The Argument from

"Merely"
A Critique of C. S. Lewis's
Argument from Reason

Jonathan M. Giardina

2019
2019 by Jonathan Giardina

Creative Commons

An early version of the title essay was

released under the title "Requiem for
Lewis" in the pamphlet "Insuppressible
Fallacy-Mongers": C. S. Lewis.
Preface

"For had ye believed Moses, ye would have

believed me…. But if ye believe not his writings,
how shall ye believe my words?" (John 5:46 &
47)

In an early attempt at philosophy, I

wrote that, according to naturalism, if it exists it
is natural. Events themselves don't prove or
disprove naturalism; naturalism is chosen prior
to reckoning. I incorporated the last sentence
into my book Stubborn Credulity. I used the
back cover of the book (which, of course, is not
included in digital versions) to defend my
position. It seems now that I should have
digressed a little more in the body of the text,
where it counted. In the text, I hinted at the
idea that my position was, arguably, the
Christian one. Didn't Jesus say, through his
parable, that "if they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be persuaded,
though one rose from the dead" (Luke 16:31)?
Isn't he saying that presuppositions matter? He
is, at the very least, saying that.

1
 "Naturalism entail[s] atheism."1
"[T]heists are committed to the denial of
naturalism, and naturalists are committed to
the denial of theism."2 "What Naturalism
cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands
outside Nature and made it."3 Can you tell by
the above quotes whether the author is a
believer or an unbeliever? The last statement
was provided by none other than C. S. Lewis. I
wish to focus our attention on his early work for
the remainder of this Preface. I believe that, in
the early days at least, he inadvertently did
atheists a favor.

First, some background. I have been

saying and writing for some time now that
events themselves don't prove or disprove
naturalism; naturalism is chosen prior to
reckoning. I think now that I misspoke. I can't
mean that something―anything―is chosen
prior to all thinking. Perhaps, I should have
written "adopted" instead of "chosen". I,
however, don't believe that I missed the mark
by that much. Coming from a social science
background, I was aware of what have been
referred to as visions. A vision, according to the
2
economist Joseph Schumpeter, is a "pre-
analytic cognitive act".4 Certainly, what is true
about a vision is even more the case with
respect to what Lewis referred to as a
"preconception".5 Lewis was concerned about
whether he could "trust [his] own thinking to be
true."6 It is ironic, then, that he directed
attention toward the one act that is, arguably,
anterior to all thinking.

Let's begin with what should be a

famous passage (at least among philosophers of
religion) from the sermon (not the book)
"Miracles". According to Lewis,

[S]eeing is not believing.… Whatever

experiences we may have, we shall not
regard them as miraculous if we already
hold a philosophy which excludes the
supernatural. Any event which is
claimed as a miracle is, in the last
resort, an experience received from the
senses; and the senses are not infallible.
We can always say we have been the
victims of an illusion; if we disbelieve in
the supernatural this is what we always
3
 shall say. Hence, whether miracles have
really ceased or not, they would
certainly appear to cease in Western
Europe as materialism became the
popular creed. For let us make no
mistake. If the end of the world
appeared in all the literal trappings of
the Apocalypse, if the modern
materialist saw with his own eyes the
heavens rolled up and the great white
throne appearing, if he had the
sensation of being himself hurled into
the Lake of Fire, he would continue
forever, in that lake itself, to regard his
experience as an illusion and to find the
explanation of it in psycho-analysis, or
cerebral pathology…. Experience proves
this, or that, or nothing, according to
the preconceptions we bring to it.7

Atheists may wish to deny that what Lewis said

about materialists applies to themselves, but,
frankly, I am not sure why or if they should. As I
explained in an earlier work, naturalism "can
lead to false negatives." I discussed the
consequentialist arguments for naturalism
4
there. As noted there, I got one of them
secondhand from Lewis's sermon.8

To further show why the sermon, as

opposed to the book, "Miracles" is one the
most reasonable and insightful of Lewis's works,
I'd like to draw attention to a debate between
William Lane Craig and Keith Parsons. The
relevant part is a discussion about the
miraculous:

Craig: What I fear from your response is

that this watchword, "Extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence,"
is really just an excuse for an a priori
rejection of the miraculous because you
weren't―you didn't give any sort of
evidence that would satisfy you with
respect to one of these extraordinary
claims and made it sound like―to me,
you were saying that nothing would
convince you no matter…

Parsons (interrupting): All sorts of

things would convince me…

5
Craig (interrupting): Well, with respect
to the resurrection, though, I mean,
you, instead of―if there was a video
camera, you would say it was a fake
stone that was rolled away…. [audience
applause] What sort of…

Parsons (interrupting): The more

reasonable hypothesis under the
circumstances.

Craig: But, see that's what I fear. It

is―it's just an a priori rejection of the
miraculous here. You're not―there isn't
any kind of literary testimony, historical
testimony that would convince you.

Parsons: Once again―common sense. If

we appeal to court cases―in court, on
what basis do we believe certain
testimony? We believe testimony often
on how likely or unlikely we think it is
that somebody is telling the truth. On
the basis of all sorts of [?]
circumstances. Now, in court cases,
generally speaking, there are no claims

6
of supernatural action. There are no
claims to anything occurring which was
physically impossible or against the
laws of nature, however one wants to
phrase it…. Yet we still judge guilt or
innocence and send people to the―to
execution or not on the basis of what
we consider to be likely or unlikely on
the given circumstances…. So once
again, … "Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence" in no way
implies a bias against the supernatural.
It is simply an application of a rule
which we use in our daily lives.

Craig: But you're saying that

these―when you say "extraordinary,"
really what you're saying is "No amount
of evidence would―could convince me
of these extraordinary claims."

Parsons: Sure it would. If tomorrow

morning, immediately after breakfast,
suddenly there was an earthquake, you
know, and a silvery light shown from
the sky, and the leaves dropped from
7
the trees, and I dashed outside, and
there towering over us like a[n] [?]
Everest was this giant figure with
lightning flaying around from his
Michaelangeloid face, and he pointed
down and said, "Be assured, Keith M.
Parsons, that I do, in fact, exist, and I'm
sick of your logic-chopping." Uh, Dr.
Craig, I would join you in the front pew
of the church the next Sunday.9

[applause]

Craig: You don't think that you would

have said, "Boy! I was having an [sic]
hallucination."

[roaring applause10]

Parsons: Not if you saw it too. You

know, then [cross-talk] I'm assuming
five hundred brethren…

Craig (interrupting): You appeal to

multiple…

8
 Parsons: I'm assuming that it's on the
evening news, that [?] goes to see it,
you know, that sort of thing. In that
case, it would be like what David Hume
says―that there was a darkness over
the earth for eight days, and all nations
and all languages, that sort of thing. In
that case, if that's a hallucination,
everything's a hallucination.

Whether any of our sense data constitutes

proof of something extra-mental (veridical) is an
issue that Lewis addressed. Some discussion of
that topic will be saved for later. What concerns
us for the moment is Parsons's criterion for
deciding when he's hallucinating and when he's
not. Surprisingly, Parsons never really denied
Craig's accusation;11 he just said that he would
reject the hallucination hypothesis if the
experience was inter-subjective. Because
Parsons did concede quite a bit to Craig, it's not
much of a stretch for even an unbeliever to
agree with Lewis up to this point.

Before moving on, it should be noted

that Lewis never stopped viewing naturalism as
9
a presupposition. Perhaps I should have written
that naturalism was contracted, in the sense of
a disease, prior to thinking: "[T]he mere idea of
a New Nature, a Nature beyond nature, a
systematic and diversified reality which is
'supernatural' in relation to the world of our
five present senses but 'natural' from its own
point of view, is profoundly shocking to a
certain philosophical preconception from which
we all suffer…. We are prepared … for the sort
of reality that Naturalists believe in. That is a
one-floor reality: this present Nature is all that
there is."12 Although I don't agree that
naturalism is as widely accepted as Lewis
seemed to indicate (The vast majority of people
believe in God if I'm not mistaken), I think that
it's useful to think of naturalism as a
preconception or presupposition.

Returning now to the sermon: Lewis

was determined to prove the existence of the
Nature beyond Nature ("Supernature"). As I
hope to show, here, we are free to part ways
with him because his arguments fail. One of
Lewis's worst blunders is an early version of

10
what is known as the Argument from Reason.13
He included it in his sermon:

The belief in … a supernatural reality

itself can neither be proved nor
disproved by experience. The
arguments for its existence are
metaphysical, and to me conclusive.
They turn on the fact that even to think
and act in the natural world we have to
assume something beyond it and even
assume that we partly belong to that
something. In order to think we must
claim for our own reasoning a validity
which is not credible if our own thought
is merely a function of our brain, and
our brains a by-product of irrational
physical processes.14

If the above sounds like sophistry, it is because

it is. Even an author sympathetic to Lewis had
to agree that "in his [Lewis's] original argument
against naturalism Lewis failed to distinguish
between irrational and non-rational causes."15
As an anonymous blogger observed, "evolution
is not 'irrational'. Evolution is not a process of
11
thought and therefore cannot be rational or
irrational."16 Even if we replaced "irrational"
with "non-rational," the argument is still
fallacious. As I hope to demonstrate in the body
of this work, Lewis confused non-rational
(ultimate) causes with "not rational" opinions. I
suspect that he didn't know the difference
between "non-rational causes produce his
opinions" and "he has non-rational opinions."
(The fact that he often used another ambiguous
word, "mindless," gave the game away.17 Keep
reading for examples.) Lewis tried to salvage his
argument. In that long process, he made
additional errors. He never gave up.

The Argument from "Merely"

I would like to discuss C. S. Lewis's

writings and speeches in chronological order.
Unfortunately, a very important speech is of
uncertain date but can be roughly dated to the
early forties. Because of its importance, I will
discuss it first. In the speech, Lewis taught that
inference or reasoning was a way to give us
empirical knowledge. Kant, I believe,
acknowledged such reasoning and called it
12
"anticipation of perception."18 According to
Lewis, "We find that matter always obeys the
same laws which our logic obeys. When logic
says a thing must be so, Nature always
agrees."19 Reasoning almost totally eclipsed
presuppositions in Lewis's work from that point
on, as far as I can tell. Before delving into why I
personally find this development to be
unfortunate, let's consider what mainstream
philosophers believe about the veracity of
statements. I am going to reproduce some of
what my professor and his colleague wrote.
Before deciphering what will look like jargon to
many, it should be clarified that philosophers
use words in counter-intuitive ways. When
people think of the word "synthetic," they think
it is synonymous with "fake". To philosophers,
however, "synthetic" means roughly the same
thing as "true". Keep that in mind for just a little
longer. The following table, included in a book
co-authored by my professor, is the best
pedagogical tool for explaining the different
types of statements we may encounter in our
daily lives:

13
 Analytic Synthetic
Apriori A B
Aposteriori C D

As the authors explained, "the columns are

headed by the concepts of analytic and
synthetic, which depicts whether application to
the real world is in force: no in the former case,
yes in the latter. In contrast, the rows are
labeled Apriori and Aposteriori, which
categorizes ways of knowing, or epistemology.
Here, the former means logic, the latter
through experience."20 Synthetic Aposteriori
statements are just true statements derived
from experience. Everyone uses statements
from that category. Analytic Aposteriori
statements don't exist.21 Analytic Apriori
statements do exist, but they are about "purely
definitional matters". That leaves us with
Synthetic Apriori. These statements can't be
denied without self-contradiction, yet they
"apply to the real world." The authors
mentioned that it is the "cornerstone of logical

14
positivism … that B [Synthetic Apriori] … is a null
set."22

With the above framework in mind,

let's consider what Lewis said in his speech "De
Futilitate":

[T]he material or external world in

general is an inferred world …
[P]articular experiments, far from
taking us out of the magic circle of
inference into some supposed direct
contact with reality, are themselves
evidential only as parts of that great
inference. The physical sciences …
depend on the validity of logic just as
much as metaphysics or mathematics. If
popular thought feels 'science' to be
different from all other kinds of
knowledge because science is
experimentally verifiable, popular
thought is mistaken. Experimental
verification is not a new kind of
assurance coming in to supply the
deficiencies of mere logic. We should
therefore abandon the distinction
15
 between scientific and non-scientific
thought. The proper distinction is
between logical and non-logical
thought.23

Any attempt to incorporate Lewis's views into

the conventional framework is beyond my
capacities. I mention them in passing because it
appears that positivists will have an easy time
rejecting Lewis. If someone who accepts
synthetic a priori can justifiably doubt Lewis,
he's probably doomed.24

The views quoted above were known as

phenomenalism. According to John Beversluis,
"To understand why [Lewis] thinks naturalism
impugns the validity of reason and rational
inference, we must start with a theory that is
far removed … from common sense, but that is
actually the foundation of his whole
argument."25 Lewis's "primary strategic reason
for basing his case against naturalism on this
theory seems to be this: since, according to
phenomenalism, we start from our own
sensations and infer the existence of an
external world from them, it follows that if
16
rational inference is impugned, we would be
deprived of our only access to the external
world and confined to contemplating our own
sense data―a view that few would be eager to
embrace." What Beversluis wrote next is
interesting. He mentioned solipsism, the view
that "I alone exist, or less radically that there
are no rational grounds for believing that
anyone or anything else exists."26 I've wondered
to myself how you could convince a solipsist
that he was wrong. I don't think that you can.
Most people just, consciously or, more likely,
unconsciously, presuppose that their sense data
is being caused by a real external world.
Similarly, people don’t infer from their
sensations that the external world exists; they
just assume that, as Parsons put it, not
everything is a hallucination.27 As Beversluis
explained,

Ask any homeowner whether she is

sure that the house she is about to
enter is hers or, for that matter,
whether she is sure that what she sees
before her is a house. Then go on to
suggest that she might be dreaming or
17
 she might be a brain in a vat or
deceived by an evil genius. When you
"challenge" people like that, they do
not argue from their sensations to an
external world. They ask if you are in
your right mind, assure you that they
have 20/20 vision, [etc.]28

Phenomenalism was promoted by Lewis most

famously in the book Miracles and its revision.
We'll save commentary on the theory for the
discussion of those books.

We will now turn our attention to the

now famous "milk jug" passage. Like "De
Futilitate," the words in the passage were first
uttered during World War 2. We know that the
words about the milk jug were first published
under the title Broadcast Talks in 1942. They
made it into the American version of the
material, which was given the title The Case for
Christianity. Then, in 1952, Macmillan published
Mere Christianity. On the title page of the
Macmillan version, the book is described as a
"revised and enlarged edition … of the three
books The Case for Christianity, Christian
18
Behavior, and Beyond Personality." What I
found peculiar is the fact that the "milk jug"
passage was excised from the material that was
originally published in the U.S. as The Case for
Christianity. Other material had to be revised
for the sake of coherence (Compare Case for
Christianity p. 39 with Mere Christianity, 2001 p.
38). Most of the excised material has been
disseminated in the form of a meme. Here is
the paragraph (The "milk jug" segment is in
brackets):

The first big division of humanity is into

the majority, who believe in some kind
of God or gods, and the minority who
don't. On this point, Christianity lines up
with the majority … against the modern
Western European materialist. [There
are all sorts of different reasons for
believing in God, and here I'll mention
only one. It is this. Supposing there was
no intelligence behind the universe, no
creative mind. In that case nobody
designed my brain for the purpose of
thinking. It is merely that when the
atoms inside my skull happen for
19
 physical or chemical reasons to arrange
themselves in a certain way, this gives
me, as a bye-product, the sensation I
call thought. But if so, how can I trust
my own thinking to be true? It's like
upsetting a milk-jug and hoping that the
way the splash arranges itself will give
you a map of London. But if I can't trust
my own thinking, of course I can't trust
the arguments leading to atheism, and
therefore have no reason to be an
atheist, or anything else. Unless I
believe in God, I can't believe in
thought: so I can never use thought to
disbelieve in God.]29

If one is familiar with Lewis's work, one thing

that should come to mind is how similar this
argument is to the one from Haldane that Lewis
cited in Miracles. According to Lewis, "[t]he
shortest and simplest form of [the Argument
from Reason] is that given by J. B. S. Haldane….
He writes, '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
20
for supposing my brain to be composed of
atoms'."30 The statement appears to be widely
shared and sounds insightful, but the full quote
has problems.31 I'll ignore the full quote and just
focus on what Lewis thought was decisive. J. B.
S. Haldane was a biologist who almost certainly
had a grasp on the principle of "environmental
adoption";32 so it's puzzling that he would write
"I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are
true." If one's beliefs about strictly practical
matters weren't true, one's chances of dying
would increase. Those who were prone to
erroneous beliefs would be less likely to survive.
Those with erroneous beliefs would be
displaced by those with correct beliefs. Those
organisms that survive and proliferate would be
those whose beliefs were correct. Surviving
organisms would have correct beliefs. Certainly,
we are all the offspring of surviving organisms.
Our ancestors apparently had correct beliefs.
Why wouldn't we have correct beliefs too?33

We could perhaps ignore Evolution

since something that Lewis said in "De
Futilitate" appears to be applicable here:

21
 [T]he view in question is just the view
that human thought is not true, not a
reflection of reality. And this view is
itself a thought. In other words, we are
asking 'Is the thought that no thoughts
are true, itself true?' If we answer Yes,
we contradict ourselves. For if all
thoughts are untrue, then this thought
is untrue.34

Haldane proclaimed that he had no reason to

suppose that his beliefs were true, but the
statement "I have no reason to suppose that my
beliefs are true" is itself a belief. In a recently
unearthed speech, G. E. M. Anscombe criticized
the Haldane sentence at length. While holding a
book, she said, "[T]he linguistic marks occurring
in this book are wholly determined by the
machinery that printed the book…. [W]e
wouldn't dream of saying: if that is true, we
have no reason to suppose that any of the
things said in the book are true or are false, or
anything like that."35

An excellent blog post called "C. S.

Lewis' Milk Jug: Apologetics and the Retreat
22
into Epistemology" did a fine job of picking
apart the Lewis argument. The blogger accused
Lewis of attacking a straw man. He assured us
that the human mind did not originate by
accident, and he explained, "Far from being
improbable, evolutionary development, when it
has the right environment and enough time to
produce minds as complex and sophisticated as
the human mind, will almost always select such
cognitive faculties to be reliable and truth-
finding."36 Out of all the great points made in
the blog, I bring up the one about evolution
because it is similar to other rebuttals to Lewis's
argument or arguments like it. For example, the
1966 textbook Primary Philosophy by Michael
Scriven refuted an argument similar to the one
Lewis gave. Scriven explained that evolution is
not analogous to a milk jug spilling milk. I'll
quote it in full because we'll be seeing it later:

The argument from the efficacy of

reason

Statement of the argument. One of the

more striking arguments [for the
existence of God] attempts to show
23
that the very act of criticizing the
arguments is self-refuting and God-
supporting. How do we criticize the
arguments? By using our reason. Why
should we trust our reason? From long
experience we have discovered that it
gives us reliable indications of how
reality will turn out. How can the
operation of the human reason (or of
the brain on which it depends) be a
reliable guide to the operations of the
rest of the world? Surely not by chance
alone. It could not be mere chance that
there is a close relationship between
the outcome of the mental processes
leading to a prediction and the events
predicted; it must instead be due to
prior arrangements by some master
planner―indeed the very Planner
whose existence the skeptic so
arrogantly attempts to disprove!

Assessment of the argument. Of course

this argument blatantly ignores the
alternative that every biologist today
would think of: the fact that organisms
24
 are constantly modified by their
environment in the processes called
learning and evolution. It is indeed not
chance that the brain's predictions
work; it is the result of 1 million years of
development, which produces the
ability, and years of learning that
convert it into a working skill. Brains
that did not work during that million
years did not consistently survive, and
the ones that do not learn now survive
with difficulty, if at all. Brains that did
work efficiently, i.e., in harmony with
reality, not only survived but
reproduced themselves through the
mechanism of heredity, and thus there
evolved the present modest
achievement of human reason.
Improvement for 1 million years is not
mere chance, and it is not a miracle; it is
the pedestrian operation of natural
forces. And it completely explains the
efficacy of reason, such as it is.37

In the part of "De Futilitate" that is parallel to

the "milk jug" meme, Lewis said that "if
25
perpetual happy coincidence throughout the
whole of recorded time is out of the question,
then surely we must seek the real explanation
elsewhere [for "the validity of knowledge"]."38
Everyone can agree that chance is not a good
explanation for the human brain.39 Evolution,
however, is quite unlike "upsetting a milk jug".
As paleontologist Niles Eldridge explained, "we
can theoretically set up experiments in the lab
and in the wild and predict that organisms with
certain features will outsurvive and outbreed
those less well suited to whatever the prevailing
conditions are. So natural selection can be
predictive and, in any case, it is undeniable that
there is a nonrandom process of differential
reproductive success: true natural selection."40

We could ignore Evolution completely

because the milk jug passage, as written, is
apparently fundamentally flawed. Notice the
crucial premise: "It is merely that…" As we'll
see, Lewis was "inordinately fond" of the
word.41 He also used the word simply. In a
paper, he wrote, "[They] ask me to believe that
Reason is simply the unforeseen and
unintended by-product of mindless matter at
26
one stage of its endless and aimless
becoming."42 I am tempted to call Lewis's
argument the Argument from "Merely". I must
be careful, however, because there is an
argument from "merely" that is known to be
unsound. Antony Flew wrote about it.
According to him, the unsound argument states
that "if there are always physiological reasons
why I utter the sounds which I do utter, then I
cannot have, and know that I have, good
reasons for believing the propositions which I
assert by uttering those sounds. If it is the one,
then it must be merely that and not the other."
What Flew wrote at the end of the paragraph is
revealing: "For a thorough examination of an
argument of this kind, as C. S. Lewis presented
it in the first edition of his Miracles…"43 Flew
believed that the argument in the first edition
of Miracles was the unsound argument from
"merely". Can we also dismiss the widely shared
sentences from The Case for Christianity? Read
these words from a sympathetic Lewis
biography and form your own speculation:

Believing, as they claim to do, that

Nature means absolutely 'everything
27
 that happens', all of which came about
by the blind working of chance, it must
therefore follow that even their
thoughts must also be the working of
chance and the accidental by-products
of atoms moving in their brains. That
being so, why, Lewis asks, should [they]
believe that one thought is more 'valid'
than another, or that it should give a
correct account of all the others?44

Notice the parallels:

"[T]heir thoughts must also be the working of

chance and the accidental by-products of atoms
moving in their brains."

Lewis: "It is merely that when the atoms inside

my skull happen … to arrange themselves in a
certain way, this gives me, as a bye-product, the
sensation I call thought."

"Why … believe that one thought is more 'valid'

than another …?"

Lewis: "[H]ow can I trust my own thinking to be

true?"
28
Despite the similarities, the biographers were
not paraphrasing the argument from Case for
Christianity. They were instead commenting on
the third chapter of Miracles: A Preliminary
Study.

I commented on the Case for

Christianity passage elsewhere before I had
read "De Futilitate". After having read "De
Futilitate," the passage is even more, not less,
puzzling. Since the milk jug paragraph was
probably delivered earlier than the other
speech, it seems as though Lewis went from a
focus on the "validity of reason" to a focus on
the "validity of knowledge". If he had been
talking about the validity of knowledge, he
could have avoided the most obvious objection:
"Lewis's question 'How can I trust my own
thinking to be true?' is an asinine one that only
a non-philosopher would ask. Thinking is … valid
or invalid, sound or unsound. Statements are …
true or false."45 Assuming that Lewis meant
"valid" instead of "true" doesn't help his case
much. The issue just becomes nebulous, as G. E.
M. Anscombe grasped in her paper on Lewis:
"Isn't this question about the validity of
29
reasoning a question about the validity of valid
reasoning?... [W]hat do you mean by 'really
valid'?"46 If we had wanted to be charitable, we
could've interpreted "thinking" to mean
"thoughts" or "premises" or "presuppositions,"
but that option isn't available to us due to the
undeniable mention of thought at the end of
the paragraph. As we'll see, for Lewis, all
epistemology depended on thinking (In the
early speech "Bulverism," he included the
essential caveat, "beyond our immediate
experiences".47 "Immediate experiences"
evidently meant impressions in the Humean48
sense). People who share the meme are
probably unaware of how at odds with common
sense Lewis's unstated assumptions are.
Previously, I had faulted Lewis's views for being
counter-intuitive (not at all what one would
expect from a Christian apologist). I wrote, "The
argument proves too much as even Lewis
admitted when he said he had no reason to be
'anything else'. Really? If we account for the
brain one way as opposed to another, does one
really have no reason to take a position on
mundane facts like the color of one's eyes?"

30
Whether I was correct or not, I wouldn't write
that today. At the time, it had not sunk in that
Lewis's underlying philosophy was worse than
counter-intuitive. A thorough discussion of
Lewis's fringe beliefs will be included in the
review of Miracles below.

Unfortunately, the refutation from

Scriven is not robust. The Theory of Evolution is
an empirical theory that could be falsified. For
that reason, we need to, if possible, offer a
strictly philosophical refutation. Besides, Lewis
probably understood Evolution (See "The
Funeral of a Great Myth" in Christian
Reflections/The Seeing Eye). As I insinuated,
Lewis's errors dwell on a more fundamental
level. Commenting on the Haldane quote in the
original version of Miracles, Lewis wrote, "The
trouble about atoms is not that they are
material … but that they are, presumably,
irrational. Or even if they were rational they do
not produce my beliefs by honestly arguing with
me and proving their point but by compelling
me to think in a certain way. I am still subject to
brute force: my beliefs have irrational causes."49
The same Lewis who was worried that "nobody
31
designed my brain for the purpose of thinking"
was also worried that atoms (for the sake of
argument, rational ones) were compelling him
to think in a certain way. Irony? If the
"intelligence behind the universe" gives you
reason, Lewis was fine with that. If atoms
intervene, it's compulsion. In either case, you're
being treated like a computer. Either way,
you're being programmed. Even if Lewis was
uneasy about the Intelligent Designer, it's
bizarre to speak of the atoms compelling
you―the atoms are you. One might say that his
drug habit made him "do it," but no one, unless
he's joking, says, "My atoms made me do it!"50

Regardless, it should have been obvious

to Lewis that it didn't make sense to call atoms
irrational―maybe non-rational in the sense
that they are also non-emotional, but
"irrational" is certainly not the correct word.
Not surprisingly, all of those comments were
cut from Miracles when the revised version
came out.51 The sentences that followed were
also excised, but they are, nonetheless,
important: "An attempt to get out of the
difficulty might be made along the following
32
lines. Even if thoughts are produced by
irrational causes, still it might happen by mere
accident that some of them were true."52 Here,
we have a connection to the milk jug analogy.
The irrational causes could produce true
thoughts just as the spilled milk could produce a
map of London. The odds against either of the
outcomes are, according to Lewis, immense.
The major problem here is that Lewis didn't
distinguish between irrational and non-rational.
Consequently, he ended up calling everything
an irrational cause, even things that are, at the
most, merely non-rational.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument,

that Lewis really meant “non-rational”. In fact,
when Anscombe criticized the first edition of
Miracles, she gave Lewis the benefit of the
doubt and assumed he really meant “non-
rational”. Even then, only some non-rational
causes are known to produce true thoughts
only by an accident, not all. Consider what
Anscombe wrote in her famous reply to Lewis:

"Granted that this is a piece of

reasoning, did the man who wrote it
33
 actually reason? Was he really
persuaded by this reasoning or by
something else? Or―another
possibility―did he really understand
and mean this argument? Or did he
perhaps write it down quite
mechanically?―Here is a statement
(which is even in fact correct), but did
the man who wrote it himself assert it
because of the good grounds which do
exist for asserting it?" If we can answer
"yes" to such questions as these we call
the opinions in question "rational" or
the man "rational" for holding them.
And if we know that a man's opinions
are not rational in this sense, we regard
it as accidental if in fact they are worth
attending to or true: we shall not
expect to find them worth attending to,
and if it is a question of information to
be accepted on his word, we shall not
accept it.53

A non-rational opinion will lead to correct

information only by accident.54 What is true of
non-rational opinions, however, need not be
34
true of all things that can be labelled "non-
rational". Lewis can talk about "atoms
arrang[ing] themselves," "a mere mechanical
dance of atoms,"55 etc. Maybe, the narrative is
a misrepresentation of what naturalists believe;
maybe, it isn't. The real straw man is the
naturalist who can't tell the difference between
a non-rational opinion and a non-rational Big
Bang or neural circuit. Naturalists instead can
agree with the conclusion of Anscombe's
article: "A causal explanation of a man's
thought only reflects on its validity as an
indication, if we know that opinions caused in
that way are always or usually unreasonable."56

In the revised Miracles, Lewis

apparently incorporated Anscombe's point
about non-rational opinions into his own
thought. He wrote, "Unless our conclusion is
the logical consequent from a ground it will be
worthless and could be true only by a fluke."57
I'll save commentary on the revised version for
later because, as one writer observed, "the
revised [Argument from Reason] chapter is
among the most difficult of Lewis's
philosophical writings to understand."58 I'll just
35
mention for now that even if a conclusion is the
logical consequent from a ground, it still won't
be true. It would be valid by definition, but
whether or not the conclusion is true in the
empirical sense depends on whether the
ground is true in the empirically verifiable
sense. As we'll see, Lewis's phenomenalism
leaves him with no way to legitimately gather
empirical or veridical facts to reason about.

There is a grain of truth in Lewis's

argument. According to one interpretation ("all
thoughts are … tainted59), if some philosophies,
such as Marxism, weren't so ad hoc, they would
be, in Lewis's words, "argument[s] which
proved that no argument was sound―[proofs]
that there are no such things as proofs."60
Marxism, for example, taught that "a man's
thought is dependent on his class membership
to such an extent that all the theories which he
may arrive at express, not universally valid
truth, as their author imagines, but an ideology
that serves his class interests."61 The Marxists,
however, "were not consistent enough to assign
to their own doctrines merely ideological
character."62 Lewis was not ignorant of the fact
36
that Freudians and Marxists made exceptions.63
Not all naturalists, however, have to make
exceptions, and maybe the issue is more
complicated than Lewis grasped. As Thomas
Sowell explained, we should think of ourselves
as being more or less constrained by causal
factors:

Reason has at least two very different

meanings. One is a cause-and-effect
meaning: There is a reason why water
expands when it freezes into ice, even
though most of us who are not
physicists do not know what that
reason is…. The other meaning of
reason is articulated specification of
causation or logic…. The more
constrained one's vision of human
capabilities and potential, the greater
the difference between these two
meanings. Everything may have a cause
and yet human beings may be unable to
specify what it is. Since no theory is
literally unconstrained entirely, there is
always some awareness of the

37
 difference between the two meanings
of reason.

Conversely, no theory is so
constrained that man can understand
nothing, which would imply a total lack
of overlap between the two meanings
of reason.

Sowell, a former Marxist, argued that Marx

"was not inconsistent in using the concepts of
the constrained vision for his analysis of the
past and the concepts of the unconstrained
vision for criticizing the present in comparison
with the future he envisioned. His overall
theory of history was precisely that constraints
lessened over time, with the advancement of
science and technology."64 What Marx believed
bore some resemblance to a concept that Lewis
acknowledged early in Miracles. I am indebted
to David Kyle Johnson for pointing out that
Lewis was aware of the possibility of "a great
cosmic consciousness" emerging after a long
natural process.65 Thomas Molnar confirmed
my suspicion that Marx is better understood as
a gnostic. Marx was like a Utopian writer since
38
he "conceive[d] of history as a process leading
to himself … [H]e, the ultimate comprehensor,
stands in the center of history."66 Although
Murray Rothbard, like Lewis, believed that the
materialist "man-God" concept was self-
contradictory, he understood that Marxism was
about "the unfolding of the God-man".67 It's not
as ad hoc as it appeared to be.

What is disturbing is that Lewis believed

that all naturalists, like the Marxists,68 had to
believe that "all thoughts [had to] result from …
conditioning."69 As he put it, "If my own mind is
a product of the irrational―if what seem my
clearest reasonings are only the way in which a
creature conditioned as I am is bound to
feel―how shall I trust my mind …?"70 Once
Lewis or a Marxist asserts that, according to
some philosophy, all thoughts are invalid,71
there is really no escape for the person who
wants to rebut. I'll pick up on this issue at the
end of the review of Miracles when I share
David Kyle Johnson's brilliant refutation of
Lewis.

39
 Given the high regard for Lewis and his
work, it may surprise people to learn that "the
argument presented in Miracles breaks down at
the very outset."72 It doesn't matter whether
one has the original chapter three, "The Self-
Contradiction of the Naturalist," or the revised
version, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism,"
the faulty beginning is apparently word-for-
word identical in both versions. A few pages
into the chapter, Lewis wrote, "It is clear that
everything we know, beyond our own
immediate sensations, is inferred from those
sensations. I do not mean that we begin as
children, by regarding our sensations as
'evidence' and thence arguing consciously to
the existence of space, matter, and other
people. I mean that if, after we are old enough
to understand the question, our confidence in
the existence of anything else … is challenged,
our argument in defence of it will have to take
the form of inferences from our immediate
sensations."73 What Lewis said was clear is not
clear at all. If you skipped the Preface, all you
must know for the moment is that my thesis
was that Lewis started off the sermon

40
"Miracles" by talking about preconceptions. He
then went on to talk about the validity of
reasoning. I am about to venture that he erred
when he neglected preconceptions
(presuppositions, assumptions) and that he
wouldn't have blundered so horribly (as we'll
see) if he had just remained cognizant of how
people actually function in the real world.

Elsewhere, I brought attention to what

B. C. Johnson called "common-sense beliefs".
According to Johnson, "In our everyday lives we
certainly act upon assumptions which we
cannot prove to be true."74 The following quip
delivered by Thomas Warren in his famous
debate with Antony Flew reinforced Johnson,
albeit in a roundabout way: "Philosophers say a
lot of things they do not really believe.
Philosophers sometimes say we can not really
know the external world is there (exists), but
they always get off the railroad track when a
train is coming."75 In this case, the philosophers
are sincere. We cannot really know that the
"external world" is veridical,76 but we, as
Johnson maintained, assume that it is. One of
Johnson's common-sense beliefs is the belief
41
that "there exist things other than myself."77
Contrary to Lewis, we cannot come to that
conclusion by inference, at least not by the one
that Lewis gave. The important question here is
"Given the unfortunate fact that we perceive
only such sense data as, say, brown rectangular
patches, how can we know that the inferred
entities we call tables actually exist outside our
own minds and that they are the causes of our
sense data? In short, how are we justified in
regarding our sense data as veridical, as putting
us 'in touch with' objectively existing things?"78
Lewis's answer: "Put in its most general form
the inference would run, 'Since I am presented
with colours, sounds, shapes, pleasures and
pains which I cannot perfectly predict or
control, and since the more I investigate them
the more regular their behavior appears,
therefore there must exist something other
than myself and it must be systematic'."79 If it's
not already apparent to you why the above
argument is "a bad one," here is Beversluis's
explanation:

Granted, the more we investigate our

sense data, the more regular they seem
42
 to be. But this tells us nothing about
what, if anything, exists beyond them,
much less about what "must" exist "in a
systematic way." … Lewis is left with no
justification whatever for making
inferences from sense data to actually
existing objects. It is not as if every time
in the past that we had certain brown
and rectangular sense data, we later
found real tables corresponding to
them and that we are therefore
justified in inferring that this will
continue to be true in the future.
According to Lewis's argument, no such
situation could ever arise. We never see
tables. It follows that the only regularity
his theory entitles him to talk about is
the regularity between his present and
past sense data. On the basis of this,
however, he can infer only that his
future sense data will be like his past
sense data.80

Recall what Beversluis wrote about strategic

reasons behind Lewis basing his case on
phenomenalism. Since phenomenalism is, at
43
best, extremely mistaken, Beversluis was
correct to declare that "the strategy
backfire[d]."81 Incredibly, Lewis himself
apparently admitted that his argument wasn't
legitimate. In a paper read to the Socratic Club
in the mid-fifties, Lewis said, "Most of my
generation had a belief in the reality of the
external world and of other people―if you
prefer it, a disbelief in solipsism―far in excess
of our strongest arguments."82

The next controversial assertion that

appeared in chapter three (either version) is "All
possible knowledge … depends on the validity
of reasoning."83 If you don't accept
phenomenalism, then you can't accept that all
knowledge depends on valid reasoning. As
mentioned, mainstream philosophers are
suspicious of the synthetic a priori. Among
scientists, I suspect that outright positivism is
not unusual (Stephen Hawking identified as a
positivist84). Lewis, even if we ignore the
phenomenalism, was a bit of a heretic for
believing in synthetic a priori knowledge.85 In
the speech "De Futilitate," Lewis said,

44
 It is widely believed that scientific
thought does put us in touch with
reality, whereas moral or metaphysical
thought does not…. [T]he laws of
thought are also the laws of things: of
things in the remotest space and the
remotest time…. [T]he nature of the
universe cannot be really alien to
Reason…. The laws whereby logic
obliges us to think turn out to be the
laws according to which every event in
space and time must happen.86

Beversluis, who rejected the synthetic a priori,87

strongly disagreed with Lewis. According to him,
"Logic does not 'say' anything about 'nature,'
that is, about the external world, the world of
facts."88 To clarify, synthetic a priori knowledge
is not necessarily intrinsic. As Ludwig
Wittgenstein argued, "language structures
human thought, and even what we take as
introspective knowledge, like Descartes's cogito
ergo sum [I think, therefore I am], is inherently
the result of a formulation using words….
Words do not exist as entities in the mind
independent of the real world of sensory data,
45
since they relate directly to that world."89
Because of the reason Wittgenstein gave, I think
everyone can agree with Beversluis that "[i]t is
only because we already know some truths
about the world that we can employ our
'powers' of reasoning to deduce other truths
from them." I'm not so sure that we can all
agree that "it is experience, not reason, that
provides us with truths about the world." The
above sounds like positivism90 and raises the
question "Is the truth that 'it is experience…' a
truth induced or deduced from experience?".91

Complicating matters is the wording of

Beversluis's statement. When he wrote "truths
about the world," he must have meant "true
premises." Certainly, Beversluis wouldn't deny
that some truths about the world are
theorems.92 The sentences that followed
clarified what he meant. It's reasonable to
conclude that Beversluis distinguished between
"truths about the world" and "truths".93 The
former, in this context, meant "true premises".
If introspection is also a way to learn "truths
about the world," then, perhaps, subscribing to
empiricism is not a prerequisite to accepting the
46
particular refutation of Lewis that we'll examine
shortly.

To make our case against Lewis more

robust, let's accept the synthetic a priori, at
least for the sake of argument.94 Unfortunately,
for Lewis, his argument still breaks down at
another early stage. To recapitulate, Lewis
taught that all possible knowledge depends on
the validity of reasoning. Even if we grant that
some knowledge could be acquired by
reasoning a priori, there are still problems with
Lewis's thought. You don't need to be a
positivist to agree that

The conclusion of a valid deductive

argument has nothing to do with the
truth of the statements it contains. A
deductive argument can be valid even if
all the statements it contains are
false―valid but not sound. To say that
an argument is sound is to make a
different claim. A sound argument is
not only valid; it is an argument whose
statements are true…. [V]alidity and
truth are determined in wholly different
47
 ways. Knowledge (understood as truth)
simply does not depend on validity.95

The upshot: "In wrongly believing that the

attainment of truth depends on valid inferences
and that experience does not yield truth but
only expectations …, [Lewis] inadvertently
saddles himself with a theory of reasoning
which guarantees that we can have
nothing―literally no empirical content―to
reason about."96

If you are startled by any of the

conclusions we've seen so far, I encourage you
to just forget everything you've read. Consider
the following joke that Deirdre McCloskey often
tells: "Two strictly behaviorist psychologists
make love. One says to the other, 'You enjoyed
that. Did I?'"97 Ask yourself: What place is there
for introspection in C. S. Lewis's philosophy?
Recall how his argument started: "It is clear that
everything we know, beyond our own
immediate sensations, is inferred from those
sensations." Everything.98 Not only is what he
wrote not obvious; it's demonstrably false. The
acknowledgement that you think is the
48
acknowledgment of a fact. It would be wrong to
call that inference an inference from a
sensation. It would be even more wrong to say
that you have the sensation of acting. The
acknowledgement that you act, the axiom of
action, is not a conclusion at all; it is a product
of self-reflection.99 Although Lewis's analysis
could be patched up by including thinking and,
maybe, acting under the category of
"sensations," there is no indication that he
meant to include them. Lewis's "immediate
sensations" closely approximate Hume's
"impressions". The examples Lewis gave of
sensations (colors, sounds, shapes, pleasures,
and pains)100 are almost identical to Hume's
examples of impressions (sensations, passions,
and emotions).101

Hume distinguished impressions from

ideas and defined the latter as "the faint images
of [impressions] in thinking and reasoning." At
most, ideas were perceptions. Unlike sensations
(sight and touch) and emotions (pleasure and
uneasiness), ideas were caused by thinking. The
difference between feeling and thinking was
obvious to Hume. One could get the impression
49
(no pun intended) that sensations and thoughts
about sensations were all that we knew.102
There is, however, a third category:
introspection. It's true that introspective
knowledge is dependent on sensory data in the
same way that all reasoning is dependent on
them. Without the words that are learned from
the senses, one cannot think. Not all
introspective knowledge is directly derived from
a sensation, unless we define "sensation"
broadly. There is no need to redefine
"sensation". Some facts of reality, such as "I am
conscious" and "I act," are purely introspective
knowledge. Lewis's philosophy simply doesn't
accommodate them. Even if "the material or
external world in general is an inferred world
[It's not],"103 the meanings of words can be
acquired directly from the sensory data. Once
the meanings of words are known, several self-
evident axioms follow. For example, "the
existence of consciousness is … evident to all of
us through direct introspection."104 Even if
consciousness, acting, and thinking are
sensations, they are unlike other sensations in

50
that one cannot deny them without affirming
them. As Murray Rothbard explained,

[T]he axiom of the existence of human

consciousness is demonstrated as being
self-evident by the fact that the very act
of denying the existence of
consciousness must itself be performed
by a conscious being…. A similar self-
contradiction faces the man who
attempts to refute the axiom of human
action. For in doing so, he is ipso facto a
person making a conscious choice of
means in attempting to arrive at an
adopted end: in this case the end, or
goal, of trying to refute the axiom of
action. He employs action in trying to
refute the notion of action.105

Thus, one does not have to acquire knowledge

of the existence of consciousness directly from
any sensation; much less infer it from a
sensation. Once the definition of denial is
understood, the implications are acknowledged.

51
 With some of his statements, Lewis
appeared to be a friend of the synthetic a
priori,106 but the Lewis of Miracles does not
allow for a science of human action that is "a
priori, not empirical."107 If everything we know
is dependent on sensations, then everything we
know is aposterioric.108 As Kant taught, "a
judgement is … either a priori or a posteriori. A
judgement is a priori if it 'is independent of all
experience and even of all impressions of the
senses'."109 In Lewis's defense, he probably had
to be some kind of empiricist in order to be
taken seriously. Even a prominent economist of
his day could write, "Down the ages mankind
has evolved a variety of approaches to meet the
questions and uncertainties which have
continually confronted him. It is possible to
identify at least six methods: 1. Appeal to the
supernatural. 2. Appeal to worldly authority…
3. Intuition. 4. Common Sense. 5. Pure Logic.
6. The scientific method…. Only the last
furnishes a cumulative storehouse of
dependable and consistent knowledge."110 The
heterodox economist Ludwig von Mises, on the
other hand, taught that some premises of

52
economics "are of aprioristic derivation and are
not dependent upon experience, unless one
wishes to call aprioristic cognition inner
experience."111 Lewis's premises are solely
based on experience, not "inner experience". Of
course, Lewis was not always consistent with
himself. Arguably, parts of the revised Miracles
contradict other parts. According to Gregory
Bassham, "Anscombe … criticizes Lewis's claim
that all human knowledge is based on
immediate sensations and what we can infer
from those sensations. As Anscombe notes, this
conflicts with Lewis's considered view that
some of our knowledge is based on what Lewis
calls 'axioms.' In fact, Lewis gives an example of
such an axiom just a few pages after he makes
his claim about inference as the basis of all
possible human knowledge."112 Even in the
original Miracles, Lewis wrote, "We 'just see'
that there is no reason why my neighbour's
happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as
we 'just see' that things which are equal to the
same thing are equal to one another. If we
cannot prove either axiom, that is not because
they are irrational but because they are self-

53
evident and all proofs depend on them. Their
intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own
light."113 At least one of those "axioms" have, in
Lewis's mind, "a synthetic status" since it tells
us "what we ought to do."114

The missteps continue regardless of

which version of Miracles you are reading. The
remainder of the paragraph about "possible
knowledge" reads:

If the feeling of certainty which we

express by words like must be and
therefore and since is a real perception
of how things outside our own minds
really 'must' be, well and good. But if
this certainty is merely a feeling in our
own minds and not a genuine insight
into realities beyond them―if it merely
represents the way our minds happen
to work―then we can have no
knowledge. Unless human reasoning is
valid no science can be true.115

Even a fellow "heretic" like Ludwig von Mises

could embrace methodological dualism. He

54
accepted empiricism where it was appropriate.
He wrote, "The modern natural sciences owe
their success to the method of observation and
experiment. There is no doubt that empiricism
and pragmatism are right as far as they merely
describe the procedures of the natural
sciences."116 Lewis's philosophy is at odds with
empiricism and "the modern philosophy of
causation."117 As we saw, Lewis appealed to the
criterion of regularity. He "discovered" a
necessary connection between regularity of
sense-data and the existence of something
other than himself. In this case, however, there
is not even a constant conjunction, much less a
necessary connection. The notion of necessary
entailment is alien to the post-Humean
philosophy of causation. As Hume explained,
"There is no object, which implies the existence
of any other if we consider these objects in
themselves, and never look beyond the ideas
which we form of them."118 Lewis's blunder was
evident as far back as "De Futilitate". There, he
said, "The apparatus used in the experiment is
believed to exist outside our own minds only on
the strength of an inference: it is inferred as the

55
cause of our visual sensations. I am not at all
suggesting that the inference is a bad one."119
Unfortunately for Lewis, it almost certainly is a
bad one. Notice that he wrote about cause.
How could anyone infer cause here? According
to Hume, "when we say 'A causes B,' we mean
only that A and B are constantly conjoined in
fact, not that there is some necessary
connection between them."120 Unfortunately
for Lewis, A (visual sensations) is never seen
conjoined with B (an apparatus that exists
outside our minds). We never see the apparatus
itself.121 If Lewis meant that visual sensation
entailed the apparatus, then he was not
speaking about causation.122

Although Lewis had to retract, the first

edition of Miracles wasn't a complete disaster.
In fact, another reason why the textbook
(literally speaking) response is not an ideal one
is that Lewis anticipated it. He wrote,

An attempt to get out of the difficulty

might be made along the following
lines. Even if thoughts are produced by
irrational causes, still it might happen
56
by mere accident that some of them
were true…. Now individuals whose
thoughts happened, in this accidental
way, to be truer than other people's
would have an advantage in the
struggle for existence. And if habits of
thought can be inherited, natural
selection would gradually eliminate or
weed out the people who have the less
useful types of thought. It might
therefore have come about by now that
the present type of human mind―the
sort of thought that has survived―was
tolerably reliable

But it won't do. In the first

place, this 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. Unless, therefore, you
start by assuming inference to be valid,
you cannot know about them. You have
to assume that inference is valid before
you can even begin your argument for
57
 its validity. And a proof which sets out
by assuming the thing you have to
prove is rubbish.123

There is a lot wrong with the above argument.

Lewis wrote quite a bit about the validity of
inference or the validity of reasoning. When
Anscombe wrote her paper criticizing Lewis, she
seized on the incoherence of his phrasing: "I
want to examine your remark that we must
believe in the validity of reason…. You can talk
about the validity of a piece of reasoning, and
sometimes about the validity of a kind of
reasoning; but if you say you believe in the
validity of reasoning itself, what do you
mean?"124 If you think that my problem with the
incoherence of the "validity of reason" is a
quibble, then let's ignore that. What Lewis was
really accusing his opponents of doing was
begging the question.125 How could Lewis blame
them? The term "validity of reason" is vague
enough to mean different things; it could mean
the "normativity of reason,"126 or it could just
mean that "inference is valid."127 Regarding the
latter interpretation, if something can't be
denied without being affirmed, it's a true
58
axiom. For example: Lewis's observation that
"The forces discrediting reason, themselves
depend on reasoning."128 The naturalists have
no choice but to affirm "the validity of reason".
As Murray Rothbard explained, "it is self-
contradictory to use reason in any attempt to
deny the validity of reason as a means of
attaining knowledge. Such self-contradiction is
implicit in such currently fashionable
sentiments as 'reason shows us that reason is
weak.'"129 Here, Lewis didn't argue that the
validity of reason is an axiom, but he could have
if all he meant was that "reason is a valid means
to truth." There is a good reason to believe he
in fact did mean that. As David Kyle Johnson
noticed, Lewis wrote in the revised Miracles, "…
'it is incontestable that we do in fact reach
truths by inferences.' Certainly. The Naturalist
and I both admit this."130

If the above interpretation is correct,

then Lewis's argument was a slick one: He
conflated "the thing [the Naturalist has] to
prove" with the axiom about reason. Then, he
accused the Naturalist of assuming the axiom in
order to prove the axiom. Even in his example,
59
that is not what the Naturalist is doing. The
Naturalist is not trying to prove that inferences
reach truth. He is trying to prove that the
human mind is reliable. Recall that Michael
Scriven never had to assume his conclusion in
order to respond to an argument that
resembled Lewis's. It was understood that the
challenge was to explain the efficacy of (human)
reason without resorting to a Cosmic Designer.
What's going on here? The problematic
sentence is "we know about these
things―certainly about their existence in the
past―only by inference." Lewis mentioned
scientific facts or theories. We know about
those things via the scientific method. Mundane
scientific facts don't depend on deductive
inferences at all. (Hypotheses, on the other
hand, do.131) I can only speculate on what Lewis
is talking about when he referred to "existence
in the past." The natural historian, like any
historian, must have presuppositions. As Bart
Ehrman explained, "Most historians would
agree that they necessarily presuppose that the
past did happen…. The basic operating
assumption …, which itself cannot be proved, is

60
that something did in fact happen before
now."132 Certainly, "it is conceivable that the
world popped into existence just 5 minutes ago,
complete with all its apparent memories and
traces of the past."133 Generally, we presuppose
that the world didn't just pop into existence
recently. Lewis apparently taught not only that
we can know that the past is real by inference
but also that we know that the past is real by
inference. The assertion is, at best, dubious.
Notwithstanding all the other problems,
because Lewis based his argument on a dubious
assertion, his case falls apart.

Because we have the speech "De

Futilitate," we can be somewhat assured of
what Lewis actually did mean. When he wrote
about the validity of inference in Miracles, he
was referring to the "great inference"134 that we
saw earlier. His argument, therefore, was "We
must assume that we are correct about the
great inference in order to prove that we are
correct about the great inference."
Unfortunately for Lewis, phenomenalism is
incorrect. Even Pascal, a Christian apologist,
wouldn't have accepted it:
61
 We know the truth not only through
our reason but also through our heart.
It is through the latter that we know
first principles, and reason, which has
nothing to do with it, tries in vain to
refute them. The sceptics have no other
object than that, and they work at it to
no purpose. We know that we are not
dreaming, but, however unable we may
be to prove it rationally, our inability
proves nothing but the weakness of our
reason, and not the uncertainty of all
our knowledge, as they maintain.135

Skeptics understand that "no person is certain,

apart from faith, whether he is awake or
sleeps…. [W]ho knows whether the other half of
our life, in which we think we are awake, is not
another sleep a little different from the former
…?"136 "As we often dream we are dreaming,
piling up one dream on another, is it not
possible that this half of our life is itself just a
dream, on to which the others are grafted, and
from which we shall awake when we die?"137
Because virtually no one accepts

62
phenomenalism, Lewis failed to prove that the
Naturalist was begging the question.

When Lewis presented his paper

"Bulverism" to the Socratic Club, he outlined
the argument that would be developed in
Miracles. Unfortunately, all that survives of the
early stage of the argument is the paraphrase of
a note-taker at the meeting: "One might argue,
Mr Lewis continued, that reason had developed
by natural selection, only those methods of
thought which had proved useful surviving. But
the theory depends on an inference from
usefulness to truth, of which the validity would
have to be assumed."138 The word "reason"
here must mean human reason that is
constitutionally fitted to find truth. Even here,
he didn't reportedly say that a naturalist has to
assume human reason to prove human reason.
The second term, "the validity," isn't referring
to the existence of human reason, at least not
directly; it probably just referred to the validity
of a specific inference. If we read them
critically, the notes from the meeting reveal
that Lewis's fallback position is flawed. In
Lewis's own words,
63
 Let heredity and the rest be granted.
Even then you cannot show that our
processes of thought yield truth unless
you are allowed to argue 'Because a
thought is useful, therefore it must be
(at least partly) true'. But this is itself an
inference. If you trust it, you are once
more assuming that very validity which
you set out to prove.139

At most, one is once more assuming the validity

of, in the words of Anscombe, a "piece of
reasoning."

As you may recall, Lewis himself, a very

smart man, couldn't come up with a valid way
to infer a truth about the outside world from
sense data. Lewis depended on the regularity of
his sense data "to draw the momentous
conclusion that other things exist." Lewis's
criterion was shown to be faulty. As Beversluis
argued, "If we restrict ourselves to what Lewis
has actually shown, as opposed to what he
claims, we can have no genuine knowledge at
all. [Not even introspection.] We remain
confined to observing regularities among our
64
sense data."140 From an early period, Lewis
believed that "all knowledge whatever depends
on the validity of inference." As mentioned, he
was wrong; introspective knowledge such as "I
think" doesn't depend on inference. Likewise, "I
act" is self-evident. You don't have to infer that
from sense data.

As hinted at earlier, Anscombe's paper

caused Lewis to revise chapter three of
Miracles. Anscombe commented on the
revision in her collected papers. Just reading a
fresh copy of Miracles, one would never know
that "[t]he last five pages of the old chapter
have been replaced by ten pages of the new."141
Also, one would not know that the chapter "The
Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism" used to be
called "The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist".
Stripped of his right to call Naturalism obviously
self-refuting, the Lewis of 1960 is reduced to
writing things like "The mere existence of
causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising
a presumption that it is groundless."142
Popularly treated as raising a presumption? He
had to recant some of what he wrote in the
early version. As Beversluis noticed, "the term
65
irrational is replaced with nonrational
whenever Anscombe's criticisms require it."143
Of course, Lewis still didn't believe that he was
wrong. Even in the first edition, he wrote, "It is
only when you are asked to believe in Reason
coming from non-Reason that you must cry
Halt, for, if you don't, all thought is
discredited."144 It wasn't the words that he
used; it was the way Lewis defined those words.
He simply equated irrational with non-
rational.145 Last I checked, those terms are not
"popularly treated" that way.

The original argument was relatively

simple, but even Lewis could write, "Is it not
intolerable, and indeed incredible, that
knowledge of the most basic of all Facts should
be accessible only by wire-drawn reasonings for
which the vast majority of men have neither
leisure nor capacity? I have great sympathy with
this point of view."146 I do too. Whether the
new argument is an example of demonstrative
reasoning or probable reasoning is an important
question. Demonstrative reasoning "can never
have any such difficulties as will weaken [its]
authority, when once [it is] comprehended."147
66
On the other hand, the new argument's value as
an apologetic will depend on more than just
whether or not it is sound. As David Hume
explained,

tho' our reasonings from proofs and

from probabilities be considerably
different from each other, yet the
former species of reasoning often
degenerates insensibly into the latter,
by nothing but the multitude of
connected arguments. 'Tis certain, that
when an inference is drawn
immediately from an object, without
any intermediate cause or effect, the
conviction is much stronger, and the
persuasion more lively, than when the
imagination is carry'd thro' a long chain
of connected arguments, however
infallible the connexion of each link may
be esteem'd…. [A] man may receive a
more lively conviction from a probable
reasoning, which is close and
immediate, than from a long chain of
consequences, tho' just and conclusive

67
 in each part. Nay 'tis seldom such
reasonings produce any conviction.148

The complexity of the revised argument

exacerbates one misgiving, as Lewis referred to
it, although the argument itself alleviates some
misgivings caused by the original argument.

It's appropriate that we return to Hume

and another passage from the Treatise.
Although Lewis never returned to atheism (not
Anscombe's intention whatsoever), I believe
that Anscombe pushed him into the direction of
mainstream philosophy. The new material
includes the sentence "[Naturalism] discredits
our processes of reasoning or at least reduces
their credit to such a humble level that it can no
longer support Naturalism itself."149 If Lewis had
just written that Naturalism reduces the credit
of our reasoning to a humble level, he wouldn't
be saying anything that a skeptic couldn't also
agree with. Hume, for example, wrote a
fascinating chapter called "Of skepticism with
regard to reason". It began

68
 In all demonstrative sciences the rules
are certain and infallible; but when we
apply them, our fallible and uncertain
faculties are very apt to depart from
them, and fall into error. We must,
therefore, in every reasoning form a
new judgment, as a check or control on
our first judgment or belief; and must
enlarge our view to comprehend a kind
of history of all the instances, wherein
our understanding has deceiv'd us,
compar'd with those, wherein its
testimony was just and true. Our reason
must be consider'd as a kind of cause,
of which truth is the natural effect; but
such-a-one as by the irruption of other
causes, and by the inconstancy of our
mental powers, may frequently be
prevented. By this means all knowledge
degenerates into probability.150

If there is grain of truth in Lewis's argument, it's

in the recognition of the fallibility of our natural
faculties. As William Godwin speculated, the
axiom-deductive method may be
"incommensurate to our powers."151 If Lewis
69
had just said that the "irruption of causes"
should make us humble about our conclusion,
that claim would have been sensible. In "De
Futilitate," Lewis acknowledged that "through
inattention or fatigue we often make false
inferences and while we make them they feel as
certain as sound ones." He contrasted that
condition with one where "inference itself" was
a "merely subjective phenomenon."152 Lewis's
goal appears to have been to drag the
estimation of a normally functioning
neurological anatomy down to the level of that
of a condition that ought to require medical
attention: "You say that on this hypothesis [the
naturalistic hypothesis] there would be no
difference between the conclusions of the
finest scientific reasoning and the thoughts a
man has because a bit of bone is pressing on his
brain."153 His rhetorical trick is understandable
given that "[m]ost of us would agree that some
natural causes destroy the validity of reasoning,
as when an emotional prejudice interferes with
the rational development of an argument."154

Picking up where we left off: Lewis tried

to prove his case with an explanation of the two
70
meanings of because. The word can indicate
causation or entailment.155 Evidently influenced
by Anscombe, Lewis arrived at the following
crucial premise: "Unless our conclusion is the
logical consequent from a ground it will be
worthless and could be true only by a fluke.
Unless it is the effect of a cause, it cannot occur
at all. It looks therefore, as if, in order for a train
of thought to have any value, these two
systems of connection must apply
simultaneously to the same series of mental
acts."156 He wrote "train of thought," not
"thought."157 It would seem, therefore, that
there would consensus about his premise.158 In
the next paragraph, Lewis argued that "the two
systems are wholly distinct."159 Without saying
what was wrong, Ansombe commented,
"[T]hat's his expression, 'are wholly distinct'."160
She did not (perhaps out of generosity) point
out the clause "[W]e behave in disputation as if
they were mutually exclusive."161 Notice that he
never outright said that the two systems are
mutually exclusive. He just insinuated as much.
As Beversluis explained, "[Lewis's'] key mistake
here is one of ambiguity. He wants 'wholly

71
distinct' to mean 'incompatible,' but it only
means 'different.'"162

Lewis then argued that "the most

popular way of discrediting a person's opinions
is to explain them causally―'You say that
because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist,
or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or only a
woman'."163 It may have been the case that
arguing that way was popular, but isn't that sort
of argument just an example of the "Bulverism"
that Lewis condemned in an essay of the same
title? There, he wrote, "[H]e heard his mother
say to his father … 'Oh you say that because you
are a man.' 'At that moment', E. Bulver assures
us, 'there flashed across my opening mind the
great truth that refutation is no necessary part
of argument….'"164 Bulverism “tries to show that
the other man has causes and not reasons and
that we have reasons and not causes."165
Contrast that with what he wrote in "Religion
without Dogma?": "[F]or naturalism all thoughts
are mere events with irrational causes….
[N]aturalism seems to me committed to
regarding ideas simply as events."166 Regardless,
causes qua causes don't lead us to dismiss a
72
conclusion. Causes that we know from
experience are constantly conjoined with self-
deception lead us to dismiss a conclusion.167
When one says, "The reason you gave for
believing x is not the real reason," one doesn't
mean "We only think a conclusion because
certain previous events have happened."
According to Lewis, "our thinking the conclusion
is an event and must be related to previous
events as effect to cause, i.e. this act of thinking
must occur because … previous events have
occurred. It would seem, therefore, that we
never think the conclusion because … it is the
consequent of its grounds but only because …
certain previous events have happened."

Lewis's post-Anscombe strategy was

hinted at in his reply. He acknowledged the
distinction between the two systems or
relations mentioned above (Cause and Effect;
Ground and Consequent). He commented,
"[T]he sharper [the] distinction becomes the
more my difficulty [the cardinal difficulty of
naturalism] increases;"168 so it's no surprise that
he would argue that the distinction was the
sharpest of all. While making the most of the
73
distinction between the two systems, he
continued to make no distinction between
credibility-destroying causes and scientific
causes. In the first edition of Miracles, he wrote,
"When Nature … attempts to do things to
Rational thoughts she only succeeds in killing
them." The statement, found in chapter four,
was never revised, with the exception of the
dropping of the capitalization from the word
"rational".169 Indeed, the distinction between
the two systems and the equation of the two
causes are two sides of the same coin. How
Lewis could soften his position on one without
softening his position on the other is an
interesting question.

Given what we've read so far, the

following sentences surprised me: "In his
original argument, Lewis thought that grounds
and cause-effect explanations were mutually
exclusive; Anscombe rightly pointed out that
both explanations can rightly apply to the same
phenomena. Lewis grants the point."170
Technically, the sentences are true, but Lewis
may have just granted it for the sake of
argument. For example, he asked,
74
 But even if grounds do exist, what
exactly have they got to do with the
actual occurrence of the belief as a
psychological event? If it is an event it
must be caused. It must in fact be
simply one link in a causal chain which
stretches back to the beginning and
forward to the end of time. How could
such a trifle as lack of logical grounds
prevent the belief's occurrence or how
could the existence of grounds promote
it?171

Assuming Lewis understood evolution,

questions like these are a bit surprising.
Needless to say, lack of logical grounds is not a
trifle.172 As Celsus (Matthew Ferguson)
explained,

[R]eason is not at all an unlikely feature

to evolve in complex life. Reason
merely provides an analytical tool for
processing information and responding
in logical ways. If the host does not
operate in logical ways, such as the
roach perceiving the motion and
75
 change of light but then not running
away, then the host will quickly perish
from the hazards in its environment.
Accordingly, there is strong selection
for hosts with reliable reasoning
faculties that can draw true conclusions
about their environments.173

Although Lewis understood evolution, his

interpretations of it haven't aged well:

Granted that we now have minds we

can trust, granted that organic life came
to exist, [Evolution] tries to explain, say,
how a species that once had wings
came to lose them. It explains this by
the negative effect of environment
operating on small variations. It does
not in itself explain the origin of organic
life, nor of the variations, nor does it
discuss the origin and validity of reason.
It may well tell you how the brain,
through which reason now operates,
arose, but that is a different matter.174

76
We've already speculated on what "validity of
reason" means. Lewis admitted that Evolution
might explain how the brain arose. He may have
even understood here that the variations that
mattered were genetic variations. If so, then,
unfortunately, Miracles represents a
retrogression in his thought. There, he wrote,
"The type of mental behavior we now call
rational thinking or inference must … have been
'evolved' by natural selection…. [N]atural
selection could operate only by eliminating
responses that were biologically hurtful and
multiplying those which tended to survival."175
David Kyle Johnson argued that Lewis was
wrong about that detail. Lewis would have been
correct if he had just continued to talk about
the environment operating on small variations.
The question is: Variations of what? Not beliefs,
but brain size is the answer given by scientists
and philosophers today.176 Johnson explained,
"As the brain got bigger, a number of abilities
gradually developed, including the ability to
form true beliefs…. [T]he person who gets a
brain able to go through a 'truth-getting-cause-
effect-process' as a result of random mutation

77
of DNA is able to come to true beliefs better
than others."177 Even in the early sixties, Ludwig
von Mises understood that "[w]hat the
normal―healthy―child inherits from his
parents are not any categories, ideas, or
concepts, but the human mind that has the
capacity to learn and to conceive ideas, the
capacity to make its bearer behave as a human
being, i.e., to act." It may seem that I am
quibbling here (and it's possible that Lewis
meant instincts instead of responses178), but I
think it will help us understand the critiques of
Lewis's comments on Evolution. No one I'm
aware of has accused Lewis of intentionally
obfuscating, but it's inexplicable that he would
use a vague word like "responses." Earlier, he
accused some naturalists of believing that
reason "has 'evolved' out of instinct."179

Charles Darwin appeared to have had

the same misgivings as Lewis. He wrote, "Shake
ten thousand grains of sand together and one
will be uppermost:―so in thoughts, one will rise
according to law." According to Charles
Taliferro, "Darwin worried about this deeply, for
he thought his own theory might undermine
78
the trustworthiness of reasoning."180 Besides
mentioning that brain size, not a thought, is
being selected by the environment, how could
we respond to Lewis and Darwin? I think that
Stephen Hawking's remarks in A Brief History of
Time are as adequate as any. Concerned with
human capacity to discover the "Theory of
Everything," Hawking wrote,

The ideas about scientific theories

outlined above assume we are rational
beings who are free to observe the
universe as we want and to draw logical
deductions from what we see. In such a
scheme it is reasonable to suppose that
we might progress ever closer toward
the laws that govern our universe. Yet if
there really is a complete unified
theory, it would also presumably
determine our actions. And so the
theory itself would determine the
outcome of our search for it! And why
should it determine that we come to
the right conclusions from the
evidence?...

79
 The only answer that I can give
to this problem is based on Darwin's
principle of natural selection. The idea
is that in any population of self-
reproducing organisms, there will be
variations in the genetic material and
upbringing that different individuals
have. These differences will mean that
some individuals are better able than
others to draw the right conclusions
about the world around them and to
act accordingly. These individuals will
be more likely to survive and reproduce
and so their pattern of behavior and
thought will come to dominate. It has
certainly been true in the past that
what we call intelligence and scientific
discovery have conveyed a survival
advantage.181

The first difficulty one may have with Hawking's

comment is that he assumed that humans are
rational beings. Doesn't that aspect need to be
explained? Perhaps not. As we read on, we
discover that Hawking made a distinction
between drawing a logical deduction from
80
observations and drawing the right (factual)
conclusion. He must have understood that
"validity and truth are logically independent and
determined in different ways." As Beversluis
explained, "From the fact that an argument is
valid, it does not follow that its conclusion is
true. Validity is not a means to truth."182

Hawking's perceptiveness manifested

itself in an even more surprising way.
Superficially, the Hawking passage doesn't
appear to be telling us anything that Scriven,
who was a philosopher, didn't tell us already.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Read
what Hawking wrote about the principle of
natural selection again. Hawking explained that
his answer was based on natural selection.
Natural selection selects for genes,183 but
Hawking mentioned not only genetic material
but also "upbringing." I believe Hawking
recognized something that no social scientist
would overlook. He must have been writing
about the one force that could conceivably
select for upbringing and "pattern[s] of
behavior and thought." He must have been
referring to cultural evolution. Indeed, the same
81
year that the revised Miracles was published, F.
A. Hayek endorsed the view that "institutions
and morals, language and law, have evolved by
a process of cumulative growth … [I]t is only
with and within this framework that human
reason has grown and can successfully
operate."184 How could anyone overlook
language as a prerequisite for reason? Reason is
difficult to imagine without it.

Hawking understood that any

discussion about human reason that didn't
acknowledge cultural evolution was incomplete.
Did Lewis? Apparently, he did. He wrote,
"Besides natural selection there is, however,
experience―experience originally individual but
handed on by tradition and instruction." Lewis
didn't believe that (culturally evolved?)
traditions could "conjure" reason because
experience could only produce expectations,
not valid inferences.185 Incredibly, "Lewis's use
of 'valid' and 'validity' commits him to the view
that deductive inference is the only legitimate
form of inference."186 Lewis used the word
"invalid"187 when, at most, he should have
written "not valid" or "not deductive."188
82
Perhaps, one just has to posit rational beings
with the capacity for deductive inferences like
Hawking did. It's an open question.

Although we had to skip ahead to

examine Lewis's views on cultural evolution, his
comments there were germane to the next
serious problem we find in Lewis's revised
argument. We find some familiar ideas: "If it
ever 'follows from' in the logical sense, it does
so always. And we cannot possibly reject the
second point of view as a subjective illusion
without discrediting all human knowledge. For
we can know nothing, beyond our own
sensations at the moment unless the act of
inference is the real insight that it claims to
be."189 As we've learned, Lewis could only reach
knowledge about the outside world through a
deductive inference that was shown to be
invalid. In a sense, one has to rely on a "faith" to
believe in the outside world, but this "faith" is
really just a common-sense assumption. Lewis
should've written that we can know nothing
beyond introspective knowledge and
deductions from that knowledge unless our
presuppositions are true (I am ignoring
83
knowledge about mere sensations or
"appearance expressions"190).

The next charge against Naturalism is

arcane. Paraphrasing the message is not a task
for laymen; so I will quote it in full: "Any thing
which professes to explain our reasoning fully
without introducing an act of knowing thus
solely determined by what is known, is really a
theory that there is no reasoning. But this, as it
seems to me, is what Naturalism is bound to do.
It offers what professes to be a full account of
our mental behavior; but this account, on
inspection, leaves no room for the acts of
knowing or insight on which the whole value of
our thinking, as a means to truth, depends."191
When confronted with such an abstruse192
passage, one is tempted to look for clues
wherever they may be found, even in less than
obvious places. Lewis's comment about
"explaining fully" calls to mind the rule from the
original version of Miracles.193 His original rule
was that "no thought is valid if it can be fully
explained as the result of irrational causes."194
Superficially, the new material looks like the
rule. Anscombe commented on the new
84
material also, but she did so long after Lewis
had died. She wrote, "[Lewis] does not explore
this idea of 'an act of knowing solely
determined by what is known,' which is
obviously crucial."195 The key word in the phrase
is "determined". Lewis is determined (no pun
intended) to make you feel uncomfortable
about determinism.196 Consider what he wrote
in Miracles, 1947. The revised portions are in
brackets:

[I]t is tempting to try whether

Naturalism cannot still be saved. I
pointed out in Chapter II that one could
remain a Naturalist and yet believe in a
certain kind of God―a cosmic
consciousness to which 'the whole
show' somehow gave rise: what we
might call an Emergent God….

But I am afraid it will not do. It

is, of course, possible to suppose that
when all the atoms of the universe got
into a certain relation (which they were
bound to get into sooner or later) they
would give rise to a universal
85
 consciousness. And it might have
thoughts. And it might cause those
thoughts to pass through our minds.
But unfortunately its own thought, on
this supposition, would be the product
of irrational [non-rational] causes and
therefore, by the rule which we use
daily, they would have no validity. This
cosmic mind would be, just as much as
our own minds, the product of mindless
Nature. We have not escaped from the
difficulty, we have only put it a stage
further back. The cosmic mind will help
us only if we put it at the beginning, if
we suppose it to be, not the product of
the total system, but the basic, original,
self-existent Fact which exists in its own
right.197

The "rule we use daily" must refer to the rule

that was cut out of the revised version. The
product of non-rational causes, on the other
hand, doesn't necessarily have "no validity."
Another part of Miracles that was edited out
reveals that Lewis couldn't tell the difference:

86
 The mind, like every other particular
thing or event, is supposed to be simply
the product of the Total System. It is
supposed to be that and nothing more,
to have no power whatever of 'going on
of its own accord'. And the Total System
is not supposed to be rational. All
thoughts whatever are the results of
irrational causes, and nothing more
than that. The finest piece of scientific
reasoning is caused in just the same
irrational way as the thoughts a man
has because a bit of bone is pressing on
his brain. If we continue to apply our
Rule, both are equally valueless.198

Of course, the Rule was just fine. The problem

was Lewis's equation of determinism with
"everything is caused by irrational causes."199

Still, might determinism make us

uneasy? In the original version of Miracles, the
next paragraph began, "The shortest and
simplest form of this argument is that given by
Professor … Haldane." He then reproduced the
Haldane quote that we saw earlier. Lewis
87
commented on the quote, writing, "The trouble
about atoms is not that they are material … but
that they are, presumably, irrational."200 Who is
making the presumption? Not Lewis circa 1960.
Of course, the reference to atoms moving
deterministically found in chapter four loses its
appeal without the expurgated sentences.

Deprived of the opportunity to simply

call the Total System irrational, Lewis must talk
about Naturalism leaving "no room" for acts of
knowing. As philosopher Michael Martin
summed up Lewis's position, "If [Naturalism] is
true, all our thinking must be explicated in
terms of cause and effect."201 If Naturalism is
true, that only means that our thinking can be
explained in terms of cause and effect.
Although Lewis did begin his argument by
writing that, according to Naturalism, thinking
"must be … explicable in terms of the Total
System," what he could've meant was that
"[thinking] could be explained in terms of the
Total System."202 If so, there is no
disagreement. He wrote "must be explicable,"
not "must be explicated." There is a difference.
If something must be explicated in terms of x,
88
then you can't explicate it in another way. If
something must be explicable in terms of x, you
could explain it in those terms. You could
explain it in some other terms.

Even Lewis couldn't maintain that

thinking was fully explained by the Cosmic
Mind. According to him, "Rational Thinking can
be shown to be conditioned in its exercise by a
natural object (the brain). It is temporarily
impaired by alcohol or a blow on the head. It
wanes as the brain decays and vanishes when
the brain ceases to function."203 If the
supernaturalist doesn't have to maintain that
the Cosmic Mind fully accounts for thinking,
why does the naturalist have to maintain that
causation fully accounts for thinking? Nature
may be "the whole show,"204 yet some
philosophers argue that cause and effect don't
fully explain thinking, or, at least, that has been
the view of Lewis critics since Michael Martin.
Beversluis has written, "There is a more
convincing way of showing what is wrong with
Lewis's view. Instead of granting that
explanations in terms of nonrational causes
fully explain thought causally and then
89
introducing other kinds of noncausal
explanations, we can deny that explanations in
terms of nonrational causes fully explain mental
events."205 There is room for "complimentary
explanations".206

Even if reasoning was fully explained by

non-rational causes, "[t]o say that something is
fully explicable in purely causal terms is only to
deny that it is random, unintelligible, the result
of 'blind caprice.' It is not to deny that other
noncausal considerations are relevant." Lewis
made the mistake that religious conservatives
still make. He "too often moved from 'A is fully
explicable in terms of B' to 'A is explicable
merely (simply, only) in terms of B.'"207 In a
speech, Ben Shapiro, parroting Lewis, said that
if materialism and determinism are true, then
"all human activity is traceable to neurons firing
in your brain." He then concluded that
materialism/determinism implies that "we're
just a set of chemicals and neurons and
biological functions," as if different descriptions
of humanity were rivals for space.208 Just
because human activity can be fully explained
by physiological processes, that doesn't mean
90
that human activity can be merely or only
explained by physiological processes: "the
expression 'full explanation' has reference only
to the type of explanation that is in
question."209

Since the context of the quote that I

lifted from David Kyle Johnson will probably be
brought up by a Lewis defender, it is necessary
for us to address it here. The end of the original
chapter three, as mentioned, was revised and
greatly expanded. The relevant segment began:

'But', it will be said, 'it is incontestable

that we do in fact reach truths by
inferences'. Certainly. The Naturalist
and I both admit this. We could not
discuss anything unless we did. The
difference I am submitting is that he
gives, and I do not, a history of the
evolution of reason which is
inconsistent with the claims that he and
I both have to make for inference as we
actually practise it. For his history is,
and from the nature of the case can
only be, an account, in Cause and Effect
91
 terms, of how people came to think the
way they do.210

What mattered to Lewis was what he said in his

reply to Anscombe: "It would seem … that we
never think the conclusion [because of
entailment] but only [because of causation]. If
so, it does not seem that the [entailment]
sequence makes us more likely to think the true
conclusion than not. And this is very much what
I mean by the difficulty in Naturalism."211 We
think thus only because of Cause and Effect. The
naturalist history, therefore, can only be about
Cause and Effect. The key word is "only". In the
closing paragraph of chapter three, Lewis wrote
that "an act of insight" is "determined … only by
the truth it knows." Thinking will not be an "act
of insight" if it is not "sufficiently free from non-
rational causation." Thinking must be
determined only by causation or only by "the
thing known."212 Why can't it be determined by
both? Antony Flew, who knew Lewis personally,
argued,

[T]here is no ground for thinking that

reasons for saying that a proposition p
92
 is true must be irreconcilable rivals to
reasons―or, better, causes―why
sounds were uttered which could be
interpreted as expressions of that
proposition….

Nor will it do to allow that there

might be physiological sufficient
conditions for my uttering sounds
which could be construed as the
assertion of p, and that there might also
be sufficient reasons for believing that
p; but then to insist that, in that case,
while any 'reasons' I offered might of
course in the abstract constitute good
reasons for holding that p, still they
could not actually be my reasons for
maintaining this proposition. This
rearguard action seems to accept the
distinctions which we have outlined.
But really it confounds them both.213

There is good evidence that Flew had at least

the first edition of Miracles in his thoughts
when he wrote the words quoted above.214
According to Anscombe, the second edition
93
doesn't fare much better with respect to "full
explanations". Long after Lewis died, she wrote,
"After some consideration he reverts to the
(unexamined) idea he used in the first edition,
of 'full explanation'."215 When it came to "full
explanation," the Lewis of "Bulverism" was
much more thoughtful than the Lewis of
Miracles. In his latter days, Lewis wrote, "The
implication is that if causes fully account for a
belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the
belief would have had to arise whether it had
grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider
grounds for something which can be fully
explained without them."216 In "Bulverism," on
other hand, he asked, "Does the taint invalidate
the tainted thought―in the sense of making it
untrue―or not?" He also contended that "you
can only find out the rights and wrongs by
reasoning." At the end of the paper, he did,
admittedly, assert that a belief "which can be
accounted for entirely in terms of causes is
worthless."217 A similar principle can be found in
Miracles.218 The first example given of the
principle resembles an example of "Bulverism."
The principle is dubious since Lewis himself also

94
taught, "[W]ith all thinking and all systems of
thought…. You must first find out on purely
logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break
down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go
on and discover the psychological causes of the
error."219

In the early days, Lewis seemed to think

that all products and "bye-products" of
"mindless nature" were like a stream or spilt
milk. In "De Futilitate," he wrote, "[T]he Gulf
Stream produces all sorts of results…. What it
does not produce is maps of the Gulf Stream.
But if logic, as we find it operative in our own
minds, is really a result of mindless nature, then
it is a result as improbable as that."220 By the
time that the revised Miracles was released, the
parallel passage delivered in the "Broadcast
Talks" had been quietly removed from the
record. Apparently, by then, Lewis had
acknowledged that not all products of mindless
nature are the same. He at least mentioned the
phrase "evolutionary product."221 It would be
too easy for a critic to point out, like Scriven
did, that evolutionary products are not like

95
other products of nature. As I explained
elsewhere,

[N]o one who has read Darwin's Origin

of the Species could fail to notice the
similarities between artificial selection
and natural selection. Everyone grants
that artificial selection is intelligent
design. Natural selection is a form of
design also: the environment itself is
limiting the possible candidates one can
breed with. The breeder limits the
candidate down to one so there is only
a difference in degree between artificial
and natural selection. If one is going to
dismiss natural selection as a mindless
chemical and physical process, it must
be emphasized that the mind aspect is
not the crucial one.222

Natural selection, as Richard Dawkins explained,

"is a cumulative process, which breaks the
problem of improbability up into small
pieces."223 Lewis, at this stage, evidently did
believe that Evolution involved "perpetual
happy coincidence throughout the whole of
96
recorded time." In his most popular book, he
wrote,

[T]here is what is called the materialist

view. People who take that view think
that matter and space just happen to
exist …; and that the matter, behaving
in certain fixed ways, has just
happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce
creatures like ourselves who are able to
think. By one chance in a thousand
something hit our sun and made it
produce the planets; and by another
thousandth chance the chemicals
necessary for life, and the right
temperature, occurred on one of these
planets, and so some of the matter on
this earth came alive; and then, by a
very long series of chances, the living
creatures developed into things like
us.224

Richard Dawkins, of course, has been trying for

decades to debunk the notion that Evolution or
Darwinism is "a theory of 'chance'." In The Blind
Watchmaker, he explained, "Darwinism is a
97
theory of cumulative processes so slow that
they take between thousands and millions of
decades to complete. All our intuitive
judgements of what is probable turn out to be
wrong by many orders of magnitude."225 Lewis's
judgement of probability may be intuitive, or it
may be loosely based on Humean principles.
Hume taught that "we are never sensible of any
connexion betwixt causes and effects … [It is]
only by experience of their constant
conjunction [that] we can arrive at any
knowledge of this relation…. [A]ll objects, which
are not contrary, are susceptible of a constant
conjunction."226 Lewis purposefully contrasted
logic with "mindless nature" in order to leave
his hearers with the impression that one, at the
very least, wouldn't be likely to cause the other.
Of course, he could have just as easily
mentioned that Nature was eyeless, genderless,
legless, etc.

As we saw, Lewis anticipated the

objection regarding evolutionary products in
the first edition of Miracles. In the revised
version, he did likewise, but his argument was
almost completely rewritten. Fortunately, a
98
philosopher has recently provided a great
refutation. First, Lewis's argument:

The Naturalist might say, 'Well, perhaps

we cannot exactly see―not yet―how
natural selection would turn sub-
rational mental behavior into
inferences that reach truth. But we are
certain that this in fact has happened.
For natural selection is bound to
preserve and increase useful behaviour.
And we also find that our habits of
inference are in fact useful. And if they
are useful they must reach truth'. But
notice what we are doing. Inference
itself is on trial: that is, the Naturalist
has given an account of what we
thought to be our inferences which
suggests that they are not real insights
at all. We, and he, want to be assured.
And the reassurance turns out to be
one more inference (if useful, then
true)―as if this inference were not,
once we accept his evolutionary
picture, under the same suspicion as all
the rest.227
99
David Kyle Johnson responded, "Lewis has
challenged the naturalist's notion of inference.
When the naturalist presents an argument to
answer him, Lewis just says, 'You are using
inference but whether or not inferences are
trustworthy is the issue. You beg the question
by answering my objection with an argument.'"
As mentioned, the naturalist has no escape.
Fortunately, for the naturalist, Johnson argued
that "the strategy is fallacious." He explained,

You could use this strategy to discount,

literally, any theory you like. Take the
best theory in the world, and then
challenge it suggesting that it makes
trustworthy inference impossible; your
argument can be as bad as you like. No
matter what answer those defending
the theory give, even if they point out
how obviously bad your argument is,
you can just say, "You are using
inference but whether or not inferences
are trustworthy is the issue. You beg
the question by answering my objection
with an argument." A critique that

100
 could falsify even that which is true
cannot be a valid critique.228

In other words, a "trial" of this sort can easily

become a show trial.

Lewis continued his argument, writing,

"If the value [usefulness] of our reasoning is in
doubt, you cannot try to establish it by
reasoning."229 No one, however, doubts the
usefulness of reasoning to find any truth
whatsoever. We must distinguish between
trivial truths and statements that add "to our
store of knowledge."230 According to one
interpretation of a widely quoted paragraph
from David Hume, "there are only two
meaningful kinds of statements―definitional
and factual."231 I will quote the paragraph here
with some of the emphasis deleted: "When we
run over libraries, persuaded of these
principles, what havoc must we make? If we
take in our hand any volume; of divinity or
school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask,
Does it contain any abstract reasoning
concerning quantity or number? No. Does it
contain any experimental reasoning concerning
101
matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it
then to the flames: for it can contain nothing
but sophistry and illusion."232 If it is not already
apparent, the type of reasoning that is "in
doubt" is abstract reasoning concerning matter
of fact.233 As we've learned, such reasoning is a
priori and synthetic. There is an additional
problem. The interpretation that I quoted
essentially dodges an important question.
Taken out of context, the phrase "matter of
fact" could mean "applicable to the real world."
It certainly does mean "applicable to the real
world" or "synthetic."234 Does it, however, only
mean that? More importantly, did it mean only
that to Hume? The answer may surprise you.
According to S. Körner, "The argument of Hume
and the logical positivists against metaphysics
rests on two statements, one of a logical
distinction, the other of a definition…. The
definition gives a meaning of the term
'meaningful proposition': it defines a
meaningful proposition as one which is either
empirical or analytic."235 See what happened.
Instead of synthetic and analytic, the empiricists
and positivists embrace empirical and analytic.

102
"Matters of fact," then, can only be a posteriori
statements. How, then, can one translate
"synthetic" into "layman's terms"? I don't have
a good answer; so pardon me if I temporarily
borrow the phrase "matter of fact".

If a philosopher merely doubts

synthetic a priori reasoning, critics have the
option of using a type of reasoning that is
acceptable. Using an acceptable form of
reasoning, the critics may then try to undercut
the philosopher's grounds for doubting the
synthetic a priori. For example, A. J. Ayer,
influenced by Hume, "developed his principle of
empirical verifiability. According to this
principle, a statement, to be meaningful, must
either be true by definition (such as 'all triangles
have three sides') or else it must be verifiable
by one or more of the five senses."236 To make a
long story short, philosophers and scholars used
reason to pick apart the principle. As Hans-
Hermann Hoppe argued, "Regarding
positivism's [verificationism's] supposedly
exhaustive classification of analytic, empirical
[synthetic237], and emotive propositions one
must ask: What, then, is the status of this very
103
axiom?"238 The substance of the argument is
not all that relevant. The takeaway is that no
one doubts the "value of reasoning"
completely; some or, perhaps, most doubt the
usefulness of "abstract" (a priori) reasoning
with respect to "matters of fact" (synthetic
truths).239

If you wanted to argue that the second

edition of Miracles is worse than "its disgraced
predecessor,"240 you would have to read until
almost the end of chapter three. There, we read
that "the act of knowing" is "the act, not of
remembering that something was so in the
past, but of 'seeing' that it must be so always
and in any possible world."241 If I am not
mistaken,242 Lewis was saying that acts of
knowing must involve the axiom-deductive
method.243 An act of knowing involves an
implication―"B follows from A."244 If there was
any doubt about what Lewis meant, it vanished
after the full context was considered:

[W]here the inference depends on an

axiom … we do not appeal to past
experience at all. My belief that things
104
 which are equal to the same thing are
equal to one another is not at all based
on the fact that I have never caught
them behaving otherwise. I see that it
'must' be so…. To see fully that A
implies B does … involve the admission
that the assertion of A and the assertion
of B are at bottom in the same
assertion.245

For Lewis, the act of knowing is the act of

discovering apodictic truths: "That some people
nowadays call axioms tautologies seems to me
irrelevant…. [T]o call them tautologies is
another way of saying that they are completely
and certainly known."246 The statements
clarified what Lewis meant, but it should be
noted that a tautology "is not a proposition that
is 'completely and certainly known.' It is a
proposition that is necessarily true whether
anyone knows it or not."247 Lewis's notion of an
act of knowing is divorced from, if not at odds
with, how that notion is understood in common
discourse. The act of knowing does include and
should include the learning of contingent truths
as well. For example, we know that the sun
105
usually "rises". It is a contingent truth that it will
"rise" tomorrow. It is not the case that the sun
must "rise" tomorrow, but no one will think it
strange if someone says that he knows that the
sun will "rise" tomorrow.248

If we count the early sermon titled

"Miracles," then we can say that Lewis began
his discussion on miracles in a way that was
insightful and surprising. What he said early in
the sermon can be characterized in modern
terms as a gaffe:

This fact, that the interpretation of

experiences depends on
preconceptions, is often used as an
argument against miracles. It is said
that our ancestors, taking the
supernatural for granted and greedy of
wonders, read the miraculous into
events that were really not miracles.
And in a sense I grant it. That is to say, I
think that just as our preconceptions
would prevent us from apprehending
miracles if they really occurred, so their
preconceptions would lead them to
106
 imagine miracles even if they did not
occur.249

To my knowledge, Lewis would never address

Type I and Type II errors with respect to
worldviews again. Given the consequentialist
advantages of naturalism, one would need a
good intellectual reason in order to reject it. It
only made sense that Lewis would spend years
trying to find that argument. Granted that Lewis
had to offer intellectual arguments in order to
undermine naturalism, there is at least one
question left unanswered. We've only
speculated on why Lewis worked on intellectual
arguments; we never answered why he sought
to undermine naturalism. Why, furthermore,
was he oblivious to the conspicuous
shortcomings that vitiated his original
argument? I will only offer an analogy. In a, at
times, cringe-worthy creationist book, we find
the following excoriation: "The solutions to
man's massive social problems depend upon a
correct understanding of origins. If the
evolutionary philosophy is correct, then life is
without moral direction and purpose."250
Contrast that with what Lewis wrote in the
107
precursor to Miracles: A Preliminary Study,
"Religion without Dogma?": "[Naturalism]
overthrows all our hopes: not only our hope of
immortality, but our hope of finding significance
in our lives here and now."251 It appears that
comically bad arguments against a belief are, to
borrow Hume's phrase, constantly conjoined
with animus against a belief. We can infer that
one is the cause of the other, but why one is the
cause of the other is a separate question.

Toward the end of the revised chapter

three, Lewis wrote that the Naturalist asserts,
"There is nothing except [Nature]." The
assertion is "remote from practice, experience,
and any conceivable verification."252 If he meant
that experience doesn't prove or disprove
naturalism, then I agree with Lewis. So did
Jesus, apparently.

108
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118
Stubborn Credulity Blog
With the exception of one typo, I left the text
alone. I added an explanatory note to the 3/7
post.

3/5/2019

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Share the “Milk

Jug” Meme

A meme with a C. S. Lewis quote has been going

around the internet for years now. It reads:
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the
universe, no creative mind. In that case nobody
designed my brain for the purpose of thinking.
It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull
happen for physical or chemical reasons to
arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives
me, as a bye-product, the sensation I call
thought. But if so, how can I trust my own
thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk-jug
and hoping that the way the splash arranges
itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't
trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the
arguments leading to atheism, and therefore
have no reason to be an atheist, or anything
else. Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in

119
thought: so I can never use thought to
disbelieve in God.

There is already a fine response to the meme

published by Celsus (Matthew Ferguson) ("C. S.
Lewis' Milk Jug: Apologetics and the Retreat
into Epistemology"
<https://celsus.blog/2013/07/07/c-s-lewis-milk-
jug-apologetics-and-the-retreat-into-
epistemology/>). I, however, wish to argue that
there are even simpler and more obvious
reasons why the quote shouldn’t be shared.

1. Lewis apparently disavowed the passage.

We know that the words about the milk jug

were first published under the title Broadcast
Talks in 1942. They made it into the American
version of the material, which was given the
title The Case for Christianity. Then, in 1952,
Macmillan published Mere Christianity. On the
title page of the Macmillan version, the book is
described as a "revised and enlarged edition …
of the three books The Case for Christianity,
Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality."
What I found peculiar is the fact that the "milk
jug" passage was excised from the material that
was originally published in the U.S. as The Case

120
for Christianity, and other material had to be
revised for the sake of coherence (Compare
Case for Christianity, Macmillan, 1948, p. 39
with Mere Christianity, HarperCollins, 2001, p.
38). According to Worldcat.org, the earliest
version of the material was published last in
1996. It can only be purchased second-hand.

2. As written, the argument makes an

elementary philosophical mistake.

Lewis asked, “How can I trust my own thinking

to be true?” Antony Flew, who knew Lewis
personally, explained why the question isn’t
sensible on the first page of the first chapter of
his book How to Think Straight Second Edition:
What is true, or false, is propositions. What is
valid, or invalid, is arguments [thinking]. These
notions and these distinctions are absolutely
basic. To say that an argument [thinking] is true
or that a proposition is valid is as
uncomprehending or as inept as to say that
someone got to first base in basketball or that
someone made a home run in tennis.
(Prometheus, 1998, p. 11)

Lewis’s words could still be salvaged, but only if

one adopts an obscure metaphysical outlook

121
called phenomenalism. For more on that
philosophy, see John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and
the Search for Rational Religion Revised and
Updated (Prometheus, 2007) p. 149.

3. Lewis evidently didn’t know the difference

between evolutionary products and non-
evolutionary products.

In the early days, Lewis seemed to think that all

products and "bye-products" of "mindless
nature" were like a stream or spilt milk. In the
speech "De Futilitate," he said, "[T]he Gulf
Stream produces all sorts of results…. What it
does not produce is maps of the Gulf Stream.
But if logic, as we find it operative in our own
minds, is really a result of mindless nature, then
it is a result as improbable as that" (The Seeing
Eye, ed. Walter Hooper, Ballantine, 1986, p. 87).
By the time that the revised Miracles was
released, the parallel passage delivered in the
"Broadcast Talks" (the “Milk Jug” meme) had
been quietly removed from the record.
Apparently, by then, Lewis had acknowledged
that not all products of mindless nature are the
same. He at least mentioned the phrase
"evolutionary product" (Miracles: A Preliminary
Study Revised, HarperCollins, 2001, p. 32). It
122
would be too easy for a critic to point out that
evolutionary products are not like other
products of nature.

Bonus: An Intelligent Designer may not be

essential.

Richard Dawkins famously argued that natural

selection is the “Blind Watchmaker” in the book
of the same title. Long before, Michael Scriven,
a contemporary of Lewis, argued, Brains that
did not work during [one million years of
development] did not consistently survive, and
the ones that do not learn now survive with
difficulty, if at all. Brains that did work
efficiently, i.e., in harmony with reality, not only
survived but reproduced themselves through
the mechanism of heredity, and thus there
evolved the present modest achievement of
human reason. Improvement for 1 million years
is not mere chance, and it is not a miracle; it is
the pedestrian operation of natural forces. And
it completely explains the efficacy of reason,
such as it is. (Primary Philosophy, McGraw-Hill,
1966, pp. 130 & 131, emphasis added)

A similar argument can be found in a much

more obtainable book. See Stephen Hawking, A

123
Brief History of Time (1988; Bantam, 1996) pp.
12 & 13.

For more information and ideas, see a rough

draft of “Requiem for Lewis,” a chapter in my
forthcoming book Insuppressible Fallacy-
mongers:
<https://www.scribd.com/document/40059280
1/Requiem-for-Lewis>

3/7/2019

[NOTE: At the time I wrote the post, I am afraid

that I was under the impression that empirical
and synthetic were synonymous. Also, as I
wrote in "Requiem for Lewis," I still believe that
"synthetic" means roughly the same thing as
"true." It may be forgivable to believe that
"synthetic" means "true," but it is not forgivable
to believe that "synthetic" means "empirical."
As my professor taught, "empirical" means
"based on data". In other words, empirical
statements are synthetic a posteriori
statements (Kai Nielsen, Naturalism without
Foundations, Amherst: Prometheus, 1996, 34 &
35).]

124
"For the life of me I don't see what they have
against particles."

(Title quote from Victor J. Stenger, Quantum

Gods, Amherst: Prometheus, 2009, p. 159).

According to C. S. Lewis, "[t]he shortest and

simplest form of [the Argument from Reason] is
that given by Professor J. B. S. Haldane…. He
writes, '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'"
(Miracles: A Preliminary Study, London:
Geoffrey Bles, 1947, pp. 28 & 29). I am quoting
from the original version of Miracles, but, as G.
E. M. Anscombe noticed, "The last five pages of
the old chapter have been replaced by ten
pages of the new, though a quotation from J. B.
S. Haldane is common to both" (The Collected
Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol.
II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind,
Basil Blackwell, 1981, p. ix, "Appendices to
'What Lewis Really Did to Miracles," Journal of
Inklings Studies I, 2, October 2011). As you
probably noticed, there are ellipses in the
Haldane quote. I was curious to know what
125
Haldane's reasoning might have been. Here is
the full quote: "It seems to me immensely
unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of
matter. For 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. They may be sound chemically,
but that does not make them sound logically.
And hence I have no reason for supposing my
brain to be composed of atoms" (Possible
Worlds, London: Chatto and Windus, 1930, p.
209). The full quote is essential because here
Haldane brings up the issue of soundness.
According to John Beversluis,

To be sound, an argument must be valid and its

premises must be true. In that sense, validity
and truth are logically independent and
determined in different ways. Whether an
argument is sound or unsound depends on
whether its premises are true or false. That, in
turn, depends on the way the world is, on the
facts. But whether an argument is valid or
invalid depends completely on its logical form.
(C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated, Amherst: Prometheus,
2007, p. 186)

126
Also,

The conclusion of a valid deductive argument

has nothing to do with the truth of the
statements it contains. A deductive argument
can be valid even if all the statements it
contains are false―valid but not sound. To say
that an argument is sound is to make a different
claim. A sound argument is not only valid; it is
an argument whose statements are true….
[V]alidity and truth are determined in wholly
different ways. Knowledge (understood as
truth) simply does not depend on validity. (C. S.
Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion,
Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1985, pp. 75 & 76)

I believe that Haldane was confused about the

distinction between true premises and
theorems. Logical soundness only applies to
theorems, but soundness can apply to any true
belief. As Beversluis explained, "It is only
because we already know some truths about
the world that we can employ our 'powers' of
reasoning to deduce other truths from them."
The way I read Beversluis, he distinguished
between "truths about the world" and "truths".
The former, in this context, meant "true
premises". Given my interpretation, I think I can
127
agree with Beversluis that "it is experience, not
reason, that provides us with truths about the
world" (C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational
Religion p. 77). (There may be some exceptions
in the cases of true axioms.) The proposition
that your brain is composed of atoms need not
be deduced logically from a true premise. The
proposition about the composition of a brain or
anything must be tested empirically. In short,
logical accuracy (validity) and empirical
accuracy (truth) must only be present for a
sound deduction. A true belief (premise), on the
other hand, must only be empirically accurate.
At the risk of taking him out of context, I'll add
that even Lewis himself wrote, "Reason knows
that she cannot work without materials. When
it becomes clear that you cannot find out by
reasoning whether the cat is in the linen-
cupboard, it is Reason herself who whispers,
'Go and look. This is not my job: it is a matter of
the senses'" (Miracles: A Preliminary Study,
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1947, p. 110; Revised,
HarperCollins, 2001, p. 144).

128
3/18/2019

The "Argument from Reason" Speculations

Several years after C. S. Lewis passed away, G.

E. M. Anscombe, the philosopher who caused
him to retract an early version of the argument,
reflected on Lewis’s final attempt to save his
argument. According to her,

[Lewis] distinguishes between ‘the Cause-Effect

because’ and ‘the Ground-Consequent because,
where before he had simply spoken of
‘irrational causes’. If what we think at the end
of our reasoning is to be true, the correct
answer to “Why do you think that?” must use
the latter because…. These thoughts lead him to
suggest that being a cause and being a proof
must coincide — but he finds strong objections
to this. (He obviously had imbibed some sort of
universal-law determinism about causes.) (The
Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M.
Anscombe, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the
Philosophy of Mind, Basil Blackwell, 1981, ix,
“Appendices to ‘What Lewis Really Did to
Miracles,” Journal of Inklings Studies I, 2,
October 2011)

129
In her paper debunking Lewis, she wrote, “I am
going to argue that your whole thesis is only
specious because of the ambiguity of the words
‘why,’ ‘because’ and ‘explanation’” (“A Reply to
Mr C. S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is
Self-Refuting,” The Collected Philosophical
Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. II,
“Appendices to ‘What Lewis Really Did to
Miracles,” Journal of Inklings Studies I, 2,
October 2011). An editor has relabeled a
relevant section of the paper “the varieties of
explanation”. Some explanations for an
utterance may involve grounds and other
explanations may involve causes, but there is no
inherent reason why two different explanations
should be rivals for the same space. Anscombe
quoted Lewis as writing, "Unfortunately the two
systems are wholly distinct" (quoted in The
Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M.
Anscombe, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the
Philosophy of Mind, ix). Lewis, according to John
Beversluis, "wants 'wholly distinct' to mean
'incompatible,' but it only means 'different'"(C.
S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated, Amherst: Prometheus,
2007, 174).

130
Antony Flew, another philosopher who knew
Lewis personally, also disagreed with him. He
wrote, "[Lewis] argues that to say that you hold
a belief because you have excellent grounds
leaves no room for saying―in another
context―that you hold it because your
organism is in such and such a physiological
condition." This contention is "plausible, but
surely mistaken" (Hume's Philosophy of Belief,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, 203). I
agree with Flew that Lewis's Argument from
Reason is flawed. I'd like to add that the
Argument could only exist in an era where men
have discarded "animistic" theories. In an age
where events in the external world are seen as
being "animated by a mind," explanations in
terms of Cause and Effect either don't exist or
are not the real explanation.

In Stubborn Credulity, I wrote, "We don't look to

physiological processes to explain philosophical
doctrines." Judging from a cursory glance at the
history of ideas, it appears that my view may be
old-fashioned. I find it suggestive that the
Argument from Reason is a relatively new
argument for the existence of God. Let's inquire
whether it isn't a coincidence that it emerged in

131
an era where scientific inquiry, narrowly
speaking, is being applied to all areas of study.

Before continuing my speculation, it's necessary

to introduce readers to the controversial topic
of scientism. According to its most prominent
critic, F. A. Hayek, the term describes "an
attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the
true sense of the world, since it involves a
mechanical and uncritical application of habits
of thought to fields different from those in
which they have been formed" (The Counter-
Revolution of Science, Free Press of Glencoe,
1964, 15 & 16
<https://archive.org/details/counterrevolutio03
0197mbp/>). The "habits of thought" that
Hayek was referring to were the methods of the
physical and natural sciences. According to
Hayek, in the nineteenth century, the term
science "came more and more to be confined to
the physical and biological disciplines…. Their
success was such that they soon came to
exercise an extraordinary fascination on those
working in other fields…. Thus the tyranny
commenced which the methods and technique
of the sciences in the narrow sense of the term
have ever since exercised over the other

132
subjects" (Counter-Revolution of Science, 13).
The methods of "Science" have a "proper
sphere" (Ibid, 15). As Hayek's teacher, Ludwig
von Mises, argued, "There is no doubt that
empiricism and pragmatism are right as far as
they merely describe the procedures of the
natural sciences" (Human Action Scholar's
Edition, Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute,
1998, 32). At this point, I can only speculate, but
I believe that there was a gradual development,
beginning in the nineteenth century, that paved
the way for the Argument from Reason. Once
science becomes narrowly defined to mean only
physical and natural sciences, then a scientific
explanation becomes, by definition, a causal
(Cause-Effect) explanation. There is no logical
reason why the causal explanation should be
considered the "full explanation" or the real
explanation, but it's understandable why
theologians and even scientists could hold that
naturalism entails such a view. I doubt that it is
coincidental that Hayek wrote his articles
criticizing scientism in the same decade that
Lewis published the first edition of Miracles.

After reading the following passage from Hayek,

it's no wonder that theologians could accuse

133
scientifically-minded people (naturalists,
materialists, physicalists) of not being able to
believe in reason:

The tendency to abandon all anthropomorphic

elements in the discussion of the external world
has in its most extreme development even led
to the belief that the demand for "explanation"
itself is based on an anthropomorphic
interpretation of events and that all Science
ought to aim at is a complete description of
nature. There is … that element of truth in the
first part of this contention that we can
understand and explain human action in a way
we cannot with physical phenomena, and that
consequently the term "explain" tends to
remain charged with a meaning not applicable
to physical phenomena. (Counter-Revolution of
Science, 18)

According to Hayek, people once accepted

animism and attributed agency to natural
phenomena. Once upon a time, people found
minds everywhere―in the wind, the rain, etc.
Reasons, in the sense of motives, were replaced
with reasons, in the sense of causes, with
respect to natural phenomena. Naturalists, who
believe that everything is encompassed under
134
natural phenomena, had a choice. They could
ask for an explanation of human action, but,
with humans, as opposed to inanimate objects,
there are at least two explanations. There is a
causal explanation for human action, and there
are non-causal explanations for human action.
As Antony Flew taught, there are reasons for
doing something and there are reasons for
believing something. If the scientific explanation
is, by definition, the causal explanation, and the
scientific explanation is the real explanation,
then all explanations involving reasons (in
either non-causal sense of the word) are non-
scientific. One could then conclude that a
scientific worldview can't accommodate reason.
Since science is methodologically naturalistic
(Michael Shermer, How We Believe, New York:
W.H. Freeman, 1999, 115), one could get the
idea that naturalism has no place for reason.
Reason exists; so naturalism would be refuted.
There is no necessary reason why scientism,
applying the methods of "Science" to human
action, should lead to the belief that reason
doesn't exist, but it's not surprising that
scientism and the Argument from Reason were
being pushed at the same time.

135
Anscombe accused Lewis of having a mistaken
notion of "full explanation." According to her,
"the expression 'full explanation' has reference
only to the type of explanation that is in
question" ("A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis's
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting,"
The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M.
Anscombe, Vol. II , 228 & 229). Lately, John
Beversluis has proposed simpy denying that a
causal explanation counts as a "full
explanation." Regardless of how we define "full
explanation," "there is surely room: both for a
scientific account of the origins of my
beliefs―considered as psychological or as
physiological phenomena; and for my having,
and knowing that I have, good reason for some
of those beliefs―considered now as something
to which rational standards may be applied"
(Antony Flew, Hume's Philosophy of Belief, 98).
The methods of the physical sciences may be
rigorous and precise, but that doesn't mean
that we must explain everything using the
terms of that discipline. Although naturalists
only accept natural explanations, it is not the
case that natural explanations must be
scientific, narrowly defined, explanations. As
Michael Martin argued, "There is no reason why
136
naturalists cannot use terms such as truth,
validity, and probability to explicate rational
thinking"(Atheism: A Philosophical Justification,
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990, 194). A
scientific, narrowly defined, explanation is only
a full explanation in the case of inanimate
matter. Applying the tools of the physical
sciences to human action is fine if we are
considering it, in the words of Anscombe,
merely as an event ("A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis's
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting,"
227). We need not consider it that way. As Flew
explained,

Suppose that someone utters a series of

sounds, which could be interpreted as a
significant assertion. The most usual reaction
would be to consider it as such; proceeding to
raise questions about its truth and about the
reasons for holding it to be true or not to be
true. But it would also be perfectly legitimate,
albeit rather curious, to consider it as if it had
been a purely physiological phenomenon. You
might then proceed to raise questions about its
possible physiological causes, systematically
ignoring the semantic aspect which usually is

137
the more interesting. (Hume's Philosophy of
Belief, 97)

The methods of the natural sciences can only

investigate the causes, but the causes, in the
sense of physiology, don't fully explain the
assertion.

3/20/2019

Environmental Adoption Notes

At least one critic has accused C. S. Lewis of not

understanding the theory of Evolution. He or
they may have had passages from Mere
Christianity (HarperCollins, 2001, 21 & 22) in
mind. In his latter days, Lewis wrote about
evolution in a way that wasn't so objectionable.
For example, in Miracles Revised, he wrote,

It is agreed on all hands that reason, and even

sentience, and life itself are late comers in
Nature. If there is nothing but Nature,
therefore, reason must have come into
existence by a historical process. And of course,
for the Naturalist, this process was not designed
to produce a mental behavior that can find
truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until
there were thinkers, there was no truth or

138
falsehood. The type of mental behavior we now
call rational thinking or inference must
therefore have been 'evolved' by natural
selection, by the gradual weeding out of types
less fitted to survive. (HarperCollins, 2001, 27 &
28)

In a late essay, Lewis conceded what I wish to

refer to as the principle of environmental
adoption. In "The World's Last Night," he wrote,
"It can even be argued that what Darwin really
accounted for was not the origin, but the
elimination of species" (The World's Last Night,
Boston: Mariner, 2012, 101). At around the
same time that the later essays were published
(the fifties), the U.C.L.A. economist Armen
Alchian published his famous paper that
explained the principle of environmental
adoption. The principle of environmental
adoption forms the basis of a plausible
objection to Lewis's Argument from Reason.
Many rebuttals to Lewis's argument and ones
similar to his unwittingly use the principle. As
Alchian explained the principle, the
environment itself will "adopt" organisms that,
by "sheer chance," perform correctly:

139
All individual rationality, motivation, and
foresight will be temporarily abandoned in
order to concentrate upon the ability of the
environment to adopt "appropriate" survivors
even in the absence of any adaptive behavior….
Consider, first, the simplest type of biological
evolution. Plants "grow" to the sunny side of
buildings not because they "want to" in
awareness of the fact that optimum or better
conditions prevail there but rather because the
leaves that happen to have more sunlight grow
faster and their feeding systems become
stronger. ("Uncertainty, Evolution, and
Economic Theory," The Journal of Political
Economy, Vol. 58, No. 3, Jun., 1950, 214)

Of course, plants don't have awareness, but

animals do. Those animals which, for whatever
reason, are aware of relevant facts will survive.
It's plausible that animals that are in touch with
reality―that know what is good or bad for
them―will, all other things being equal, outlive
their rivals. The environment would then select
those animals which are aware of the facts.
Alchian continued,

[A]nimals with configurations and habits more

appropriate for survival under prevailing
140
conditions have an enhanced viability and will
with higher probability be typical survivors. Less
appropriately acting organisms of the same
general class having lower probabilities of
survival will find survival difficult. More
common types, the survivors, may appear to be
those having adapted themselves to the
environment, whereas the truth may well be
that the environment has adopted them. There
may have been no motivated adapting but,
instead, environmental adopting. (Ibid)

Alchian then provided an illustration to show

that only organisms that, by chance, stumble
upon the correct behavior would live or, in this
case, continue their journey: "Assume that
thousands of travelers set out from Chicago,
selecting their roads completely at random and
without foresight. Only our 'economist' knows
that on but one road are there any gasoline
stations. He can state categorically that
travelers will continue to travel only on that
road; those on other roads will soon run out of
gas" (Ibid). We could infer from the illustration
that organisms that can learn about pertinent
facts also have a better chance at survival.
Those that are aware of the truth, in the

141
mundane sense of the word, will be selected by
the environment. It's plausible that natural
selection weeds out those who don't know
about the world in general. Those that survive
know about the world, at least the mundane
facts. Those that could not ascertain practical
knowledge, narrowly defined, would die out.

J. B. S. Haldane, a biologist Lewis was fond of

quoting, almost certainly had a grasp on the
principle of environmental adoption; so it's
puzzling that he would write "I have no reason
to suppose that my beliefs are true." If one's
beliefs about strictly practical matters weren't
true, one's chances of dying would increase.
Those who were prone to erroneous beliefs
would be less likely to survive. Those with
erroneous beliefs would be displaced by those
with correct beliefs. Those organisms that
survive and proliferate would be those whose
beliefs were correct. Surviving organisms would
have correct beliefs. Certainly, we are all the
offspring of surviving organisms. Our ancestors
apparently had correct beliefs. Why wouldn't
we have correct beliefs too?

142
7/5/2019

Did I Get It Wrong?

Note: Ironically, I embraced C. S. Lewis's position

on "preconceptions" when I wrote Stubborn
Credulity. As I wrote in the subsequent
"Insuppressible Fallacy-Mongers," "I believe
that, in the early days at least, [Lewis]
inadvertently did atheists a favor" (2). On that
point, Michael Martin appears to have agreed
with me. In his comments on Lewis, he wrote,
"Lewis's position, if accepted, would perhaps do
more to undermine the argument from miracles
than any naturalistic critique of this argument"
(Atheism: A Philosophical Justification,
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990, 193). What then
was Lewis's position? As Martin put it, "in order
to assess whether miracles exist, it is first
necessary to decide between naturalism and
supernaturalism" (Ibid, 192). For reasons cited
in my books, I have gravitated towards Lewis's
position. Martin, however, disagreed with
Lewis; so it's essential that we take into account
what he said. According to Martin, "Lewis is
certainly right to suppose that in considering the
question of whether miracles exist there is a
danger that one will appeal to a priori
143
arguments and assumptions. But the solution to
this problem is not to decide on naturalism or
supernaturalism beforehand. Rather, one must
attempt to reject the a priori arguments and
instead base one's position on inductive
considerations" (Ibid, 193). I conjecture that
Martin's position is actually more commonplace
than Lewis's. As I wrote years ago, "laymen
don't generally think that regardless of what
happens nature is all there is" (See below).

I am tempted to borrow Martin's idea

concerning nature^b (nature in its broadest
sense) and nature^n (nature in Its narrowest
sense), but I am uncomfortable with the
inclusion of supernatural beings in nature^b
(Ibid, 190). I do, however, think that the term
broad naturalism could be an appropriate one
for my views. The term narrow naturalism, on
the other hand, could be used to label the a
priori assumptions that Martin taught us to
resist.

In any discussion about labels, It's cliché to bring

up the Hobbes quote "Words are wise men's
counters; … but they are the money of fools."
We can expect Christian apologists, who should
know better, to say that naturalists are no
144
different than Hume's Indian prince. The Indian
prince refused to believe in frost or ice because
It was contrary to nature or, more accurately,
contrary to his narrow and limited experience of
nature. I am tempted to label such an attitude
narrow naturalism. I don't believe that many
people who identify as naturalists are narrow
naturalists. I think most naturalists simply
believe, as Michael Shermer articulated it,
"There is no such thing as the supernatural or
the paranormal. There Is only the natural, the
normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain."
A person who agrees with Shermer would not
have to deny the existence of something
commonly referred to as "supernatural" or
"miraculous" if he had compelling empirical
evidence for the phenomenon. To borrow an
idea from economics, naturalism can be a "filing
system" (Milton Friedman, "The Methodology of
Positive Economics"). Someone who uses a
different filing system is not analogous to the
incredulous prince.

In the piece that follows, I am afraid that I was

under the impression that one of my targets had
the mindset of Hume's Indian prince. If so, my

145
conclusions are suspect. Keep that in mind while
reading.

For the remainder of this post, visit:

https://jmgiardi.wixsite.com/stubborncredulity/
post/did-i-get-it-wrong

146
Please visit
https://jmgiardi.wixsite.com/stubborncredulity
for more information.

147
References

1
Evan Fales, "Naturalism and Physicalism," The
Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael
Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007) p. 118
2
Graham Oppy, "Lowe on 'The Ontological
Argument,'" Debating Christian Theism, eds. J.P.
Moreland et al (Oxford UP, 2013) p. 72
3
C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised
(1960; HarperOne, 2001) p. 11
4
quoted in Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions
Revised Edition (Basic Books, 2007) p. 4
5
C. S. Lewis, "Miracles," God in the Dock, ed. Walter
Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970) p. 26
6
C. S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity (New York:
Macmillan, 1948) p. 32
7
C. S. Lewis, "Miracles," God in the Dock pp. 25 & 26
8
Jonathan Giardina, Stubborn Credulity: A
Contribution to a Critique of Supernaturalism
(CreateSpace, 2019) pp. 183 & 184
9
See chapter 1 of Keith Parsons, God and the Burden
of Proof (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1989) for a full
discussion.
10
Pro-Craig youtube videos end here.
11
He said, "Not if you saw it too," suggesting that if
only he saw it, then he would conclude that he was
hallucinating.
12
C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised
p. 251

148
13
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985) p.
58
14
Lewis, "Miracles," God in the Dock p. 27
15
Victor Reppert's position in John Beversluis, C. S.
Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion Revised
and Updated (Amherst: Prometheus, 2007) p. 178
16
Author, "Three Presuppositionalist Arguments
from C.S. Lewis,"
<www.strongatheism.net/library/counter_apologeti
cs/presup_arguments_from_lewis/> accessed
2/11/2019
17
S. T. Joshi's comment "the argument … is an
argument of words, not of facts" seems applicable
(God's Defenders, Amherst: Prometheus, 2003, 110
& 111).
18
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.
M. D. Meiklejohn (Amherst: Prometheus, 1990) pp.
117 & 118
19
C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," Christian Reflections,
ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans, 1992) p. 64
20
William Barnett II & Walter E. Block, Essays in
Austrian Economics (New York: Ishi Press, 2012) p. 8
21
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.
M. D. Meiklejohn (Amherst: Prometheus, 1990) p. 7
22
William Barnett II & Walter E. Block, Essays in
Austrian Economics p. 9
23
C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," Christian Reflections,
ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2014) pp. 76 & 77; originally p. 62
149
24
See James F. Ross, Introduction to the Philosophy
of Religion (Macmillan, 1969) p. 117
25
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion Revised and Updated (Amherst:
Prometheus, 2007) p. 147
26
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion Revised and Updated p. 149
27
"[W]e assent to our faculties, and employ our
reason, only because we cannot help it"
(Anonymous [David Hume], "An Abstract of A
Treatise of Human Nature," An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding by David Hume, ed. Antony
Flew, Chicago: Open Court, 1988, 39). See also
Pascal's Pensées 282 & 434, available online at
Project Gutenberg
<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-
h/18269-h.htm> accessed 4/9/2019
28
Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational
Religion Revised and Updated p. 149
29
C. S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity (1943; New
York: Collier-Macmillan, 1989) pp. 31 & 32;
published in an edited version in C. S. Lewis, Mere
Christianity (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1960) p.
29, (HarperCollins, 2001) pp. 35 & 36
30
C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London:
Geoffrey Bles, 1947) pp. 28 & 29
31
"For the life of me I don't see what they have
against particles." March 7, 2019
<https://jmgiardi.wixsite.com/stubborncredulity/pos
t/for-the-life-of-me-i-don-t-see-what-they-have-
against-particles> accessed 3/20/2019
150
32
Armen A. Alchian, "Uncertainty, Evolution, and
Economic Theory," The Journal of Political Economy,
Vol. 58, No. 3, Jun., 1950, pp. 211-221
33
Ludwig von Mises advanced a similar argument:
"Only those groups could survive whose members
acted in accordance with the right categories, i.e.,
with those that were in conformity with reality and
therefore―to use the concept of
pragmatism―worked" (The Ultimate Foundation of
Economic Science, ed. Bettina Bien Graves,
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006, 12).
34
C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," Christian Reflections,
ed. Walter Hooper (1967) pp. 60 & 61
35
Elizabeth Anscombe, "C. S. Lewis's Rewrite of
Chapter III of Miracles," C. S. Lewis and his Circle, ed.
Roger White et al (Oxford UP, 2015) p. 16
36
Celsus (Matthew Ferguson), "C. S. Lewis' Milk Jug:
Apologetics and the Retreat into Epistemology"
<https://celsus.blog/2013/07/07/c-s-lewis-milk-jug-
apologetics-and-the-retreat-into-epistemology>
accessed 2/14/2019
37
Michael Scriven, Primary Philosophy (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966) pp. 130 & 131
38
C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," The Seeing Eye, ed.
Walter Hooper (New York: Ballantine, 1986) p. 88
39
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2006) pp. 119 & 120
40
Niles Eldridge, The Monkey Business: A Scientist
Looks at Creationism (1982) p. 77, emphasis added
41
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion p. 73
151
42
"Is Theology Poetry?" The Weight of Glory, ed.
Walter Hooper (New York: Macmillan, 1980) pp. 88
& 89
43
Antony Flew, How to Think Straight Second Edition
(Amherst: Prometheus, 1998) p. 64, emphasis added
44
Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, C. S.
Lewis: A Biography (1974; New York: Harvest-
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) p. 226
45
Jonathan Giardina, Stubborn Credulity: A
Contribution to a Critique of Supernaturalism (2019)
p. 283, n. 666, emphasis dropped
46
G. E. M. Anscombe, "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis'
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting,"
"Appendices to 'What Lewis really did to Miracles,'"
Journal of Inklings Studies I, 2 (October 2011)
Appendix B
47
C. S. Lewis, "Bulverism," God in the Dock, ed.
Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970) p.
274; Even a pro-Lewis book is uncomfortable with
the position: "[Lewis's] initial line of approach is to
point out how reliant we are on reasoning for our
claims to knowledge. In fact, he claims all knowledge
depends on the validity of reasoning. Perhaps he
overstated the case here, or did not strictly mean
that literally all knowledge depends on reasoning,
including even basic sense beliefs and the like. But it
is beyond serious dispute that much of what we
claim to know depends on the validity of reasoning"
(Scott R. Burson & Jerry L. Walls, C. S. Lewis & Francis
Schaeffer, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998,
179). Also, "Anscombe rightly points out that Lewis's
152
claim that 'all possible knowledge … depends on the
validity of reasoning' is an exaggeration even in
terms of Lewis's own view of human knowing"
(Gregory Bassham, "Anscombe's Critique of C. S.
Lewis's Revised Argument from Reason," 18).
48
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature Second
Edition, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1888; Oxford UP, 1978)
p. 1
49
C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 29
50
Ching-Hung Woo, "Free Will is an Illusion but
Freedom Isn't," Philosophy Now: The Ultimate Guide
to Metaphysics, ed. Katy Baker p. 98
51
Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 22
52
Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 29
53
G. E. M. Anscombe, "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis'
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting," Socratic
Digest, ed. Joel D. Heck (Austin: Concordia UP, 2012)
p. 106
54
As Lewis evidently conceded: "the black dog
might, after all, have been really dangerous though
the man's reason for thinking it so was worthless"
(Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 29).
55
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; New York:
Collier-Macmillan, 1960) p. 21
56
G. E. M. Anscombe, "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis'
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting" p. 108
57
Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 23
58
Erik J. Wielenberg, God and the Reach of Reason
(Cambridge UP, 2007) p. 94
59
C. S. Lewis, "Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 272
60
Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 22
153
61
Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of
Economics Third Edition, trans. George Reisman
(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003)
62
Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (1957;
Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007)
63
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 30
64
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions Revised
Edition pp. 47, 48 & 118
65
David Kyle Johnson, "The Argument from Reason:
Lewis's Fundamental Mistakes," Conference Paper
(January 2008) p. 5
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/289505
941>; Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 11
66
quoted in Murray N. Rothbard, Classical
Economics (1995; Auburn: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 2006)
67
Murray N. Rothbard, Classical Economics
68
Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of
Economics Third Edition, trans. George Reisman
(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003) p. 205;
See also John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search
for Rational Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985)
p. 74
69
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 30; John
Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational
Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985) p. 70 & 71
70
C. S. Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth,"
Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1967) p. 89
71
C. S. Lewis, "Religion without Dogma?" God in the
Dock p. 137
154
72
John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion p. 80
73
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 20
74
B. C. Johnson, The Atheist Debater's Handbook
(Amherst: Prometheus, 1983) p. 96
75
Antony G. N. Flew & Thomas B. Warren, The
Warren-Flew Debate on the Existence of God
(Glasgow, KY: National Christian Press, 1977)
76
"A different kind of alternative reality occurs in the
science fiction film The Matrix, in which the human
race is unknowingly living in a simulated virtual
reality created by intelligent computers to keep
them pacified and content while the computers suck
their bioelectrical energy…. How do we know we are
not just characters in a computer-generated soap
opera? If we lived in a synthetic imaginary world,
events would not necessarily have any logic or
consistency or obey any laws. The aliens in control
might find it more interesting or amusing to see our
reactions, for example, if the full moon split in half,
or everyone in the world on a diet developed an
uncontrollable craving for banana cream pie. But if
the aliens did enforce consistent laws, there is no
way we could tell there was another reality behind
the simulated one. It would be easy to call the world
the aliens live in the 'real' one and the synthetic
world a 'false' one. But if―like us―the beings in the
simulated world could not gaze into their universe
from the outside, there would be no reason for them
to doubt their own pictures of reality" (Stephen
Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design,
155
New York: Bantam, 2010, 42). See also Pascal,
Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin, 1966) pp.
62 & 63
77
B. C. Johnson, The Atheist Debater's Handbook p.
97
78
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
81
79
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised pp. 20 & 21
80
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
81 & 82
81
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
81
82
C. S. Lewis, "On Obstinacy in Belief," The World's
Last Night (1960; Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin,
2012) p. 16, emphasis added
83
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 21
84
Stephen Hawking & Roger Penrose, The Nature of
Space and Time (1996; Princeton UP, 2010) p. 121;
Stephen Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell (New
York: Bantam, 2001) p. 31
85
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action Scholar's Edition
(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998) p. 32
86
C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," Christian Reflections
(1967) pp. 61, 63 & 64; The Seeing Eye p. 83 - 87
87
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 190
88
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 164
89
paraphrase in Victor Stenger, Physics and Psychics
(Buffalo: Prometheus, 1990)

156
90
See Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of
Economic Science, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (1962;
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006) p. 10
91
See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and
the Austrian Method (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 2007) p. 57
92
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Amherst: Prometheus, 1990) p.
2
93
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
77
94
See James F. Ross, Introduction to the Philosophy
of Religion (Macmillan, 1969) pp. 26 - 29
95
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion pp.
75 & 76
96
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 188
97
Donald N. McCloskey, "Economics and the Limits
of Scientific Knowledge," Rethinking Knowledge, ed.
Robert F. Goodman & Walter R. Fisher (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995) p. 15
98
Compare with Bertrand Russell: “Whatever can be
known, can be known by means of science” (A
History of Western Philosophy, 834). Statements like
that were apparently what prompted others to
accuse Russell of promoted scientism. As Kai Nielsen
explained, "By scientism I mean the belief that what
cannot be known by science―and particularly by the
'hard' sciences―cannot be known. This view was
famously held by Bertrand Russell and W. V.

157
Quine…" (Naturalism without Foundations,
Prometheus, 1996, 26).
99
Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Introduction,
Epistemological Problems of Economics Third Edition
by Ludwig von Mises
100
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 21
101
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature Second
Edition p. 1
102
Perhaps not coincidentally, "a long series of
authors have attempted to do without the
knowledge derived from 'introspection'" (F. A.
Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science, 1955; Free
Press, 1964, 45).
103
"De Futilitate," The Seeing Eye p. 84
104
Murray N. Rothbard, "The Mantle of Science,"
Economic Controversies (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 2011) pp. 4, 9 & 10
105
Murray N. Rothbard, "Praxeology: The
Methodology of Austrian Economics," Economic
Controversies (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute,
2011) pp. 69 & 70
106
"[T]he laws of thought are also the laws of things:
of things in the remotest space and the remotest
time" ("De Futilitate," Christian Reflections, 1967,
63). At least one statement that I cited from "De
Futilitate" isn't, strictly speaking, an endorsement of
Misesian apriorism. The statement "We find that
matter always obeys…" implies or, at least, suggests
that one could test an aprioristic theory. According
to the Misesian method, "economic theories cannot
be 'tested' by historical or statistical fact [sic]....
158
There are always many causal factors impinging on
each other to form historical facts. Only causal
theories a priori to these facts can be used to isolate
and identify the causal strands ... The only test of a
theory is the correctness of the premises and of the
logical chain of reasoning" (Murray Rothbard,
America's Great Depression Fifth Edition, 2000).
107
Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of
Economics Third Edition, trans. George Reisman
(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003) p. 13
108
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Amherst: Prometheus,
1990) pp. 2 & 121
109
S. Körner, Kant (1955; Penguin, 1966) p. 19
110
Stuart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind
Revised Edition (1956) p. 3. I am relying on my essay
"Differences: Epistemological and other" for the
source and on a tweet for the quote.
<https://twitter.com/drbairdonline/status/1080788
820667260928?s=20> accessed 5/9/2019; See also
Robert Higgs, "The Dangers of Samuelson's
Economic Method"
<https://mises.org/library/dangers-samuelsons-
economic-method> accessed 4/8/2019, published in
Taking a Stand (Independent institute, 2015)
111
Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of
Economics Third Edition p. 20
112
Gregory Bassham, "Anscombe's Critique of C. S.
Lewis's Revised Argument from Reason" p. 18
<https://www.academia.edu/29424562/Anscombes

159
_Critique_of_C._S._Lewiss_Revised_Argument_from
_Reason> accessed 5/13/2019
113
Miracles: A Preliminary Study pp. 43 & 44;
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 54; In
"Bulverism," Lewis also said, "Our knowledge
depends on our certainty about axioms and
inferences" (God in the Dock, 275). It is unclear,
however, if he was distinguishing between analytic
and synthetic knowledge.
114
Kai Nielsen, Naturalism without Foundations
(Amherst: Prometheus, 1996) pp. 40 & 41
115
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 21
116
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action p. 32
117
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
(New York: Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1945) p.
664
118
quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy p. 665
119
"De Futilitate," The Seeing Eye p. 84
120
paraphrase in Bertrand Russell, A History of
Western Philosophy p. 665
121
"The only conclusion we can draw from the
existence of one thing to that of another, is by
means of the relation of cause and effect, which
shews, that there is a connexion betwixt them, and
that the existence of one is dependent on that of the
other. The idea of this relation is deriv'd from past
experience, by which we find, that two beings are
constantly conjoin'd together, and are always
present at once to the mind. But as no beings are
ever present to the mind but perceptions; it follows
160
that we may observe a conjunction or a relation of
cause and effect between different perceptions, but
can never observe it between perceptions and
objects. 'Tis impossible, therefore, that from the
existence or any of the qualities of the former, we
can ever form any conclusion concerning the
existence of the latter, or ever satisfy our reason in
this particular" (David Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature Second Edition, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford
UP, 1978, 212).
122
"[Hume] realized well enough that the question
whether a given causal proposition was true or false
was not one that could be settled a priori…. [H]e
showed, I think conclusively, … that the relation of
cause and effect was not logical in character, since
any proposition asserting a causal connexion could
be denied without self-contradiction" (A. J. Ayer,
Language, Truth and Logic, Penguin, 1971, 40 & 41).
<https://archive.org/details/AlfredAyer/> accessed
5/15/2019
123
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 29
124
Anscombe, "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis' Argument
that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting" p. 104
125
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 153
126
Charles Taliaferro, "On Naturalism," The
Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, eds. Robert
MacSwain & Michael Ward (Cambridge UP, 2010) p.
106
127
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 152
161
128
C. S. Lewis, "Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 274
129
Murray N. Rothbard, "The Mantle of Science,"
Economic Controversies (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 2011) pp. 6 & 7
130
Johnson, "The Argument from Reason: Lewis's
Fundamental Mistakes" p. 6
131
See John Dewey, How We Think (1910; Amherst:
Prometheus, 1991) p. 94
132
Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne,
2014) pp. 144 & 145
133
quoted in Roy Abraham Varghese, ed. The
Intellectuals Speak Out About God (1984)
134
C. S. Lewis, "De Futilitate," Christian Reflections,
ed. Walter Hooper (1967) p. 62
135
Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Penguin,
1966) p. 58
136
Pascal's Pensées 434, available online at Project
Gutenberg
<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-
h/18269-h.htm> accessed 4/10/2019
137
Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer pp. 62 &
63; The famous quote that begins "What sort of
freak then is man!" is part of the same discussion
(Ibid, 64).
138
Lewis, "Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 275
139
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 30
140
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
pp. 81 & 82
141
quoted in Erik J. Wielenberg, God and the Reach
of Reason p. 94
142
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 24
162
143
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
73
144
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 36
145
"A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis' Argument that
'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting" p. 104
146
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 50
147
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature Second
Edition p. 32
148
A Treatise of Human Nature Second Edition p.
144; See also Paul Samuelson, "Economic Theory and
Mathematics―An Appraisal," The American
Economic Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May, 1952) pp. 57
& 58 <https:///www.jstor.org/stable/1910585>
accessed 4/10/2019; Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J.
Krailsheimer (Penguin, 1966) p. 86
149
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 22
150
A Treatise of Human Nature Second Edition p. 180
151
William Godwin, The Equirer (1797) pp. v - vi
152
"De Futilitate," Christian Reflections (1967) p. 63
153
G. E. M. Anscombe, "A Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis's
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting," The
Collected Works of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol II:
Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Basil
Blackwell, 1981) p. 226, "Appendices to 'What Lewis
really did to Miracles,'" Journal of Inklings Studies I, 2
(October 2011) Appendix B
154
John Owens, "C. S. Lewsis's Argument against
Naturalism," A Myth Retold, ed. Martin Sutherland
(Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2014) p.57
155
Erik J. Wielenberg, God and the Reach of Reason
p. 95
163
156
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised pp. 23 & 24
157
If I am reading her right, Anscombe believed that
there was a distinction: "[I]t seems to me that a
belief is not the same thing as an act of thinking. Nor
need a belief even involve an act of thinking" ("C. S.
Lewis's Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles," C. S. Lewis
and his Circle, ed. Roger White et al, Oxford UP,
2015, 18).
158
David Kyle Johnson argued that "rational
inference does not require the recognition of
ground-consequent relations" ("The Argument from
Reason: Against" ["Naturalism Undefeated"]). He
wrote recognition; so I don't think that there is a real
disagreement.
<https://www.academia.edu/21564623/Naturalism_
Undefeated_A_Refutation_of_C.S._Lewis_Argument
_from_Reason_> accessed 5/12/2019;
159
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 24
160
Elizabeth Anscombe, "C. S. Lewis's Rewrite of
Chapter III of Miracles," C. S. Lewis and his Circle, ed.
Roger White et al (Oxford UP, 2015) p. 17
161
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 24
162
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 174
163
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 24
164
C. S. Lewis, "Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 273;
available online <www.barking-
moonbat.com/God_in_the_Dock.html> accessed
4/27/2019
165
"Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 275
166
God in the Dock p. 137
164
167
If we dismiss the reasoning, wouldn't we also
dismiss the conclusion? See G. E. M. Anscombe, "A
Reply to Mr C. S. Lewis's Argument that 'Naturalism'
is Self-Refuting," The Collected Philosophical Papers
of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. II: Metaphysics and the
Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981)
pp. 229 & 230. The relevant passage begins with the
often-quoted sentence "It appears to me that if a
man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and
they are genuinely his reasons, for thinking
something―then his thought is rational, whatever
causal statements we make about him."
168
C. S. Lewis, Appendix B, "Religion without
Dogma?" God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970) p. 146, emphasis dropped
169
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 39
170
"The Argument from Reason: Lewis's
Fundamental Mistakes" p. 4
171
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 24 & 25
172
David Kyle Johnson, "The Argument from Reason:
Against" ("Naturalism Undefeated")
<https://www.academia.edu/21564623/Naturalism_
Undefeated_A_Refutation_of_C.S._Lewis_Argument
_from_Reason_> accessed 5/12/2019
173
Celsus (Matthew Ferguson), "C. S. Lewis' Milk Jug:
Apologetics and the Retreat into Epistemology"
<https://celsus.blog/2013/07/07/c-s-lewis-milk-jug-
apologetics-and-the-retreat-into-epistemology>
accessed 5/12/2019

165
174
C. S. Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth," The
Seeing Eye, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Ballantine,
1986) pp. 118 & 119
175
quoted in "The Argument from Reason: Lewis's
Fundamental Mistakes" p. 2 & 3, emphasis added
176
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 30th
Anniversary Edition (Oxford UP, 2006) p. 23
177
"The Argument from Reason: Lewis's
Fundamental Mistakes" p. 3 & 4
178
Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of
Economic Science, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (1962;
Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006) p. 12 & 13
179
C. S. Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth,"
Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1967) p. 86
180
Charles Taliaferro, "On Naturalism," The
Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, eds. Robert
MacSwain & Michael Ward (Cambridge UP, 2010) p.
109
181
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988;
New York: Bantam, 1996) p. 12 & 13
182
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 186
183
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 30th
Anniversary Edition (Oxford UP, 2006) p. 11
184
F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty The
Definitive Edition, ed. Ronald Hamowy (1960;
University of Chicago Press, 2011)
185
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 29

166
186
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 191; See also original
version p. 77
187
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 30
188
just like he wrote "irrational" when he should
have written "non-rational"
189
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 26
190
Antony Flew, Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961;
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) p. 48
191
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 27
192
"damnably obscure proposition, 'knowledge
determined only by the truth it knows'" (Anscombe
quoted in Gregory Bassham, "Anscombe's Critique of
C. S. Lewis's Revised Argument from Reason," 19).
193
See C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational
Religion pp. 69 & 72
194
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 27
195
quoted in C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational
Religion Revised and Updated p. 164
196
The original chapter four of Miracles began, "If
our argument has been sound, rational thought or
Reason is not interlocked with the great interlocking
system of irrational events which we call Nature. I
am not maintaining that consciousness as a whole…"
(London: Geofrey Bles, 1947, 33). "Interlocking"
apparently referred to determinism. See chapter
three, paragraph two of any edition of Miracles. See
"Appendices to 'What Lewis really did to Miracles'"
for side by side comparisons.
197
Miracles: A Preliminary Study pp. 38 & 39;
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised pp. 45 & 46
167
198
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 28
199
See "Religion without Dogma?" God in the Dock p.
136
200
Miracles: A Preliminary Study p. 29
201
Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical
Justification (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990) p. 193
202
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 17
203
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 61
204
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 6
205
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 167
206
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
73
207
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
pp. 73 & 74
208
Daily Wire, "Shapiro At University Of Tennessee
On An America Divided: 'There is A Purpose-Shaped
Hole In Our Hearts That We Are Filling With Anger'"
<https://www.dailywire.com/news/22456/shapiro-
university-tennessee-america-divided-there-daily-
wire> accessed 2/14/2019
209
"A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis' Argument that
'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting" p. 106
210
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised pp. 31 & 32
211
C. S. Lewis, Note, "A Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis'
Argument that 'Naturalism' is Self-Refuting" by G. E.
M. Anscombe p. 109; Lewis, Appendix B, "Religion
without Dogma?" God in the Dock p. 146
212
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised pp. 27& 36
213
Antony Flew, Hume's Philosophy of Belief pp. 97 &
98
168
214
See Antony Flew, How to Think Straight Second
Edition (Amherst: Prometheus, 1998) p. 64
215
G. E. M. Anscombe, The Collected Philosophical
Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe Vol. II: Metaphysics and
the Philosophy of Mind ix, "Appendices to 'What
Lewis really did to Miracles,'" Journal of Inklings
Studies I, 2 (October 2011) Appendix B
216
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 24,
emphasis added
217
"Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 272, 274 & 275
218
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 55
219
"Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 271 - 273
220
"De Futilitate," The Seeing Eye p. 87
221
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 32
222
Jonathan Giardina, Stubborn Credulity p. 285, n.
666
223
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2006) p. 121
224
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; New York:
Collier-Macmillan, 1960) p. 17
225
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986;
New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) pp. XVIII & XIX
226
A Treatise of Human Nature Second Edition p.
247, emphasis added
227
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised pp. 32 & 33
228
"The Argument from Reason: Lewis's
Fundamental Mistakes" pp. 5 & 6
229
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 33
230
William Barnett II & Walter E. Block, Essays in
Austrian Economics p. 9

169
231
Norman L. Geisler, "Philosophical Presuppositions
of Biblical Inerrancy," Inerrancy, ed. Norman L.
Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1979) p. 320
232
David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Antony Flew (Chicago: Open
Court, 1988) p. 195
233
Kai Nielsen, Naturalism without Foundations
(Amherst: Prometheus, 1996) p. 33 & 34
234
"Judgments of experience … are always
synthetical" (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, Prometheus, 1990, 7)
235
S. Körner, Kant (1955; Penguin, 1966) p. 17,
emphasis added
236
Norman L. Geisler, "Philosophical Presuppositions
of Biblical Inerrancy," Inerrancy, ed. Norman L.
Geisler p. 320
237
Apparently, even a PhD. philosopher got synthetic
and empirical mixed up. The philosopher, whom I
won't name, wrote, "On the basis of Hume's two
kinds of premises, which [A. J.] Ayer called analytic
and synthetic…" Hume, if I'm not mistaken, only
recognized analytic and empirical. Empirical does
imply synthetic. Is the converse true? Does synthetic
imply empirical? Even if it did, the two terms are not
synonymous.
238
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "Austrian Rationalism in
the Age of the Decline of Positivism," The Economics
and Ethics of Private Property Second Edition
(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006) p. 363
239
See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Antony Flew p. 73 & Immanuel
170
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D.
Meiklejohn p. 7
240
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion p.
68; He changed "disgraced" to "chastened" in the
revised edition (161).
241
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 35
242
In revised version of C. S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion, Beversluis asked, "what does
Lewis mean when he says that some, and perhaps
all, inductive inferences depend … on axioms?" (184,
emphasis added). I don't know where Lewis said
that. Beversluis was commenting on the passage
that takes up most of pp. 30 & 31 of the version of
Miracles (HarperCollins) that is easiest to find today.
I wondered if the sentence was an error. The original
version of the book reads, "what does he mean
when he implies that some, or all, factual inferences
depend … on axioms?" (72, emphasis added). I
prefer the original version of the sentence. If
Beversluis considers inductive to be synonymous
with factual, then I would categorize his thought as
empiricism (See Hume, Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Antony Flew, 72 & 73). Beversluis
is apparently a Humean empiricist. He wrote, "The
fact is that we do not 'trust' reason about matters of
fact. For empirical truth, we rely wholly on our
senses, on our undisputed ability to discover
constant and regular conjunctions" (C. S. Lewis and
the Search for Rational Religion, 80). I consider that
to be a summary of Hume's position. I personally
find it inconvenient that Hume and his followers
171
defined the phrase "matter of fact" to mean
empirical truth or synthetic a posteriori knowledge.
If you believe in synthetic a priori knowledge, then
you have to look for another phrase. Even the word
"fact" could be confused with Hume's "matter of
fact". Although I could grant that all inductive
inferences are factual, I would prefer not to say that
all factual inferences are inductive. By changing the
word "factual" to "inductive," Beverlsuis appeared to
be suggesting that all factual inferences are
inductive.
243
Lewis, "Bulverism," God in the Dock p. 275
244
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 26
245
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 30 & 31
246
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 31
247
C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion
Revised and Updated p. 184
248
See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding p. 113 & 114
249
"Miracles," God in the Dock p. 26
250
Scott M. Huse, The Collapse of Evolution (1983) p.
5; The first edition may not feature Fishibian,
Amphitile, and Repbird, but the second edition does.
251
God in the Dock, 1970 p. 135
252
Miracles: A Preliminary Study Revised p. 34

172