that is not bound by nature itself, it can intervene.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
Well also I think that another problem that comes up is people think… When we talk about a miracle being God’s intervention, I’m concerned that some people treat it as like, well, the universe is here… I’m holding this pen out here, and God’s out here and it’s just floating there doing its thing. He’s like, well, better become incarnate. And there we go. Better miraculously help Dave get that a promotion, which is not a miracle that’s providence. But the universe isn’t floating out here, God is sustaining all of it. So it’s not like he kind of hops in every 2000 years. He’s always here, but he makes his presence known by superseding the laws.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
Is I think is a good way to look at it.
David Bates:
Absolutely. I think it relates to a deistic idea that has infiltrated all aspects of our lives, that we think of God as abstract, away, and out there and occasionally stops by to see how we’re doing.
Trent Horn:
Right. What was it? It was either Lewis or I think it was JI Packer, someone described God as an absentee landlord, basically. It’s like, let’s check and make sure everybody’s all right. The super is here to do his necessary maintenance.
Trent Horn:
Before we talk though about… I want to talk about his primary… It’s interesting miracles, he talks about the rational, but he’s got to get off the ground floor saying that well we can’t just be shackled and naturalism. So he makes a primary argument against naturalism itself that we’ll get to here shortly. But I want to talk about some of the great things that are in the book. There’s a part where he addresses an objection. I love reading in older authors, I see objections I hear all the time now. It shows they’re right on the ball.
Trent Horn:
So one would be, people will say, well, if God existed, why isn’t it obvious? Why isn’t it just obvious? I look around like, oh yeah, of course God exists. It should just be an obvious thing. And Lewis in a very condensed way says, well, sometimes there are truths that are so obvious we miss them. Like, for example, if I’m looking at you and I’m talking to you right now, one of those truths is I’m looking at you with eyeballs. But I rarely think about the fact that I have eyeballs, until I start to stop and think, how am I able to see you? Or Lewis used the example that if I’m looking at a garden, I’m looking through a window pane, and it’s obvious I’m looking through a window pane, but I don’t notice it until I stopped to think, oh. Or grammar is another example he gave, we’d speak and if someone asks you to actually explicate grammar, you’re like, I don’t know I do that.
David Bates:
Yeah. You quickly look past it because you’re using it every day. Another example he gives in Mere Christianity to make a different point, but a fish doesn’t notice that it’s wet because it’s in the water the entire time. How many times during a day do you actually think about your breathing?
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
Unless you’re a Yogi, not very often.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, actually I wanted to jump right off that into the argument from reason. Let’s put a pin in that, because that idea of obvious things pointing you back to God will be useful. Another one here is Lewis says, if anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. So it’s not a [inaudible 00:11:55] saying, okay, here’s enough evidence to believe in this miracle. Because I watched Matt Dillahunty’s reply to my debate. He did a little recap of his own.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
And Matt seemed to take it…. Mike Licona debated him as well, and Dillahunty seemed to express that it was not fair in a debate about a resurrection to start putting out arguments for God. Like, well, you don’t need to bring God into this, just prove that this event happened. Well for me if God doesn’t exist, you’re always going to go to some other alternative explanation.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
It’s quite fair for me to say, there’s good evidence for the causal entity I’m proposing. And Lewis seems to have that on here, that if you are locked in naturalism, it’s a fool’s game to try to argue for miracles.
David Bates:
And it’s not even just simply reading about evidence or hearing about evidence. [inaudible 00:12:42] says our own senses, when you boil it down, if you encounter the miraculous, you’re going to be receiving that through your senses. And we know that our senses aren’t infallible.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
We can be tricked.
Trent Horn:
It could be an illusion. It could be a hoax.
David Bates:
Exactly. I saw David Copperfield levitate a car. I knew that my senses were lying to me, that things were not as they were, because I know that he isn’t a supernatural being like God that could do these things. So I naturally start looking for other options and I’m pretty sure it was a hollowed out car, I think that’s how it works.
Trent Horn:
Well that’s helpful, because some atheists will say, “Why doesn’t God come and do a miracle right now in front of us?” Well, if you don’t believe it’s God, you could believe all kinds of other explanations. Arthur C Clark once said that advanced technology would be practically indistinguishable from magic.
David Bates:
It’s the Thor argument.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, basically. If Thor comes down… Oh, well, you’re mis-attributing the cause there.
David Bates:
I just want to say, I think of Matt Dillahunty when I read that section. Because I’ve listened to a lot of his debates and honestly, I don’t know what could convince him.
Trent Horn:
Nothing.
David Bates:
He seems to have a closed system where no evidence is even admissible. That even if you saw the most miraculous thing, he would assume it was something else, like a brain aneurysm-
Trent Horn:
Right-
David Bates:
Or some kind of illusion.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And at that point you’re stuck.
Trent Horn:
Right. Because he’s assuming that it’s just an observational thing to lead to the supernatural. But if you’re already presuming naturalism, then that doesn’t work. The other point we were making about things being obvious, like we see the garden through the window pane, we take the window pane for granted. The fact that we are reasoning about whether God exists, the fact that we’re saying, well, are we justified in believing in miracles? Are you justified in believing in God? The fact that we are able to use reason, that’s what motivates Lewis in Miracles to put forward what he calls the cardinal difficulty with naturalism. And so that would be chapter three in Miracles, where he puts forward the argument from reason. So in a nutshell… And there’s lots of, actually there’s multiple arguments from reason. What’s the gist of the argument from reason?
David Bates:
Yes. I’ve heard this explained in lots of different ways, with different aspects being emphasized. But I put it like this: we have thoughts and we have beliefs and we reason to those beliefs. And if you adopt the worldview of naturalism, all of those things, all that entire process must be reducible to natural processes in your brain.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And your brain itself is a product of blind, raw natural forces. And so then the question is, if that is the case, why would I trust my brain to help me arrive at beliefs which are true?
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
On what basis? Because it does seem to rather undermine lots of things, like meaning, morality, free will. But also my cognitive faculties, my ability to reason. Why should I expect my brain to give me a true understanding of the world out outside of my body?
Trent Horn:
Right. And Lewis points out that when we criticize other people for believing things, sometimes we try to say, oh, well that guy only believes in it because he has a bias. Or he believes in it because it makes him feel good to know that it’s true. And we think that we’ve shown someone isn’t justified if they believe something for non-rational or irrational means, and the distinction will be important as we discuss his argument. That we try to point out, oh, if we can show the guy only believes this for non-rational reasons… You know, his parents told him this.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
It makes him feel good when he believes this we’d say, well, that’s not a good reason to believe something. But Lewis points out, but wait, if naturalism is true, then the only reason we believe things… If you’re saying like, oh, well I believe x because when I say these words to myself, it gives me a warm feeling in my tummy. If I believe x, because you know, if the way my molecules and my stomach go, it’s like, that’s not a reliable means for truth. If the molecules in my brain are also shifting and rearranging just as haphazardly, why would I trust them?
Trent Horn:
In the book… So this argument does predate Lewis, he quotes JBS Haldane, who’s also an atheist actually, who said, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” So the idea here is that if my belief, if… So this argument from reason seems to be it’s not an argument for God, per se. It’s just an argument that naturalism isn’t true.
David Bates:
Naturalism doesn’t provide enough material. It doesn’t provide enough explanatory power. And if we can’t get the answer from nature, then we have to look at something beyond nature. Super nature.
Trent Horn:
Right. And so the idea here is that we cannot… If naturalism leads to faulty reasoning, then I can’t trust anything I reason from it, even the claim that naturalism is true.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
And so instead we have to look somewhat beyond that. So that was his primary argument, the argument for reason in Miracles. What’s interesting about… And this has also been developed more, as good arguments are they get developed over time, maybe at the end of our talk, we’ll talk about modern defenders of this argument. So he’s put this together, but what’s interesting about it is it’s part of an urban legend that’s kind of grown up around CS Lewis. And there’s a lot of urban legends related to CS Lewis. And one of them, the legend kind of goes like this.
Trent Horn:
So Lewis, he’s a literary guy. He understands Western culture, he’s good at writing fiction, and he’s good at talking to the common man. But he ain’t no philosopher.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
And Lewis and Miracles tries to do philosophy. And then he goes to the big boys and the big girls and he gets his butt kicked. He gets his hat handed to him by a Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, who said… And the myth goes like this, that Anscombe eviscerated Lewis’ argument from reason, and he went back with his tail between his legs and he just ended up writing children’s literature after that and stopped doing apologetics and realized he was a fraud and a phony. And there’s a lot of intelligent people, even Lewis biographers, who buy into this myth and it’s… I mean, he did have the criticism from Anscombe, but then it’s completely blown out portion.
David Bates:
Absolutely. It’s kind of funny. People just don’t go to the primary sources. It’s much like the myth that Tolkien hated Narnia. It grows each time in its retelling, particularly as biographers who don’t do the homework retell the story, adding their own flourish to it.
Trent Horn:
In Lord of the Rings the original name of Sauron was C S Alran.
David Bates:
There you go. Exactly. And in this particular incident, it’s retold as a battle of the sexes; that you have this stodgy English professor thinking he can do philosophy and gets eviscerated and destroyed by a woman no less, gasps and clutching of pearls.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And people always skip over the fact that she was a Catholic. She was a mother of seven. That all of this took place at the Oxford Socratic Club, which Lewis himself helped found.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And the idea that he either didn’t do any more apologetics, that’s just flatly false, because Mere Christianity comes out after this as well as a number of other theological works. And Lewis had been writing fictions since long before this. And even his fiction, I would actually argue, is some of his most powerful apologetic.
Trent Horn:
Right. But the biggest thing here is that he did not abandon the argument. He revised it and released a second edition. And actually the Miracles I have the second edition, I’d love to track down… I’m sure someone has a first edition or at least the original-
David Bates:
It’s available online.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. You can get to compare his original argument in Miracles, the cardinal difficulties of naturalism with the revision. Because Anscombe… And that’s what good philosophers do, you put out an argument, your peers say this doesn’t quite work, and then you strengthen it and you move forward. And so Anscombe put out good objections to it to make it stronger. So for example, one of them in Lewis’s original formulation of the argument from reason he tried to… It was almost like kind of what Victor Reppert calls a skeptical threat argument. That Lewis tries to argue, kind of like presuppositionalists do today, That if our reasoning is from motion of atoms in our brains, then we could never know if we’re ever validly reasoning at all. We could have no idea where any kind of reasoning is valid.
Trent Horn:
And a lot of people might think that doesn’t seem right. It feels like we can do trial and error and we can compare things. And sometimes we do get it right. And so Anscombe brought up this objection. And so Lewis reformulates the argument: well, it’s not so much that we can’t know if we’re reasoning. We do know we have valid reasoning. How are we able to do that?
David Bates:
How can we ground that?
Trent Horn:
Right. How do we ground it? How do we make it the case? So it would be like someone saying that if God doesn’t exist, we would have no idea what’s good or evil.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
That would be a bad argument. We do have an intuitive understanding of good and evil. People can figure it out if they don’t know God. A better argument is, well, what objective really makes things good or evil? And so the same thing with the argument for morality. I’m trying to think what are some…. Anscombe’s other criticism of the argument is interesting. She tries to say, well… Lewis’ argument is basically this: that if a belief you have can be explained purely with non rational causes. If you can explain, you have a belief because of these synaptic connections in your brain, and I can explain it all the physical causes, therefore it’s not warranted.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
And so Anscombe says, well, that’s not necessarily true because you could have all of the reasons that somebody believes some… You get have the physical description of why they believe something they do. But if they also have reasons concurrent with that… If you could say, it’s like David, I’m mad at you because I didn’t eat lunch this morning and the chocolate milk is actually lactose free and I can taste the difference. And I told you, I could taste the difference.
David Bates:
Sorry.
Trent Horn:
It’s all good. And I have this, this and that, and this and that. Even if I have that completely understood. If I also say comprehend reasons along with it, then it could be rational.
David Bates:
To go back to the genetic fallacy, which we spoke about a little bit earlier. The idea that just because you were born in part of the world, because your parents told you, my parents told me the world was round.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
But I also believe that because I’ve spoken to flat earthers online and their arguments don’t make any sense.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And I’ve looked at the positive scientific evidence for it. So I believe that the earth is round for multiple reasons, but one of them is because my parents told me to.
Trent Horn:
Right. Now I do think though that Anscombe’s criticism is actually not that decisive against the argument, because I think it can be pressed as well. And Victor Reppert does this in his book, Defending the Argument From Reason… Because the way I can look at it as he gives this example, suppose David you asked me what’s my position on a divisive issue? And I say, oh, well, my position is x and I give you all of these reasons. You might think, oh wow, you’re very reasonable person. You gave me all of these reasons for it. And you asked me for all these different issues. But then what if I revealed that on position A, B, and C, I first rolled a dice and that’s where I chose my position, and then I gave reasons afterwards.
David Bates:
That maybe set your criteria for how you’re going to assess things.
Trent Horn:
Right?
David Bates:
Which is the best series of movies, Justice League or Marvel? I’m going to roll a dice to decide which of these sets of criteria I’m going to decide are going to be the deciding factor, then apply those to each of the sets of movies.
Trent Horn:
Right. So just for people to understand Reppert’s criticism here, that’s to say, okay, even if I gave you all these reasons for why DC movies are better or why Marvel movies are better and you though he’s a reasonable person. But then if you later found out, I just pick them based on how I rolled a die, which is purely by chance, you’d want to withdraw saying that I’m reasonable because the main factor in why I believe that is a non-rational factor; the rolling of a die. Which were the same for what Lewis would say is when it comes to our brains, that if it’s just the same chance occurrences of neurons firing, things like that, then we don’t have an explanation there for why we have the ability to reason at all, to rise above the natural interlocking system.
Trent Horn:
And actually, let’s talk a little bit about the variants. Because when you move from Lewis, there are different things in the philosophy of mind to take the argument from reason to help at the very least to show an atheist or a naturalist we’re more than just the material. Now, jargon alert for everybody listening; naturalism and materialism are not necessarily the same thing. And you can opine… I think we’re probably on the same page with this?
David Bates:
I think so.
Trent Horn:
Naturalism is a tricky word to describe it, basically seems like a world without God.
David Bates:
Yeah. In Miracles, Lewis actually even says that it’s a very floppy term. Because a naturalist, when he says talks about nature just means everything that there is. But he’s assuming that there was no such thing as supernatural.
Trent Horn:
Right. And that’s what makes it hard. I think the best description would be naturalism is the view that at the basement of reality, it’s physical.
David Bates:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Now different naturalists… Now some naturalists will say it’s only physical. And some of them, the most extreme, would be eliminative materialists. These are people like Paul and Patricia Churchill and their philosophers of mind who say that our belief… Like the idea that I believe something, or I think of something, that doesn’t exist, actually. That’s an illusion. Because if something exists, you can put spatial coordinate to it, you can have a physical fact about it. There’s nothing like that for our mental states whatsoever.
David Bates:
But there are naturalists… I didn’t know this until fairly recently, like I think they’re called broad naturalists?
Trent Horn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
David Bates:
Who believe that there can be emergent properties.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
David Bates:
That are non-physical.
Trent Horn:
Right. So for example-
David Bates:
They have no problem really with what Lewis says here.
Trent Horn:
Right. So some of them would say, okay, I’ll agree with Lewis. So it would be more of the stricter materialists. So these people would try to say that water molecules are not wet, but you get enough of them together you have wetness. So when it comes to mind, you might say, well, synapses lack reason. But somehow if you get enough of them together, you can get reason. And that would get into more of a debate if reason can really be an emergent property in the same way that like wetness might be.
David Bates:
The question of if we throw enough circuit boards at Clippy in Microsoft word, will he actually become alive and intelligent?
Trent Horn:
I hope not.
David Bates:
The answer to that is of course not.
Trent Horn:
He might be alive, but he will never be intelligent. By his very nature he can’t be.
David Bates:
It looked like you were writing a letter. He just wants to help.
Trent Horn:
“You want some help here?” “No.” Go to my Free For All Friday on corporate mascots to hear more. So there are different ways of taking the modern argument. One that I find interesting is when you look at atheists who will admit their worldviews have significant problems. Alex Rosenberg in the Atheist Guide to Reality famously said that our minds, or our brains, cannot be about anything.
David Bates:
He says no more than a table can be about something. He just thinks it’s an illusion.
Trent Horn:
This is hard. Because we talk about this, this goes back to Lewis and the window pane and the garden. It’s just secondhand to us. I’m talking to you about my trip to Europe or Israel three years ago. But aboutness, I would say, well, what is aboutness? It’s kind of like asking somebody what time is? Not what time it is, but what is time?
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
It’s like, oh yeah, you just get this kind of blank stare to say, okay, well what is aboutness? Like, okay… I’m having a thought about Antarctica. I’ve got that bright blue glacier sitting in the water, it’s freezing cold. I’m having a thought about Antarctica. And that’s a property of that thought. And it’s in my head somewhere. Everybody seems to agree. Whether you’re Christian, atheist, whatever. It’s in my head. My brain is an important part of my thinking.
David Bates:
If we put your head in a CAT scan, we would see very particular things light up that relate to that.
Trent Horn:
Absolutely.
David Bates:
We would see some physical response to it.
Trent Horn:
But then we’d have to zoom in and we would zoom in closer and see that one neuron, that one synapse. All right, where’s Antarctica? There is no blue glacier, there is no cold there. How is it that these molecules, they have Antarctica? It doesn’t conform in that way. And also neither though it’s not a convention. Because for example, you take a stop sign. You know, it’s a red octagon… And it says stop on it.
David Bates:
And in California, you only have to slow down a little bit as you pass through it.
Trent Horn:
The rolling stop, right. We all agree by convention that means stop. But in 2000 years we could change our language. And we would just know it’s a cute little relic from the past. And it would have no meaning to us. So we can see that that stop sign is about stopping because we all agree on it.
Trent Horn:
But that doesn’t explain my neuron in my brain, because it’s being about Antarctica is not dependent on you and me agreeing that it is.
David Bates:
No.
Trent Horn:
It objective is, but why? So that point us more in the direction that there is something… We are more than matter, we are more than part of a closed interlocking system. And that points us to something beyond that. And Lewis should get credit for getting a lot of people to think in that direction.
David Bates:
As we said right at the beginning, this gets you back to your presuppositions and to not look past them quite so quickly.
Trent Horn:
Very good. When it comes then to… To close ourselves out here, to talk a little bit about Lewis as philosopher. I think that, to be honest, I feel like it’s sometimes the way people talk about Peter Kreeft, because Peter Kreeft is kind of our CS Lewis. He really is.
David Bates:
I’ll take that. I’ve even had people say that Peter Kreeft is our generation’s CS Lewis. No, no, no. CS Lewis was their generation’s Peter Kreeft.
Trent Horn:
Right, I like it. That people will say… And I’ve seen criticisms… It’s interesting the criticisms of Lewis, I’ve seen these criticisms of Peter Kreeft online. That many people, regular people, love Peter Kreeft and CS Lewis. And then you read the philosophers, and they’re not a serious thinker. They’re not playing by the rules of the other philosophers when they’re putting forward these ideas, because they’re not submitting things to peer-reviewed journals and have everything written out in symbolic logic-
David Bates:
Which is funny-
Trent Horn:
And their writing is understandable.
David Bates:
Oh, that’s the cardinal sin in academia. And the funny thing is, is that it’s dressed up a little bit cause it has to be. But yeah the people that want serious philosophy are actually really committing the ad hominem fallacy. They’re spending all the time complaining about the man rather than pointing out where his arguments fail.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I think to address their criticisms: number one, it’s not fair to say if someone is speaking to a popular audience to say, oh, you’re not talking to us, the philosophers. Well, he wasn’t… I’m not talking to you. And to see in the different areas, like for example, Peter Kreeft, he has a wonderful textbook, Socratic Logic, that’s not meant for the average guy on the street in a bookstore. It’s meant for a college student. You know? And Lewis has other… Would you say that Lewis has a range of writings, like Miracles would be one, that Lewis would say is not probably for the common layman?
David Bates:
No, not at all. When you start reading Miracles and you’ve just come from Mere Christianity, you notice he’s change gears a little bit.
Trent Horn:
Yeah.
David Bates:
There aren’t quite so many neat little analogies. He’s trying to define himself a little bit more, trying to deal with deeper topics. And that is Lewis all over. This is why he wrote in all of these different genres and he wrote to different audiences and wrote accordingly for that audience.
Trent Horn:
Right. And when you go through and when you read it, you can take an appreciation to know that he may not be a professional philosopher in sense of being a philosophy professor, but he did teach philosophy.
David Bates:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Trent Horn:
And he was a part of the Socratic Society. And this objection I think also, oh he’s not a real philosopher, this… Now Kreeft he does actually have a PhD in this, he teaches it. I think some people can feel this way about Lewis and others as if you to be… Or even today, people will say, you’re not a real… Like today to be a philosopher means you have to have a PhD, you teach somewhere. But for most of human history, the most famous philosophers in history would not have met at that test.
David Bates:
I was going to say, Plato, Socrates, they can’t be philosophers.
Trent Horn:
Socrates was a drifter, basically. He went around bugging people.
David Bates:
Saint Justin Martyr had a cloak. That was it.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. He had the philosopher’s cloak, that’s right. And so even people like David Hume and others, these are people who manage to snag a patron and could write about things. But the question is, judge them by their works and what they provoke others. Even if they don’t necessarily put forward a fully comprehensive thought to something, their role may be to put forward something very interesting that others are going to build upon. And I think that’s true with a lot of Lewis’ writing.
David Bates:
And just to think about. If you think about most of the arguments for the existence of God, they can get very technical very, very quickly.
Trent Horn:
That’s right.
David Bates:
But you can also just boil it down to a simpler thought that you can just recognize. So the arguments from design, you could just say, well, I look at the world, it looks designed.
Trent Horn:
Right? And then you go deeper than that.
David Bates:
You can go deeper than that. Likewise, I feel like there’s such a thing as right and wrong. And that only really makes sense to me if there’s a God. Again, you can unpack this in a more detailed fashion. You can submit all the peer-reviewed papers that you would like.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
But first and foremost, just to communicate an essential insight or an idea that you have.
Trent Horn:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let’s talk now about some resources for this argument, people who want to learn more. If you want to learn more about the argument from reason, a good author on this is Victor Reppert, and he has a good book called-
David Bates:
CS Lewis’ Dangerous Idea.
Trent Horn:
CS Lewis’ Dangerous Idea. And it talks about the argument from reason, the interaction with Anscombe. Alvin Plantinga has worked on this, the evolutionary argument against naturalism. I’m trying… Oh, there is a book by, I believe it’s Michael Augros called The Immortal In You. And so I think that is another one that I would put out there. Because we talked about philosophy of mind… It’s so weird. You might think like what’s harder to talk about cosmology or philosophy of mind? But like it’s weird, our brains are… It’s right next to us. You think about black holes or the big bang, it’s so hard because it’s way far away. Our brain is right here, but when we try to talk about how it works, it gets really confusing.
David Bates:
Also, I think the data is richer. It’s like the difference between say the Kalam cosmological argument and the argument for morality. I have way more data about morality because I am a moral person. I’m a moral agent living in the world and I’ve interacted with my conscience so that I have way more data. But I can just get overwhelmed at when I’m trying to work out what’s going on inside me. And this actually ties in very nicely with something that Lewis talked about, that there are two different ways of seeing things. You can either laugh at a joke or think about why it’s funny.
Trent Horn:
Right.
David Bates:
And you don’t really do the two things at once.
Trent Horn:
Right. Exactly. Well, great. Well, David, thanks so much for joining us today. Can you tell us more about your podcast and where people can find your work?
David Bates:
Sure thing. I am a co-host on Pints with Jack with two other guys. We go through the works of CS Lewis chapter by chapter. We’ve so far done Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces and we are just wrapping up The Screwtape Letters.
Trent Horn:
Alrighty. Well definitely check out Pints with Jack. And then I would like to join you on a Pints with Jack in the future. In studying this argument… Well, I’ll give the listeners a heads up what I’d like to talk about. I would like to talk with you about CS Lewis’ fiercest critic.
David Bates:
Oh. Does his fiercest critic also have a British accent?
Trent Horn:
I don’t know, because he’s not me. There was an author who wrote… The only author I know of who wrote a full book-length critique of Lewis. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to partake of it or not-
David Bates:
No, I haven’t read it.
Trent Horn:
It’s fascinating. So maybe the next time on Pints With Jack will talk about the philosopher who’s come after Lewis and my thoughts on him. I think that’d be fun. But thank you though, for being on Counsel of Trent again.
David Bates:
It’s wonderful to be back. It’s good to have you back in California for awhile.
Trent Horn:
For just a little bit. It has been fun. And thank you guys for listening. Definitely go to trenthornpodcast.com to check out more what we have.
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