Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

No Basis for Reason

No Basis for Reason

It’s because you have no basis for reason.

For how can physics criticize value judgments?

Understand: Exploding stars can not comment on ethics.

An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)

Naturalism Undoes Itself?

Naturalism Undoes Itself?

Naturalism undoes itself in the sense here that asks: Why should we trust human reason anyway?

And why should that reason be the ultimate arbitor or reality?

The long and short if it is that morals do not follow from naturalism.

The argument is structurally identical to the one he would make a couple of years later in his book Miracles, in a chapter called “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” There he argues that if human reason is a product of the blind, undirected forces of natural selection, and unrelated in any necessary or intrinsic way to the way things actually are, then we cannot trust the claims made by the use of human reason, including the claim that human reason is a product of the blind undirected forces of natural selection. Naturalism, then, says Lewis, undoes itself.

-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)

This reminds me of a lecture I heard in gradschool about the nature of reality.

It was, of course, obsurd – but the point of the talk was that life would not look much different if we were simply brains in an electrical vat living a simulation.

In a world of 100% naturalism, why trust human perception?

Sterling Terrell