In an exchange on the Argument
from Reason between myself atheist philosopher David Kyle Johnson, both in the
volume C. S. Lewis’s Christian
Apologetics: Pro and Con, and in a subsequent exchange I had with him in Philosophia Christi; there emerges a
significant issue as to exactly what the argument from reason targets. In
Lewis’s book Miracles he calls the
target position naturalism, and he contrasts that with supernaturalism. For
Johnson, naturalism is the view that the natural world is whatever makes up the
universe. Hence, he says, “if a person believes that the mental is a
fundamental element or property of that which makes up the universe, and
believes that the mental is causally operating at the basic level, then that
person is a naturalist.”
But I think there is more to
it than that. There is a significant
viewpoint in philosophy and science which is very insistent on denying that the
mental operates at the basic level. As I have indicated earlier, this thrust is
largely responsible for the increased popularity of atheism since the
publication of Origin of Species. The
problem is, as I pointed out with the example of the rocks falling down on my
head, for most of nature the mental is not thought to be anything that operates
at the physical level, and it is widely held that nothing other than the
initial position of the basic particles, whatever they and the laws that govern
those basic particles, constitute a closed system of causation, and nothing
other than these can determine where, for example, the particles in my left arm
will be on Sunday morning. Thus even if I could truly say “I went to church on
Sunday because I believe the teachings of Christianity and wanted to worship
God,” I cannot explain the presence of the atoms and molecules in my body in
ways that do not, in the last analysis, reduce down to the mindless movements
of fundamental particles in accordance with the laws of physics. In the last
analysis, the laws of physics, not the rules of conduct by which I live my
life, govern the actions of the basic particles of my body.
When I wrote my book defending
the Argument from Reason, I entitled it C.
S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, obviously
in response to Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea. Interestingly enough, Jim Slagle entitled his book about
arguments of this sort The
Epistemological Skyhook, which again makes reference to Dennett’s book. The
reason for this is not hard to understand. For Dennett, Darwin’s dangerous idea
is that in explaining the world, we must operate from the ground up, not from
the top down, using cranes instead of skyhooks. As he explains:
Let us understand that a
skyhook is a ‘mind-first’ force or power or process, an exception to the
principle that all design and apparent design is ultimately the result of
mindless, motiveless, mechanicity.
On the other hand,
A crane, in contrast, is a
subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to
permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection,
and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively
explicable) product of the basic process, (p. 76, italics in original)
Now, I
was very surprised to see Johnson, in our most recent exchange, characterize
Dennett’s resistance to skyhooks as an argument that divine minds are not
causally operative. He writes:
For example, he takes
naturalists’ arguments that divine minds are not causally operative to be
arguments that human minds are not causally operative. This is especially clear
when he quotes Dennett talking about Darwin. Reppert thinks that his skepticism
about “meaning” entails that he is eliminating human mentality from the natural
world; but Dennett makes I absolutely clear that he is talking about meaning
“in the existentialist sense” (as in “the meaning of life,” or “the purpose of
the world”). Darwin argues that the world was not designed for a purpose (like
the creation of intelligent life) by an intelligent designer—not that it lacks
mentality at the basic level.
Dennett is
an atheist, and of course a member of the “four horsemen,” of New Atheists:
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens being the others, but Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is not primarily
an atheist polemic. The Darwinian critique of divine design is for the most
part presupposed throughout the book. Instead, Dennett spends most of the book
criticizing people who aren’t religious believers, but somehow are shy about
applying the Dangerous Idea; people like Searle, Gould, Penrose, and Chomsky.
They may be philosophical naturalists, but they fall into viewpoints that
involve skyhooks, and thus they are inconsistent naturalists whose nerve has
failed.Most importantly, Dennett insists on applying the Skyhook Ban to every
area, including our understanding of mind.
Long
before Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, explicates the Skyhook Ban in an essay entitled
“Why the Law of Effect Will Not Go Away,” where is explicitly applies the Ban
to our account of the mind.
Psychology of course must not
be question-begging. It must not explain intelligence in terms of intelligence,
for instance by assuming responsibility for the existence of intelligence to
the munificence of an intelligent creator, or by putting clever homunculi at
the control panels of the nervous system. If that were the best psychology
could do, then psychology could not do the job assigned to it.
Well, what
“job” is Dennett assigning to psychology? He claims that the social sciences,
which are intentional in nature, depend on the science of psychology. But the
task of psychology is to explain intelligence, and it has to explain in terms
of a universe which at its base lacks intelligence. Whether we explain
intelligence in terms of intelligent design, or by putting homunculi in the
nervous system, (that is, providing a ground-level intentional explanation that
does not appeal to a transcendent being), we would be committing what Dennett
would later deride as a skyhook.
What I
have called C. S. Lewis’s dangerous idea, by contrast, is the idea that a
consistent application of the Skyhook Ban to the mind undermines the very
explanations that thinkers need to apply to their own reasoning in order for it
to provide a rational foundation for what they believe. If none of our beliefs
can be traced back to skyhooks, then reason is explained away. Thus, if the
watchmaker is really blind, then Dawkins wouldn’t know that it. But since we do
have knowledge, (a claim you can’t abandon without undercutting science) and we
do form beliefs based on reasons, the skyhook ban cannot be fully and
completely implemented.
S
